June 2004 Archives

Intel Corp. and Proxim Corp. have just announced they will collaborate to develop and deliver WiMAX solutions, including base station and subscriber unit access points designed to deliver fast wireless access for data, voice, and video.

“We as an industry are headed toward the ‘broadband wireless era,’ and WiMAX will play a key role in delivering on our vision,” said Scott Richardson, general manager of Intel’s Broadband Wireless Division. “The next wave is about portability, with people wanting access anywhere. Together, Intel and Proxim will enable people around the globe to use emerging services and content in their homes, businesses, and on the road.”

The companies have agreed to co-develop a reference design for WiMAX CPE equipment. Intel will provide the CPE architecture, including the key hardware and software components as a reference design for other WiMAX equipment makers. The reference design will help subscriber station designers bring products to market faster, assisting in the proliferation of WiMAX for both licensed and unlicensed networks.

Proxim will target traditional wireless carrier and enterprise customers looking to provide their users with cost-effective broadband wireless solutions. Proxim will include its core wireless software capabilities that enable subscriber roaming, increased subscriber support and dynamic bandwidth management.

Intel and Proxim will also work together to develop base stations based on the emerging 802.16e specification designed to enable broadband wireless portability.

“Proxim strongly believes in both the technological and market potential of WiMAX and particularly portable implementations of WiMAX,” said Kevin Duffy, chief operating officer at Proxim Corporation. “We are pleased that Intel has chosen to work with Proxim to address this most exciting prospect for WiMAX technology. We will work closely with Intel to bring industry-leading WiMAX solutions to market, and to drive market adoption both at the system and client level.”

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In other WiMAX-related news, Nokia has decided to rejoin the WiMAX Forum, an organization it helped found, then later quit, allowing its membership subscription to lapse.

Speaking to reporters assembled at Nokia’s Connections conference this week regarding the about-face, General Manager (Networks Group) Sari Baldauf told the crowd, “The decision was perhaps made too much on a practical basis rather than with regard to what the rest of the world is doing.”

Industry watchers maintain that Nokia had left the Forum in order to focus on its core handset business and its shrinking market share in that arena. The return to the WiMAX Forum is further validation of the important role WiMAX will play as a competitive broadband wireless access technology. Though products are not generally expected before late 2005 at the earliest, the 105-member Forum boasts an impressive roster of particpating companies, the likes of which include Alcatel, AT&T, British Telecom, Euskaltel, France Telecom, Fujitsu, Intel Corp., and many more.

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TMC is currently in the process of soliciting speaking abstracts for the upcoming WiMAXcon Conference, to be held in conjunction with the Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO, October 4-7, 2004 in Los Angeles. In fact we've extended the deadline by a week. If you are interested in speaking, please follow this link to the WiMAXcon Call for Papers. Abstracts are now due Friday June 25.

On June 5, AmeriDebt, a non-profit credit counseling and debt management services organization, announced that -- in an effort to best serve the interests of its consumer clients -- it has filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

Irony can be so... ironic, no?

Carriers and service providers are increasingly using voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) for peering purposes to deliver new and enhanced services to consumers and enterprises. Session controllers are devices deployed at the network’s edge and are designed to facilitate carrier-to-carrier peering, carrier-to-enterprise peering, and carrier to consumer peering. In a new report entitled VoIP Is Heating Up The Need For Native IP Peering, Yankee Group explores the session controller market and the VoIP applications driving the need for these devices.

Many incumbent carriers have publicly announced their consumer VoIP plans. AT&T launched its CallVantage service and plans to offer it to 100 markets by the end of 2004; Verizon announced it will have a voice-over-DSL offering in the first half of 2004; and Qwest has a trial voice-over-DSL service in Minnesota and is evaluating its expansion into other markets.

“The features and functionalities introduced by session controllers are valuable to the VoIP market and deployment will continue,” says Danny Klein, Communications Network Infrastructure senior analyst at Yankee Group. “As operators pursue their architectural vision, networks will evolve and vary. Some operators prefer to have a centralized softswitch, while others prefer many localized devices. The same will hold true for session controllers in the future. Some operators would prefer to leverage their existing infrastructure and have the functionalities embedded into existing devices, and others may prefer to keep the two networks separate.”

