IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

Something better than IPv6

Johna Till Johnson at Network World cleverly compares IPv6 to the U.S. Financial crisis in this article. She believes that IPv6 may well have been an ill conceived solution to the problem and cites John Day's research into a whole new solution to the problem.

John Day is not the first guy to suggest we build something new from scratch. Forgetting the world of IETF for a moment, Todd Underwood proposed it at a conference a couple of years back, which I referenced in a blog shortly thereafter (Apr 2006) .

One of the points that I made then which I still believe now is that there is going to be a shortage of IP addresses in the future and it may be too late to start working on something new. Personally, I do not have faith that the IETF can work fast enough to create a brand new protocol that will solve the shortage while providing new and interesting functionality. Once they get it implemented, then every router and operating system vendor in the world must update their software to support the new protocol, extensive interoperability tests have to be performed, etc. etc. Then you have to get the entire world to deploy it! This is only something that could be whipped out in 2-3 years if everyone was in agreement that a simple and straightforward stop-gap measure was necessary, and that would be hard since IETF is largely a meritocracy that demands consensus among academics, technologists and vendor interests before it can even hope to move out of Internet-Draft into RFC (standard).

read more...

David Siegel
VP IP Product Management
biography
Virtualization – Part 3 - The Abstraction of Applications

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

Sorry for the long delay between postings.  Within the last 10 months  I have moved into more of a customer facing role and find myself – always with a customer and no time to blog. I recommend you start the series by reading Virtualization – Part 1  - The Abstraction of the Internet” and “Virtualization – Part 2  - The Abstraction of a Computer”.

read more...

Onofrio (Norm) Schillaci
Principal Solutions Architect
biography
Top 10 in VoIP

I recently discovered an interesting report on the history of the VoIP industry, from 1995-2007. The report is titled, “The 10 That Established VoIP”

Below are stages of VoIP development from the report:
1)    Articulating the concept of telephony over the Internet
2)    Interworking of VoIP with PSTN
3)    Making cross network (IP/PSTN) telephony a commercial service reality
4)    Establishing VoIP and displacing TDM in international long distance
5)    National long distance (North America) scalability in VoIP systems
6)    Making national long distance a commercial service reality

read more...

Adam Uzelac
Director and Principal Network Architect - Converged Architecture
biography
Gut check

Activity is reaching a fever-pitch before the FCC on the issue of inter-carrier compensation. Carriers are pitching various plans, each tailored to advantage their own business model. Whether the FCC will actually issue a decision in the face of all of this conflicting advice is anyone’s guess, but nothing before the Commission is more important to the financial health of the telecommunications industry.

By way of background, inter-carrier compensation concerns the monies that carriers pay each other for the origination and termination of traffic. At present, the current regime is a patchwork of disparate rates established to serve various (and often conflicting) public policy objectives and bears no relation to the actual cost of originating or terminating traffic. Under this regime, when a call is received in your home from your neighbor across the street, your local phone company collects one rate (reciprocal compensation, somewhere around $0.003/minute) to complete that call (assuming your neighbor is served by a competing phone company). When you receive a call from your sister a few towns over (say you live in Philadelphia and your sister lives in the suburbs), your local phone company receives a higher rate (intrastate, intraLATA toll access, which can run as high as $0.012 per minute but is usually around $0.02 per minute) to complete that call. When you receive a call from your brother in Harrisburg, your local phone company could receive yet another rate (intrastate, interLATA toll access, which again can run as high as $0.012 per minute but is usually around $0.02 per minute). But when you receive a call from your old college roommate in Princeton, New Jersey, your local phone company could receive a different (usually lower) rate (interstate, interLATA toll access, usually around $0.01 per minute, but higher in rural areas). Of course, if your spouse calls from the grocery store, your local phone company receives something entirely different from the wireless operator.

read more...

Paul Kouroupas
Vice President Regulatory Affairs
biography
Surprise me! Is Innovation really just more for less?

I moved to London 18 months ago to head up GC’s business in the UK/EMEA. We have a deep managed services network in the UK for enterprise, government and carrier customers and a good carrier capability in Europe where we also round out our global enterprise offers with local support.

Various colleagues have been at me to blog for a while, but I opted not to for all the usual reasons: too busy, lots out there already, my team hears from me enough already as it is, etc.  Needless to say, I was finally worn down.

In my role now and prior to this when I was CMO at GC, I spent lots of time with customers from all industries. The other day I was with a CEO of a mid-size UK services company and we were discussing our current contract, our desire to extend it and his desire to do so for less money and more functionality - the normal “value” driven discussion - which actually went well. As we were talking about how to accomplish this in tangible ways, he mentioned a few examples of real, value-add things both we, as well as our competitors, had done for him in the past.  …One in particular from our team was a 3 or 4 day new offer turnaround for a new customer he had landed, which was applauded by his client, that actually helped him seal the deal. I thought he might push for more things like this expedited offer…and of course bring in the lower price aspect…but then he said something that was a little different than the normal “more for less” mantra.  He started by saying, “I may be naïve but I can't let this opportunity pass, given this is a contracts discussion, and you are our current supplier (big smile) that wants to extend your contract with us.” Then he went on to say “that everyone always spends so much time on the details” and “we know his business better than he did”… ( which I highly doubt!) … and as we work to extend our contract he wanted us to look for chances to …“surprise him” and to “innovate”.  Now this was not a techie CEO, quite the opposite.  This was a seasoned GM and solicitor (lawyer) by training and I believe he meant what he said. He wanted to be pleasantly surprised by us…He wanted us to innovate.

read more...

ADC
EVP, Managing Director EMEA
biography
VoIP and IP Telephony - The Benefits Revisited

Over the past 14 months i've met with many different customers at many different levels. One thing I continually do is talk about the benefits of converged technology such as VoIP and IP Telephony. The last few blogs have leveraged convergenced as a foundation for unified communications as a next generation service offer but in this post I thought I would try something different and revisit the benfits of some common technology - VoIP and IP Telephony.

Most people understand the benefits of transitioning to a converged all-IP environment. As more applications come onto the market and the technology proves itself, these firms will be able to avail themselves of the many benefits of such converged technology adoption.

So why consider leveraging VoIP and IP Telephony?  

read more...

Thomas Hobika
VP, Sales Engineering, EST
biography