Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - Video Archives

Software Telcos Based on NFV Want Less Equipment Provider M&A

2013-06-18T11:51:03Z

Mergers are nothing new but about a decade ago in the telecom market they reached a fever pitch when SBC purchased AT&T and rebranded itself with the name of the acquired company. At the time it became common in the industry to believe consolidation among carriers meant consolidation needed to take place at the equipment supplier level.

The idea is if you have fewer customers, you have less pricing power which means lower overhead with means merging suppliers can eliminate redundant costs such as accounting, marketing, HR and other “synergistic” areas of the business.

Large carriers have also been known for choosing large suppliers for their hardware needs as they felt these larger companies were more likely to be around to support them in the future as they roll out their solutions. Carriers think in terms of decades and continuity is crucial when providing customer services.

One of the big hardware mergers of the last decade was a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia which moved the carrier product divisions of each into a new company called NSN or Nokia Siemens Networks. Joe Rizzo reported last week on TMC’s TechZone360 that Siemens is considering buying Nokia out and taking control of the carrier division once again.

It’s worth pointing out that generally the telecom market is still in consolidation. Gary Kim in fact wrote yesterday on TMC’s sister-site Mobility Techzone that the market is rife with potential acquirers of Canadian wireless firms.

It’s worth pondering a situation where a company is looking to turn (pictured NSN hiT 7100) back the time on a joint-venture. One possible explanation is NFV has the potential to change the current world of telecom equipment manufacturers into telecom software developers. This may mean that by taking more direct control, Siemens will be able to navigate the new world of software in a more rapid fashion. This may mean the ability to spin-off assets more quickly.

In an NFV white paper from ETSI the authors mention the following as one of the benefits of this industry move:

Enables a wide variety of eco-systems and encourages openness. It opens the virtual appliance market to pure software entrants, small players and academia, encouraging more innovation to bring new services and new revenue streams quickly at much lower risk

The document further explains that by creating further abstractions, faster innovation is enabled.

There are likely arguments to be made as to why NFV is good and bad for incumbent companies serving communications service providers but it is likely more instructive to focus on the fact that software companies are generally more creative when they are smaller and nimbler.

Furthermore, carriers are telling the market they want to buy from nimbler suppliers.

This should make us ponder what the future will bring when it comes to M&A in in the carrier equipment market. It is possible that larger organizations will be able to benefit from scale as they sell their software which will run on virtualized servers but will such large organizations be able to keep up with the faster development cycles needed to effectively write the best software possible?

Time will tell but is certainly worth wondering if NFV-based software telcos will change telecom equipment M&A economics. If the industry moves in the direction the carriers want, it will need lots more companies producing solutions and this means additional equipment M&A could hurt the resulting players rather than help them.

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A Billion WebRTC Endpoints Force Voice and Data Players to Adapt or Die

2013-06-05T21:52:30Z

From an evolutionary standpoint regardless of whether we talk about nature or business, adaptation is a key to success in changing environments. During the industrial revolution in London a species of moth with a white color blended in with the bark of the local trees until soot from the nearby factories turned the trees black. Some darker moths were now camouflaged in the dark trees and eventually the species adapted and became black. When air quality improved, the moths over successive generations changed color again.

Although this may not be the most flattering segue, WebRTC is spreading like the soot from factories in London – it’s now available on one-billion endpoints… It’s beyond the point of no return and tech and telecom companies which don’t adapt will get eaten, just like a white moth on a black tree.

It’s worth pointing out there are some potential question marks regarding implementation of this new standard which encompasses peer-to-peer audio, video and data sharing. For example, when will Microsoft and Apple decide to support or ignore this standard.

It seems inconceivable however that either company could ignore WebRTC because quite frankly the ecosystem of companies developing new applications which leverage this new standard is staggering. In fact our upcoming WebRTC World Conference in Atlanta later this month had to expand its exhibit area twice to handle all the companies that wanted to participate.

These and many other entrants and existing organizations will be offering compelling services to the market and in order for companies to take advantage of them, they will have to leverage devices which run Chrome or Firefox as these are currently the browsers supporting the new standard. This will eventually force Redmond and Cupertino to come around and support WebRTC in my opinion.

But I digress – there are a few points regarding this disruptive technology which we should all consider. The first is how Unified Communications or UC vendors will handle this transition. Steve Anderson writes an intriguing piece about the matter on the WebRTC World website and it’s worth a read. Rory Lindstone writes another piece about how gateway vendors such as Voxeo, Huawei and Mavenir are helping bridge the old and new worlds of telecom meaning you won’t have to retire your existing solutions to take advantage of WebRTC.

Doug Mohney also writes on WebRTC World and describes some of the differences between RCS and WebRTC – he explains the latter is on a fast track when compared to the former. He has a good point – I heard about RCS quite often since the last few SuperComm shows which haven’t existed for years and still, RCS seems to be getting rolled out very slowly.

The point is, WebRTC is changing everything again. The same way IP led us to IP communications with new possibilities and entrants in the market, WebRTC will see hundreds if not thousands of new companies releasing products and services and many new entrants will displace older ones.

