BPN 1225 Pre-internet (11): The arrival of internet

While the online industry was developing and coping with disruptive technologies like videotext and CD-ROM, a new online phenomenon was developing in academic circles. It started out in 1969, when the ARPA project was started by the US Department of Defence (DoD). It was the Cold War with a division between the two superpowers of the USA and Russia. In order to be able to keep a network alive after a potential bombing or worse nuclear bombing, a new network had to be designed, which would leave the not –hit network part operational. This required a new network protocol. By 1971 it lead to the packet switching telecom technology. It also yielded a new way of co-operation between the Department of Defence and the universities, which executes assignments for the DoD, and between the universities mutually. A number of networks came into existence, which were eventually based on a new series of protocols, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol), developed by Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf between 1972 and 1976. The protocols took care that networks could exchange electronic mail and information. By 1986 The DoD started talks to move the Internet over from the department to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Internet as it existed in the USA became an interrelated network of networks which was expanding to universities and research centres in other countries.

The network was mostly in use for e-mail, for file transfer (Ftp) and other facilities such as Usenet. However there was no overlay in the system which made it easy to jump from one function to another or from one server to another. This was for the Brit Tim Berners Lee, a researcher at the European Particle Physics Laboratory CERN in Geneva, the moment to start thinking about the World Wide Web in 1990.

Tim Berners Lee defined the first web client and server in 1990 with specifications of web addresses (URL, Unique Resource Location), links (HTTP, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) ) and the mark-up language (HTML, Hyper Text Mark-up Language); HTMP was based on the ISO standard 8879 of 1986 known as the Standard Generalised Mark-up Language). In 1991 he developed the first pages on a Next machines.

With this material browser-like products were produced such as Gopher, a distributed search and retrieval protocol. Important was the text menu. It was soon to be superseded by Mosaic, which was a user-friendly interface. This web browser took the computer world by storm and popularised the World Wide Web, soon to be followed up by Netscape Navigator.

The online industry with ASCII databases and videotext services were taken by surprise and had problems understanding the depth of the change. Internet expanded fast and the traditional online industry had no answer. Databases sprang up like mushrooms and coming from the academic world were available at no costs. Information providers of ASCII databases were able to convert their data to the HTML, and later to XML standard. Yet the pioneer host Dialog was sold off to the Canadian publisher Thomson. But the videotext services were hard to convert due to its page structure and the videotext information providers were left in the cold and only a few were able to cross over to internet. Yet a completely new industry with new players came up, all using the same protocol. The scientists could put their databases online, pre-publish their articles and universities could build up repository of the PhD theses and scientific articles. Business started sites and company promotions and online business became a new line of trade. And the tifosi of the bulletin board systems made the cross-over easily and started their own sites. The internet protocol gave any target group the opportunity to get online.

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Blog Posting Number: 1125

Tags: online, internet

Pre-internet (10): Frozen online

The online industry was in development in the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. But online was expensive, especially for intermediaries in science, scientists and business people. On the other hand information providers, usually publishers of scientific, technical and medical information (STM) wanted more penetration for their electronic information. So they looked around for other carriers than online, especially in the optical field. By the end of the seventies the laser disc had been launched as a consumer product for film, but it lost its race against the video tape. But in the STM world there was interest in the laser disc. In the early eighties a consortium of STM publishers, among which Elsevier Science and Blackwell Scientific, formed the consortium Adonis to produce and distribute scientific articles on laser disc.

However this technology was superseded by the CD-ROM technology in 1984, when Philips started to produce CD-ROM. The carrier was seen as an adequate storage medium with 600Mb. For many STM publishers this was sufficient space to store many of their text databases. Besides the publishers could promote and handle this medium themselves. However in the first year there was a problem with the logical file structure, which bound a product to a particular brand of CD-ROM player. So twelve hard- and software parties came together and established the High Sierra format, which was turned into the ISO 9660 standard in 1988. From the High Sierra format onwards, any information provider could deliver a silver disc for any CD-ROM player. And the STM publishers and information providers made use of it as it was much the same type of subscription management distribution as magazines and books.

To the online industry CD-ROM was a disruptive technology. CD-ROM could hold 600Mb of data, which is a lot of text. And as most of the databases were archive databases putting the database on a CD-ROM was cheaper and more profitable than putting the material online. Besides, with CD-ROM no taxi meter was running in the back of the mind of researchers. And for information provider with timely information, h could choose for a hybrid distribution model offering timely information online and the archive on disc. This business model was adopted by STM publishers and information provider a well as business publishers.

The Dutch publisher Kluwer had started a commercial online service in 1980 and started to experiment with CD-ROM in 1987. By 1988 it published the legal database on the silver disc, while it used online only for timely matters. The Royal Tropical Institute ran it database Agris on two host computers/servers. Its audience were intermediaries in countries with problematic telephone networks and with high costs. So when he institute started to distribute the disc KIT Abstracts, it reached more subscribers than online.

Although many a publisher believed that the combination of online and CD-ROM had a healthy life expectancy, the business model was over by 1995 and the publisher and information providers had to cope with another disruptive technology: internet. Companies like Kluwer had to invest again. And Elsevier Science started the radical idea to bring all its publications, including its article archives, into the ScienceDirect database. By 2000 STM text CD-ROMs were over and online had been defrosted.

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Blog Posting Number: 1224

Tags: online, CD-ROM

Update Three Dutch nominations in Europrix Multimedia Awards 2008

Among the 23 nominations of the 2008 edition of the Europrix Multimedia Awards, are three nominations of Dutch designers. The nominations have been selected out of 338 entries from 32 countries. The winners will be presented at the Gala in Graz (Austria) on 29 November 2008

The Dutch nominees are:

Title: Images of the Street
Designer: Sandra Karis (NL)
School: Utrecht Graduate School of Art, Media, Music and Technology
URL: http://emma.hku.nl/

Title: Kika and Bob
Designer: Fons Schiedon (NL)
Company: Submarine
URL: http://www.kikaandbob.com/



Title: Treehuggers, A Studies in Immersive Animation
Designer: Gatze Zonneveld (NL)
School: Utrecht School of the Arts
URL: www.don-quixote.nl/pages/treehuggers.htm

Update NRC Handelsblad starts international site in English

The Dutch quality paper NRC Handelsblad has started an English language site in co-operation with Spiegel Online. The Dutch site contains news from NRC Handelsblad, but will also publish items by DutchNews.nl. See video.

