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Living in the Third World of Communications
March 8, 2007
If you haven’t heard, a court decided Vonage needs to pay Verizon $58 million in past damages for patent infringement in the following areas:
- Technology used to bridge Internet calls to the traditional phone system
- Features such as call-waiting and voice-mail
- Wireless Internet phone calls
Now I know many people at Verizon and they are very smart, well rounded and seem nice enough. From an investment perspective they did a good thing by using patents as a competitive weapon against a small provider who has revolutionized the telecom industry and made telcos wake up and realize they need to compete.
The question worth posing however is how is the consumer benefiting from this lawsuit?
My concern is with the government and the various agencies who are supposed to be protecting me, my family and friends’ from monopolistic practices such as this.
When I learn about large companies using the legal and regulatory systems, to flush their competitors down the toilet I have to stop and remember what country I am living in.
I am a US citizen. I was born in the US and I am proud of it. I want consumers to have the best of everything. Lower prices, better quality – again, the best of everything.
VoIP has afforded consumers many benefits. FCC Chairman Michael Powell realized this and used Vonage as a poster child for competition that was pro consumer.
Unfortunately the massive amount of telco consolidation leaves a few large service providers with war chests full of cash and patents they will use to wipe out any and all competition in the market.
The system is so broken it is tough to imagine it can be called a system. How could the FCC feel good about this sort of decision? How could it ever be argued that a huge patent portfolio wielded like nuclear weapons can benefit consumers?
Merger after merger gets approved and no one puts an end to it.
This patent case is but one result of consolidation.
The damage of these mergers is not only to consumers but to the very telcos who are merging. I am speaking tomorrow at the VPF in Miami and as I sat through the sessions today I almost started tearing as I heard the amazing technologies and services being rolled out by companies like BT.
It seems phone companies in every country in the world are rolling out services that are many years ahead of the US.
The United States of America is the third world of telecom. It is an embarrassment and an outrage. Worse yet, we invent the leading edge technologies which actually get deployed on our shores next to last!
The few telcos in this country are falling behind in innovation and to be honest I do not blame them one bit. If I were a shareholder I would be proud of these accomplishments. In fact the way things are going, AT&T will be a single telephone company left to battle a single cable company.
At what point does the FCC need to stop mergers? It looks like there will soon be one choice in satellite radio for example.
Who decides how much competition is enough?
I remember a telecom market with no choice. I do not recall any innovation taking place with one company at the helm. Disruption and fear breeds competition and makes companies experiment with new products to get consumers excited. Duopolies do not.
When the old AT&T saw the threat from Vonage they rolled out a competitive service called CallVantage and you know what ? Tthey had a bunch of enthusiastic people at the helm of this organization and they innovated regularly. It was very refreshing to see AT&T act like a start up.
CallVantage now has pretty much been left for dead.
Every day I worry the path the US is going down is very wrong. We have to focus more on expanding competition and stop killing it at every turn. All government officials are responsible for what is happening to consumers through rulings such as the one above.
I suppose all I can ask is does anyone want to be responsible for telling their kids they are the reason there are 2 choices for telephone service where there was once thousands? Is this a legacy anyone wants to leave? How do you want to be remembered?
One day your kids may read this article – or even your grandchildren. Are you concerned at all? Please tell me you are.
I am very interested in opinions to this entry and I apologize if I come out harsh. Unfortunately some things just have to be said and someone has to start protecting consumers and keep them from getting thrown to the sharks.
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Explosive Small Business Communications Growth
March 8, 2007
Please enjoy my April 2007 Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook.
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You would have to be asleep to not realize how fast small business communications is growing. The reason? Small businesses didn’t have so many telecom choices a scant ten years ago. There was pretty much key systems and then some inexpensive PBXs came along thanks to AltiGen and other, similar players.
What is different now? VoIP. Vonage has done the marketing to educate small businesses about the power of IP communications and the small business owners are getting it. Do they all understand the massive potential afforded by the latest in Internet protocol communications? Of course not, but they know there are more choices, ranging from open source to hosted systems to IP PBXs. It is astounding in fact how many choices there are for a small business these days.
According to AMI-Partners, the growth in this space is expected to hover at 11% between 2005 and 2007. The research firm estimates that, at the end of this year, the total size of the SMB communications space shall be $6.7 billion. The IP PBX business is slated to grow at a — hold on to your hat and have a seat — 33% for the next five years.
One item cited in the study that I have mentioned before is Microsoft’s involvement in the market via their unified communications initiative. AMI feels Microsoft will act like lighter fuel on a burning fire. I believe prices per seat will increase as businesses start to purchase communications applications along with their phone systems.