The adaptable startups and existing companies will make it through this transition and perhaps become tomorrow’s Skype, Facebook or Twitter. You may not realize it but Skype was released six years after the VoIP market was conceived! In other words when it comes to disruption it is difficult to predict who the next winners and losers will be but what you can generally predict is the more adaptable the company to new technology, the better it will do.

Oh and if you made it this far, I have a present for you… Here is a special code you can use for 50% off at WebRTC Conference & Expo. It’s only for friends of Rich Tehrani – if you enter it manually it is: WRTCRich and it will save you $397.50.

I hope to see you at the show.

Avaya Takes Networking Lead in SPB

2013-05-15T22:19:19Z

At Interop Las Vegas 2013 Avaya was demonstrating their real-world Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) solutions and while interoperating with Spirent, HP and Alcatel-Lucent. Many of you will remember when Avaya was actually the enterprise division of Lucent before the company spun off just over twelve years ago. Randy Cross the company’s director of PLM discussed how there is a rapid move to software in the networking market and SPB is an evolution of MPLS allowing services to be created dynamically on the server where the applications reside or on the switches nearest the users.

This is one of the main benefits of SPB in-fact… It allows customers to simplify network creation and management by requiring service provisioning only at the edge of the network. Avaya thinks the new protocol has a bright future as it saves time, effort, and reduces human error by dynamically building and maintaining the network topology between nodes using intermediate system to intermediate system (IS-IS), a carrier-grade link state protocol. Another benefit lies in its ability to establish a multi-path fabric for traffic distribution and subsequently maximize bandwidth utilization on all paths while being able to execute seamless, sub-second network changes.

The company showed multicast over SPB utilizing its VSP 4000 multiservice edge switch and later demonstrated a sub 200 millisecond failover to me in their booth. I can’t vouch for the actual speed of the failover recovery as I didn’t have a stopwatch but it seemed quite rapid.

Cross told me using this technology and the VSP4000, you can extend the service enabling fabric to the edges of the network supporting a distributed enterprise.

He further explained that they deployed this technology with video surveillance company Pelco and were able to show that SPB provided three times better performance than IP multicast (PDF) without needing to reset the IP cameras frequently.

Another big benefit of this technology is building metro area networks (pictured) where a data center can have VSP 7000s or VSP 9000s while the VSP 4000 can sit in the basement of a building providing all the benefits of MPLS with security and isolation at a lower cost. This can be as simple as having a few engineers lighting up the metros quickly with fiber to the building and a truck roll to deploy the box he explained.

Other benefits of this solution include simple commands of a few words to allow services to come up quickly between nodes as well as the ability to transfer virtual machines rapidly between the gear of various equipment vendors.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst, ZK Research had this to say about the news, "These four vendors coming together to showcase SPB interoperability in a public forum such as Interop is significant. In comparison to alternative fabric technologies, SPB offers more vendor support, offers greater scaling and has implementations which are closer to the actual standards – facilitating this type of interoperability testing. Companies that are looking to virtualize data centers and reduce network complexity need to consider an approach based on Shortest Path Bridging."

Alianza Wants to Host Your Software Telco

2013-05-14T21:33:33Z

The software telco(r)evolution representing the move from hardware to software is perhaps the biggest trend in the world of carrier telecom this decade. Whenever we see such disruption in a market, it becomes an opportunity for new entrants to displace existing companies. As you may recall, Sonus Networks and Acme Packet (now Oracle) were just a few companies which were born and prospered during the transition from circuit to packet switched carrier networks.

In the past I have written about Metaswitch and their software telco solutions through NFV or network functions virtualization and their open-source Project Clearwater initiative which allows a carrier to run IMS on standard servers for free.

In both instances the company has shown leadership in the move to software which runs a telco. Another company I consider a software telco pioneer is Alianza. I wrote about them in 2011 when they announce d a deal with Clearwire to provide the company with hosted voice solutions.

I spoke with Kevin Mitchell the company’s Vice President of Marketing, about his company today and this is what you should know. Alianza has a relationship with Level 3 Communications who provides the termination, origination and wholesale services while the company provides a cloud-based voice platform. He says the company provides everything a voice service provider would need to buy, build or manage. In fact the two companies are working together to provide customers with the Level 3 Carrier Cloud Voice Solution. He continued that this could apply to a green field situation or even a migration to IMS.

The concept of “software telco” is a move from “bespoke or custom” hardware to software – there really is no reason why the solution can’t live a cloud and be delivered as a service. In fact, Mitchell tells me that his company embraces much of the concepts embodied in NFV… He says they run their own software and leverage VMware and HP servers for session management, applications and features.

Kevin further explained that a service provider using Alianza instead of hosting their own equipment wouldn’t have to deal with the CAPEX associated with the servers and other equipment needed to run the network. In fact they would just need to provide the CPE such as ATAs, soft clients or IP phones and pay Alianza as they grow. He also said that not all of his customers have the budget for SIP, VoIP and IMS expertise and as a result they turn to his company so they can in-turn focus on improving their video services and broadband speeds.

Moreover, he touted the company’s 350 web methods for integration and control functionality allowing smooth back office, customer care and billing integration. He also explained that carriers aren’t locked into preset calling/service plans… They have complete control of how their customers receive and are billed for the service they receive.

