Voice of IP

Aculab is probably best known for its DSP-based hardware which has been providing the media processing power for TDM and IP-based communications since 1998. Additionally, since 2003, we have provided developers who had a preference for a software only solution to have access to the same media processing capabilities with our Prosody S host media processing (HMP) product. You could say that these products are the bread and butter of Aculab's portfolio.

As you may have seen from our recent press release, we have been working on an extension to our portfolio, the AMS Server.

This week saw the UK get national coverage of the next evolution in telephony, HD Voice, from Orange. Technically, it has been a long time coming - the first wideband codec to be standardised by the telecommunications industry (ITU-T) was G.722 and it dates back to the 1980s! It was perhaps constrained in its early years by the patents in place to use it, but now patent free, it is seeing widespread adoption in enterprise solutions such as IP-based desk phones and conferencing systems.

Orange's announcement is of nationwide availability of HD Voice based on a codec developed specifically for mobile environments, AMR-WB (a.k.a. G.722.2).

You might recall the poem by William Wordsworth that begins, "I wandered lonely as a cloud." His poem may have been about 'a host of golden daffodils', but the second verse is more appropriate if we pretend that it's about the advocates of cloud computing.

I'm sure there are at least ten thousand advocates of cloud computing, tossing a few heady paragraphs into their latest blog or preaching to us all from their twittering stance. "The more fool you," if you're not listening, seems to be the message.

You could say there are now two types of businesses, "Those with their heads buried in the sand and those with their heads in the clouds." That phrase would neatly sum up the present situation and, although it's not quite complimentary to the advocates, their devoutness probably means they'd miss the subtlety. Yes, indeed, the 'Cloud' is being hyped at the moment - and rightly so.

However, as with everything, there is always more than one approach.

My previous posts in this Aculab technology blog have been mainly on the subjects of voice or video communications, which correlates well with Aculab's main customer activities where our products support services such as voice conferencing, call centre media processing, and interfacing TDM and IP communications.

An oft forgotten technology, still utilised throughout businesses, though perhaps now less prevalent, is fax. We have all been moving our business communications along with the times - investing in mobile solutions, using voice and video conferencing, getting involved in the VoIP communications space, and finding out how Unified Communications and IM might help with business communication efficiencies. Whilst many have been distracted, chasing the latest and greatest way to communicate with colleagues and customers, the humble fax machine has been there in the corner of the office, performing a key function when the newer approaches of document transfer, such as email, did not work or were not suitable.
 
However, as more and more businesses move to IP-based communications, there comes a time when keeping a single analogue phone line just for the fax machine is no longer economic. To some, it may not matter that a fax is no longer an option for communications.

Video communications is (still) in the early adopter stage of the product lifecycle curve (PLC). As I hinted previously in my blog, it was given a big push up the ramp last week with the launch of the iPhone 4, but what it needs for mass success is ubiquity in the core network.



I believe that there are two good reasons why Apple might have chosen to provide the FaceTime video chat application over Wi-Fi only:

A video call on a 3G mobile network provides a low bandwidth for the video, so that careful choice of frame rate and resolution is needed to keep within the constraints. When 3G video capable devices were first introduced, screen sizes and the resolutions possible over the network were well matched. Reasonable video quality (QCIF, 176x144 pixels) could be achieved, despite 3G bandwidth restrictions.

Today is the day - queues at Apple stores around the world of people waiting to get their hands on Apple's latest piece of tech. It sounds like a fantastic piece of kit, and I would love to have one (if I hadn't just splashed out on a Nikon DSLR camera then I might have been tempted). The feature I have been most interested in is the video chat application that Apple has come up with, FaceTime.

As I wrote in my previous post, this could kick start the video communications market, a feat that others have tried previously but with limited success. You may also know that one of the other topics I am following closely, and for which Aculab has a great product, is HD voice.

The recent announcement by Apple of the iPhone 4 and its support for two-way video chat using the new FaceTime application has once again brought the subject of video communications, and in particular mobile video communications, to the table. As many have already pointed out, this is not a new concept that Apple has invented. The idea of two-way video calls has been around for decades and mobile video call services have been in existence for several years - but with limited take-up. Perhaps this time, with Apple's backing, it might reach mass market.

The power of Apple stems from the way its devices are a pleasure to use.

I recently had a conversation about the need for PSTN failover. The basic proposition being that VoIP, IP telephony, SIP, Skype, etc. are OK, but if you have an IP network - be it broadband/DSL or SIP trunking, or an Ethernet WAN/LAN - you must have the option of being able to failover to the PSTN. Why?

The team here at Aculab are gearing up for NENA 2010, which takes place in Indianapolis, USA in early June. NENA 2010 is an event run by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) for public safety professionals, telecoms specialists and government officials, which focuses on the near and long term issues facing public safety in the USA.

NENA is calling for the migration of 911 networks to next generation E911. The idea is to move 911 systems to standards-based IP platforms and, in the process, enable citizens and those involved in emergency response to interact not only in voice, but also via text, IM and possibly even video communications.

The ultimate goal is that citizens, no matter who they are, where they are or which communications device they use, can make an emergency call and the emergency services will have the accurate location and subscriber information to find them.

Is the lack of widespread support for full 'five-9's' reliability in IP-based networks  holding back the adoption of IP communications?

It is certainly something we thought might be the case, and so we set our engineers the task of providing redundancy mechanisms for IP communications , based on Aculab's SIP stack, that would enable end customers to build in the reliability they were craving.

Our goal was to enable our customers to build enterprise and service provider communications platforms that could match the reliability and resilience of a legacy TDM-based system, but also give the full unified communications experience made possible by IP.

For over 30 years, designers of TDM networks have taken every step possible to minimise network downtime in search of the mythical 99.999% availability figure (just over 5 minutes downtime per year). The basic rule has been to eliminate any single point of failure. This philosophy has extended beyond simply duplicating the network hardware - separate buildings with separate power feeds and physical connecting cables are also a key part of a resilient network design.

For the IP-core network consisting of routers that are inherently designed to utilise multiple routing paths, this is not an issue; but for hardware attached at the network edge such as media processing servers, it is not so straightforward. An IP-based media server supporting VoIP and video services and using SIP for its signalling is one such platform that sits at the edge of the service delivery network.