Consumer as ISP – Broadband Australia 08

Whew, I just got home from presenting on Social Network Telecommunications – the Consumer as ISP at Broadband Australia 2008 conference. Anyway, I thought I’d take you through the slides (above), which develop further my other open mesh blog posts.

The First Bit (up to slide 6)

Click or got to Flickr for full view of diagram

I wanted to show that currently social media is still very 2.0. Locked down content. The user generated video or podcast or photo or mix of all goes in the content box. It’s been created before hand (pre-prepared) and then offered to the network as a finished product. The ensuing discussion may change people’s minds, but it doesn’t change the content. (more on my blog post: Social Media Content Portal) Web 2.0 is about user generated content (singular).

The Second Bit (Slide 9 to 17)
Is about Mogulus and Qik and UStream and so on- live streaming sites, that allow many creators of content to mix with many producers and have a branded channel and ads and so on. Citizen Live Broadcaster. (covered in my blog post Video 3.0 – Social Video)

The Last Bit (slide 17 onwards)
Social networks will want always on, ambient, mobile connectivity so that they can take advantage of these services. So consumers will, by using a variety of routers (or software on their normal router) donate a sliver of bandwidth to the community. In return, they get always connected no matter where they are in the world, revenue share either with a carrier (British Telecom in the UK) or direct consumer to consumer and so on. They can use router-turned-to-wifi-hotspot Fon. Or mesh network routers such as Meraki. Or open source Open-Mesh. Slide 26 is that the network will ignore Terms and Conditions from ISPs that say they can’t resell bandwidth in the same way they ignored “can’t video from TV” until recently.

I chatted about Myles and Ajay (slide30) and Nathanael and FreeAustraliaWireless. (slide 32) I gave mention to Mark Pesce support as well.

Uh oh. I forgot to tell the conference attendees about Netcomm have started up a community called My Open Source Router and are offering… an open source router. And how the proposed 802.11 s

IEEE 802.11s is a draft IEEE 802.11 amendment for mesh networking, defining how wireless devices can interconnect to create an ad-hoc network.

… nor did I mention One Laptop Per Child and how it was used to cover outback areas in Western Australia nor did I… ah well, only 1/2 an hour after all. Heh.

This is a three part series:
1. Social Media Content Portal – about the limitations of blogs and *old* social media leading to the need for more broadband to use more collaborative content.
2. Video 3.0 – Social Video, or collaborative video vs YouTube non-collaboration and how we consume media if we have more broadband
3. Consumer as ISP, Social Networks Telecommunications – How consumers using peer to peer telecommunications to create an always on, ambient, mobile social network full of collaborative content in innovative ways, including video.

Key take aways. Currently we are doing analog content creation in a digital space. We are doing isolated creativity in a collaborative space. We are moving towards creating content collaboratively online, live streaming with the ability to mix multiple videos live and mobile. This puts demands for a free/cheap wireless solution that peer to peer social telecommunications can provide.

By the way during question time and tea time: Telstra were interested in B.T.s business model (locking out competitors by giving Foneros free access across the U.K.). Vodafone wanted to know more about social networks online. Government wanted to know about municipal installations (thank goodness I remembered about Prestonburg in Kentucky) and about privacy, tracking paedophiles who use free wifi, identity, regulatory issues. Someone from New Zealand was there but I forget what she wanted.

There, now you know as much as I do about the conference, cos I had to come home after a brilliant presentation by John Lindsay of Internode. He mentioned the name Simon Hackett – I think he was at Adelaide Uni when we were setting up our AARNET there in about 1988….