The following is a portion of my April 2006 Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook:
I think this year will see serious wireless disruption. In my life, I have witnessed many a technology look to replace Ethernet only to find out that Ethernet was an evolving standard that kept changing with the times.
So, instead of replacing Ethernet, we just kept upgrading it. No matter what new technology came onto the scene, it never gained traction.
History repeats itself and, if you picture WiFi as the wireless equivalent of Ethernet, then you can figure the technology will keep evolving as well to fight off the replacement technologies.
In this case, I think WiMAX may be the technology that gets hurt by WiFi. Technology already exists to extend the reach of WiFi, but I anticipate this will be the year where we see a technology emerge that extends the range of WiFi in such ways that WiMAX loses its edge in many applications. Mesh networking may be this technology, but I imagine that WiFi's range can be extended to a few miles without too much effort, and mesh networks, coupled with long-range WiFi might eliminate the need for WiMAX in areas where it is feasible to pepper your access points.
March 2006 Archives
I am about to leave for most of the day for a one-day trip to see some exciting VoIP and related companies. I am not sure if I will be blogging as I will be in the car for much of the day. If I get a chance I will for sure. I am glad to see the weather picking up. It was about 45 degrees when I got to work today.
Here are some news items of interest I noticed and wanted top pass along:
BroadSoft Announces IMS-ready Media Resource Function Server
Amdocs Brings CRM to Kazakh KaR-Tel Contact Center
Nortel To Host Bharti Contact Center" href="http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/03/28/1509441.htm">Nortel To Host Bharti Contact Center
Centillium Marries Optical Tech, VoIP
BroadSoft Announces IMS-ready Media Resource Function Server
The following is a portion of my April 2006 Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook:
Most business magazines will tell you the phone companies will have a tough time unseating the cable companies when it comes to TV transmission. Here is why every one of those magazines and newspapers is wrong: HDTV selection stinks today. Apparently, I spent a fortune for a 60" HDTV so I could watch but a handful of channels on it.
Most of what I watch is not HDTV and I either can have a black square around what I view or choose to stretch the picture to fill the whole screen. Every actor gains 20 pounds if I use the latter approach, and I am sick and tired of paying more for a TV that, most of the time, makes my TV viewing experience worse.
The phone companies should supply 50 HD channels, or even more. If they did that, I would switch to IPTV tomorrow and never look back. I understand fully that, without HD content, this isn't possible, but
Everywhere I look there is more VoIP peering news. Take a look at this New Telephony story on peering. Well it is a story about my peering panel last week at Comptel but it is a good story and news nonetheless
Furthermore I just learned that XConnect is doing amazingly well with their peering network. Almost 200 ITSPs are connected to their network and they've partnered with a consortium (mentioned in above article) that includes all the cable operators in the
There will be a time soon where the service providers that aren’t peering in one or more peering communities will be the exception.
Just over a year ago I got fed up with the term parasitic being used to describe VoIP vendors. Countless people I knew actually went out and got broadband connections so they could use Skype. I understood fully well that VoIP providers are not parasites as many called them but instead added a tremendous amount of value.
I was inspired to write VoIP: Not Parasitic.
I argued that broadband and VoIP providers are symbiotic meaning both services benefit from one another.
Today I read an article on Techdirt that was pointed out by Ted Wallingford. The argument goes, why is Verizon paying CBS to carry their stations via IPTV and thinking of charging companies like Vonage? For many people, Vonage was the reason they purchased broadband access in the first place. Now Vonage and others are being threatened by the very service providers who benefited from their service in the past!
The following is a portion of my April 2006 Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook:
On to VoIP Peering
Everywhere I turn, people remind me that I declared 2006 the "Year of VoIP Peering." At least, it seems that everyone agrees. The numbers I am seeing coming out of the VPF, for example, are staggering. The total number of minutes carried each year seems to grow exponentially on their peering network.
In addition, there are rumors that AT&T will join the VPF. The announcement was not made formally, but my sources tell me there is a good chance it will happen. Incidentally, I met some people from AT&T after my last keynote at the Voice Peering Forum in
If this announcement happens, I will be absolutely correct and we will see even more rapid acceleration of VoIP peering in the world. If it doesn't happen the market will still grow - just a bit more slowly. So far, this is still the Year of VoIP Peering. I will be keynoting the next Voice Peering Forum event in
Xavier Van de Lanotte, President VXTConsulting, Inc. forwarded me some whitepapers he wrote some years back. I am passing them along because in some ways they are ahead of their time and they also show where Xavier thinks the telecom market is headed.