A wave of cloud-based companies are providing enterprises with cloud-based services from payroll to CRM and call recording. To date, communications service providers haven’t had many options to choose from in this area and the nature of their business dictated in many cases that they manage everything themselves.

With the advent of NFV, carriers told equipment providers that they wanted to be able to design their networks in the same way an enterprise designs its data center… Using virtualized software running on OTS servers. As this transition continues, there is no reason why a carrier shouldn’t or wouldn’t consider working with a cloud-based provider for their IMS services as well.

After all, if you are going to become a software telco, you have to explore what the benefits are of controlling all of the software yourself. Why not get a head start and host your services from a carrier that exists already, providing you APIs and referenceable customers? This of course is the vision Alianza hopes many carriers will continue to consider when evaluating their software telco options.

Be sure to learn everything there is to know about NFV and the birth of the software telco at Software Telco Congress, Nov 19-21, 2013 in Santa Clara, Ca.

Metaswitch Clearwater: Game Changing Open Source IMS Initiative

2013-05-08T12:20:23Z

The march to a software telco world is progressing nicely

Communications service providers are at war with OTT providers and need to ensure they are able to battle on as level a playing field as possible. There are significant costs associated with running a major telco and hardware infrastructure certainly ranks high among them. Sure, OTT providers like Skype and WhatsApp have infrastructure costs as well but they often leverage standard servers and software to achieve their goals. Contrast this to a telecom operator who typically buys proprietary equipment from a number of specialized manufacturers. The difference in costs between these approaches is quite steep.

This is of course is why carriers are pushing equipment providers to provide all of the network functions they supply in software which will run in virtualized instances on off-the-shelf servers. It also explains what ETSI network functions virtualization or NFV is all about and Metaswitch Networks has been on the forefront of this trend and hopes to ride the wave into larger carriers worldwide.

To further this push from hardware into software, the company recently announced Project Clearwater which takes the components of IMS and runs them on standard servers in an open-source manner. A number of carriers have leveraged open-source Asterisk in the past to provide telephony service to their customers, now they and others can take advantage of this new initiative to provide open-source IMS as well.

One of the main reasons carriers want to shift their network functions to software is it allows them to select products from a wider variety of vendors. The reason has to do with the costs of developing telephony hardware for carriers. You need phenomenally deep pockets and lots of patience to sell to carriers as an upstart hardware provider. As a result, an amazing number of equipment companies have gone belly up waiting to become adopted by telcos worldwide. Software on the other hand has less cost associated with it meaning a potentially higher likelihood of success.

Still, telcos can never be too cautious choosing a company to base their network on. One of the benefits of going with an open-source project is you no longer need to worry about one company to support it.

I spoke at length with CTO Martin Taylor and he tells me they learned a great deal from the efforts of many of the players in the social networking and cloud space and took the best ideas from these players and applied them to a SIP centric IMS network. Some things they learned and applied were using DNS as a load balancing technique as well as building massively scalable and resilient solutions in a low-cost manner.

How low cost you ask? Well, I am glad you did. Taylor says about 2 cents per subscriber per year based on the costs of AWS. Of course the solution is not dependent on Amazon, but this is just a guideline to consider. Moreover, this cost covers core plumbing of voice, video and messaging… You would still need an SBC, telephony app servers, messaging app servers and media gateways.

He further explained that carriers who are looking to deploy RCS know they have compete with OTT providers and being able to lower the cost of IMS is a huge help in doing so.

Metaswitch will supply support and bug fixes for the project. Taylor exclaimed, “Charging for peace of mind really is what it boils down to.” This and supplying additional solutions is how the company hopes to monetize this new initiative which is free for telcos to use.

This news is a potential game changer for telecom. Carriers once had to grapple with whether to purchase their IMS solutions from the US, Europe or Chinese equipment providers… Now they have the option of trying a software-centric, open-source approach. They can even try this solution in tandem with other trials going on in their labs.

Be sure to learn everything there is to know about NFV and the birth of the software telco at Software Telco Congress, Nov 19-21, 2013 in Santa Clara, Ca.

AT&T: From Dumb Pipe to Security and Home Automation

2013-04-26T21:49:39Z

There has been talk within the telecom industry for many years regarding whether communications service providers would eventually just become providers of dumb pipes or provide added value they can charge for. The move to IMS in-part was supposed to allow these companies to add more apps and services to their offerings, allowing them to generate more revenue.

When Apple opened up its iPhone platform, hundreds of thousands of apps began to do many of the things telcos would have liked to provide. Moreover, many functions which telcos used to charge for like SMS were given away for free from the likes of WhatsApp and Facebook.

A natural place for these companies to look for growth is an adjacent industry – one which could not easily be disrupted by an app or a technology shift.

This explains AT&T’s move into the home security market with its Digital Life solutions which also tackle the task of home automation. TMC reported on this news in the past but the big roll out was today in Atlanta, Austin, Texas, Boulder, Colo., Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif., San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and select areas of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area. The company plans to introduce Digital Life in up to 50 markets by the end of 2013.

