VoIP Blog - Tehrani.com

October 9, 2006

October 9, 2006

I got this editorial pitch today for ITEXPO. You know I notice so many companies calling the show incorrectly IP Telephony Conference & Expo instead of Internet Telephony Conference & Expo – actually IP Telephony is a more inclusive term than Internet Telephony. The reason we chose Internet telephony for the name of the magazine and the show was at the time Internet was the pervasive term and IP was unknown. After the bubble burst many people predicted the death of all publications with the term internet in their titles. Thankfully one brand with internet in the title survived. Internet Telephony.

But I didn’t start this blog as a session for reminiscing I wanted to point out that fax vendors seem to being well still. I keep hearing how much business these companies are doing. The mortgage craze in the past few years is one of the reasons. I wonder what the next big growth engine will be for internet fax now that the mortgage market is slowing.

Here is the pitch I received about coming to the FaxBack booth this week at ITEXPO:

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Think fax is a thing of the past? With 2.2 trillion minutes of annual long distance and over 35 VoIP hardware companies now selling T.38 fax solutions, demand for VoIP fax is intensifying. Migrating analog fax is no longer an obstacle to a successful VoIP rollout as enterprises and service providers alike are deploying VoIP fax concurrently with converged voice and data networks.

A fax technology leader for nearly 25 years, FaxBack's T.38 NET SAtisFAXtion IP software automates desktop faxing, requires no fax hardware or complex network configurations and leverages VoIP network investments.

Visit FaxBack in Booth #835 at the IP Telephony Conference and Expo and discover how our T.38 VoIP fax products are redefining the fax messaging market.

October 9, 2006

October 9, 2006

October 9, 2006

If you have any doubt about the future of open source communications consider it shattered as Amazon.com will soon be deploying 5,000 phones connected to the Pingtel ECS platform running on Linux. The relationship between Pingtel and Amazon.com started about a year ago with an initial deployment of Pingtel’s SIPxchange Enterprise Communications Solution (ECS) at Amazon’s headquarter in Seattle. This deployment replaced a legacy PBX system.

The question is why would Amazon switch out their existing PBX and the answer is the leading e-commerce site already runs about 20,000 Red Hat Linux servers so they are what you might say is comfortable with Linux to begin with. This install will add 3 more Linux servers to the mix.

As you might imagine as voice is mission-critical to Amazon they are running these Pingtel PBXs in a redundant manner with failover built in. Failover was obviously an important issue to Amazon and with the Pingtel solution the company can also take advantage of the SOAP interface as well as the ability to manage the system 100% from the web.

In addition the system has a built in ACD which can be used in Amazon’s call center. Amazon will be coupling the Pingtel solution with softphones and IP phones from Polycom.

I had a chance to speak with Bill Rich the CEO of Pingtel about this news briefly and I also had a chance to speak with Martin Steinmann, SVP Marketing at length. They are obviously very happy about this news and see it as something that they hope to build momentum around. Certainly this deal is a huge validation of the Pingtel technology that once manifested itself exclusively in some of the most creative IP telephones in the business.

Pingtel and Bill Rich were some of the earliest entrants in the VoIP market in fact and I remember when Rich received dozens of millions of dollars to launch a company whose core mission was to design IP phones. This was in the telecom bubble days of the late nineties and shortly after Internet Telephony Magazine was launched. Rich was successful in his endeavor designing really unique and usable phones but the market for these devices was small so sales were slow and over time the company decided to focus on the IP PBX space and later open-source and SIP. The rest is history as they say.

In a related press release and attached e-mail the company goes after Asterisk in a manner unusual for most press releases I have seen. Here are the exact words below:

While Asterisk has received a lot of media attention, Pingtel and the open source SIPfoundry community (www.sipfoundry.org) have busily built a true next generation enterprise solution based on a superior architecture and technology. Rather than being limited by a home grown and TDM-like first generation architecture, the SIPxchange ECS is a set of standards-based SIP servers that provide full PBX functionality and core SIP routing.  As a result, ECS easily scales as a fully distributed system, does not have any single points of failure, offers better voice quality as media flows peer-to-peer between end points, does not limit the total number of simultaneous calls in a system, does not force the user to use simple PSTN gateway cards from a single vendor, supports unlimited number of PSTN or SIP trunks, and is easy to use providing centralized plug & play management for the entire system including phones and gateways.

