IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

While visiting with several individuals a few weeks ago at the Ziff Davis Unified Communications Summit in Seattle, WA I noticed that some people hadn't yet realized the power of one aspect to the overall value of unified communications which relates to presence awareness. That is leveraging presence not just in instant messaging but in other communication vehicles can play an important role in transforming your business impact as an IT organization. As a result I thought I would dedicate this post to help create ideas around things that can be done to assist in helping IT in leading the way.

Here at Global Crossing in an attempt to leverage this core components of Unified Communications in an ongoing effort to incorporate the advantages of collaborative, converged services within our enterprise we've transformed internal applications from static non presence aware to anticipatory engaged communication tools that are supporting contextual collaboration with presence-awareness throughout the enterprise. In this instance presence-awareness (whether someone is available in simple terms and how to contact) is utilizing capabilities including chat, computer-based telephony, conferencing, IP video, and e-mail across tools that leveraged across the enterprise drive in principle more efficacy from consumption and corresponding execution. In fact it is my opinion that since presence has been embedded into our application infrastructure to enhance our collaborative capabilities it is natural to see transformational improvements occur around our "quality of experience" associated to the overall user experience. This is so because enabling enhanced customer experience truly enables the IT organization to drive one more component to our IT organizations transformational success in enabling the business to not only "react" but be proactive by achieving extensibility required within the distribution transparency model required for execution. Said another way the fact that presence awareness has been integrated into our application infrastructure means this action will further enhance our agility to enhance operational efficiency by allowing application "pivots" to be present thus accelerating communication by eliminating in some instances serial cognitive task execution.

As the industry landscape continues to evolve there are a few constants that will remain the same: (1) increasing business demands require more innovative, transformational capabilities between employees, partners and customers and (2) continually driving operational velocity reductions around the cost basis of delivering information technology services is imperative. It is commonly believed by many vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Intel, Nortel and Siemens as well as software developers such as IBM and Microsoft that presence technology will continue to become an increasingly important tool at driving traditional costs out by attacking the serial nature of traditional work execution thus increasing operational efficiency.

So why is presence so important to Unified Communication services? Presence is important because it can become the intelligent communication application for converged IP communication services such as those demonstrated by our IT organization at Global Crossing. Determining where a user is and how best to reach them in our case by leveraging presence enabled applications that have been integrated into our infrastructure with the "glue" to increase the overall value of our converged IP services brought to the table and help realize substantial business transformation value.Said another way presence-aware applications offered on a converged IP communication service help evolve traditional serial actions of quickly determining and thus engaging with employees regardless of location, modality or scheduling which allows our globally dispersed users to communicate and collaborate in real time providing productivity in a truly global and mobile workforce environment. Combined converged IP communication services with presence technology provide for accelerated collaboration between our employees, partners and customers by knocking down the walls of traditional serial communications and by accelerating communication through anticipatory engagement.

Presence is the value.

With the release of ”Networked Nation: Broadband in America 2007”, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (“NTIA”) takes credit for largely achieving President Bush’s 2004 goal of “universal, affordable broadband access for all Americans.” Not to be too cynical, but NTIA’s claim is akin to Hank Morgan’s claim that he caused the solar eclipse in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

First, the methodology by which NTIA reaches its conclusion is spurious at best. But I shouldn’t be too harsh on NTIA since they are simply following the FCC’s methods. You see, NTIA makes it claim because “broadband service was available in 99 percent of the nation’s zip codes, encompassing 99 percent of the nation’s population.” If one person in a zip code has broadband service, the FCC counts the entire zip code as having broadband access. So by this methodology it isn’t too hard to claim success.

Second, increased broadband penetration was inevitable and would have occurred regardless of public policy. Broadband penetration occurred at a rate that surpassed all previous consumer electronics. In a September 2007 survey, Pew Internet found that broadband was adopted by a majority of consumers faster than other technologies. Broadband took 10 years to break 50% adoption, followed by the CD Player at 10.5 years, the VCR at 14 years, cell phones took 15 years, color TVs took 18 years, as did the personal computer.

So was this adoption due to Administration policy or because consumers know a good thing when they see one?

Third, this Administration considers bandwidth speeds of 200 kbs to constitute “broadband.” 200 kbs may be “Rubenesque” among narrowband speeds, but it hardly counts as broadband, especially when you consider the speeds available around the world. And when you look at actual speeds that U.S. consumers enjoy, the picture is even grimmer. The Communications Workers of America (an obviously self-interested source) produced a report last year showing the median download speed in the United States is 1.9 Mbps, compared with 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 21 Mbps in Finland, 18 Mbps in Sweden, and 7.6 Mbps in Canada. And of course U.S. consumers pay far more per megabit than residents in these other countries. According to the OECD, the average price per advertised Mbit/s of connectivity in the OECD is USD $18. Japan, France, Sweden, Korea and Finland have the least expensive offers per Mbit/s
o Japan: USD $0.13
o France : USD $0.33
o Sweden: USD $0.35
o Korea: USD $0.38
o Finland: USD $0.42

So what exactly is there for this Administration to take credit for? Did their policies stimulate broadband penetration, increase broadband speeds, and reduce broadband prices or like Hank Morgan are they simply taking credit for a phenomenon that was already happening over which they had no influence?

