Last month (April 12th), Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) announced the completion of its acquisition of 3Com for US$2.7billion. HP has also announced plans to build upon 3Com’s market lead in China to challenge rival Cisco’s market leadership worldwide in the market for enterprise networking solutions. The business plan’s focus is the increased use of open standards with the explicit purpose of lowering costs to consumers and stimulating increased innovation.

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Next week the 3GPP will host the LTE world summit in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the 3GPP’s (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard for next generation mobile telecommunications networks. LTE is the main competitor to the WiMAX standard, both of which are branded as 4G mobile network standards, and is capable of speeds up to 100Mbit/s downloads and 50Mbits/s uploads wirelessly.
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In December last year two wireless mobile networks, compliant with the LTE next generation mobile network standard (see the previous blog post here), were rolled out in the Scandinavian capitals Stockholm and Oslo by network provider TeliaSonera. While the LTE standard, which offers considerably faster connection speeds relative to the current 3G technologies, is widely backed by Governments and Network Providers, the TeliaSonera networks were the world’s first publically available networks utilizing the new technology and market a significant mile stone for the new technology.
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In April, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on the topic of formal review/ranking of Standard Setting Organisations (SSO). Contributors were asked to discuss whether such review/ranking of SSOs would foster or impede efficient standardization?

Ajit Jaokar argued that any “standards for standards” effort risked the creation of a “class system between consortia” based on an arbitrary set of criteria and will only be more difficult to apply as new innovation becomes increasingly cross-domain (e-health, Mobile health, etc).

Helen Disney, arguing that the priority of an SSO should be promotion of both competition and innovation, identified the criticism that formal review creates more bureaucracy within the standard setting organisations and as such may slow change in dynamic markets such as the IT sector.
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Rankings are becoming more and more popular in order to assess individuals, institutions or even countries according various criteria like wealth, innovativeness or economic performance. Crucial for such rankings are the selection and the weighting of the criteria. The more complex the issue addressed by such a ranking, like the innovation performance of economies, the more criteria have to be integrated and the more effort has to be invested in the development of an adequate weighting of the criteria.
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The crux and, indeed, the most challenging aspect of standards creation is the ability of different standards to promote both competition and innovation. Today there are many different approaches to setting standards, including de facto standards set informally through the market and formal standards established by governments or standard setting organisations (SSOs). There are also standards involving proprietary efforts and those based on collaborative or open efforts.
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The title of this blog is a play on the famous words by the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay who said that: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. In contrast, the ‘Standards for standards’ approach seems to take the view that: The best way to predict the future is to standardize it. In other words, it seems to predict future directions for innovation and preemptively create a standards template for future innovation.

This approach will not work for a number of reasons, but in this post I will focus on two specific issues:
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In my previous post, I discussed the actuality of Charles Duell’s 1899 statement “Everything that can be invented has been invented” on the basis of reluctances to innovate at the very core of the Internet and the role of overlay networks.

In this post, I try to answer the question: what are the implications for standards by these overlay networks?
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Innovation at the core of the Internet

“Everything that can be invented has been invented” is a statement attributed to Charles H Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899. No one really expects this to be true…

But oddly enough, when it comes to the Internet, the incorporation of new innovation has some unique caveats.

Charles H Duell

It is almost that we want Charles Duell’s statement to be true!
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Abstract: This is a multi part blog about Smart Grid standardization. It outlines the complexities and the standards at the ‘last mile’ of the Smart Grid i.e. between the Smart meter and the home area network. This is the key interface from the customer standpoint.
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