If there’s a lasting impact of Steve Jobs, it’s an increased awareness that deep design matters. I say deep design, because so often “design” is dismissed as something superficial – applying to only the veneer of an object, it’s aesthetics, what it looks like. But I think Apple, and Steve Jobs in particular, showed that design applies throughout the entirety of a product; from its external appearance to its very soul.

Designing and delivering a service is, in my opinion, harder than designing and delivering a satisfying, if not delightful, product. A product is a tangible good, the benefits of which are consumer post production – you can’t use a car or a computer until after they have been manufactured. You can touch, feel and even taste a product. Classic examples abound, but arguably the most high profile products of recent times are the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.

Services are different. Services are intangible goods, the benefits of which are consumed simultaneously with production of the good.

Think about that for a while, take your time to mull it over. I’ll say it again; Services are intangible goods, the benefits of which are consumed simultaneously with production of the good.

The single most important attribute of good product design is consistency of behavior. We can easily hop from car to car because the form factor of car design has largely resolved itself to be consistent. Gears change just so, indicators operate just so, wiper blades and so on… Services should also be designed to give as consistent a user experience as possible. Apple’s app store is a well designed service, one click and you’ve bought a new app that installs itself on your iPad. No hassle. The iTunes store is another example of a well design process, augmented by an innovative product, the iPod.

These are two examples of well designed services that are supported by well designed products that serve a market need. Satisfaction guaranteed to all participants.

But have we ever had quality services in telecoms? I recently postulated that when “voice” was the only service offered by telecoms, the medium could deliver the message by which I meant that the copper wires could provide sufficient and consistent bandwidth over significant distance such that service could be universal. The switching equipment was incredibly reliable with up times being 99.999% of the time. Satisfaction guaranteed. But actually I don’t think this is correct. Satisfaction wasn’t guaranteed: in fact the service was both rudimentary and poorly delivered.

Remember the definition of a service: Services are intangible goods, the benefits of which are consumed simultaneously with production of the good.

Rotary phones were slow and if you misdialed you had to start over. Push button phones masked usability problems – on the face of it these were easier to use, but only if you knew the number. You could store numbers on speed dial buttons – but I have about 3,000 contacts on my iPhone. Any advanced services were dire – remember “Star services”? Even now, with advanced LCD-based IP Phones, transferring calls remains a hit and miss affair. The service-supporting products were poor and the network limitations couldn’t offer much beyond basic telephony.

And as for the network – using copper in the access – did this really do such a great job of transmitting the human voice? The reason a telephone call sounds like a telephone call is because while the range of the human voice extends from 80 Hz to 14 kHz, traditional, narrowband telephone calls limit audio frequencies to the range of 300 Hz to 3.4 kHz, which results in the subsequent loss of audio fidelity giving the characteristic “telephone call” sound. So it seems to me that while the old telephone network may have made the best use of the technology available, the available technology couldn’t deliver a truly satisfying service.

The iPhone showed the way. It reignited the phone market and showed that phones could be useful and usable. The dramatic change that this product triggered in the cell phone market is still in progress with former giants Nokia and RIM in trouble. Despite all the Apple vs Samsung, Samsung vs Apple litigation, smart phone form factor is becoming settled.

But the element that lets these devices down is the network. There just isn’t enough bandwidth to match the processing power and thus the capabilities of smart user devices, whether they are tablets such as the iPad, smartphones, or traditional laptops and desktops.

Old copper networks didn’t have the smart end user devices, they delivered low-fidelity audio and they had severe limitations that hampered even slightly advanced features. But they had reach and they had consistency of behavior, they were predictably reliable. Now we have smart devices, but we have an inconsistent and unpredictable reliability in the network that doesn’t have reach.