“We know how important security is to our customers, and this was our top priority when we set out to build Digital Life,” said Kevin Petersen, senior vice president, AT&T Digital Life. “People rely on their mobile devices more than ever, so Digital Life offers an easy and convenient way to secure their homes, protect their families and simplify their lives from virtually anywhere.”

The system is designed to be user-friendly and control cameras, door locks, lights, thermostats, small appliances and provide the capability of setting alerts or programs which manage your home.

Customers can choose from two base plans: Simple Security, which is their basic home security package; or Smart Security which includes enhanced security features and the option to add home automation.

Simple Security - Includes 24/7 home monitoring, 24-hour battery backup, a wireless keypad, keychain remote, recessed sensors and an indoor siren for $29.99 a month plus $149.99 for equipment and installation.
Smart Security - Includes the benefits of Simple Security plus a choice of three of the following features: motion sensor, carbon monoxide sensor, glass break sensor, smoke sensor or takeover kit. Smart Security begins at $39.99 a month plus $249.99 for equipment and installation.

Customers who select Smart Security can add these automation packages:

Camera Package - View live video from inside and outside of the home for an additional $9.99 a month plus equipment and installation.
Energy Package - Control appliances, lighting and thermostats for convenience and energy efficiency for an additional $4.99 a month plus equipment and installation.
Door Package - Allow a pet sitter or repairman into your home remotely with automated door locks, or check to see whether your garage door is open or closed for an additional $4.99 a month plus equipment and installation.
Water Detection Package - Detect water leaks before damage occurs for an additional $4.99 a month plus equipment and installation.
Water Control Package - Detect leaks and shut off water at the main water source for an additional $9.99 a month plus equipment and installation.

According to wireless analyst Jeff Kagan, "This is the kind of new and innovative service we can expect from the wireless industry going forward. This is an exciting opportunity for AT&T, and a competitive threat to the traditional home security and automation business. I think we can expect to see much more innovation in this space thanks to this move from AT&T. This service connects every part of a consumer's home to the AT&T Mobility wireless network. Home automation and security is the next generation of services we will see AT&T offer across the country."

ADT is the leading player in the market with nearly 16,000 employees and over six million small business and residential customers. They will have to contend with a new and very large competitor in AT&T.

I reached out to Sarah Cohn, Director, Media Relations about the company’s thoughts on the new competition and she said, “With nearly 140 years of experience, our customers have told us that what matters most to them is the quality and reliability of our home automation and security solutions. Telecom and cable companies have been in the security space before, and we welcome their re-entry because we believe it will not only raise awareness of smart home technology, but also expand the category, ultimately helping to attract new customers to ADT Pulse.”

Of course AT&T has the ability to not only offer home automation but can further bundle television, wireless and broadband service into an attractive package which may cut into ADT’s margins if they choose to compete for market share. Consider this the new quadruple or quintuple play. Moreover, AT&T has retail stores which means this real estate has just become more valuable as some customers will certainly be swayed to purchase from the company which allows them to speak to a salesperson about their home security system in their local shopping center or mall. In fact, home automation can be a complex concept to many - seeing solutions in action at a store is likely the best way to sell such solutions.

There is always the chance that AT&T’s marketing clout will grow the market and as a result, the entire home security and automation sector will see a boost. Either way, for AT&T, the move to offer television and now security and home automation shows that communications service providers do have numerous options when it comes to extending their revenue base beyond just dumb pipes.

How a Call Center Translation Service Went Mainstream

2013-04-24T18:24:08Z

Virtually everything in our lives has gotten more expensive over the years such as housing, cars, postage stamps, food and energy and yet telecommunications and broadband service costs continue to plummet. This state of affairs is in-part due to Moore’s Law and a side benefit of the declining connectivity costs has been bringing the world closer together. In the nineties you could bankrupt yourself quite easily if you direct-dialed from one country to another yet today IP communications has lowered the price of such calls to zero or a few pennies a minute depending on your location and device.

In 1982 a company called LanguageLine Solutions was founded to focus on helping translate conversations via telephone and since then, the company has grown to 6,000 interpreters who speak 98.6% of the 6,809 languages spoken in the world today. In this same year, TMC launched a magazine focusing on the call center market (now called Customer) and wrote about this company frequently in the subsequent decades.

I recently caught up with LanguageLine representative Linda Taffy who walked me through many of the new services the company offers such as Language Line University which measures the proficiency of multilingual agents. LanguageLine Direct Response is a service which allows your customer who speaks limited English to hear your message when they call in. From there, they first speak with an interpreter who greets them and then changes from being the greeter to an interpreter again. The company also offers a localization and translation service which helps companies keep their websites and documents accurate in other other countries and languages.

Perhaps the most exciting service is Language UC which is a video chat solution which runs on Macs, PCs and tablets. I had a chance to see a demonstration of sign language via an iPad and it was quite fascinating. What I learned was the sign for coffee which is an arm churning looks more to me like butter. But I digress. With this service you could be a traveling salesperson who could go to any country and communicate effectively in meetings by connecting to LanguageLine UC as needed.

Some of the benefits of LanguageLine’s services are you don’t have to hire full-time people on staff and can instead pay as you go. It is worth noting the video service has a license fee as well.

