By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Frank Sinatra’s The Platinum Collection:
Philippine VoIP providers will be required to post a performance-guarantee bond, according to the Filipino news service ABS-CBN.
“Besides a minimum paid-up capital, firms interested in offering voice calls over the Internet, or VoIP have to post a performance bond to guarantee the delivery of services to the public,” the National Telecommunications Commission said.
The Philippine journal Business World called the move an effort “to block fly-by-night providers, but at the risk of preventing some bona fide applicants.”
The NTC will require VoIP service-providers, defined as “a person or entity providing the service directly to the public or through resellers for compensation,” to post a P5-million performance bond on top of raising at least P10 million ($180,000) in paid-up capital.
In addition to the bond, anyone register as a VOIP service reseller, defined as “persons or entities that intend to derive or source VoIP service from a duly registered VoIP provider under an agreement to resell the service directly to retail end-user customers,” is required to show proof that the entity is at least 60 percent owned by Filipinos.
According to ABS-CBN, the Philippine National Economic and Development Authority estimates that VoIP can reduce the cost of current international calls “as much as 75 percent, from the present $0.40 to only about $0.10 a minute, or even lower, as is the case in other Asian countries.”
Business World reports that the Philippines has seen “long-drawn debates over telecommunication firms’ rights as service providers and the right of typically small value-added service companies like internet service providers to offer this service at rates that could be much cheaper than those of big telcos.”
Telcos argue that VoIP is a voice service, the journal says, “noting that, under Republic Act No. 7925, only telcos that have Congressional franchise can roll out voice services.” VAS providers contend that “hefty financial requirements” should not be “slapped on a service that, theoretically, does not require that much capital to offer and that this is one business that evens the playing field.”
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Happy birthday, Joe DiMaggio, one of the most graceful and classy athletes in history.
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Integrated Research, developers of Prognosis performance monitoring products, has announced a partnership with T-Systems, a division of Deutsche Telekom, for a major VoIP deployment in Germany.
The company also announced the opening of a new office in the center of Frankfurt to support its customer base and to target new IP telephony opportunities in the region.
Prognosis is an established provider in Germany with clients such as DB Systems (Deutsche Bahn) and Deutsche Bank. “We had committed to open the new European office in Frankfurt and this new partnership with T-Systems has reinforced our decision,” said Keith Andrews, CEO of Integrated Research.
Over the past 17 years Integrated Research has concentrated on building up its Central European business for their HP NonStop server performance management products, relying on the support of local distributors. Andrews says the firm is now “investing in a more direct presence to address the rapidly emerging German market for VoIP and IP telephony performance management.”
The Gartner Group predicts compound annual growth of business VoIP in Western Europe at 37 per cent annually, which represents 11.7 million new IP telephones deployed by 2009.
Wolfgang Sattel, Service Delivery Manager from T-Systems, said corporations are now “starting to roll out large IP telephony deployments.”
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Happy birthday Andrew Carnegie. He emigrated to America from Scotland as a penniless youth, and became one of the wealthiest Americans of his time in the steel industry, retiring on a guaranteed pension of one million dollars a month for life. He spent the last years of his life giving away his vast fortune, endowing 2,811 libraries and buying 7,689 organs for churches to “lessen the pain of the sermons.”
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“After years of false starts,” says a new study, “Mobile CRM: Re-energizing the CRM,” published by industry research company visiongain, “the market for mobile CRM finally started to gain traction in 2004 and this has continued through 2005.”
Although still a “nascent market,” the report says, “mobile CRM should be reasonably robust on a global scale by 2007.”
The study found that, to this point, mobile CRM has accounted for less than 10% of total CRM revenues, but believes it will continue to show steady growth.