While comparing and contrasting the technical differences between Asterisk and SIPfoundry is beyond the scope of this article, Asterisk has received the lion’s share of attention in the open source space. I would say Asterisk and Digium get about 90% of the mind share from the press and other vendors in the space.

What I have witnessed first hand however is attendees at TMC’s expos such as the VoIP Developer event (now called Communications Developer) come in large numbers to SIPfoundry educational events. This means the press may be distorting the interest level between these two platforms. With high-profile deals like this on, the rivalry between the two open source IP communications companies can only increase and as this rivalry heats up we can expect more quality products from both sides.

In the end I look at this deal as a shot in the arm for the open source IP communications space and certainly if Amazon adopts a technology it should be good enough for any and every other company as well.

If you are looking to learn more about open source communications and VoIP, you are in luck as Internet Telephony Conference & Expo takes place this week in San Diego California. This is the best event to learn about the wide range of open source PBX solutions from the experts themselves.

October 9, 2006

Many people think one of the best things the FCC ever did was to put someone associated with COMPTEL on the commission. In my conversations at every level of the telecom industry, executives tell me consistently they think the FCC and government do whatever the LECs -- or more recently AT&T wants. If you are a CLEC you have felt the pain of having the government deregulate telecommunications so you could compete only to find out less than ten years later -- surprise -- you really can't compete -- go and find another thing to keep yourself busy. Oh and the billions you invested in your business -- you can just write it off. Have a nice day.

This is why many in the industry applauded the appointment of Robert McDowell onto the commission as he represented CLECs who were COMPTEL members who petitioned to block the AT&T BellSouth deal.

Many who make a living competing with LECs see excess consolidation as a very bad thing for the industry. They are hoping McDowell will level the playing field.

The timing of this "playing field leveling" is perfect in fact as this Thursday the FCC will have a vote potentially approving the $67-billion dollar AT&T BellSouth mega-merger.

But according to a recent article it has become apparent McDowell may not vote due to a conflict of interest relating to his activities at COMPTEL.

So it would seem that having McDowell on the commission may have the opposite result from what many thought. Instead of making it difficult to allow AT&T to get back together, in this case at least, McDowell may be the ace up the sleeve of the ILECs -- or perhaps soon to be more precisely AT&T.

It is possible however that when asked if anyone opposes this merger at the wedding ceremony a few politicians could chime in. According to the Wall Street Journal a slew of politicians are writing the Justice Department and FCC asking for special conditions to be imposed if the merger is allowed. In addition, other well known people of influence such as Elliot Spitzer are saying there has not been an increase in competition due to the mergers of Verizon Communications and MCI or SBC Communications and AT&T.

Kevin Martin the Chairman of the FCC has spoken candidly before saying he feels there is enough competition as wireless, cable and other forms of communications ensure consumers have a multitude of choices. But one wonders if having a few behemoth companies controlling a market so important as communications doesn't give these giants a tremendous advantage on the lobbying and investment front.

After all Sens. Mike DeWine and Sen. Herb Kohl, the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee, wrote asking the Justice Department and the FCC to consider imposing conditions on the merger to prevent the new AT&T from hoarding the wireless spectrum it controls, thus keeping it out of the hands of competitors.

These are valid concerns. Moreover if the government continues to allow these mega-mergers to occur won't they continuously have to police the activities of these massive entities and ensure they are allowing competition to flourish? But let's think about this for a moment. If it is so easy for a larger AT&T to block competitors out of the market by hoarding spectrum, doesn't AT&T also have an obligation to its shareholders to make this happen? By allowing the phone company to grow to its former glory, the FCC will always have to stand watch over it and in many cases could be too late to pick up the pieces of smaller competitors who have been squeezed out of a variety of markets.

It seems apparent that many in the government are beginning to publicly state that mega-mergers aren't helping consumers and moreover giving too much control to a single massive telecom company may be like putting the mouse in charge of the cheese.

The AT&T-BellSouth merger is all about IP Multimedia Subsystems. To find out more about IMS and how it represents the lifeblood for service providers today, be sure to visit the IMS Expo -- a must-attend event, collocated at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo, WEST, which runs October 10-13, 2006, in San Diego.