BPN 1223 Pre-internet (9): Videotex outstripped by the time and technology

Videotex was a European technology. It was heavily stimulated by national politics and by the European Commission; grants were provided to promote research and development of the technology and market. Despite the support, videotext had a varying success.
For Great Britain the whole videotext adventure lasted 20 years from the start in 1971 till the sale of assets in 1991. Despite the fact that Prestel made use of common household devices such as the telephone and the television, it was still an expensive proposition. As a result, Prestel gained a limited market penetration among private consumers achieving a total of just 90,000 subscribers. But Prestel also received competition from other BT value added services like the combined e-mail and database system Telecom Gold.
In The Netherlands the whole technology also existed just twenty years, from 1976 (its first demonstration) till 1996 (the end of Videotex Netherlands. By that time the technology was over and done with. In the end roughly 350.000 users had made use of the public systems Viditel and its successor Videotex Nederland.
Other European countries, such as Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Germany bought the Prestel system. Italy registered 180,000 subscribers.
Remarkable is that the success of the French Télétel/Minitel was never repeated in any other country, let alone by any other videotext system. Yet Prestel had more success with selling the system than Télétel/Minitel. The success in France is often attributed to the free handing-out of the Minitel terminals. However I think that the Kiosque model was the key to success. The Kiosque was not regulated by the French PTT and the information providers felt more involved.
But also outside Europe videotext was no success. Singapore used a variation on the Prestel system by using a telephone line for prompting the system, while cable was used for downloading, providing a higher speed, allowing the transmission of pictures. Yet the system did not get out of the starting blocks and the same goes for the American trials of Green Thumb and Knight-Ridder. But system Telidon in Canada and Captain in Japan never got of the drawing board at all.

Part of the problem of penetration was also the colliding technologies. When videotex came onto the market, the PC was introduced in companies and bought as a toy by amateurs. They found out that the videotex technology and mini-computers and PCs were incompatible. All kind of conversion programs had to be written to transfer information from videotext devices to PCs for processing and storage of data.
Another interesting fact is to see that operational videotex remained limited to Europe. On the other hand in the United States the residential services like The Source, CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL also struggled to get enough market penetration. One should not forget that the seventies were a time of technology change with the introduction of computing and the first sales of PCs. In the eighties consumers were discovering how to make sense out of all these new technologies and how to cope with these new devices.

Could videotex have won the technology race against ASCII databases, e-mail and bulletin board systems? I personally do not think so, as the videotext technology was too much of a suit of armour, limiting the information provider and user. Besides the retrievability of information was too limited due to tree structures and page oriented navigation.

British Telecom, the telephone company spun out of the British Post Office, was early to abolish Prestel in 1991. Other countries were later. The Netherlands dumped Videotex Nederland on January 1 1997. In France Télétel/Minitel is dying out as the number of information provider declines with 30 percent a year. In 2005 there were still 6 million of Minitels (at its height it were more than 20 million), still yielding 351 million calls for 18.51 million hours of connection, generating € 206 million of revenues, of which € 145 million were redistributed to 2000 service providers. But the success of Télétel/Minitel has had also a drawback with the introduction of internet in France. In the nineties France turned out to be the first country on gaz and the last on electricity. France was one of the laggard countries in adopting internet.

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Blog Posting Number: 1223

Tags: videotex, kiosque, online

BPN 1222 Pre-internet (8): videotext to conquer the world

Videotex as created by the British Post Office started to promote the system around the world, but it also sparked variations on the system. The rush for a consumer system was on. Although the PC had come to the market being pushed by the company Hewlett & Packard (HP) and by the newcomer Apple, it had not gained speed as a consumer product. So the was still a window for a television oriented text service for residential (left) and professional (right) use.



USA
The British Prestel system was migrated and adopted to the American television system. The American government department of Agriculture and Trade initiated a 16 month long pilot in the state of Kentucky under the name Green Thumb. Another trial, with a different system, was held in the region of Miami by the newspaper conglomerate Knight-Ridder. Both projects were discontinued with the rise of information services like The Source and Compuserve as reason.

Japan
In Japan a trial was started in 1978 with a system, dubbed Captain (Character And pattern Telephone Access Information Work). 1.000 devices, ready to receive text, were handed out. The information was sent out from a central system through the telephone line to the consumer’s device. The television set had a decoder with a memory of 64k. the screen pages existed of only 8 rules with 15 symbols. The Captain system could handle the Roman alphabet as well as the Kanji, Hirangana and Katakana symbol set. The trial involved a daily newspaper.

Canada
In 1979 Canada showed its own videotex system, dubbed Telidon. Over the British Prestel system, the Telidon system had as advantage that it had more graphical opportunities. Instead of a mosaic only having six small squares like in the British Prestel system, the Telidon letters and symbols were made up with points. A car wheels would be less square in Canada than in Britain. The Canadian trial lasted from 1979 till 1982. During the trial 100.000 pages were entered. The trial encompassed ca. 1.000Bell Canada paid the experiment.

The Netherlands
The British videotex system was shown in the Netherlands in 1976 during a conference of cable operators during a secret meeting. By 1978 the Dutch PTT announced that it was going to introduce the Prestel system. The Dutch publisher VNU tried to reach a deal with the Dutch PTT in order to control the consumer and professional market, but the Dutch PTT got out from under this agreement. On August 7, 1980 the Dutch PTT started the videotext service, dubbed Viditel (I see from afar). One year later VNU got its videotext computer, but never was able to make it profitable with professional services. In order to get a better penetration for videotex, VNU started Ditzitel, a project with videotex technology but with cable transmission instead of telephone. Ditzitel never got the technology right, but by the end of the eighties the technology was operationel.

France
France had a different point of departure. The country needed a new telephone network. Plans for this were put on paper in 1975. But it became not only a technical specification of a network, but the paper also contained ideas about information services. The Centre National d’Etudes de Télécommunication (CNET) developed a terminal under the codename TICTAC (Terminal Intégré Comportant un Téléviseur et l’Appel au Clavier), which later on became known as Minitel. In order to stimulate the use, a program for free distribution of 1 million Minitels was set up. But the French PTT also thought about content. It planned to replace the printed regional directories with a total of 34 million telephone numbers by an electronic directory, with the advantages of 24 hours availability and the passing out of the print edition. The electronic directory was launched in 1981.
The French videotext system Télétel became a success. This is often ascribed to the free handing out of the terminals Minitel to stimulate the use of the telephone directory. But not all Minitels were free. The success can rather be attributed to the distributed network organisation, to which information providers could hook up, and the freedom of information providers using the distributed network.
The French Télétel/Minitel became a success with millions of Minitels around. They generated millions of online connected minutes, amongst others with sex messages via the messagerie rose, the pink e-mail service.

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Blog Posting Number: 1222

Tags: videotex, kiosque

BPN 1221 Pre-internet (7): Videotex, tree content

Videotex content
Videotex differs from ASCII in presentation and linking. Videotex is a presentation protocol and not a communication protocol like ASCII. While in ASCII the rules fill the screen from the top, videotex presents the information as a page. All those pages are like a mobile artwork from the ceiling, but a mobile with nine levels. The top two levels (0 to 9 and 01 to 99) were destined for system activities. The third level (001 to 999) was intended for starting pages. An information provider could use six levels to distribute his/her information. Every page could expanded with add-on pages from a to z. Via a tree menu one could search for information and by keying in page numbers one could reach a page directly; in this way it was possible to use the system for timely information by keying in a date like 800915 (15 September 1980). In this way it was also possible to search sideways. Searching like in ASCII databases by keywords was not possible, unless the information provider put up a list of controlled keywords as links.

Illustration of tree structured pages:
- top two systems levels;
- level three is starting page;
- information pages;
- add-on pages.

Every page had 24 rules of 40 positions (letters, figures, symbols and diacritical signs). Every position was built up in a small mosaic of sic squares, which could be used to produce rudimentary graphical representations such as cars (with square wheels). Text as well as graphical representations could be embellished with one of seven colours (white, black, green, blue, red, yellow, magenta).

