Yesterday, the MultiService Forum (MSF) held a press conference to outline the test frameworks for GMI 2006, its bi-annual global test event to be held in October 2006. Hosted by five of the world’s largest carriers (BT, KT, NTT, Verizon, and Vodafone as well as a state-of-the-art test facility at the University of New Hampshire) the event will comprise a large-scale, real network trial of the MSF IMS-compatible (IP Multimedia System) Release 3 architecture.

The GMI 2006 event is designed to bring together dozens of carriers and vendors to test the interoperability of IMS-based infrastructure components in a real-world setting. According to the MSF, GMI 2006 will provide a test-bed for the full spectrum of hardware, processes and services needed to assemble an effective next-generation delivery platform.

The MSF hopes to demonstrate multi-vendor interoperability geared towards achieving Fixed Mobile Convergence supporting IMS.

In summary, the goals of GMI 2006 are as follows:

To move IMS convergence from theoretical to practical;To address key interoperability issues before network implementation;Provide an industry framework for service interoperability; andProvide a global framework that sets the stage for worldwide adoption of IMS architectures.

For more information, interested parties can check out the MultiService Forum site.

Two sets of numbers crossed my desk today. Looks like more evidence that VoIP is here to stay.

Stats from Infonetics and TIA both show significant growth.

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NUMBER OF VOIP SUBSCRIBERS MORE THAN TRIPLES IN 2005 REACHING 4.2 MILLION; EXPECTED TO GROW TO 18 MILLION BY 2009

Arlington, Va. -- The number of residential VoIP customers (not including PC-to-PC services) more than tripled to 4.2 million in 2005 and is expected to grow by a compound annual rate of 43.9 percent through 2009, reaching 18.0 million.

President and CEO Mike Zafirovski continued to revamp the executive suite at Nortel as he announced the appointment of Joseph Flanagan as vice president, Order Management.

Flanagan will report to Joel Hackney, senior vice president, Global Supply Chain and Quality and will be responsible for leading and standardizing the Company's business-to-business processes, and driving increased efficiencies across operations systems. Flanagan, who has global responsibilities, will work closely with Nortel's sales operations teams to ensure tight alignment with the strategic direction of sales and marketing.

Flanagan comes to Nortel from GE, where for the past 13 years he has held positions of increasing responsibility, culminating in the post of General Manager of Operations for GE Consumer & Industrial in EMEA. At the same time, he served as Division leader for Six Sigma.

Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski said yesterday at the RBC Capital Markets Communications, Media and Technology Conference in Whistler, British Columbia that the telecom equipment maker is poised to embark on a growth story. We’re “starting at ground zero,” he said and “we have a very tall mountain to climb.”

He said the company will announce next week how it plans to spend its $1.9 billion research and development budget. Among the more promising technologies that Nortel will likely invest in are IMS, WiMAX, and IPTV.

“We have teams working on where and how we will be investing $1.9 billion,” Zafirovski said. “We have thrown a challenge for us to gain 20 points of market share, at a minimum, in anything in which we participate today.”

Business lines where Nortel trails the 20% market share figure are presumably up for reevaluation.

According to Zafirovsky, “It’s a combination of business transformation and realigning our investments to have this be an organization that has profitable growth as a key expectation.”

Regarding Nortel’s service business, Zafirovsky vowed to increase the portion of Nortel’s revenue coming from services and applications.

Today is Steve Jobs’ birthday.

Happy Birthday Steve!

For your birthday we give you a billion. That is, a billion songs have now been downloaded from Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

The billionth song Speed of Sound was purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan and for his fortuitous timing, Alex will be rewarded with a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth-generation iPods, and a $10,000 gift card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School in his name to commemorate this milestone.

Regarding the milestone, the birthday boy said, “I hope that every customer, artist and music company executive takes a moment today to reflect on what we’ve achieved together during the past three years. Over one billion songs have now been legally purchased and downloaded around the globe, representing a major force against music piracy and the future of music distribution as we move from CDs to the Internet.”

Happy Birthday indeed.

Looks like I'm not the only one who thinks our nation is in dire need of help from the wireLESS community.

According to this report from Reuters, several leading tech CEOs  plan to call upon Washington to free up more spectrum for the next generation of wireless applications. 

Here's the Reuters report:

Chief executive officers of some leading technology companies plan to call on Thursday for the U.S. government to find more wireless airwaves for use as new applications emerge .

The Technology CEO Council said on Wednesday it will issue a report urging Congress to order the Bush administration to analyze which airwaves are not being used best, and how they might be re-allocated.

Additionally, the organization plans to urge the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to consider allowing government airwaves that are underutilized to be used for other purposes.

"Our nation's wireless needs are too often governed by 1970s regulations that hinder economic progress and innovation," Motorola Inc. CEO Edward Zander said in a statement obtained by Reuters.

Popular Telephony today announced the worldwide Beta release of PeerioBiz 1.1 - the serverless enterprise communication platform that comes loaded with business level PBX features and multi-lingual Instant Messaging (IM) all available for free download.

PeerioBiz is designed for SMB users who need a reliable, secure and scalable VoIP solution. It includes business PBX features and an enterprise IM application that are all designed to showcase the solution's overall simplicity and low cost nature.

Check out the company's Web site here.

NMS Communications today announced the acquisition of Openera Technologies. Openera will become an integral part of NMS’s Mobile Applications business.

I wrote about Openera back in December. They  make IMS mobile client applications for both fixed and mobile operators, and in fact launched a P2P video sharing application when last we spoke.

This is good news for the whole Openera team - I'd like to congratulate Joel Hughes, Openera CEO on yet another success. My feeling is he just really likes his NMS business cards.  ;)

Completion of the transaction is expected to occur within the next few weeks, for consideration of $16.4 million in stock, approximately 51 percent of which is contingent upon the continued employment of key employees of Openera over the 30-month period following the closing.

A conference call will be held on Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 11:00 am ET to discuss the details of the announcement.  The call will be available live via the Internet by accessing the NMS Web site under the Investor Relations section.

For more information, check out the Openera or NMS Communications Web sites.

I just received my weekly issue of the Sage/CMB Market Pulse market research from Sage Research (the technology practice of Chadwick Martin Bailey) that explores the hottest topics and issues on the minds of the 13,000 enterprise and service provider technology professionals that make up their Technology Panel...

Fixed/Mobile convergence (FMC) is one of the early applications being deployed in realm of IMS. If the Sage data are to be believed, only 11% of the carriers surveyed believe that FMC is not worth allocating any budget. Conversely 89% of the survey respondents are spending or evaluating at least some future spend in the space. 20% of the service providers interviewed are spending up to 20% of their budget on FMC and 3% are spending 20% or more.

To me this certainly means that IMS and FMC are no mere hype.

Brix Networks today unveiled its new BrixVision IPTV service assurance portfolio, a comprehensive offering designed to give service providers complete visibility into the quality of video content, the underlying delivery infrastructure, and the overall customer experience. 

This solution set has been developed specifically for IPTV deployments, and the company says it delivers the unequaled service visibility that providers demand, which has been unmet by legacy test and measurement tool suppliers. 

“IPTV is a very complex and highly performance-sensitive service that places increased demands on a network.  As a result, the importance of the customer’s quality of experience has been greatly elevated,” said Kaynam Hedayat, chief technology officer at Brix Networks.

With BrixVision, service providers can perform root-cause analysis to identify IP transmission versus video quality impairments, monitor end-to-end video quality, and proactively monitor and manage their subscribers’ experience throughout the lifecycle of their services.

For more on this latest solution from Brix, please visit www.brixnet.com.