There aren’t too many companies still focusing on the same core business for over 30 years but LanguageLine is certainly one of them. With their new app/video service, they have certainly elevated their offerings and brought themselves current with the times and made their solutions something the mainstream market can use. You might even say the company is now a bit ahead of the times.

Is The Media Tweeting Away its Profits?

2013-04-16T20:15:13Z

I’d like to start by saying my heart goes out to the victims of the horrific Boston Marathon and their families. Having said that I read with interest that The New York Times, Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal took down their paywalls during this crisis and moreover many reporters were reporting on Twitter without linking to any content on their sites.

The challenge paid and many other media outlets face is obvious… They need to master social media while also getting readers to pay for their news and/or visit their websites for more information.

Of course there is the ability to give away a great deal of free content on Twitter and other social sites in order to get many followers who can be then directed to special subscription offers.

Perhaps the ideal scenario is a social model which shares revenue with publishers. For example, YouTube allows content creators to share in the proceeds of the ad sales from the content they create. Twitter and Facebook will probably want to consider a similar strategy.

Then again, these two social sites are so popular they may not need to change a single thing in order to keep the growth of their sites going. This of course means media companies will have to adhere to guidelines to ensure they don’t tweet away news which someone would consider paying for. Ron Matejko at Publishing Executive has more and is especially irritated at media sites which drop paywalls when these sites have news which readers need most.

Leatherface Shares 3D Moviemaking Tips With TMC

2013-03-06T22:30:41Z

How often do you get a SciFi movie star in your office to talk about 3D movie-making? Well TMC recently had such an opportunity when Dan Yeager AKA Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw 3D stopped by. Truth be told we wanted him to bring his chainsaw into our office and show it off but building security wasn’t 100% cool with the idea.

Rich Steeves did the interview and also has an article about the encounter worth reading. Check out the video interview above.

IPgallery Helps Carriers Become Social Hub and More

2013-03-01T19:57:11Z

Communications service providers once the center of the customer's world have awoken to the new reality - social and apps are the new hub. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and a wave of other social networks have fully overtaken the telephone number as the primary method of communicating among many - especially younger users. Then there are the the OTT VoIP and video vendors such as Skype. The telephone number has gone from being a protected client relationship to an afterthought. Even the bright spot related to phone numbers - massive texting revenue has recently been eroded by OTT apps like WhatsApp and even iOS messaging which seamlessly takes text messages off the operator network.

Enter IPgallery, a company playing in the IP communications carrier space for over a decade who wants to help service providers become the focal point of this brave new world of social and apps. Their suggestion is to provide customers with a social communications and hosted-PBX solution which integrates so seamlessly with popular web-based servies that users will rarely need to leave the comfort of the environment. An HTML5 interface allows a cloud-based service to tap into APIs of a slew of other companies to provide social, mapping and just about anything else a user can think of.

Just like a person might use HootSuite as a central hub to interface with numerous social networks, IPgallery helps carriers provide customized user interfaces which they believe are captivating enough to keep consumers living inside them.

Consumers for their part have shown a willingness to spend huge amounts off time interfacing with specific services such as Facebook. In fact, companies are tripping over themselves to have users interact with them on the world's most-popular social network. Carriers have a shot to get control back by providing customers with a user interface worth "living in."

In addition, they can add services such as shopping and entertainment and even combine location information to provide compelling applications which rival those of the OTT world. As carrier information is even richer than what is available to typical smart phone applications, they can actually provide better services than consumers can get elsewhere.

At Mobile World Congress in 2013 the Israeli company showed me an app they wrote which accesses Facebook and Maps and provides the photos of friends on their actual locations on a map. A user can select one or more friends and start a group communication, complete with file sharing and collaboration.

There is a great deal more - such as integrated e-learning, a hosted PBX with separate skins and functionality broken out by department such as accounting or sales. Finally, operators can add functionality by providing cloud-storage which could be used to hold content which is shared between users on the system.

IPgallery functions as part software/integration vendor and part systems-integrator, working with carriers the world-over to develop solutions which they need in their particular markets. This allows carriers to focus on their core competency while taking advantage of best-practices being developed by other service providers.

We often hear of discussion revolving around whether carriers are ok just being "dumb pipe" providers and regardless of the answer, there is definite value in owning the home page of the customer's world. Amazon has used this prime real estate to successfully push Kindle devices and Google uses it to push its Chrome OS, tablets and other devices.

Perhaps the better question is - what are the benefits from being the gateway to your customer's online activities including social, commerce and shopping? The answer of course is increased revenue and flexibility. And as service providers grapple with stagnant to lower ARPU and increasing network costs as they upgrade to 4G and beyond, exploring new revenue opportunities which could also reduce churn seems to make a lot of sense.

Vantrix Optimizes Media Delivery at MWC2013

2013-02-26T16:04:50Z

As audio and video traffic over wireless networks has grown exponentially, operators around the world have struggled to deal with managing the challenge. Enter Vantrix who focuses on bandwidth management and more specifically media optimization according to company execs execs at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona.