The first is titled Historical perspective on Telecom Industry Lessons Learned and the other, Challenges for the Telecommunication Services Company.
The following is a portion of my April 2006 Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook:
There is Enough Broadband Competition
I get the general sense that our government believes we already have enough broadband competition. I think that the FCC believes service providers should be allowed to charge anyone and everyone who uses their pipes whatever they need in order to pay for the maintenance and further build-out of their networks.
We have witnessed the slow dissolution of the CLEC market in the past years; we have seen the slow and steady decrease of ILECs; and we have just about reassembled the former AT&T.
Many taking this side of the argument will point out that cable and VoIP companies are generating sufficient competition along with wireless, broadband over power line, and satellite.
In the late nineties, we thought the market would be best served with thousands of CLECs serving customers. That was the environment the government set up. Now it seems that the FCC is happy with just a handful of strong competitors.
Many have seen me quoted in such newspapers as The
In addition, it is fairly obvious that current FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, has little or no interest in net neutrality. The chairman is well connected with the Bush administration, which pretty much cements the fact that net neutrality arguments are a big waste of time. You may as well use the effort for a worthy cause, like donating time to a charity or helping underprivileged children, because from where I sit, Chairman Martin's mind is pretty much made up.
This, of course, is just one person's opinion - but I have heard the chairman speak and have been researching the matter for quite some time.
Ours is a country based on freedom, which we spread around the world. But we will soon lose some of this freedom - at least on the Internet. We may not be able to use applications, like Skype, without paying extra for them; still, this would be better than the situation in China, for example, where the practice (using Skype) has been banned or, to put it nicely, "put on hold." Furthermore, unless service providers get an extra fee, videos streamed on the Internet may not be of very high quality. In general, we can expect service providers to provide inferior Internet service unless they are paid a premium by the customer, the content provider, or both.
Once we accept these certainties, the question becomes how to make money in such a new world. If you think the model of charging $15 per month for VoIP and raking in cash is the future of your VoIP company, you may as well plan to start passing out the pink slips by New Year's Eve.
This concept won't work; the only way to differentiate yourself is to provide different offerings. Explore higher quality VoIP, surround sound VoIP, stereophonic VoIP, videophones, collaboration products, dual mode phones, and so on. You can partner with anti-spam or security companies to offer a bundle of secure voice and Web surfing.
The one thing you need to stop doing is going head-to-head with Vonage. This is a nice business model, but can't last forever. Survey your customers. Hold focus groups. What do your customers want? Do everything you can to figure out where the money will be tomorrow.
Here is a simple idea worth hundreds of millions, in my opinion. Offer a wake up service hosted by celebrities. How many teenagers would pay $.25 per day to be woken up by Justin Timberlake or Britney Spears? How about a service that wakes you with an MMS message containing a Paris Hilton photo? You can even choose the rating.
Design an AJAX-based application to allow full call control and a toolbar that sits in IE and Outlook. Make your services stickier and stickier.
Explore enhanced 911, where any calls to 911 are recorded and sent via e-mail to loved ones. Integrate 911 with video cameras in the home, so emergency workers can see what is happening, in case those three digits are dialed.
Get creative. If one more service provider tells me they are better than Vonage because they are cheaper, I may scream. If you have to price lower than Vonage to make sales, you have a cheap phone service, and customers don't want a cheap phone service to carry their 911 calls. As I have asked before, would you rather have the ambulance taking you to the hospital made by Honda or Yugo? Which would you send your kids in?
As I spend more and more time in hotel rooms I find my laptop often wakes me up at night due to the various applications that are set to run after hours. There is the disk defragmenter, the anti-spyware program, the virus scanner, etc. it is a wonder I get any sleep at all with all my computer is doing right next to my head in most hotel rooms.
Sure I can turn the computer off but then I am a day behind in my protection from hackers, viruses and worms.
Obviously I am looking forward to faster and quieter hard drives such as this one from Samsung based on SSD which stands for solid-state disk technology. The storage device features immediately accessible, static NAND flash memory rather than the rotating discs usually used in hard drives
What’s more, SSD weighs only half as much as a hard drive. Samsung claims that the gadget reads data three times faster and writes data 1.5 times quicker. Not only that, but SSD consumes only five percent of the electricity required to power a hard disk drive. The device operates silently since it doesn’t have any motor or other noise-generating components.
Analysts are of the view that laptops equipped with SSD will comprise 30 percent of the global laptop market by 2008. They have high hopes for SSD-equipped laptops, predicting that the price of a 32-gigabyte SSD will go down from the $500 to $200.
Media reports say that the global SSD market will expand from $540 million in 2006 to $4.5 billion dollars by 2010.