The page orientation entailed consequences for the writing of content. The author was limited in text by the space of a page and always had to think about navigation. Every page needed links to go back to the level above or to the starting page as well as the exit page (which was hardly used), but there was also a need to lead the user in the navigation from top to bottom, from the bottom pages up as well as sideways by using index pages (see illustration).

Videotex was seen as a consumer information system. The first British Prestel system contained 16 sections:

Buying a Car------Financial Information
An Evening Out -- Market Intelligence
Houses for Sale---Business Intelligence
Local Information-Community Services
Social Guidance---Route Planning
Looking for a Job-Holiday Information
Entertainment-----News
Education---------Sports Results

Source: The Viewdata Revolution by Sam Fedida and Rex Malik; Associated Business Press, 1979

Organisation
The organisation of the videotext service was similar to the ASCII database service, except that the videotext services in the eighties were claimed by the national mail and telephone services as an extra service and source of revenues. In the UK the British post office claimed the service, in The Netherlands the Dutch PTT, in West-Germany the Bundespost and in France the French PTT.
But soon there came a difference between the organisation of the service following the British Prestel model and the French kiosque model. In the Prestel model the PTT controlled the system, did the marketing and publicity and handled the revenues on behalf of the information providers. The PTTs even got involved, for the first time, in content for the first time by claiming the common index and keyword maintenance.
The French PTT was less in control and left the content business to the information providers and publishers. The French PTT was involved with maintaining the system and the network as well as handling the revenues. But the information provider and publishers were more independent in setting up their services, including the technical side. They could link their own computer to the central computers and use the service like a newspaper kiosque, promoting their own products. This has been a key success factor in the promotion of the French Teletel project.

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Blog Posting Number: 1121

Tags: videotex, kiosque

Update: Butterfly Tattoo in world premier showing

Last Saturday the movie Butterfly Tattoo, based on a novel with the same title by the British author Phillip Pullman, went on screen for the first time during the movie festival Film by the Sea in Vlissingen (Flushing) in The Netherlands. The production team and the cast were present. I have written before in a posting about this movie (and my small investment in the movie).

The photograph was taken after the showing of the movie. The three people from the left are the members of the production team and the the three people from the right are the two main actors and the producer.

There are no reviews yet. Personally I found it remarkable that such a low budget movie had such a professional look. The movie was dramatic, emotional and entertaining with humour and fine music. It is also a very British movie in its language and the theme of class distinction. The pace of the movie could be speeded up in some parts, but the movie was not boring.

Presently the movie The Golden Compass can be seen in the theaters. This movie based on a novel by the same author was produced for 16 million US dollar. The Butterfly Tattoo was produced with a budget of a little over 200.000 euro. The money was picked up in two days after a front page article of the Dutch financial daily FD, describing the project of three students. The production team is presently negotiating about the distribution rights.

BPN 1220 Pre-internet (6): Online from Europe by television

Online was started by the Americans using computers. Information was shown on a terminal screen or on paper. But another development came from television. The basic idea was that a central computer would send textual and rough graphic information to a television screen. The information was transported by television waves at first and later by telephone.
The US company RCA started the development of a text system for television under the name Homefax. In 1971 Mitre Corp. started the first text tests bundled on a television wave. However the company was passed in its ambition by the British broadcast company. The BBC announced that it had developed a system Teledata in order to broadcast news in text form to an adapted television independently of the programme broadcasted at that time and without interrupting the program. On the other hand the texts could be coupled with a television programme for subtitling or translation. BBC described the system in 1970 in an internal memo of December 14, 1970 and a patent was applied for on February 9, 1971. The BBC named the system Ceefax (see facts) and started trials from 1974 till 1976. An official Ceefax editiorial staff was operational from 1976 onwards. However the success was dependent on the number of adapted television sets (10.000 sets in 1978 and 40.000 sets in 1980). The commercial broadcast company started a teletex service in 1973 under the name Oracle (Optical Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics). Both systems started to present the weather, stock quotes, news- and sports items.
The British system was exported to the Netherlands, West-Germany, Flanders in Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Australia and Hong Kong. France developed a system of its own under the name Antiope (Acquisition Numérique et Télévisualisation d’Images Organisées en Pages d’Ecriture). There were also other standards developed like in Japan (Captain) and Canada (Videotron).

From teletex to videotex
The development of Teledata by the BBC was followed with great interest by Sam Fedida of the British Post Office Research Department. In 1970 he combined the Teledata system with the Telephone system and developed the viewdata concept, an online system via the plain old Telephone system with the television as information delivery system. (The generic system name viewdata became obsolete due to depositing the brand name and was dubbed videotex – the Latin word combination for I see text). With the consumer in mind and the absence of a personal computer – which only was introduced from 1995 onwards -, the system was seen as the Volkswagen of the online industry: a costly central computer, a common telephone network and a mass consumption television as delivery station. Only a modem and decoder were needed, but these devices would become cheap through mass production. The advantage of the telephone transmission was the interactivity between the user and the central computer; with the transmission through television waves information could only be sent one way.
Sam Fedida made his first presentation on January 13, 1976. In the same year the UK Queen Elizabeth II sent a first message by videotext. In October 1978 the first test service was opened on the Waterloo computer in London. In the same year the Financial Times and the financial information company Extel started the financial service Extel. In September 1979 the British Post Office officially started the commercial videotext service Prestel (see illustration of opening screen of the service) for business and consumer services.

Cover of the book book Viewdata Revolution by Sam Fedida and Rex Malik; Associated Busines Press, 1979

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Blog Posting Number: 1220

Tags: teletex, videotex

BPN 1219 Pre-internet (5): Consumer services

Online was not exclusively the domain of scientists and business men. Small and middle large companies as well as well to do private persons were interested and looked for timesharing services from 1969 onwards. However, also consumer services were set up some 10 years later, from 1979 onwards.

Consumer services
Some companies with a computer saw an opportunity to make money by selling idle computer time at night. It was the start of consumer online companies. In 1969 the online service Compuserve started in this way. While best known for its consumer services division, the CompuServe Information Service, CompuServe was also a world leader in other commercial services. Another consumer online company was The Source, which offered e-mail and chatting from 1979 onwards. Compuserve started to offer e-mail in 1979 and chatting in 1980.

The Source (Source Telecomputing Corporation) started service in 1979 as an online service, one of the first such services to be oriented toward and available to the general public. Intended for use with 300 bit/s and 1200 bit/s dial-up telephone connections, The Source was text-based for most of its existence. At its peak, The Source had 80,000 members. During much of its existence it charged a start-up fee of about $100 and hourly usage rates on the order of $10 per hour. It provided news sources, weather, stock quotations, a shopping service, electronic mail, various databases, online text of magazines, and airline schedules. It also had a newsgroup-like facility.
In 1989 Compuserve acquired The Source, which turned out to have many ghost accounts and dismantled its competitor. Eventually in 1997 the pioneer consumer online service Compuserve was acquired by America On Line (AOL)

Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) dates back to 1980 when broadcaster CBS and telecommunications firm AT&T formed a joint venture named Venture One in Ridgewood, New Jersey. The company hoped to introduce a Videotex-based TV set top device that would allow consumers to shop at home and receive news, sports and weather. After concluding the market test, CBS and AT&T took the data and went their separate ways. In 1984 Prodigy was founded as Trintex, a joint venture between CBS, computer manufacturer IBM, and retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company. CBS left the venture in 1986. The company's service was launched regionally in 1988; a nationwide launch followed in1990. It was the second largest online service provider, with its 465,000 subscribers trailing only CompuServe's 600,000. Under the guidance of editor Jim Bellows, Prodigy developed a fully staffed 24x7 newsroom with editors, writers and graphic artists intent on building the world's first true online medium. The initial result was that Prodigy pioneered Internet portals - a single site offering news, weather, sports, communication with other members, and shopping for goods and services such as groceries, general merchandise, brokerage services, and airline reservations as well as lifestyle features, including popular syndicated columnists, restaurant surveys, Consumer Reports articles, test reports and games for kids.