The company showed off its solution running on the QuickFire Networks T-Video line - an offering which deals with ever-more complex video by attacking the problem with a combination of hardware and software. Using Intel 2.3GHz Core i7 processors the T-Video V1100 reduces the footprint of video transcoding solutions by a factor of five using 44 cores per rack unit. As H.265 video becomes prevalent, Mark Hopper, the VP of Product Line Management (pictured) for the company says video systems will have to increase their footprint size by 20-30x to keep up with video which has ten times the complexity factor - referring to the differences between H.265 and H.264 video.

The company's modular software architecture allows transcoding and coding to be put on specific components on a hardware platform such as the GPU.

Dealing with bandwidth constraints often has to do with looking at the worst offenders which means of course dealing more specifically with applications. This is where the company's high performance scripting engine comes in. Part of the Vantrix All-Content Bandwidth Optimizer 3.0 solution, the engine is able to do DPI on packets and further take rapid actions based on a preset list of rules. For example in four lines of script an operator was able to optimize Pandora traffic to minimize the amount of packets it consumed. Other case studies include determining/setting Netflix bitrates as opposed to allowing the service to make this determination for itself. Finally OS upgrades were targeted by a carrier who wanted to reduce users downloading them via peak times. By slowing the downloads, they were able to encourage users to acquire these updates at a later time or on WiFi.

The one constant in the world of wireless bandwidth is there never seems to be enough of it. Targeting media and applications which tend to take up the majority of bits on the network and grow at an ever-expanding rate is an effective way for carriers to attack this burgeoning problem.

WebRTC Advisory Board Announced

2013-02-20T20:02:08Z

One of the more exciting bits of news this week has to do with TMC and partners choosing the Inaugural WebRTC advisory board. After the huge success of the first WebRTC World show in Santa Clara, California, we wanted to make sure we worked with the absolute top minds in the communications, technology and WebRTC fields to ensure our conferences have the best content possible.

The next show takes place June 25-27, 2013 in Atlanta, GA. Here is a list of the new board members with Twitter handles for easy-following purposes.

Update: Jim Donovan's correct Twitter handle is now listed below.

Name/Company	Member Handle	Company Handle
Jim Donovan Acme Packet	@jdrtc	@Acme_Packet
Tsahi Levent-Levi Amdocs	@tsahil	@Amdocs
Alan Johnston Avaya	@alanbjohnston	@Avaya
Chris McGugan Avaya	@cmcgugan	@Avaya
Arnaud Budkiewicz Bistri	@arnaudbud	@Bistri
Cullen Jennings Cisco	@cfluffy	@CiscoSystems
Steven Sokol Digium	@ssokol	@digium
David Duffett Asterisk	@dduffett	‏ @asteriskpbx
Dean Bubley Distruptive Analysis	@disruptivedean	@DApremium
Geoff Hollingworth Ericsson	@geoffworth	@ericsson
Craig Walker Fierspotter Labs	@cwalker123	N/A
Jan Linden Google	@jtlinden	@google
Justin Uberti Google	@juberti	@google
Stephen Brown Mitel	@mitelcloudchief	@mitel
Boris Selitser Oracle	N/A	@Oracle
Joe Burton Plantronics	@JoeBurtonCTO	@Plantronics
Goncalo Morais Siemens	@gnclmorais	@SiemensEnt
Mohan Palat Sonus	@mpalat	@sonusnet
Mark Weidick TenHands	@markweidick	@TenHandsInc
David Jodoin ThruPoint	@david_jodoin	@Thrupoint
Dan Burnett Voxeo	@voxeodanburnett	@voxeo
Alexey Aylarov Zingaya	@aylarov	@Zingaya_Service

Video is the Recurring Star

2013-01-30T00:11:15Z

There is an insatiable demand for content of the video variety. It is so great in fact that sports networks like ESPN are getting an outsized portion of your cable bill. The network in fact gets more than $5 per subscriber per month regardless of whether you ever watch their networks. Cable and IPTV companies for their part are in quite a pickle as more subscribers drop their service altogether for OTT competition. The solution to the problem is painful for many but will eventually be taking sports programming and breaking it out into tiers according to Gary Kim who writes on TMCnet. He explains the first step these companies are taking is adding a $3 fee for local sports programming. At some point ESPN will have to be dealt with it seems.

We have all heard content is king and - remember that until recently Netflix took a massive hit to its earnings due to its lack of leverage in negotiating with content providers. The solution? Develop more of your own content. Exactly what the company is going to do with some of the $400 million in debt it just raised.

TMC’s Erik Linask had this to say about the news: “Companies like Netflix and Hulu are proving that the longstanding dominance of mainstream networks may be in jeopardy. The combination of a modern business model, high-quality programming, and multi-device capabilities, present a compelling case for today's connected viewer, potentially disrupting the competitive landscape to the benefit of the consumer.”

To summarize: content is still king but consumers will soon have the ability to pick from infinite monarchs.

And as more of this content is streamed to various devices, networks have become more clogged than ever. The good news is the emerging H.265 standard which was just approved by ITU is twice as efficient as the current H.264 standard deployed on most tablets and smartphones and data centers pumping the content out.

Amazon today deployed news which is wonderful for the video market with the launch of Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon Elastic Transcoder a solution which leverages the company’s cloud to obsolete the entire market of small transcoding companies playing in the video space. Of course your definition of “wonderful” will vary based on where you sit in the food chain.