“Today’s Yankee Group report further demonstrates the viability and necessity of session controllers in today's growing Voice over IP market,” said Bruce Hill, CEO of Netrake. “We hear feedback similar to what Yankee reported from carriers and are meeting those demands head-on - a recent example is the addition of key features to our nCite session controllers so carriers can securely offer residential VoIP services.”

“We are delighted to see the analyst community embracing the Session Border Controller (SBC) VoIP category,” said Jim Greenway, VP of Marketing for Kagoor Networks. “SBCs are being recognized by carriers, VoIP service providers and leading telecom vendors as a critical, standalone element in their VoIP infrastructure designs and implementations. We believe that between now and 2008 this category will see explosive growth as the incumbent and new telecom carriers start to scale and new players like cable and wireless begin to enter the VoIP market.”

Never say never.

So says John Chambers, Cisco Systems’ President and CEO regarding the possibility of a potential merger with Nortel Networks.

“I believe in strategic partnerships. I would love to have Nortel as a partner,” Chambers told a question and answer session after a speech in Toronto. “I believe going to market together is the way of the future.”

Further whetting the appetite of investors and tech junkies alike, Chambers said, “I'm at the altar, I'm not playing hard to get.”

Nortel chief executive William Owens said on Thursday he is open to partnerships, but has not discussed the idea with Cisco.

“I know John Chambers, but I have not talked to him about partnerships,” Owens told Reuters. “Nortel is open to strong partnerships and we would be open to discussions.”

Nortel’s stock rose on the partnership chatter, closing the day up 7.58% at $4.40 on the NYSE.

Hmm… I wonder if the original Bay Networks corporate logo would be included in the deal?

Members of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation heard testimony on Wednesday, June 16 regarding “The VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act of 2004” (S. 2281) — legislation introduced by Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, the purpose of which is to enable growth of VoIP by protecting the burgeoning technology from the heavy-hand of federal and state regulation.

Among the witnesses speaking before the Committee, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Laura Parsky told the Senate Commerce Committee that unregulated VoIP would be a “haven” for terrorists unless the government forces service providers to build special wiretapping capabilities into their systems.

“If legal loopholes allow criminals to use new technologies to avoid law enforcement detection, they would use these technologies to coordinate terrorist attacks, to sell drugs throughout the United States and to pass along national security secrets to our enemies,” Parsky said.

Speaking in favor of limiting regulation, James X. Dempsey, Executive Director Center for Democracy & Technology, stated, “The Internet and applications like VOIP … are different from traditional telecommunications services, so significantly different that they have not been and should not be regulated under the traditional regulatory framework for telecommunications. For reasons that are still valid today, the Internet and Internet applications were not included in the regulatory mandates of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (CALEA).”

As a proponent of VoIP, I believe that a hands-off approach is best policy for the time being. All too often government — even with the best of intentions — creates laws and regulations that end up stifling opportunity and promoting the interests of industry lobbies who have clout in D.C.. The best thing that can happen for our industry is to allow the vendor community to come up with solutions that meet a predefined set of requirements laid out by government. Often, when faced with challenges, the best solutions arise when market forces conspire to achieve the desired result.

Webfonepartners.net, Inc., (www.webphonepartners.net) has introduced a series of programs aimed at the reseller and distributor community designed to offer them rapid entry into the growing VoIP market.

“Telecom has been in a relative funk in recent years due to a combination of factors but is currently undergoing a revitalization of sorts by the burgeoning VoIP developments in both network technology and product enhancements,” says Jim Gibson, Vice President of Sales. “The introduction of IP-in-a-Box brings superior equipment and significant quality of service.”

The series of Internet Telephony programs, dubbed “IP-in-a-Box,” is available in four basic packages: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. IP-in-a-Box combines product, back-office, and network components, designed so resellers do not have to shop around for providers who only offer partial Internet Telephony products or services. Starter packages include a Web site for product sales, e-shopping cart, administration services, billing server, and a supply of Webfone handsets. Among the most attractive benefits is the drastic reduction in time to market for new players in the VoIP space. In most cases, these new entrants can be up and running in less than 30 days

According to Webfonepartners.net, Inc., resellers further derive benefits as they are able to produce revenue for hardware sales and on a residual commission on their customers’ usage. Commissions can reach as high as 60 percent of the call usage profit.