AOL (formerly America Online, Inc.) is an American global Internet services and media company. It was founded in1983 as Quantum Computer Services and franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services. AOL offers millions of customers around the world to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the internet as a whole. In January 2000, AOL and Time Warner announced plans to merge and the deal was closed on 2001. AOL began life as a short-lived venture called Control Video Corporation (or CVC), founded by Bill von Meister. Its sole product was an online service called Gameline for the Atari 2600 video game console after von Meister's idea of buying music on demand was rejected by Warner Brothers. Subscribers bought a modem from the company for $49.95 and paid a one-time $15 setup fee. Gameline permitted subscribers to temporarily download games and keep track of high scores, at a cost of $1 per game. The telephone disconnected and the downloaded game would remain in Gameline's Master Module and playable until the user turned off his console or downloaded another game. In 1985 launched a dedicated online service for Commodore 64 and 128 computers, originally called Quantum Link ("Q-Link" for short). The joint venture with Time Warner has not delivered the content engine from Time Warner to AOL,so that it could become a real new publisher.

Bulletin board systems
For the real amateurs the electronic messaging service Fido net became available. This e-mailsystem was developed by the American Tom Jennings, who named the network after his dog (see the opening screen of Fido-net). In 1984 he succeeded to realise a computer network for PC amateurs, which was a fraction of the subscription to The Source and Compuserve. The core of the success was in the bulletin board software. Copies were multiplied and distributed freely to PC amateurs as long as they wanted to function as a system administrator. In this way more nodes in the network were created along which messages could be sent at night against tariffs for down hours. Amateurs could call in at a local telephone rate. The messages could also be sent to other networks. But no guarantee of receipt was given. When internet was introduced the population moved over from bulletin board systems to internet without any troubles.

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Blog Posting Number: 1219

Tags: bulletin board system, walled garden, portalwalled garden, bulletin board system, portal

BPN 1218 Pre-internet (4): European databases

Also Europe was very early active with online. In 1969 Lockheed performed an assignment for the European Space Agency (ESA) in Frascati (Italy) on behalf of Lockheed. The company installed the NASA database RECON. From 1971 ESA started as ESA/Information Retrieval Services the first online service with NASA RECON en Chemabs databases for scientific and technical research. The service could position itself thanks to the cheap telephone tariffs of Tymnet.

The ESA initiative spawned online services in many European countries. Usually it were the governments which stimulated the usage of online services for scientific and technical research.

In Western Germany the government published in 1974 a program for the promotion of information and documentation. One of the plans was to found a Fachinformationszentren (FIZ) for the disciplines environment, technology, patents and research. FEZ started in1977. In 1978 the online service INKA was launched and in 1982 it already had 40 databases, among which the medical database DIMDI. In 1983 a distributed online service was launched under the name STN International; it linked the FIZ databases, Chemical Abstracts in the USA and the Japan Centre for Science and Technology (JICST).

In France the scientific and technical host Questel was founded in 1975. In the following years the online service has specialised in patents, IPR and brands databases. In 1994 the US online service Orbit was acquired from the legacy of Robert Maxwell’s media empire.

The UK was seen in the seventies as a stepping Stone to Europe for the US online information services. Due to the success of the ESA services, Lockheed’s online service, in the meantime named Dialog, saw possibilities to sell their databases in Europe. Roger Bilboul with his company Learned Information (in 1994 bought by VNU) was asked to be the representative for Lockheed’s Dialog in Europe.
BOC DataSolve was from origin an UK company, the computer department of the this multinational. The computerised documentation department developed itself into a an online information service which was sold to the television and record company Thorn-EMI. The service developed into a media host. It contained the complete full text of for example the Financial Times and the radio broadcasts such as BBC World. All those texts, including those of the newspapers, had to be retyped. In 1984 the Financial Times bought the service and changed its name to FT Profile, which was bought by Lexis/Nexis.
In 1979 BPCC, the media company of Robert Maxwell (see photograph), started to profile itself. Through its scientific publishing company Pergamon, Maxwell bought the rests of the bankrupt Infoline to form the scientific online information service Pergamon-Infoline. In 1987 the US service Orbit was added and continued as Pergamon Orbit Infoline to be divided up in 1991: Orbit was acquired by Questel and the rest was sold off.

In Switzerland a business information service Data-Star was launched in 1980. the service was financed by Radio Suisse. The online service bought the BRS search software, but made the mistake to buy a version which it could not maintain itself. The service was eventually bought by the Canadian publisher Thomson, which also bought Lockheed information service Dialog.

The online industry
The online industry in the US got its recognition in 1977, when Online Inc. (see team on photograph) started the magazine Online and organised a first online conference and exhibition. The conference and exhibition were mainly visited by librarians, online intermediaries and business intelligence users. The business grew fast from 1977 onwards as PCs were introduced by HP and Apple.

Online got a face in Europe when Learned Information started the magazine Online Review and the annual Online Conference in London in 1977. This conference and the exhibition were aimed at documentalists and online desk researchers. In 1980 online in Europe got a stimulus from the European Commission with the launch of the Euronet Diana network (see photograph). Through this network of the European Economic Community the European countries were connected and ready for a European online industry. Besides offering a network, the European Commission stimulated the development of databases with grants. In 1983 VNU Business Publications in Londen received a grant to develop IDB Online, the first daily electronic newsletter for the computer industry.

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Blog Posting Number: 1218

Tags: online industry

BPN 1217 Pre-internet (3): Information retrieval industry

In a short time online services became commercial companies. Heart of the online service was the portfolio of textual and numerical databases and the search engines. The first databases consisted of a collection of abstracts from scientific, technical or medical articles (secondary information). But soon databases were published with full texts of laws, verdicts and newspapers (primary information). Also numerical series like stock quotes were databased. All these databases were made accessible for search action by an information retrieval program.

The texts of these databases were processed to various kinds of indexes, so that words could be found outside its context and in its context. But also controlled key words could be searched. With the search engine words and keywords could be combined by the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT. But the retrieval program could also search on words and adjacent words. This type of searching was called full-text retrieval. Besides search facilities there were user friendly facilities like highlights, highlighting the requested terms; the highlight was introduced by Mead Data Central.

Searching was an art. The low modem speed, the low processing of the central computer, the connected time and the tariffs of data lines function as a ticking taxi meter for the user. By training the users learned methods to search fast and they passed on tricks to each other. Professional searchers were like terminal machinists, who competed with each other to reach the best results in the shortest time and against the lowest tariffs.