Can we make a prediction about the future of video? It seems we are taking baby steps to a la carte programming or at least packages which give consumers some additional choices when it comes to sports and other areas. Investors believe there is money to be made in content production which means the Netflix deal may spawn others. Content will still be king but it gets tougher to stand out when there seems to be endless consumer choice in programming. We have seen Yahoo try the video production game on and off without a great deal of success – perhaps they just did a poor job of it or maybe times have changed. One thing in favor of all these video production entrants is the new connected TVs and cheap consumer electronic devices allowing TV sets to easily display video from the Internet.

In 1979 the Buggles launched the hit song Video Killed the Radio Star which at the time seemed to make sense with the advent of MTV which chose this song as its very first video to play. But over the years it seems radio too has evolved being transmitted from space and traveling over the Internet for example. So radio actually never died. Let me clear up the confusion from my younger readers - MTV was a network which at one time actually played music television. But I digress – I wonder if the title of the song should have been “Video is the Recurring Star.”

Who Should Buy Linksys and how does the Cloud fit in?

2012-12-17T22:32:28Z

Cisco recently appointed Barclays to help it auction off Linksys – a move consistent with the company’s desire to exit low-margin consumer businesses as it looks to invest in high-margin areas like software and services. But as the saying goes, one man’s garbage is another man’s gold. Linksys is indeed a treasure to the right partner like Google or even Samsung.

The reason is simple – both companies need to blunt the move by Apple into the home and entertainment is the future of technology as consumer technology trends coupled with BYOD turn into corporate success. When the iPhone first came out CEO after CEO explained to me patiently about how they could never abandon RIM and that the iPhone would never be secure enough for their IT departments to sanction.

Well, that was a short wait as a few years later RIM is gasping for air and even mighty Microsoft is trying to figure out how to get people to buy its mobile products.

As Apple invades the living room further with its rumored new TV solution – whatever it may be, the defensive strategy of its competition has to be to get into the home via an adjacent method and leverage this success with add-on solutions. Of course the acquisition of Scientific Atlanta by Cisco coupled with Linksys was in-theory going to do the same thing except the cable and telecom companies stood in-between Cisco and its customers meaning the leading networking company wasn’t going to come out with an OTT television solution.

The question is – who should buy Linksys and the answer to me seems to be anyone who needs to compete with Apple. Aside from Google and Samsung, let’s be sure we add Microsoft to the list as well. Imagine what they can do with Linksys and Skype integration – coupled of course with Lync and Xbox. This combo would certainly make the company even more powerful in the world of VoIP/IP communications.

Then there are the cloud vendors – there is a natural fit between products and services these days – Amazon has shown us that software can and will subsidize hardware. In its case, a suite of cloud services and apps are there to increase consumer spending on products in the Amazon ecosystem.

Google with its Chromebooks gives away lots of cloud services in the hopes customers will buy more. Expect this trend to extend across hardware in general meaning companies like Carbonite and Mozy may look at Linksys as a way to get consumers to use their services on a trial basis.

In a way, both of these companies can justify the purchase of Linksys by subsequently cutting their marketing budgets as the sale of each router and other consumer electronics product bundled with a free trial is effectively the same as the result of advertising on radio, TV or the web.

Finally, there is Dell and HP – I can’t imagine either company successfully pulling off such a merger but the synergies between consumer printing, computing and networking are too obvious to ignore. Moreover there are a slew of Asian vendors – many in China who could take the Linksys brand and use it to introduce a number of new products which would have immediate name recognition in the US. Lenovo leveraged IBM at first to do something similar – I imagine in my scenario a Chinese manufacturer renaming itself as opposed to the other way around. Of course the US government may have something to say about such a move from China but then again being a consumer play, Linksys may not get much attention from the feds looking to keep our communications networks safe.

Either way the biggest opportunity for growth for Linksys seems to be the melding of hardware with cloud services such as storage, audio and video. Apple and Amazon are pulling this off brilliantly and it seems to me the future of commodity hardware will be using it to push a surrounding ecosystem. In a way consumers can thank the cloud for adding more value to the products they buy and for its ability to subsidize hardware in order to make upfront costs more attractive.

Important Tech News of the Day Dec 14, 2012

2012-12-14T20:34:59Z

Amazon Prime Instant Video app for iOS is out
Alcatel Lucent says providing video to devices is a great new revenue opportunity for carriers
Google Just Settled a Six-Year Dispute with Belgian Publishers
IT spending will pick up in 2013
Mobile data growth is booming
Apple lost patent litigation to MobileMedia
Easilydo is an app which aims to become a personal assistant
There are some good apps to help manage your holiday shopping
A win for the free market in the EU
There’s an app to measure skin health
Social is playing a major role in news dissemination in tragedies as
Sprint’s Clearwire bid will help it deliver true unlimited and unthrottled data plans
Small business hopes for better 2013
Cities are cutting out ISPs
We are actively trading privacy for security
But at least the government wants to make it tougher for apps to share our private location data
Comcast now allows video downloads
Social media has destroyed the web
If mobile payments are booming why is Verifone telling us it is an unprofitable market?
China will be less restrictive with their Internet censorship

Amazon Prime Instant Video app for iOS is out and in my testing on a 4^th generation iPad it worked well. Some complaints remain that for non-Prime users the experience isn’t that great. I for one would like to be able to download video on the app – there is a download area but no instructions as to what is downloadable or how to download.

