Cell Phone Yell

Esther Dyson recently raised the issue of why people talk so loudly when they talk into Skype or mobile phones.  There have been many theories advanced as to why this happens.  At first many people attributed this behavior to general rudeness or a feeling of self-importance that came with being one of the first users of an expensive new toy, but it turns out there are more subtle processes at work.

Don Norman and Dave Farber have pointed out that mobile phones usually lack sidetone - the feedback of your own voice that provides the reassurance that you are talking loud enough.  There is speculation that the mobile phone manufacturers left it out because the circuitry would be too bulky or expensive and that it was difficult to make it work in the noisy, outdoor environment were the phones were likely to be used.  According to some reports the Motorola RAZR and other, modern phones do incorporate this feature.  It would be interesting to see if users of such devices were perceived as being more polite.

Probably not, according to some research done by Andrew Monk at the University of York and reported on by Jakob Nielsen.  Monk compared how people responded to being exposed to two person conversations vs. hearing only one side of a cell phone call.  Even though Monk kept the volume the same (as measured by a sound level meter), the subjects reported that the cell phone conversation was louder.  I've always thought this was because people were annoyed at not being able to eavesdrop on the entire conversation, but Nielsen has a more intriguing theory: that people are better at tuning out the drone of a two-way conversation, perhaps on some unconscious level.

Of course, as Esther has pointed out, "sometimes there just really is a crappy
connection!"

Who's going to pay for the Internet?

Antone Gonsalves in the InternetWeek newsletter commented recently about Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg's  keynote at CES, in which Seidenberg joined AT&T's CEO Ed Whitacre in calling for content providers such as Google to pay the telcos for "use of their pipes" as if the fees they collect from their subscribers were not enough.  While Gonsalves on his blog says he's neutral on the topic, he seems to have adopted some of the telco's language with statements such as:

Google, Yahoo and others are building multi-billion-dollar businesses on the Web with out paying a dime to operate the networks that feed their moneymaking services to consumers.

I think this is a mistatement of how the Internet is financed.  Here's what I wrote in response:

I agree with you that the Internet is too important to let a handful of companies control what applications and content get delivered, but disagree that Google and Yahoo are not “paying a dime” for operating the networks.  Companies that deliver content pay substantial sums for their connection to their ISPs.  A portion of those fees go to support the Internet backbone, just as do a portion of the fees paid by Verizon’s subscribers.  In addition, the largest content providers, such as Google, operate their own worldwide networks, carrying the data most of the distance before it is handed off to Verizon for delivery over the “last mile.”  This system has worked successfully for years, with the content provided by companies such as Google and Yahoo providing the incentive for consumers to pay Verizon for broadband connections.

What has changed is that Verizon’s and SBC’s stockholders are worried that the profit margins of providing a “dumb pipe” are less than what they used to make selling local and long distance phone service, and their stock prices have been declining.  Therefore the phone companies are looking for new, higher-margin businesses.  There are two avenues they seem to be considering.  One is to become content providers themselves.  If they do that, they can enhance their competitive position by giving their packets priority over those provided by their competitors.  The other is to force their competitors to pay them “protection money” to ensure that their packets will get equal treatment.  You can see this at work already with Verizon’s FIOS service, where a very small percentage of the fiber bandwidth is offered as Internet connectivity and most of it is reserved for Cable TV.  Once everything goes to IP they need to find a new excuse for not releasing that bandwidth to competitors.

There is an opportunity for your magazine to report on the economics of the Internet For example, how much does it really cost to deliver a packet from the Google server farm to a Verizon customer, and how is that cost divided between the two companies.  Also, how is it that Verizon and SBC complain they can’t make a decent profit delivering 1 mbit/sec or so when consumers in Korea get more than 10 times the bandwidth for less money?