My belief is that the larger companies will also be spending much more on communications systems as a result of all the excitement occurring in the small end of the market. Indeed, many large companies tend to have so many branches that they act like a conglomerate of SMBs. So, expect the final numbers to be potentially higher than this study predicts. Of course this assumes no new massive geopolitical events of the negative type.
Naturally, if the unified communications market is really going to grow to its full potential there needs to be an objective educational resource supporting the market. I truly believe the value of communications to an organization is greater than almost every corporation realizes.
I have heard many people on the Internet say there is no “killer application” in the voice world and I believe some of these people have it wrong. Voice and IP communications together is the killer application. This is especially true as IP communications embeds itself into your organization through SOA and other breakthrough technologies allowing all corporate applications to leverage the full potential of communications.
Pressing a single button and instantaneously being connected via a video conference and screen sharing to coworkers and customers around the world regardless of network or device type is a killer application. Anything yielding orders of magnitude productivity increases is a killer application.
Embedding presence throughout our applications and collective corporate psyche is a killer application. Having smart phones that are really smart and know what do to with phone calls depending on time of day, who is calling and what you are doing, is a killer application.
More importantly, what I am describing above is the growth of telephony from something commoditized to something truly invaluable.
Think about it this way: PCs and MP3 players are commoditized. iMacs and iPods are not. Do you know why? Because I will pay more for Apple products and part of the reason is the devices are simpler to use and have the integration the PC still lacks after all these years.
Consumers and businesses are paying more, much more for products where there is added value — products where the software and hardware is unified and thus allows us to be more productive. Apple in a way portends the future of unified communications. UC will be something companies pay more for because they get more in return.
And Now It Can Be Revealed. . .
But getting back to the original premise — where will people learn about UC technologies and the amazing things they can do for the enterprise?
Don’t fret, we at TMC have the answer. After taking careful observations of the market and spending considerable time deliberating over the way the IP communications world is evolving, TMC has decided to transform SIP Magazine into Unified Communications Magazine. SIP will end in May and Unified Communications will commence with the June issue.
The response to this news has been very positive thus far and although the market is still in its early stages we believe there is a great deal to teach and help both the enterprise and service providers as they venture forth into the world of Unified Communications. That said, TMC, with its stable of four communications magazines, websites and events, is the perfect organization to help lead the charge into the brave new world of UC, just as it had done previously with Internet Telephony and, prior to that, CTI (Computer Telephony Integration).
So what was wrong with SIP Magazine you ask? Nothing really — the technology is still sound. Indeed, the SIP protocol has disappeared into the very machinery itself of IP communications, busily working behind the scenes of countless VoIP and multimedia calls today. You will even find a prominently displayed section in Unified Communications magazine dedicated to SIP in every issue.
I would love to hear your feedback on this news and as always we look forward to serving your educational and decision-making needs with the highest quality content available anywhere. Thanks as always for reading.
Where the Development Opportunities Lie
Ecosystems. That is the key word in the development market. Ten years ago if you wanted to develop communications applications you generally worked with Dialogic, NMS, Brooktrout (now Cantata), Aculab, Pika, AudioCodes, etc. There were TAPI and TSAPI interfaces for Microsoft and Novell as well but that was about it. Then we had some application generator programs we could use to rapidly roll out apps but this was the extent of the choices you had.
Now things have evolved dramatically. We have all of the above and Asterisk, Skype, Avaya, Pactolus, Cisco, Nortel, Inter-Tel, Salesforce.com, etc. In addition, many of the board vendors from the nineties have now produced HMP-based solutions allowing even more flexibility in providing solutions for customers.
And there are real opportunities in working with all of the above companies. Ecosystems have been a great advance for companies looking to leverage existing and growing communities of customers. It just makes so much sense to have the above companies help promote your products for you.
I have heard nothing but good things from companies who provide solutions for SalesForce.com, Skype and Avaya for example.
But there are so many other opportunities out there it is a bit bewildering. The question developers must ask is where the largest opportunity is so they can allocate resources accordingly.
So here is a brief summary of some of the opportunities out there and what my take is on each:
Open Source: this market is growing at phenomenal rates. Expect to see some amazing market research in the upcoming months on how many companies and service providers are using open source IP PBXs now. This is a no brainer.
Unified Communications: Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel, Avaya and others are pushing this area and Steve Ballmer has said Microsoft programming tools will allow developers to easily write UC applications. This will be a huge market and presents tremendous opportunity
SIP: Everything will be SIP-enabled. Your car, your gadgets… Perhaps everything except Skype. You need to embrace SIP in your communications development.