Alcatel Lucent says providing video to devices is a great new revenue opportunity for carriers. According to Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer, “Left unmanaged, the rapid growth in video traffic can turn into a deluge and spell disaster. It is important to look at where service providers’ investments can have the most impact, and this research makes clear that the IP edge of both wireline and wireless networks – which are increasingly becoming one and the same - offers the greatest opportunity to improve network performance.”

It is undeniable that video streaming will grow in popularity – the war between cable providers and companies working with Roku, Apple TV, Google and others will only continue with the goal being to keep the viewer watching as much content as possible on your service(s).

Google Just Settled a Six-Year Dispute with Belgian Publishers and must pay them for their legal fees and in the form of advertising in the newspapers whose content was used by the search giant. Some say the settlement totals $6M. Moreover, there will be an ongoing advertising partnership between the news outlets and Google. The challenge for the search leader who profits handsomely from content on the web is if this case could set a precedent allowing many other companies to sue for damages because their content too is being used without permission.

IT spending will pick up in 2013 which is great news for the tech market which has had to deal with numerous ups and downs since the dotcom bubble burst over a decade ago. Gartner recently noted that “most enterprises have already significantly cut discretionary IT spending growth over the past several years,” and that “they have little room to reduce IT spending further over the long run.”

Mobile data growth is booming and has seen a compound annual growth rate of 25.4% between 2006 and 2011. Interestingly only in United States, Japan and Australia does mobile data revenue exceed fixed broadband revenues. No surprise here but voice revenue is declining in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China in 2011 according to Ofcom.

Apple lost patent litigation to MobileMedia and this is the danger of the patent wars – even if you were smart enough to invent lots of cool new ideas, there will always be some people somewhere who thought of some things before you did. This is why the tech patent wars may on the surface seem like a smart way for a company to protect their intellectual property but in reality, when defending your inventions in every country you are bound to lose sometimes.

All of this litigation hurts consumers at the end of the day.

Of course I am referring primarily to Apple and Samsung, in the case of MobileMedia, they are a patent troll (but owned by Nokia, Sony and MPEG LA) so there isn’t much of a defense when you lose. Moreover, you are generally a sitting duck, waiting for these companies to come after you. Especially when you become successful in the market.

Easilydo is an app which aims to become a personal assistant of sorts by managing friend’s birthdays, your schedule and more. It offers you time to leave alerts based on your schedule, can track packages and more. It can notify you of based weather the night before and can jump into conference calls for you three minutes before they start. I just downloaded it on iOS and will post further if it is as great as it seems. I set it to remind me of free songs to download each week and to remind me once-a-month which apps are accessing my personal info.

There are some good apps to help manage your holiday shopping and TMC’s Brooke Neuman details them for you. Gilte Groupe and others make the list.

A win for the free market in the EU as Apple and four other publishers have made an offer to ease price restrictions against Amazon in the book market as a response to an anti-trust investigation.

There’s an app to measure skin health – just take well-lit pictures of yourself and receive a personal beauty number which the company, Own says is 95% accurate.

Social is playing a major role in news dissemination in tragedies as the dreadful Newtown Sandy Hook, CT Elementary School shootings remind us. Trending topics on Twitter include #Connecticut, #Newtown, #PrayForNewtown, 27 Dead and Sandy Hook.

Sprint’s Clearwire bid will help it deliver true unlimited and unthrottled data plans, especially to its iPhone customers according to TMC’s Senior Editor, Tony Rizzo.

Small business hopes for better 2013 but don’t expect them to hire more according to a study by IP communications, data and cloud provider Cbeyond. Other important parts from the survery: 83 percent of cloud users said it made them "more flexible," 78 percent said it made them "more productive," and 71 percent said it was actually saving them money to use the cloud that they wouldn't have saved without.

Cities are cutting out ISPs to get high-speed networks to their citizens and Seattle is the latest city to do so.

We are actively trading privacy for security in the US and terrorism has definitely eroded many of our freedoms. A sense that citizens are presumed innocent seems to be slowly eroding.

But at least the government wants to make it tougher for apps to share our private location data. A new bill would require companies to get a customer's consent before collecting or sharing mobile location data. It would also ban mobile applications that secretly monitor the user's location — a feature that Senator Al Franken said allows for stalking and enables domestic violence.

Comcast now allows video downloads – this may mark the first time a cable company is doing so and is a great help to people who don’t always have fast and cheap broadband access. Airline passengers are an obvious beneficiary.

Social media has destroyed the web – it’s brought in hundreds of millions of new users but has locked us in, taken over our online identities and made it more difficult to share our information from one service to the next.

If mobile payments are booming why is Verifone telling us it is an unprofitable market? Moreover, why is it pulling out?

China will be less restrictive with their Internet censorship and has already ublocked searches for the names of many top political leaders in a possible sign of looser controls a month after new senior officials were named to head the ruling party.