The organisation of a commercial ASCII information service was fourfold: a computer centre, a sales organisation, one or more information providers and a user. The computer centre took care of loading databases and maintaining the service and the telecom facilities. The sales organisation sold access to the service and the databases and took care of the marketing and trainings. The information providers offered one or more databases to the online service. The user sought access to the information service and searched the databases.

The tariffs were composed of several items. The user paid a subscription to the service, connected system time, a copyright royalty for the use of the database. Separately the user had to pay connected time to the telecommunication company. From the beginning it was a production oriented tariff. But marketing came in when BRS came into the market with a bang as it offered search for a fixed tariff, where the other ones offered time and royalty based tariffs.

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Blog Posting Number: 1217

Tags: ASCII

BPN 1216 Pre-internet (2): USA commercial online information services

In 1964 Lockheed set up Information Sciences Laboratory under the direction of Roger Summit and purchased one of the first IBM 360/30 third-generation computers. By 1966 NASA gave Lockheed the assignment to mount the NASA RECON, a 30.000 item database on the internal information system of Lockheed. Bunker-Ramo company got at the same time the assignment to develop a dial-up service for this database. By 1967 Lockheed was awarded the contract to run the database on behalf of NASA and was granted the ownership of the information retrieval program (search engine one would say these days).

But Lockeed was not the only company working on an information retrieval service. System Development Corporation (SDC), a subsidiary of the think-tank RAND and run by Carlos Cuadra, developed in 1968 a retrieval system and demonstrated the principle of it with the ERIC, a database consisting of abstracts of educational articles. By 1969 SDC officially presented the retrieval program ELHILL using a 15.000 abstracts on Parkinson disease.

Telecommunication was changing by 1970. The packet switching was introduced and new telecom companies were set up for this, while old companies like Teletype tried for low-cost, low-speed information delivery. Low speed was 110 baud (roughly 110Kb). So remote companies would be able to link to a central hosting organisation and pick up the information needed. SDC got ready for the market seriously with the information retrieval program ORBIT. It went after a contract to back-up the internal NLM’s installation of ORBIT, but also negotiated the external exploitation of the earliest medical database MEDLINE.

TI/5/2
1/5/2
78329582
National (Netherlands) network for measurement of air pollution
van Egmond N.D.
NETHERLANDS
INTERMEDIAIR (NETHERLANDS) 1978, 14/4 (40-45), Coden: INTDB
Languages: DUTCH
Since a few years measurement of polluting substances has been carried out outside the urban and industrial areas. The national network for pollution measurement, which became operative in 1975, as well as additional mobile measurements have generated data from which it can be concluded that in rural areas lying at a great distance from the urban and industrial centers, relativelv high pollution levels occur. In large parts of the Southern Netherlands in particular, concentration which equal those in the Northern and Western industrial parts of Holland have been registered. This is caused by pollution transport from large industrial areas; particularly the source areas in the GFR and Belgium appear to he responsible for the high concentrations of SOsub 2 which were measured under favourable weather conditions in the South.
Tags: CHEMICAL AND SEROLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND PR(0102); GEOGRAPHICAL ASPECTS(0401); 4021(4021)
Descriptors: *air monitoring(0061833); *sulfur dioxide(0046727); netherlands(0032705)
Identifiers: national network;
Section Headings:
04604010100-ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH/MEASUREMENTS OF POLLUTION/Air/Ambient air

A secundary information record of an article on pollution retrieved from Dialog

But SDC and Lockheed were battling out fights with their retrieval systems as internal and back-up systems. The fights were also between two strong-willed pioneers in information retrieval: Roger Summit (photograh left) of Dialog and Carlos Cuadra (photograph right) of SDC. Faced with a potential loss of the NLM database Carlos Cuadra wanted to escape this situation and started a survey to market to see whether there was a commercial market for online services. He sent out 7000 forms, but only 72 forms were returned. The message looked to be clear: forget about a commercial market for online information. But on the other hand he saw his competitor Lockheed’s Roger Summit making a commercial offering of government’s databases like NASA RECON, Nuclear Science Abstracts and ERIC; he even had picked up Pandex, the first commercial, non-governmental database. Charles Cuadra could not see this and went commercially online.

In fact online had become a race as Mead Data Central, a subsidiary of a paper mill company, went online with hr legal database Lexis; the company had picked up experience in the field by digitising the full texts of the legal verdicts for the Ohio Bar Association. Later on the service Nexis was added to digitise and commercially exploit the full text of newspapers like the Boston Globe en de Philadelphia; Nexis acquired the database of the renown New York Times in 1979.

But the competition did not stay reduced to three major players in the US market. In 1977 BRS (Bibliographic Retrieval Services), a privatised online medical service of the state New York, came on the market and was bought in 1980 by Indian Head, the media unit of Thyssen Bornemisza Corporation.

The information industry was oriented to information retrieval. The e-mail business was a separate business handled mostly by computing companies like General Electric, which ran the e-mail network GEISCO. In the eighties combinations of e-mail servers and online databases started to appear on the market. One system was developed by Westinghouse, which produced a system that was used in the information service NewsNet in the US and the office service Telecom Gold in the UK. VNU BPG (London) used both systems in 1984 to deliver a newsletter edition by e-mail and offer retrieval facilities on the database end.

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Blog Posting Number: 1216

Tags: information retrieval

BPN 1215 Pre-internet (1): Before internet

This is the first instalment of a series of articles dealing with the pre-internet period, ranging from the seventies till the nineties. The industry which came about catered to information retrieval for professionals such as scientists and business intelligence people, messaging for business, but also to consumer services. The USA developed in a different way than Europe, which went its own way in videotext. By 1985 the online industry was in for a surprise with CD-ROM; this was frozen online. In 1991 internet was introduced, it brought unity in online with the HTP/IP protocol; it was also the beginning of a new mass medium.

For many people online is synonymous to internet. However the origin of online had nothing to do with internet or with its predecessor ARPAnet. This network was a military project set up by the US ministry of Defense. The study for the network was launched in the middle of the Cold War. The network was intended to survive rocket attacks from Russia. In the conventional telephone network a rocket hit would cut out the entire network. The ARPAnet should keep working for the part not hit. This meant another network architecture and protocol, in which the network was not dependent on a central computer. By 1969 the network became operational and started to work with computers of some Californian universities.

But at the same time an important development took place for telephone networks. So far networks had been designed for voice traffic. In fact the networks were not very suited for data transport. So a new environment for transmitting data had to be developed. In the late sixties packet switching was introduced. With this method information from databases or e-mail messages were chopped into small data packages, which could be sent to a destination through various routes and even networks. In the fall of 1971 the American engineer Roy Tomlinson transmitted a first electronic message. When asked after 30 years what the content of the message was, he answered that it most likely was the first line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; the message was written in capitals. (Tomlinson happens to be the inventor of the @ sign in the e-mail addresses). The special packet switching networks, which were set up on the basis of this technology, formed the basis for the new online industry with information and e-mail services; mind you, at first information retrieval and e-mail were offered separately by separate companies.

