I recently met with Steve Hawkins, the Vice Consul of UK Trade & Investment. I had a chance to chat with him about how the
February 2005 Archives
VoIP 2.0 happens next week!
We've been getting slammed by requests for overflow hotels as our show hotel has been sold out for many many weeks. Here are some alternate hotels to try. Don't give up. The show will be well worth the trip and I hope to see you there.
Courtyard by Marriott (1 block away)
1 305 374 3000
Sheraton Biscayne Bay (2 blocks away, less than 5 minute walk)
(305) 373-6000
J.W. Marriott (3/4 miles away, 20 minute walk)
1-800-228-9290
There is a market research report coming out in the next few months on VoIP quality. I can't tell you the details of the report but I can tell you that Packet8 seems like they may be in the lead... At least for now. I'll keep you posted on this developing story.
As many of us waited with baited breath for months... Seems more like years, Gmail is now available to the common Joe and Jolene. The salutation "Hi there," reminds me of what you'd received from a spammer trying to play on the desperate housewives concept but overall, the letter is to the point and should help the company achieve another billion eyeballs a month or so. Just an estimate mind you.
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Hi there,
Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail happenings. We hope it's been worth the wait, because we're excited to finally offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to create your new account:
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/d-2-rtehrani%40tmcnet.com-e5dbfefdb07223bb4176919cd13be1a7f76fc758
Since last April, we've been working hard to create the best email service possible. It already comes with 1,000 megabytes of free storage, powerful Google search technology to find any message you want instantly, and a new way of organizing email that saves you time and helps you make sense of all the information in your inbox.
And here are just some of the things that we've added in the last few months:
- Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports POP
- Gmail Notifier: Get new mail notifications and see the messages and their senders without having to open a browser
- Better contacts management: Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks. Add phone numbers, notes and more. Even use search to keep better track of it all.
We also wanted to thank you. For showing us your support and for being so patient. And to those who have already signed up for Gmail, thank you for giving it a try and for helping us make it better. Our users are what have made this product great. So whether you're just signing up for your account or you've been with us since the beginning, keep letting us know how we can build you the best email service around.
That's it for now. We hope you like Gmail and will share it with your friends. We've got lots of cool new stuff planned and we can't wait for you to see our work in your Gmail accounts! Stay tuned...
Thanks,
The Gmail Team
Nuvio's FCC Filing Leads Charge Against Discriminatory Broadband Practices
-- Company Urges Use of Title I Authority to Preserve VoIP Competition --
In the comments, Nuvio asserts that broadband Internet access providers, who also offer VoIP services, have economic incentives to discriminate against unaffiliated VoIP providers in favor of affiliated providers." If left unregulated, this discrimination will endanger the vibrant competition that currently exists in the VoIP market and ultimately harm consumers." In particular, Nuvio is concerned that rural ILECs will use discriminatory practices to artificially keep VoIP competition from reaching rural customers.
Broadband Internet access and the VoIP market are vertically related industries. VoIP services depend critically on the quality of the underlying broadband connection linking the customer to the Internet. "Broadband providers have the ability to control the quality of service that a VoIP customer experiences. This may lead to discrimination against unaffiliated VoIP providers in order to increase overall profits and retain market share. Therefore, Nuvio urges the Commission to exercise its Title I jurisdiction to preserve competition by prohibiting discriminatory practices of vertically integrated broadband/VoIP providers."
"Broadband providers have nothing to lose and everything to gain from degrading the connection quality of their customers who are using unaffiliated VoIP providers," said Jason Talley, president and CEO of Nuvio Corporation. "The few customers they lose from discrimination is drastically offset by the substantial increase in its VoIP subscribers, market share and revenues from the practice."
"There is ample FCC and court precedent for the proposition that the Commission has Title I authority to regulate information services and is fully justified in exercising its authority to prohibit anti-competitive practices. Such action is both timely and necessary to guarantee a competitive market for VoIP services and keep choice in the hands of the consumer."
I had a chance recently to catch up with Alcatel to see how they are doing in general and to ask about their eDial acquisition. If you are familiar with the company's unified communications product line consisting of MySoftPhone, My Messaging, MyAssistant, the eDial product fits into this family as MyTeamwork, allowing conferencing and collaboration.
Alcatel is proud to tell me that they have decoupled this product from the PBX meaning they can use it to sell into non-Alcatel environments. One key advantage to this product is that it doesn't require a software install so rolling it out in a huge enterprise is fairly painless.
Interestingly the French telecom giant is still making TDM phones and investing in this technology as customers are still buying it. While developing TDM products is almost heretical in a legacy sort of way, Alcatel is also on the leading edge. They have been an innovator in the PBX business from the standpoint of believing in XML early on and integrating this technology into their product line.
I asked what interesting applications they have now and they told me that they used XML to design an emergency notification service in a school and won a bid over another large PBX company that couldn't do the same. Another application they wrote quickly was one to do a reverse lookup on telephone numbers via an online directory service. Yet another application allows the phone system to hook into the building management system so they can control the building via the telephones. Finally you can use the phones to track FedEx packages.