Just look at the rigmarole consumers have to go through to get just a vague idea of the service they might receive from their broadband service provider, and when they do receive service it’s far and away removed from the advertised speeds. You don’t need me to tell you this, but just for the record, here’s a recent speed test on my connection (advertised as 20Mbps down and 1Mbs up), circa 1 mile from the local exchange:

Ofcom’s customer satisfaction service published in November 2011 revealed that speed, or bandwidth, was the main source of contention, so to speak, with an average of 58.2% customer satisfaction ratings across the top 5 providers. It’s difficult to see how this can be dramatically improved, given distance limitations of DSL’s high frequency electrical signals over copper.

The iPhone4S has achieved a remarkable customer satisfaction rating of 96% according to ChangeWave Research. This is because the product is predictable in use, its behavioral characteristics are consistent and it has enough processing power to be useful; so much processing power you can even edit video on one.

The only network infrastructure capable of deliver a similar degree of consistent performance and deliver bandwidth in spades, irrespective of location of the user, is optical fibre. An FTTH network may also achieve a customer satisfaction rating of 96%.

Wouldn’t that be something?

photo credit: oneVillage Initiative via photopin cc

Our world is governed by laws, which is reassuring for most of us. Although the law of unintended consequences can make a mockery of well meaning legislation, and although from time to time we’ve all been tripped up by Sod’s law, in general laws are deemed to be a good thing. Science comes up with lots of laws and Professor Brian Cox did his best to explain a few laws of physics the other night on TV and for a moment I felt an inkling of understanding of Quantum Mechanics.

The world of technology is also governed by laws, one of the most well known being Moore’s law. Moore’s law says that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This was postulated in the swinging 60’s and has been demonstrated to be true ever since.

Moore’s law is often conflated with a comment by an Intel executive, David House, who said that chip performance (or computing power) would double every 18 months, being a combination of more transistors on each chip and them being faster. House’s comment may or may not be a law, but it too has been demonstrated to be true ever since.

Disk drives operate to their own law as well, often called Kryder’s Law. Kryder’s Law states that the magnetic disk real storage density doubles approximately every 2 years, analogous to the doubling transistor count every 2 years in Moore’s Law. The result of Kryder’s law is that disk drives get larger in capacity, but smaller in form factor.

There is another law that pertains to network bandwidth. Nielsen’s law states that network connection speeds for home users increases 50% per year, which equates to a doubling every 21 months, just shy of two years.

I’m not so sure this law holds true. The most common network technology used to connect users to the internet is good old fashioned copper wire. The use of copper wire means that Nielsen’s law can’t be true for most users.

Copper wire is an excellent conductor of electricity but it also has electrical resistance. Ohm’s law is used to calculate the amount of resistance any given material has and from my hazy memory of school physics, 1m of copper has a resistance of 1Ohm.

I also recall that the longer any given conductor is, the higher the resistance it has and that the smaller its area, the higher resistance it has. Copper wires as used to deliver broadband services tend to be very long and very thin, and while these were fine for delivering low bandwidth (or low frequency) analog voice, they are less well suited to deliver high speed (or high frequency) bandwidth.

If we compare the speeds against distance of various types of established DSL technologies that are commonly used to deliver internet bandwidth to homes, we see the following:

Distance vs speed graph Source: Thinkbroadband.com & CFH

We can clearly see the tendency of high bandwidth (or high frequency) DSL technologies running over copper to lose much of their effective speed the longer the copper wire is. We can also see that the higher bandwidth DSL technologies lose speed at a faster rate than lower speed bandwidths i.e. high speed VDSL2 doesn’t go as far as low speed ADSL.

The upshot of this is that the further one lives away from the exchange, the slower the actual speed experienced will be for any given DSL service. This propensity to lose speeds over distance is known as Loop Attenuation that is caused by a combination of factors including Ohms law and frequency interference known as “cross talk”.

This is why copper-based broadband services are often marketed with “up to” speeds rather than specific speeds, because the service provider cannot with any degree of certainty tell you what the actual speed will be.

Which of course makes is it incredibly difficult for the consumer to decide which service is the most appropriate for them. As these distances refer to copper distances and not as-the-crow-flies distances, it is impossible for the consumer to work out how far they are from the exchange and hence to make an informed choice of service.

And this invokes another law: caveat emptor.