Online
In the sixties the computers, mainframes and mini-computers, could be connected with each other by modem (modulator en demodulator), a device as large as a VCR. It was originally intended to modulate the data signals for the voice network on the one side and demodulate the data signals at the other side. But this was not easy due to the incompatibility of operation systems, hardware and telephone lines. Special lines were leased for the data traffic in order to prevent a bit from falling over.
Technically it was already possible in the sixties to exchange data online. Yet it did not really pick up as it was easier to exchange punch cards and magnetic reels. But online got a political impulse, when John F. Kennedy became president in 1961 and promised the American people that the USA would be the first country to put a man on the moon. This promise accelerated the development of online. Space companies like NASA and space ship builders like Lockheed has to find new ways to make scientific, technical and medical literature accessible. On January 10, 1963 president Kennedy released a press statement, announcing the coordination of scientific, technical and medical information. A committee was formed with Alvin M. Weinberg as chair, which produced the report Science, government, and information: the responsibilities of the technical community and the government in the transfer of information (1963) in three months.
At NASA and a scientific institute like the National Library of Medicine abstracts of scientific, technical and medical articles were already produced for print magazines and the punch tapes for the text files were fed into the computer. The abstracts were indexed and made available for desk research. An employee of the institute could retrieve information through the internal network by keying a key word or a combination of keywords, upon which the index lists were checked for a match. The result was sent to a screen or printer. The step from the internal network to the external network by which researchers could use the abstract databases for their automated literature search was only logical.

Technical ingredients
For the online service the following technical ingredients were required:
1. Host computer (server we would say these days): a central computer with a communication program and an information retrieval program. These computers were mainframes or mini-computers. They worked on the principle of time-sharing, which made it possible for many searchers to start search actions and retrieve information. Although it looked like all searchers were online and actively searching together, they all got individually time assigned to get access to a file.
2. Telephone network/data network. Online information retrieval started over the Plain Old Telephone network (POT), but switched from 1971 onwards to data networks with packet switching.
3. Modem (moduleren en demoduleren). a device (de)modulating zeros and ones to sounds in the POT network and vice versa or transferring bits and bytes from A to B.
4. Terminal: a terminal had several forms as no PCs existed yet. So a terminal could be a key board either with a fixed or a separate printer. It could also be a screen and a keyboard, but without any intelligence; what came on the screen could be sent on to the printer. And there was a portable terminal consisting of a keyboard and a thermal printer.
5. Protocol: the communication protocol between the central computer and the terminal consisted of ASCII (American Standard Code of Information Interchange), a set of 128 agreed letters, figures and symbols. It was no presentation protocol telling how a screen should be made up, but it was purely intended for texts. On monochrome terminals screen, which were grey, green or amber, no pages with texts were shown, but lines of 80 columns which rolled from top to bottom.

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Blog Posting Number: 1215

Tags: online, modem, protocol, terminal, network

BPN 1214 For sale: Baidu.eu not an olympic winner

It is more than a year and a half that the brand Baidu.eu was launched by a Dutch company; besides this domain other domains like baidu.tv, baidu.nl and baidu.be were registered. These domains were not registered by Baidu.cn. On February 23, 2007 I wrote in my daily posting: The young entrepreneur had put his hopes on selling the domain name Baidu.eu to Baidu.cn and hopes to cash from the transaction. In my view it was a vulgar case of domain hijack. The moment of reckoning has come.

On September 3, 2008 Baidu Europe announced in a press release that it will sell it much wanted brand and domain names, in total 27 brand and domain names. The reason for the sale is twofold. The Asian Baidu has been propelled to theird ranking in search engines; besides Baid.cn is setting up new companies like Baidu.tv, a domain name registered by Baidu Europe. And Baidu Europe seems to become the victim of the Olympic games activities by Baidu.cn and Baidu.com. And last not but least, the company is being hindered by the (professional) Dutch marketing agency Tribal promoting the Chinese search giant in Europe (see profile in English). Yet, the owner of Baidu.eu says that the company Baidu Europe has built up a fine reputation over five years of trading.

Now the company wants to continue business under another name. the question is of course: what business. The company claimed to have 8 employees in Fenruary 2007 and it still has 8 employees in 2008. As indicated last year, you can do business with temps, especially in the university city of Groningen, where the company is located. The company was founded in 2003 and is specialised in total solution in the field of computing and webdesign. The company claimed to be in touch with a German company building a search engine for Baidu Europe.

It is surprising that Baidu.cn has never sued the owner. The company would have won the case easily and could have even claimed damages, despite the fact the owner claimed to be unfamiliar with the domain Baidu, when he registered. I am convinced that a Dutch judge would have wiped this argument off the table and judged that this was pure case of domain hijack. So, I do not see too many companies, waiting outside the door of Baidu Europe with bags of money.

Blog Posting Number: 1214

Tags: domain, domain hijacking, domain squatting

BPN 1213 EU Telecoms Reform: the 6 Most Important Issues

During the telecom debate the European Parliament addressed, in plenary session on September 2, 2008, the so-called EU Telecoms Reform. On 13 November 2007, the European Commission had proposed to the European Parliament and the Council of Telecoms Ministers to reform the EU Telecoms rules (in place since 2003) to reinforce competition and investment and to create a Single Telecoms Market in the EU with innovative cross-border services and wireless high-speed broadband for all (IP/07/1677). Following an intense debate and many hearings, the European Parliament's Industry, Research and Energy Committee (ITRE) and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee (IMCO) voted on amendments on 7 July (MEMO/08/491). The debate in the European Parliament's plenary with its 785 members is expected to pave the way for a vote on the Commission's entire EU Telecoms reform proposals in first reading on 23 September. Depending on the outcome of the vote and the discussions in the Council of Telecoms Ministers of 27 November, a political agreement on the final legislative texts could be achieved between the three institutions by the end of the year. The new regulatory framework would then become the law in all 27 EU Member States by 2010.

The following is an overview of the 6 most important reform proposals still under discussion between the European Parliament and the Council:

1. Independence of national telecoms regulators
What has the Commission proposed? For the Commission, independent national regulators are the indispensable backbone of an efficient, fair and competition-oriented system for telecoms regulation in Europe. To improve the application of telecoms rules, the European Commission therefore wants to strengthen the independence of national telecoms regulators (such as CMT in Spain, Bundesnetz­agentur in Germany, AGCOM in Italy, Ofcom in the UK, or ARCEP in France).
In the Commission's view, national telecoms regulators should not take in­structions from any other body in relation to the day-to-day performance of their tasks, and should enjoy financial and operational independence both from governments and from operators. Moreover, to strengthen the independence of the regulator, dismissal of the head of the national regulator should only be possible if certain criteria are met, such as serious misconduct.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The proposal for stronger independence of national telecoms is supported by the European Parliament while the Council is more hesitant. The Council especially indicated that it could only accept a stronger independence of national regulators in the context of market-related regulation, but not in politically sensitive areas such as spectrum management or security.