My take is that these drives will be the future for laptop-based storage. As long as prices keep coming down that is. The one possible monkey wrench in the future of SSD is the potential for our storage needs to increase. For example storing digital photos takes up more space as the resolution of digital cameras increases.
The same thing goes for video as storing TV programs and movies will become more commonplace. So the challenge for SSD will be to get the prices down per gigabyte as low or lower than hard disks.
If that happens the need for hard disks becomes questionable.
With all the news available on the Internet I am not sure how we will be able to keep up without portal pages such as the ones mentioned in this post from Om Malik.
I was reading yet another article today from David Sims, this one focusing on VoIP security. It is quite good and I also saw that it is running on TMCnet’s Call Center Mexico channel. I was not aware this channel even existed but am pretty excited to see TMCnet addressing the needs of the Mexican communications community.
EV-DO Revision A as a relatively new technology for wireless broadband access that will rock our worlds. For those of us who live on the road, we may not sacrifice our broadband connectivity at all. We’ll be able to do anything and everything with 3.1 Mbps downloads and 1.8 Mbps uploads. I am still not sure I’ll want to upload 100 8-megapixel photos over this connection but I am sure I won’t need to deal with WiFi hotspots ever again.
I have a rule that says if I am going to be in a location for more than an hour I will sign up for WiFi but if not I will use the current EVDO card that I have. Of course in some areas EVDO is miserably slow and there are other times when EVDO actually surpasses WiFi speed!
So any improvement to EVDO technology is a win for me and many others who aren’t tied down too often. Furthermore if EVDO is consistently faster than WiFi hotspots and hotel-based broadband connections more mobile executives will be able to justify using EVDO exclusively and thus the uptake of products based on this wireless standard will increase.
There is some great news in the market. Nortel and Sierra Wireless have achieved the industry’s first over the air test calls using EV-DO Revision A wireless technology and pre-commercial wireless data devices. The successful tests confirm the commercial viability of EV-DO Revision A for powering next-generation broadband wireless services.
Operators will be able to prioritize different users and applications, enabling tiered services and multiple pricing options. Operators also can make additional security enhancements by using authentication mechanisms that can identify users and give specific access rights based on the user’s profile.
“Given the tremendous success and momentum of 1xEV-DO, Nortel has embarked on an aggressive program to deliver 1xEV-DO Rev A,” said Richard Lowe, President, Mobility and Converged Core Networks at Nortel. “Nortel’s DO Rev A technology will allow operators to serve more customers on the same spectrum while delivering VoIP and other advanced multimedia services that enhance the end user’s experience and increase subscriber loyalty.”
So for the mobile warriors out there, today is a great day. We may not be able to travel less but at least we will be able to stay connected wherever we go.
According to Greg Galitzine, Alcatel could pick Lucent up and in the process create an entity that has more sales than Cisco. If the two companies do merge, they will create an IMS and IPTV monster. In addition the wireless strength of such a company would be potentially unequaled.
If you are a service provider you know time to market is key and anything you can do to shorten this is worth exploring. Now what if I told you there is a vendor who wants to speed your time to market and in addition wants to simplify the way you deliver hosted services?
Ensim aims to help you with some of your most challenging problems and then some. Their Unify application enables service providers to centrally create, control and deliver hosted IP and application services.
We live in a world where you need to deploy a number of disparate best of breed solutions to customers. At the same time you need to be cognizant of the fact that the competition may be offering similar services. How do you differentiate further? You come up with unique bundles that serve your target audiences. You may have a bundle for teens, another for small business and another for real estate agents.
The company supplies service managers that are basically adapters to popular services such as the hosted offering from Broadsoft. Using an API that Broadsoft supplies Ensim is able to configure, deal with metering and check the health of the Broadsoft application.
As the name implies, Unify can deal with multiple applications as long as they run on IP. For example you can support Blackberry Server and IM if you like. As long as it runs on IP you are OK. By encapsulating other applications the program allows you to deal with a single interface to manage disparate services.
The ultimate goal of course is programmatic provisioning allowing a service to be configured all the way down to the welcome e-mail, without human intervention.
There is no bigger believer in enhanced services than me and a solution like Ensim's is a good idea as it allows service providers to focus on how to make money by providing unique bundling strategies without having to worry about service enablement. In my opinion, anything that can be done to speed service provider profitability is a good idea.
One final note is that Ensim's licensing structure allows you to pay them only when you sell your services meaning no risky cash outlays for a product that may not pay for itself. If I were a service provider I would be spending that initial savings on things like research to determine what added services customers will pay for.
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