Page 30 - Mobile World Daily - Day 2

FRAGMENTATION | AMDOCS
Gary Miles, General Manager for Advanced Technologies and Strategic Initiatives, Amdocs
Cracks
in the
Internet
Recently, the Internet has begun to
show a disturbing trend: it is starting
to fragment. This fragmentation is
not good for consumers or the
industries which have benefited so
much from the Internet’s open,
ubiquitous capabilities.
New developments such as the Internet
of Things and WebRTC heralded as
the Internet’s next major strides
forward will not be nearly as successful as
they could be if we do not solve this
fragmentation problem, both for the services
they offer and for the underlying data
associated with these services.
Practically, the only way to solve this is for the Internet today is that there is no way for a
the industry to adopt new open standards and
open source technologies which specifically
address this fragmentation problem. Several
new initiatives are now underway which show
real promise to this end, and are gaining
adoption among both the grassroots and
mainstream Internet players.
BARRIER 1: FRAGMENTED SERVICES
Some of us may remember when it was
impossible to send emails to the majority of
other email users. Email was not a universal
standard and was instead broken into several
siloed communities. Can you imagine this
today? Probably you can, as we see the same
situation with the various instant messaging
and VoIP apps on the market: none of them
talk to one another. Viber users can't send
messages to WhatsApp; Skype can't place
calls to FaceTime.
The IoT is clearly fragmenting on the
service layer as well. The only way to collate
data from my Fitbit wristband and my
Withings heart-rate sensor is to aggregate
data from their proprietary APIs into another
silo. Meanwhile many of the larger
companies are creating vertical silos, be it
IBM’s IoT cloud, Apple HomeKit, Logitech
Harmony, etc.
PAGE 30 Tuesday 3rd March
WebRTC faces the same dilemma.
Thousands of sites are adding VoIP/Video
calling functionality but none of them can
interoperate. Calling someone via WebRTC
requires sending them the URL of a WebRTC-
enabled website, which they are then forced
to use. But why should they be forced to use
the service you picked? Imagine if you could
only read email using the same service
(Gmail, Yahoo etc.) that it was sent from – it
would be a terrible experience. Yet this is the
direction WebRTC is currently headed.
BARRIER 2: SILOS OF CUSTOMER
AND SERVICE DATA
The single biggest inhibitor to innovation on
person or service to securely publish data in
real time and allow for the safe sharing of this
data across all services the data owner has
authorized.
For example, individuals’ conversation
history or health data are trapped in different
silos. Everyone wants to own this data and
meanwhile the consumer is rarely in a
position to use it freely and securely. A
person’s heart-rate and athletic activity data
should not be lost when their current devices
are replaced with the ever-latest new gadgets.
An individual’s driving history should not be
tied to a specific car or insurance provider.
IoT devices record our life, and our life should
be accessible to us, and only us, for the
duration.
SO HOW CAN THIS BE SOLVED?
Fixing this situation is unashamedly hard.
Thankfully there is a precedent for this: the
Web itself.
The Web empowers users to consume data
and services from a completely open,
federated ecosystem with total choice,
creating an industry where federation
between different browsers, vendors and
platforms is accepted as table stakes. Had the
Web been created by for-profit companies it
would clearly have fragmented and failed. The replicated data is signed using a
blockchain-style signature to mitigate
Just imagine a world where the only content tampering, and the federated traffic is
encrypted with HTTPS and signed with each
on the Web lives in the respective walled server’s private key to avoid server identity
spoofing. Replication follows eventual
gardens of AOL and Compuserve. consistency semantics, allowing servers to
function even when offline or after data-loss
So how does one create an equivalent open by resynchronizing missing history from
other participating servers. End-to-end
ecosystem for sharing arbitrary real-time encryption is being defined, ensuring data at
rest is encrypted and only readable by the
data? The Web provides a consistent room participants.
interface for consuming data: you just visit a The end result is that data transmitted over
Matrix is never stored in any single place, and is
URL. But there is no consistent way to instead securely shared on a purely need-to-
know basis between relevant parties, with
publish data: you have a myriad of control of access residing solely with the author.
inconsistent APIs for different blog engines, Matrix only entered beta in December, so
it’s early days – but there is a groundswell of
message boards, cloud services, DAV servers, adoption around this standard. Indeed,
Matrix may provide the disruption needed to
SFTP servers, etc. change how we share data on the Internet,
opening a new age of services which are
Matrix.org is a new open source and non- forced to retain users through quality rather
than by holding their data hostage.
profit project addressing the issue with a very
Let’s overcome the barriers of service
pragmatic and novel approach. Matrix fragmentation and data silos, and unleash the
Internet’s potential for innovation once more:
defines a persistent data layer for the Web, industry giants and startups alike will
together benefit both from collaboration and
with open federation, strong cryptographic freer competition.
guarantees, eventual consistency and push “Imagine if you could only
read email using the same
semantics. service that it was sent
from – it would be a
Like the Web, Matrix can be used for many terrible experience. Yet this
is the direction WebRTC is
purposes. The “missing link” of currently headed.”
interoperable calling between WebRTC silos
becomes as simple as a single HTTP PUT to
invite the callee, and a single HTTP PUT for
them to answer. Meanwhile, OTT messaging
apps can finally federate by synchronizing
their conversations into Matrix; letting users
own their history and select their preferred
app and service.
And most interestingly, the Internet of
Things can use Matrix as a vendor-neutral data
exchange service – a secure data lake where
devices, hubs and services can share data
while the user retains exclusive ownership. IoT
hardware manufacturers can simplify their
world immensely by leveraging Matrix for
interoperable data transport and persistence,
letting them concentrate on the hardware.
The Matrix standard specifies simple
RESTful HTTP APIs for securely transmitting
and replicating JSON data between Matrix-
capable clients, servers and services. Clients
send data by PUTing it to a ‘room’ on their
server, which then replicates the data over all
the Matrix servers participating in this ‘room’.
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS DAILY 2015 | www.mobileworldcongress.com