August 2008 Archives

Today's New York Times contained an article concerning the increase in the cost of wholesale products.   According to the piece:


Taking the sum of individual rates in the grnVoIP A-Z rate deck for the  month of July 2007, divided by the total number of destinations, I arrived at an average rate of $0.15845.    Using the same calculation for the July 2008 rates, I got $0.15648.  Using sophisticated reverse regression analysis, two rolls of duct tape, and the shoelaces from an old pair of desert boots,  I then calculated that the average rate from July 2007 to July 2008 has actually decreased by approximately 1 percent.

So, by this metric at least, it appears that global inflationary trends have not affected the VoIP industry... yet.

Note:  In the interest of full disclosure, grnVoIP (a provider of pay-as-you-go wholesale SIP termination) is a customer of my company Solegy, and I am a member of their advisory board. Continue Reading...

After years of searching, my prayers have finally been answered; I have found a WiFi VoIP phone that I can actually use.   The object of my desire is the Blackberry 8820 paired with T-Mobile's @Home service.  The irony of it is that it is not a SIP phone!

For years, I have searched for a convenient way to bring my office extension with me when I travel outside of the US.   For a while, I carried around an ATA (much to my wife's dismay) almost everywhere .  But, finding an Ethernet port to plug it into was often impossible.  When the first WiFi SIP phones turned up circa 2004, my inner geek rejoiced as my imagination ran wild with the possibilities.  Alas, the reality turned out to be wanting.   Weaknesses such as  power-hungry WiFi chipsets (resulting in poor battery life) and the inability to handoff when moving between WiFi access points plagued every device I tested.    Even the most recent unit I tried, Nokia's stylish E51, disappointed.   The gadget graveyard in my basement is a field of broken dreams as a result.

So, when I recently replaced my ailing Curve with the new Blackberry 8820, it was with low expectations.   In fact, I had avoided trying T-Mobile's @Home service because of poor reviews on the early handsets (the service was initially launched with the Nokia 6086 and Samsung t409).   The @Home service uses WiFi access points to allow users to connect from home or the office to make calls at landline rates  (info about @Home is here)  Much to my surprise though, they got it right with the 8820.  

This is not meant to be a review of the 8820, so I won't get into its many great features.   Let it suffice to say that the phone is eminently useable and has the same polish and functionality that crackberry addicts love and expect  (the combination of GPS and Google Maps alone is worth the price of the phone).  The point is that  I was able to place and receive calls from WiFi hotspots in Hong Kong (where free WiFi abounds) and Manila (which is decidedly less WiFi friendly than Hong Kong) as if I were sitting at my desk in the middle of Manhattan.   Amazing!

The only downside (and its not REALLY) is that a SIP device maker didn't come up with it first.  The 8820 uses GSM-over-IP  (there is no SIP client in the device) to allow seamless transition between cellular and hotspot coverage.  Still VoIP...  just not my favorite flavour.   Nonetheless the fundamentals of the phone  (WiFi chipset, battery life, user interface) lend themselves equally well to a SIP implementation.  I look forward to the day when cellco's will embrace the 2-sided telecom business model and allow such an animal to be created.



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The recent acquisition of communications API provider Ribbit by BT has caused quite a stir within the VoIP industry.    Much of the commentary concerns the $105 Million price tag for the pre-revenue start-up (Thomas Howe explains why the deal makes sense for BT on the Telco 2.0 blog).

Another interesting aspect, however, is how this deal casts Adobe's Flash player and AIR SDK to the forefront as an enabler of communications applications.  In essence, Ribbit's appeal is that it allows web developers to create communications enabled business process (CEBP) apps without having to know anything about SIP or the underlying protocols related to VoIP.   To do this, Ribbit leveraged Adobe's cross-platform AIR runtime environment to provide a desktop programming environment that is familiar to most web developers. 

It is no secret that Adobe has had its eye on communications developers for a while now.  It went so far as to announce a project that would embed a SIP stack directly into the Flash code in September 2007.   Named Pacifica, the project appears to have been stillborn however, as very little information or anything else has emerged since then  (the official Pacifica blog is rather sparse).  And, while several other start-ups have created softphones using AIR (the AIR showcase is here) and Communigate uses AIR for its very impressive Pronto unified communications suite, to my knowledge, no major service enterprise has yet built a voice app on it (SIP or otherwise).

With Ribbit's newfound prominence however, that will change.  I won't go so far as to say that developers will flock to Ribbit and BT to 'communications enable' their desktop apps.  But, I will venture to say that Adobe and AIR will be on the short list of all future CEBP projects as a result of Ribbit's success.  Who knows, maybe this will even pump some life back into Pacifica.
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