The Spatial Miscellany

It’s been a busy week in British politics with the Blair-Brown handover at number 10, and a few security breeches thrown in for good measure; but look carefully, and in amongst the hullabaloo you’ll find a geospatial debate on the floor of the commons…

Do we need a European Global Navigation Satellite System?

TheyWorkForYou have done a great job of harvesting the Hansard and have made a readable transcript of the debate available online, you can check it out here. Obviously it’s good to see this stuff being discussed, but despite the somewhat informed discussion, members of parliament appear to tow the party line regardless; one lot are pro-European and therefore emphatically pro-Galileo, the other shower of bastards vehemently anti-European, and therefore equally anti-Galileo.

Galileo seems to have hit the rocks after the funding model for the project showed its true colours. In some sort of magic third way PPP\PFI buy-now, pay later scheme - so in vogue at the moment - it was initially envisaged that the private sector would contribute to somewhere near a third of the costs for such a system. For me, there are two chief reasons why I believe expecting a contribution from the private sector to fund this thing is pie in the sky…

First up, the Americans have developed GPS and provide free access for all, so rather crudely speaking, the argument goes “why sell Pepsi, when you can have coke for free?” - GPS is here, it works well, and it’s free.

Ok, so some say Galileo will be better, and I’m sure this is possible; but still, do we really expect business to pay for this upfront? To my mind this is the stuff of fantasy, business works for today and so often heavily discounts the future; for example, consider the following two statements:

“Today Google has joined forces with Salesforce.com to sell content based advertising”

“Google has invested $1billion in Galileo, the European Sat Nav system. On the back of this investment, it’s estimated that sales in location based advertising will quadruple, at some point after 2014 when Galileo will go live.”

Which statement will move the share price? The first! And it’s for this reason that it’s naive to expect the private sector to stump up money to fund Galileo, since any returns won’t materialise for a long, long time.

The debate is well worth a read; and now I’m going to try something new…a poll. For sure, it’s a little naff, but anyhow…if you’re one of my regular three readers…go on, vote

So if we accept that the private sector won’t invest cash up front…

Location Based Services (LBS), the wireless ‘killer app’, remember the hype on the back of the FCC’s 911 communications act 1999? Articles from the fool, at the height of the last dot com boom talking about LBS, potentially a $40 billion dollar market by 2006? Well according to Deloitte, LBS is back, and it’s well positioned to be the mobile killer application in 2007 – oh, but they’ve changed the name, it’s now Presence Based Services (PBS).

Over the weekend I read an article from the Technology, Media and Telecommunications group at Deloitte that was published last month and discusses some of their predictions for 2007.

Their boldest suggestion is the notion that the internet will grind to a halt in 2007, as the pipes currently in place will struggle to cope with the ever increasing number of videos, maps and globes we want to stream across the web*. In light of this problem, a resolution will have to be found to the net neutrality debate.

Supporters of net neutrality, suggest the proposed plans for prioritising some web traffic, over other web traffic, has little to do with covering the cost of maintaining the network, it’s just a guise for the telephone companies (Telco’s) to grab a bigger slice of the pie - currently being eaten predominately by Google (and one or two other online companies). Telco’s, both wired and wireless, are under pressure to deliver increased returns to shareholders; with this in mind Deloitte consider some killer applications that could help them do this, and for mobile operators in 2007 that could mean delivering on the hype of ‘Presence Based Services’.

The report is well worth a read, some random points I found interesting are bulleted below:

• The volume of traffic flowing over the World’s largest Internet hub in Amsterdam, which caries 20% of all of Europe’s Internet traffic, grew at a compound monthly average of 7.4% in 2006.




• Daily traffic at the exchange exceeded one petabyte in Feb 2007, it’s expected the exceed two petabytes per day by Oct 2007.




• In 2002 adult internet penetration in the USA hit 60%, it was another 4 years before it clocked 70%.




• The PC is acting as a bottle neck to the internet, as there is usually only one per house, members of the household are prevented from accessing the internet at the same time. This should spawn the development of other lower cost devices that provide access to the Internet at the same time as the PC (e.g. radio’s & video phones).




• Mobile TV won’t work – mobile operators should concentrate on getting content (e.g. pictures & movie clips) off the mobile to more suitable devices (e.g. widescreen TV’s) if they want to boost revenue.