2. Functional separation
What has the Commission proposed? The Commission wants to give national telecoms regulators the additional tool of imposing functional separation when it can be demonstrated that other remedies have failed or are likely to fail to achieve effective competition. This should increase the effectiveness of national regulators, allowing them to tackle remaining competition bottlenecks more effectively.
The implementation of functional separation aims to give all market players, including the incumbent operator's service division and new market entrants, the same network access under equivalent conditions. Functional separation, which (unlike ownership unbundling proposed in the debate on energy markets (IP/07/1361)) does not require divestiture of assets, has already been implemented with success in the UK and several other Member States have taken steps in that direction, most recently Sweden.
Common EU rules on functional separation will ensure better regulatory convergence in the Single Market and avoid distortions of competition that could result from a divergent understanding and application of this regulatory tool.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The Commission's proposal has received a lot of support in the European Parliament's lead committees, and is supported by a majority of ministers in the Telecoms Council. Furthermore, national telecoms regulators have unanimously welcomed this proposal. However, in view of the strong opposition of several incumbent operators to the introduction of the tool of functional separation, the final outcome of this debate is still uncertain.

3. Spectrum: The digital dividend and "broadband for all"
What has the Commission proposed? The Commission's proposal for radio spectrum reform aims to achieve a more efficient and consistent management of spectrum to promote innovation and achieve high-speed "broadband for all" Internet access in Europe. The Commission also proposes a coordination of approaches in the EU to optimise the overall benefits of the digital dividend (the radio spectrum freed as a result of the switchover from analogue to digital TV), particularly by encouraging new wireless services and also new TV channels in high definition quality.
A more efficient use of this scarce public resource of a high economic and societal value, while ensuring protection against harmful interference, would be a major boost to competitiveness and innovation in Europe. The Commission expects additional economic benefits from better spectrum management in the EU to be in the region of €10 billion/year.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The European Parliament and the Council support several of the main Commission proposals, such as a more flexible use and harmonised spectrum tradability. The European Parliament's lead committee also has shown a legitimate interest in a stronger European coordination, inter alia by advocating the creation of a new expert committee to advise the EU institutions on spectrum-related matters. However, the Council, continues to be rather reluctant to accept any coordination of spectrum management across borders or a stronger say of the European Parliament.
In this context, the European Parliament debated a specific motion for a resolution on the digital dividend, prepared by MEP Mrs. Patrizia Toia. The decisive issue here is whether the Parliament will support the Commission's proposal for a common roadmap on the digital dividend to coordinate Member States' approaches. A positive vote would allow the Commission to launch the required preparatory work – including the launch of a socio-economic study to quantify the benefits of various options for coordination at EU level – by the end of this year.

4. Investment into new networks
What has the Commission proposed? The Commission believes that legal certainty and effective, fair regulation of network bottlenecks are the best recipe for competition and investment in the telecoms markets. In addition, the Commission's proposal for a better management of radio spectrum (see point 3.) aims at freeing this very valuable source for new wireless services, thereby triggering more competition and attracting significant investment into these services. Furthermore, measures have been proposed by the Commission in order to improve the rules for facility sharing, by introducing in the EU's regulatory framework provisions that allow national regulators to impose entries to building, to ducts, manholes and street cabinets.
The Commission is also working on providing further guidance to national regulators (by means of a Recommendation under the existing EU telecoms rules) with regard to the conditions under which access to so-called "next generation networks" should be granted. The need for a fair return on investment is already written into the present telecoms rules, but a more coordinated approach of national regulators on this important matter could enhance legal certainty and the necessary level playing field for operators.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? There is a broad consensus in the Parliament and the Council about the need to maintain and strengthen competition, in particular to continue access regulation. Both Parliament and Council also support the promotion of investment into new networks as long as competition is effective. The European Parliament's lead committee is favouring in particular clear regulatory guidance on the return on investment for new networks to which access needs to be given to ensure effective competition. In the area of spectrum, the European Parliament and the Council support several of the main Commission proposals, such as a more flexible use and harmonised spectrum tradability, but there is a certain reluctance, especially in the Council, to accept any coordination of spectrum management across borders.

5. Number portability for European consumers
What has the Commission proposed? Consumers should be able to change their fixed or mobile operator while keeping their phone number – number portability – within 1 working day. For the Commission, this is a key facilitator of consumer choice and effective competition. At the moment, it takes 8 days on average to switch a fixed or mobile operator in the EU while keeping one's number. Europe's best performers are France for the fixed market and, for the mobile market, Ireland and Malta. It still can take up to 30 days to switch fixed operators in Estonia and up to 20 days to switch mobile operators in Italy and Slovakia.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The European Parliament is generally favourable to the Commission's proposal, even though amendments have been tabled to allow a maximum of 3 days for number portability. The Council is so far hesitant to follow the Commission's proposal, in view of the additional cost it could entail for operators.

6. European Telecoms Regulator
What has the Commission proposed? To deliver more coherent and consistent rules across the EU, the Commission proposes to create a European telecoms authority, called "European Telecoms Market Authority". The idea behind this new authority is to create a level playing field for both telecoms operators and consumers in the EU's emerging Single Telecoms Market. This new body would not replace national regulators, but would allow them to play a stronger and more effective role at European level, vis-à-vis both the Commission and individual regulators. It would therefore build on the experience of national regulators, and thus be close to the market.
Tools proposed by the Commission to make the new body more efficient than the present loose cooperation among national regulators in the "European Regulators Group" (ERG) include: the move to majority voting; a small, but efficient permanent and independent staff enabling the body to swiftly and efficiently analyse and give opinions on proposals of national regulators for market analyses and remedies from 27 EU Member States; a stronger accountability of national regulators to the European Parliament; and a permanent and independent Director appointed, after a hearing by the competent European Parliament's committee, for a term of 5 years. In order not to create a new administration at EU level, the Commission proposed to merge the new European Telecoms Authority with the already existing European Network and Information Security Agency ENISA, which already has a staff of 50.
What is the position in Parliament and Council? The European Parliament's lead committee is keen to strengthen cooperation between national telecoms regulators and make it more effective. For this purpose the Industry Committee has proposed to create a "Body of European Regulators in Telecoms" (BERT), a Community body that would replace the present ERG and advise the Commission, national telecoms regulators, and the European Parliament. The body would take decisions by majority and have a small, permanent staff at its disposal. If the body were to vote against a national regulators' proposal, the Commission would request the proposal's withdrawal.
However, in contrast to the Commission's proposal, the new body would not be dealing with network security issues and therefore not be merged with ENISA, the mandate of which the European Parliament wants to prolong for 3 years. The Parliament's lead committee also appears to favour having two-thirds of the new body's budget financed by the EU Member States. The Commission instead advocates financing it from the EU budget to bolster the independence of the body and to ensure equality among the 27 national regulators within the body.
In the Council, a number of Member States agree with the need to strengthen the Single Market and cooperation among national regulators. However, many in the Council have serious reservations about the creation of a new Community body. The Council of Ministers is also against combining telecoms regulation and network security responsibilities and would like to prolong ENISA's mandate for 3 years.
With regard to ENISA, EU Telecoms Commissioner Reding has said: "I have to accept that Parliament and Council at this moment in time do not want to reform ENISA. However, I seriously believe that network security challenges will require soon a strong, coordinated European response. Recent cyber attacks in Estonia and now again in Georgia have shown that one country alone can be very vulnerable. I call therefore on the European Parliament and the Council to start early in 2009, an intense debate on Europe's approach to network security and on how to deal with cyber attacks and also to include the future of ENISA into these reflections. Also the new tools made available by the Lisbon Treaty should be seriously taken into account in this debate. Europe cannot afford to lose time when it comes to the security of our networks. Network security is identical to the security of our public administrations, our economy and our citizens."