Another day another airplane and while frequent flyer miles are great to have, I prefer using them to receiving them. Business travel is a fact of life but I wonder if it could get better. Worse than the travel is the coinstant delay and on this flight we had to wait an extra hour on the tarmac for no apparent reason. When we finally took off, I decided to come up with the top things I want to hear the captain say while flying.
11) Folks, I am going to descend down to about 2,000 feet which is not only a safe altitude but should allow you to turn on your Blackberries to send and receive messages. Feel free to turn them on.
10) FAA regulations now require that our flight attendants drink a pint of beer prior to working to make sure they are in a great mood throughout the duration of the flight.
9) My daughter is getting married tomorrow and tonight is the rehearsal dinner. My supervisor has authorized me to increase our speed by a factor of two so we can get to our destination ahead of schedule.
8) The copilot and I are beta testers for a new in-flight WiFi service but we’d like to limit usage to only those people who write for a living and maintain a top-rated blog
7) To save weight and thus fuel, all our airlines will now serve caviar and champagne instead of unsatisfying stale pretzels.
6) Our first-class section will only be occupied by those of you in the communications market as you all had some really tough years between 2001-2003.
5) Every seat on this plane is equipped with wireless broadband triple-play technology with built-in DVR. We have taken the liberty of recording the most popular shows from the last 365 days for your viewing pleasure.
4) In appreciation of your continued patronage I am happy to inform you that your frequent flyer miles for this trip can be instantly converted into a coupon for a top of the line Apple iPOD. Alternatively the stewardess can hand one to you with your complimentary headphones if you desire.
3) Due to a flight attendant strike, our entire attendant staff has been replaced by models from the Ford Modeling agency… Thankfully these models come highly recommended by the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models also on board this evening.
2) In order to ensure passenger comfort, all seats on this flight have been fitted with electronic massage and a complimentary pair of noise canceling headphones.
1) An unexpected fire in our mini-pillow factory has forced us to purchase human-size pillows you may actually be able to sleep on.
Ahh, the holy grail in any business. How can you make money doing it? The last few years at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo has seem me field this question dozens of times from people worldwide trying to get in on what may be the most lucrative and important technology of this century (possible exaggeration alert – would you believe at least the decade?)
So rather that deal with these questions on a case by case basis, I decided to address it on a larger scale by inviting resellers (registration is on pace to potentially exceed 1,000 resellers signed up for this session) and industry experts for a healthy discussion on how to make money in this business.
Interconnects made a healthy living selling phone systems for years but now a new game is in town and you need to understand it to excel in it and you need to know what to sell, how to sell, how to position it and who else is selling it.
This is why resellers are flocking to Internet telephony Conference & Expo and hopefully we will have a full house in attendance to hear the presentation. There won't be any PowerPoints just a healthy dialogue on how to profit from selling voice over IP products and/or services.
The session will take place Wednesday February 23rd, 10:15 am - 12:00 PM in the Keynote ballroom. Hope to see you there. Please check out http://www.itexpo.com for details.
Somehow, don't ask me why, I am hooked on learning about 802.3ah, an IEEE standard for deploying broadband over copper. I have written about 802.3ah before but I never really had an in-depth understanding of it until recently. By the way, 802.3ah is also referred to as Ethernet in the First Mile or EFM (yes, we desperately needed another protocol, standard and especially another acronym in telecom!)
There are a few reasons why this standard makes sense for service providers to roll out. First of all Ethernet in my opinion is the future of broadband. T1, E1, T3, DSL, etc will fade quickly as Ethernet becomes the standard broadband technology we will all use. 802.3 supports Ethernet.
Furthermore, fiber is in short supply. If you were a financial TV watcher in post-buble months, all they talked about was the excess of fiber. When you have financial people acting like experts in areas like optical, you confuse the public. We have tremendous amounts of fiber in the ground, just not going to office buildings where it is needed. If you have fiber in your office, you are in the lucky 10-20% minority. Our office is in
But I digress and need to come back to my point which is this 802.3ah stuff is great. It allows service providers to deliver metro Ethernet services at a fraction of the cost of DSL and ATM technology.
802.3ah comes in two flavors, the longer range 2BASE-TL can reach distances of 20,000 feet and greater while the shorter range 10PASS-TS is meant for high-speed broadband deployment and FTTC deployment.
In contrast to 10PASS-TS, 2BASE-TL is designed for delivering symmetrical services from a central office to a business with a maximum delivery rate per pair of 5.7 Mbps and the ability to bond up to 32 pairs into an Ethernet port. Although I haven't seen seen a single app with this sort of bandwidth requirement, this allows a theoretical 182 Mbps! Nice. If I could get that at TMC and pay a few thousand a month, we have a deal. Any takers?
What is it?
