the onda

Despite people complaining that Apple didn't introduce cold fusion this time around (talk about winner's curse), I found my brief attendance at WWDC this year well worth it, and came away with a better understanding of how what Apple is doing with the iPhone serves as a harbinger of a trend that will likely redefine all of the consumer electronics industry.

I started the day by attending the "iPhone OS networking" session which laid out all of the incremental improvements that Apple has made to the TCP/IP routing algorithms in 3.0 so as to allow a seamless experience between the various radios in the device. Now the iPhone is not the first device I've had with both a cell modem and a Wi-fi radio, but it certainly was the first that attempted (and mostly succeeded) in doing the right thing switching between one and the other during truly mobile scenarios.

And it looks like this is about to get even better. Publicly announced was the whole "captive network" thing around hotspots at public places (think AT&T wifi at Starbucks) that require authentication which is likely to be a huge boon to folks that use these networks and have thus been trapped in authentication hell while walking by a Starbucks. But there are many other problems that follow from chatty network protocols that are suddenly hoisted from one IP address (the WAN) to another (the Wifi LAN). It's clear that the Apple team has thought through this (read the stupid NDAed docs to see how), especially along the theme of the entire conference: "refinement."

While there were many great sessions and meetings in between, my day was bookended with another networky session: an introduction to developing with the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS). Thanks to the stupid NDA again, I'm going to just make two high level observations about APNS: first, it smells of a highly efficient implementation that was likely the result of Apple still smarting from last year's MobileMe fiasco, which is to say, binary protocols are cool again.

Second, the implication of the implementation is that each of the 40MM iPhone devices out there is going to maintain a persistent TCP connection to an Apple service at all times. Seen in this light, the investment in the network stack refinements from the morning makes even more sense.

But more significantly, think about what this means for the consumer electronics industry as a whole. As it sometimes does, Apple is showing us what I think will become an increasingly common design pattern: devices that are "phoning home" via the Internet to their makers's servers in order to receive/send new information that is relevant to their overall use. This is no different than what we saw with last week's Air France's speed sensors reporting realtime telemetry back to Airbus— but instead of talking about a $35MM plane, we are going to start seeing this in all sorts of low cost consumer electronics devices.

Could this substantiate the rumors about Apple building a billion dollar data center in North Carolina? Maintaining persistent connections to that many devices alone certainly wouldn't require that level of investment— after all, large IM networks have done this for years— but it might if APNS is just the beginning and in time Apple hopes to use the connection for much richer forms of data exchange.

Two last points on this: first, every other device manufacturer is now going to have to get their heads wrapped around this type of deployment model— something which may be quite painful to the folks that have spent their entire careers "shipping boxes" and building business models that stop when the customer pays you for that box.

And second, it is interesting to see that APNS is being offered by Apple and not by the wireless carriers in each of the countries the iPhone is sold. It has got to be obvious to AT&T that APNS is the beginning of the end for SMS charges for iPhone customers, and more importantly, the continuation of something much much better (if you are an enduser): Apple wresting control of the non commodity parts of the pipe from carriers who are more addicted to their own business models than pleasing users.

Let the era of cloud consumer electronics begin!