Skype: Speaking of which you should develop applications that work with Skype and you should find ways to make sure your existing solutions interoperate with Skype. Businesses will need to have Skype Interop in the next few years so start developing Skype compatible products today.
SOA: Service providers and enterprises will all be standardizing on SOA so be sure your products embrace this architecture as well.
IMS: This is a massive opportunity and IMS will happen. The question is exactly when it will happen. Start researching and developing now so you are ready when the tidal wave of IMS enabled networks begins.
Wireless: This is a super-important segment and WiFi/WiMAX/DECT and Dual mode phones and gadgets will proliferate. Games will be voice-enabled. MP3 players (iPhone, etc.) will be voice enabled. It is getting tough to predict a device that will not be voice enabled.
The excitement in this space is beyond anything I have seen ever in VoIP or communications development ever! It is out of control and confusing and complex but you know what? The communications barons of tomorrow are developing the coolest products today.
If you are interested in learning more about the opportunities and perhaps just as important the opportunity to network with others who are part of the above ecosystems and are writing applications in the above fields I invite you to the Communications Developer Conference May 15-17, 2007 in Santa Clara, CA.
Some of my favorite sessions at this conference are integrating voice into .NET, Nortel’s IMS Development Community, Developing Unified Communications Applications and Video over WiFi.
There is so much more; I could go on talking for a long while about how exciting this market is. This show marks a milepost in the evolution from the name “VoIP Developer” to “Communications Developer”. Accompanying this is the observation that, as the communications market converges, the opportunities to generate revenue grows exponentially.
The opportunity is here. The tools are here. The networking will be at the show. Will you be there? I hope so. I will see you soon!
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Browsegoods.com
March 8, 2007
I just found out about a service bridging AJAX/Web 2.0 and e-commerce. It is browsegoods.com and is similar to Google Maps for shopping. I played around with the service for a while and I looked at the watch section. At the forest view level you can see thousands of dots that become watches as you zoom in
You can select by style, type of watch or manufacturer name such as Tissot or Timex. When you drill down to a specific watch you can click on a watch to get more info. At the moment this part of the service can be improved to provide more information.
I can see product reviews added to this sort of service and click to call as well. There is a potential to turn this site into a click to call moneymaker. I think the method of shopping using this site is similar to shopping in a store where you scan a number of watches in a glass case.
Could this be the future of shopping? Potentially. I think the interface can catch on but only when it gets to be more functional and perhaps things like audio and video descriptions are integrated in the listings.
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Voice Peering is Hot
March 8, 2007
At the Voice Peering Forum event here in sunny Miami Florida, the message is simple – voice peering is growing by leaps and bounds. Stealth Communications is the company who runs this event and attendees generally are people who have joined the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF) or who are thinking of joining.
Simply stated the VPF allows interconnection of voice calls and services. The founder of Stealth Communications is Shrihari Pandit and he kicked off the day’s meeting with his usual optimism which was backed up by staggering growth numbers.
For example the VPF carried 139 billion minutes last year and has seen 750% growth for the last three years.
In addition, Shrihari mentioned upgrades to the VPF such as the ability to utilize IPV6. Shrihari made a point to mention IPV6 is needed as the current addressing scheme IPv4 will run out of IP addresses in a few years.
In addition the VPF ENUM Registry will offer CNAM or Caller Name which will be a valuable service for CLECs or VoIP providers looking to match caller names with calls. There will be presence information embedded in the ENUM database and there is now support for MMS, SMS and EMS mapping.
The room is filled with people who are looking to learn more about VoIP peering and others who are here to network. At every VPF event I have attended there seems to be an increasing energy level and this conference is no exception.
Perhaps a good sign of how much this market has grown in the last few years is the fact that a few members of the Department of Defense are in attendance in the conferences today.
As the number of minutes and number of members of this fabric grow the value of the network grows as well. We can thank voice peering for helping to drive calling costs lower for not only service providers but large enterprises and call centers as well.
Events like the Voice Peering Forum are very helpful as they help educate the market on why peering is important and it lets companies understand how this relatively new phenomenon can help them reduce costs and provide new services for their customers or employees, students and/or patients. So while the weather here in Miami is very warm, it may be eclipsed by the sheer heat emanating from the ever-growing voice peering phenomenon taking place here on Miami Beach.
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VPF Miami 2007
March 8, 2007
I am here at the show hotel for the Miami VPF conference and the kickoff is in just under a few hours. I speak tomorrow as a panel moderator and for today I hope to catch up on the latest in peering and am hoping to see good friends and colleagues. The sunrise was beautiful this morning as you can see below. I am looking forward to blogging more soon.
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