In telecom, everything new is old again or the other way around which is why EFM technology leverages existing DSL layers. The good news here is that the technology is new but able to use current DSL chips, etc meaning costs aren’t as high as a radically new technology. One last point is that EFM is more immune from signal interference from voice T1s and other "disturbers," meaning the line will be effectively cleaner than DSL and more suitable for business.
UNE-P
EFM technology doesn't need UNE-P like a traditional T1 and as such will work with UNE-L or dry copper. This is great in a world being cleansed on UNE-P.
Hatteras Networks is a company I met with recently and they were nice enough to show me a demo of their EFM products in action. They have a series of boxes from point to point to point to multipoint allowing a service provider to dabble before he or she commits to the larger solution. Their products are the HN400 and HN4000 series Metro Ethernet Copper Access Switches. Business is good for them right now. They have found a good niche. One area of growth for example is service providers supplying broadband to WiFi hotspots and more recently WiMAX towers. EFM technology is not really too well known and I am not sure why. It seems like a great solution for companies with fiber taste and a copper zip code.
Qwest will be rolling out their VoIP service to consumers in the second quarter. Qwest was a leading-edge service provider and touted their all fiber network for the first few years of their life. Then the bubble burst and we didn’t hear too much from them. Oh yeah, they purchased an RBOC along the way. In fact Qwest was the first long-distance company (if memory serves… and I think it does) to purchase an RBOC. Now the trend is reversed with RBOCs buying long-distance companies. They were perhaps ahead of their time. Now they will enter the VoIP market and triple-play is likely around the corner. This entry perhaps marks the last large service provider to roll out VoIP. It seems every ILEC, cable company, CLEC and long-distance company that anyone has heard of is now selling VoIP. Very good news for the industry but we still need to be concerned about profitability and excess competition will certainly lead to pricing pressure. Differentiated services is the next frontier and these providers need to keep their services on the leading edge so new customers will sign up and current ones will stay hooked.
In this corner, the only city with its own liberty bell. The city of brotherly love… The city with its own cheese steak,
And in this corner, the undisputed wireless leader. The only service provider mighty enough to buy MCI with lunch money. The incumbent of incumbents, Verizon!
Al Bredenberg details the latest in this nasty brawl between the incumbent and the ILEC.
If you thought the train was a place where you could catch up on your reading without intrusions from the rest of the world and especially your boss, think again.
Here are the highlights of the announcement:
Perhaps the most interesting part of this announcement is that some links can pass data to and from the moving train at 32 Mbps, making this the fastest data link to a train anywhere in the world. So not only can you e-mail your boss and friends, you can stream a few channels, a movie and listen to streaming audio simultaneously. Now that is going from relative isolation to serous overload virtually overnight. Still, web junkies everywhere will stand in line to get a taste of wireless broadband, British style.
Tonight I have the most interesting assignment of all. I have to tear down open source telephony. Not literally mind you but next week I go on stage with Mark Spencer the guru of open source, founder of Digium and Asterisk and have to debate him one-on-one. He is taking the (no surprise here) pro-open source side of the argument and I am against it (or at least that's the role I play onstage).
If you can believe it, we couldn't find a PBX vendor to debate Mark and I thought my idea was great (I have my moments) and I wouldn’t let it die.
This is how the scenario worked out... We called Mark and asked him if he would do an open source telephony shoot-out with another PBX vendor. He agreed. We called a few PBX vendors and no would debate him. I called Mark back and said, the Hell with it... I will fill the role of the PBX vendor.
So here I am now, coming up with the questions and framing the session. I am looking forward to seeing how it shapes up next week. Hope to see you at the show. If you have any ammo for me (I know this isnt fair but open-source uses the web to its advantage, so can I :-) send me an e-mail.
Check out http://www.itexpo.com for details.
Getting wireless access in the New Orleans airport is not for the faint of heart. Verizon’s 1xRTT service is pretty slow here and the WiFi supplied by PJ’s Coffee and Tea is slow now and doesn’t seem to be speeding up any time soon. It was OK for an hour and then all these other laptops started to show up and strangle the connection. It seems like someone is definitely streaming Shrek 2. BTW this coffee shop is incredible, with about 10 outlets or more and lots of comfortable seating. They will even give you an hour free WiFi with any purchase. Now that’s good business.
Two of the world’s richest people and most savvy investors are eying the cable industry. Is this a sign that video-on-demand and other such services will be highly profitable or that a wave of consolidation will make the big bigger and stronger?
Yesterday I wrote about Cablevision mulling a possible takeover bid and now this… It seems that consolidation fever is contagious.
The most important question may be why don’t these investors see Verizon and SBC as strong competition? If they did see a serious threat, would they be making these investments? Is it possible they see an acquisition in cable by SBC and Verizon? Would the FCC allow such a merger?
As Tom Keating blogged yesterday... Time to take the popcorn out.
PS: Here is a letter Warren Buffet wrote to TMCnet last summer.