Blog Posting Number: 1213

Tags: telecom

BPN 1212 EU Telecoms Reform: 7 Very Concrete Improvements

The European Parliament has debated, in plenary session, the so-called EU Telecoms Reform, proposed by the Commission on 13 November 2007. Of particular importance in this debate were the proposals made by the European Commission to give consumers of fixed and mobile phones and Internet services more rights and better choice (IP/07/1677). The debate among the European Parliament's 785 members should pave the way for a vote of the Commission's entire EU Telecoms reform proposals in first reading on 23 September. The French presidency could broker a political agreement at the Council of Telecoms Ministers on 27 November. New consumer rights would then become law in all 27 EU Member States by 2010.

The following is an overview of the 7 most important consumer issues which were debated by the European Parliament on September 2, 2008.

1. More transparency and better information for consumers
To be able to choose the best offer available on the market, consumers need better information about prices, tariffs and other conditions. The European Commission therefore proposes that operators should be obliged to publish such information in an understandable and clear manner so that it is easy for consumers to access it and compare deals. Consumer organisations or businesses willing to produce easy-to-use interactive guides facilitating consumer choice will be free to use such tariff information. Where service providers fail to deliver, national telecom regulators will make the guides available themselves. They will also be responsible for setting detailed rules regarding the form in which such information is published.

2. "Broadband for all"
The Commission proposes to reform the management of radio spectrum by the EU Member States. This should facilitate the roll out of wireless services in Europe, especially of high speed wireless broadband connections which also reach less populated and rural areas outside the main cities. The Commission in particular proposes a coordination of approaches in the EU to optimise the overall benefits of the digital dividend (the radio spectrum freed as a result of the switchover from analogue to digital TV), thereby allowing new wireless services and also new TV channels in high definition quality to develop. Radio spectrum is a scarce public resource of a high economic and societal value, and a more efficient use of it could be a major boost to competitiveness, innovation and concrete consumer benefits in Europe. The Commission expects additional economic benefits from better spectrum management in the EU to be in the region of €10 billion/year, and consumers would be the main beneficiaries of this.

3. Switching service providers in 1 day without changing number
Consumers should be able to change their fixed or mobile operator while keeping their phone number – number portability – within 1 working day. For the Commission, this is a key facilitator of consumer choice and effective competition. At the moment, it takes 8 days on average to switch a fixed or mobile operator in the EU while keeping one's number. Europe's best performers are France for the fixed market and, for the mobile market, Ireland and Malta. It still can take up to 30 days to switch fixed operator in Estonia and up to 20 days to switch mobile operators in Italy and Slovakia.
EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding says on the issue of number portability: "In Australia, it is possible to switch operator within 2 hours – we should really be able to get this done in 1 day in Europe."

4. Better data protection: mandatory notification of security breaches
In the Commission's view, consumer trust in the security of communication services and the protection of their personal data is essential. Telecoms operators should therefore be obliged to inform their customers without delay whenever their personal data has been compromised (for example, illegally accessed, copied, or lost) as a result of a security problem.
This will allow people to take precautions against financial loss or ID fraud, for example by closely monitoring their bank accounts. The risk of bad publicity should also give operators an extra incentive to invest more in the security of their networks and services.
Recent events in the UK and in Germany have reaffirmed the need for action on data privacy, as identified by the Commission already in November 2007 when it made its reform proposals.

5. Better access for users with disabilities
The Commission wants to make sure that communications devices like PCs and mobile phones can be used by people with disabilities (eAccessibility). Users with disabilities will benefit from better access to telecoms services such as the 112 emergency services or TV channels with subtitles, audio descriptions or sign language. On 2 July, the Commission launched a public consultation on further measures that Member States can take to make websites, and other electronic services like ATMs, in Europe more accessible for the disabled (IP/08/1074). Making these services more accessible to, for example, the hard of sight, is also important because 25% of the total population is expected to be aged over 65 by 2020.

6. Securing basic "Net Freedoms"
For the European Commission, the open architecture of the Internet is of key importance for the Information Society. The Commission in particular considers that the following "net freedoms" should be general guidelines for regulators and policy makers: right for users to access and distribute (lawful) content, to run applications and connect devices of their choice.
The Commission therefore proposes, in the EU Telecoms reform, a transparen­cy mechanism concerning possible restrictions on consumers’ choice of lawful content and applications so that consumers can make an informed choice of services and reap the full benefits of technological developments. In practice, consumers will get clear and timely information from their service providers about any restrictions that the providers place on their access to or use of Internet or mobile content and applications. This will allow them to pick and switch to the operator which best suits their needs. Where consumers have no alternative, service providers should not be allowed to block or restrict such access.

7. A more effective 112 European emergency number
The Commission proposes to improve access to emergency services, in particular through better caller location information and greater awareness of the single European emergency number 112. All providers of outgoing calls to public telephone numbers - including certain Voice over IP providers – will be obliged to provide access to emergency services. This should speed up access to emergency services in case of accidents or other emergencies. On 112, see the recent overview made by the Commission of the effectiveness of implementation in the 27 EU

Blog Posting Number: 12

Tags: telecom

BPN 1211 Dutch VoIP market grows 5.1% to 2.87 million users

The total Dutch consumer telephony market grew by almost 44,000 connections during the second quarter of 2008 to 5.797 million, despite a 4.2 percent drop in PSTN/ISDN connections to 2.57 million on 30 June 2008, according to Telecompaper’s quarterly update on the Dutch fixed telephony market. The number of mobile-only households increased to 1.283 million. The number of Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) users grew by 17,000 during the fourth quarter to 360,000 on 30 June 2008. As expected by KPN and the main WLR provider Tele2, quarterly growth has levelled out after a quick start in the second quarter of 2007. The number of Dutch consumer VoIP subscriptions grew 5.1 percent during the quarter, to 2.866 million at the end of June 2008, driven by DSL VoIP with 5.8 percent, while cable VoIP only reported a quarterly growth of 3.8 percent. DSL VoIP expanded its lead as most used VoIP technology with 1.459 million connections at the end of June compared with 1.361 million cable VoIP customers on the same date.

KPN saw its share of the Dutch digital telephony market grow to 34.3 percent on 30 June 2008 due to its entry-level brand Telfort. During the second quarter, KPN won 60,000 new customers, growing 6.5 percent compared with the first quarter of 2008 and ending June 2008 with 983,000 VoIP users. Ziggo won 25,000 new telephony customers during the second quarter to end the period with 770,000 VoIP users, keeping its place as the second-largest VoIP provider in the Netherlands, although its market share dropped to 26.9 percent. The third-largest VoIP provider, UPC won 20,400 new customers, ending the quarter with 526,100, losing only 0.1 percent market share to end June with 18.4 percent of the VoIP market.

“It is expected that the digital telephony market will continue to grow at an average rate of around 7 percent per quarter to reach the 3 million subscribers mark during the third quarter, while the Dutch VoIP market will reach around 3.25 million users by the end of 2008.

Blog Posting Number: 1211

tags: VoIP, cable, fixed telephone VoIP, cable, fixed telephone, fixed telephone