Webfonecenter.net, utilizes proprietary, multilingual billing software applications in conjunction with intelligent telephone handsets to form a state-of-the-art Internet telephone service for the International consumer market. Consumers can access their account on-line and as well as download software, view their bill, view their calls, activate enhanced services such as call forwarding and even recharge their account with personal identification numbers (PINs) and major credit cards.

Webfonepartners.net has centered on international distribution through established agents and distributors in an effort to gain market share quickly. “The channels by which goods are marketed and distributed have become the new drivers of economic success”, says Gibson. “From these channels flow customer satisfaction, market share, revenue gains and profitability.”

Insight Research (www.insight-corp.com) released a new report today titled IP PBX and IP Centrex: Growth of VoIP in the Enterprise 2004-2009, in which the research firm states that VoIP phones in the enterprise will not represent the majority of installed PBX base until 2009. Even though shipments of the newer IP-based technology are expected to grow at a compounded rate of more than 20 percent between 2004 until 2009, and sales of the older TDM-based phone systems are expected to decline at roughly the same rate, the report claims that TDM technology will continue to dominate the installed base until the end of the decade.

According to the Insight study, the PBX business will ship about $4.3 billion worth of PBX equipment this year.

In essence this report highlights the inevitable transition to IP Telephony in the enterprise that began some years ago, but has taken off in earnest as of late. To hear that this relatively new technology such as VoIP will supplant 100 years of traditional telecom by 2009 is welcome news indeed!

I'm writing today from the WCA International Conference in Washington, D.C. I must say, I'm impressed with the number of people here. This year's conference is entitled "Capitalizing on Wireless Broadband: The Time Is Now" and the buzz is generally one full of positive energy regarding the current and future prospects of wireless broadband deployment.

My day started in a rather long line at Registration. With the clock ticking down and a few colleagues in the press beginning to grumble about missing the kickoff address a helpful staff member ushered us journalists out of line and into the auditorium right in time to hear Peter Pitsch, Director of Marketing at Intel and the Chairman of the Voice on the Net Coalition introduce the morning's two speakers: Michael Gallagher, Acting NTIA Administrator and Assistant U.S. Secretary of Commerce and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein.

The two discussed the various issues surrounding VoIP including regulation, which the Commissioner did not seem too enamored with. Both agreed that VoIP is in a position to revolutionize the telecomm industry, creating competition, helping businesses attain new levels of efficiency, creating innovative services and maybe even lowering costs for the consumer.

Regarding the role to be played by broadband wireless, Commissioner Adelstein said that "If VoIP becomes the standard way to use voice in the USA, then we need to make sure that there is enough broadband reaching into every corner of the USA to facilitate that." This theme merges with President Bush's recent call for universal affordable broadband by 2007.

Regulation will of course play a role in whether or not VoIP gets deployed more rapidly or languishes as a disruptive technology hampered by government interference.

According to Assistant Secretary Gallagher, "VoIP is intersecting with 100 years of regulation." We must be careful not to burden VoIP into becoming a "gray market" of telecom due to tax avoidance (current state and local taxes are in the neighborhood of 16%, and VoIP is capable of doing an end ruun around those taxes). "We must ensure that VoIP becomes a legitimate element of telecommunications.

All speakers generally agreed that a less intrusive government role would benefit the VoIP industry as a whole.
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Also in the morning session, wireless pioneer Craig McCaw announced the formation of Clearwire, a new venture aimed at improving the consumer experience and overall availability of consumer broadband voice and data services.

"We come into this opportunity with our eyes open to the challenges and difficulties associated with competing against giants in the communications arena," said Clearwire Chairman and CEO Craig McCaw. "Yet, we have worked diligently to combine a team of people that have a track record for providing exceptional customer experiences in wireless that we believe can make a difference with a unique and powerful technology. Wireless technology can open the gate that has restricted widespread access to broadband services and provide a very simple and satisfying consumer experience."

The launch of Clearwire is a culmination of more than two years of activity that has included the acquisition of several companies and the accumulation of licensed spectrum in markets throughout the United States.

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ALso, TMC has announced the creation of a new Conference focusing on WiMAX. The new event, called WiMAXcon, will be colocated with the successful Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO (www.itexpo.com) in Los Angeles this October. There is currently a call for papers out, soliciting speakers and topics for the new conference. If you are interested in speaking don't hesitate to check out the CFP online at www.tmcnet.com.

I'm looking forwrad to hearing from FCC Chairman Michael Powell tomorrow. Until then, it's back to the conference.