Femtocells the Answer?

There have been some very interesting developments in the wireless world as of late.  Femtocells are basically Access Point Base Stations that permit wireless operators to extend coverage in places where “dead spots” are problematic.  This sounds like a great idea for those that have experienced the issues where a wireless phone call drops due to one moving into an area where coverage is “shady” at best – for instance an elevator or a remote location in a campus or building.  But with this concept, comes some problems that need to be resolved, like E911, Lawful Intercept and other such governmental obligations.  

First note the informal poll below from www.cellcoverege.com - this is a problem the industry wants to address.

Femtocells have been designed to use licensed and unlicensed wireless spectrum.  In the licensed scenarios, there are concerns around Interference with the already established towers that provide subscriber access.  There are limits to the number of adjacencies that mean special attention needs to be spent with regards to the placement of the femtocells. This concern stems from marketing such solutions direct to the consumer base, and this means a “willy nilly” approach to spectrum access for subscribers causes confusion with regards to E911 and Lawful Intercept requirements that mobile network operators much meet.

Though femtocells are gaining momentum as an alternative, there are concerns that first need to be addressed before an expectation of widespread use can be realized.

DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don’t necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

Google’s Impact on the Wireless Internet

In case you missed the announcement last week, Google has tossed it’s hat into the ring for the last remaining commercially viable wireless spectrum in the US.  The 700MHz spectrum was used to provide analog TV service and becomes available to the highest bidder on January 24th, 2008.  The impact of Google’s announcement is yet unknown, but should prove to be very important in the long run.  

Some interesting datapoints:

•    From Wikipedia - Several countries, including the UK, now have more mobile phones than people. There are over five hundred million active mobile phone accounts in China, as of 2007. Luxembourg has the highest mobile phone penetration rate in the world, at 164% in December 2001. In Hong Kong the penetration rate reached 139.8% of the population in July 2007. The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the world was estimated at 2.14 billion in 2005. The subscriber count reached 2.7 billion by end of 2006 according to Informa[citation needed], and 3.3 billion by November, 2007, thus reaching an equivalent of over half the planet's population. Around 80% of the world's population enjoys mobile phone coverage as of 2006. This figure is expected to increase to 90% by the year 2010.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Now allow me to pluck the germane data from the above for my point.  Phone = 3.3 BILLION -  Computers =  1.25 Billion.  Google already enjoys dominance for eyes in the computer space, and if they are as successful on wireless phones as they are with PCs, watch out world!

The problem Google currently has with wireless devices, especially in the US, is the locked-down nature of the device to the wireless network operator.  It’s actually a sad commentary that Google has to forge ahead with buying spectrum, but it makes all the sense in the world.   Boy is it interesting watching the impacts to the industry.  Check out Verizon Wireless’ announcement about opening up their network to devices.  Don’t think for a second that these two announcements are unrelated.  They couldn’t be more tied to the hip.

All this guy has to say is, “Good on ya, Google!”


Adam “voiploser” Uzelac
DISCLAIMER: The comments here are mine only. They don’t necessarily reflect intelligence, refined thoughts, or anything that the reader should take too seriously. Should the reader expect a polished thought process in the content addressed here, then a strong dose of medication should be prescribed to address that misconception.

The fallout from Comcast’s alleged traffic management practices continues with the filing of a petition by Vuze, Inc., an Internet distributor of high definition content. This petition follows on the heels of the complaint filed by a coalition of consumer groups.

The Vuze petition asks the FCC to “adopt reasonable rules that would prevent the network operators from engaging in practices that discriminate against particular Internet applications, content or technologies.” Vuze says that it does not object to “traffic management” practices, but asks the FCC to ensure that such practices meet the following conditions –

1. The network operators’ network management practices should be based on actual impact on the network, rather than targeting or disproportionately impacting specific services or technologies;

2. Network management practices should be transparent and publicly disclosed, providing consumers, content providers, applications developers, and service
providers greater certainty that their preferred technology and services are acceptable and not subject to interference on broadband networks; and

3. Network management practices should not used as a pretext for discriminating against particular types of content or services that the network operators may view as unacceptable or potential sources of competition.

While I certainly can appreciate Vuze’s interest in establishing such rules, I again have to ask, as I have throughout this entire “net neutrality” debate, why otherwise entrepreneurial people would run to the government for help with what is essentially a problem in their distribution chain? Who is advising these companies to seek redress before the FCC and why are they being listened to? Even a cursory review of the FCC’s record would show that they are a terrible forum for these types of disputes.

More broadly, why is everyone trying to invite the FCC to regulate the Internet? Has the FCC done such a great job regulating telecommunications, cable, and broadcasting that we want them now to regulate the Internet? Think through what jurisdiction over the Internet could encompass. Network operators, ISPs, content providers, equipment manufacturers, software developers, hardware manufacturers, service providers, the list is endless. By the time all is said and done, the FCC would have jurisdiction over an enormous segment of the economy. Is this what we want? If ever there was a sure way to retard our technological progress and innovation, this is it. I said it before and I will say it again, the cure (FCC regulation) in this case is likely far worse than the disease (alleged discrimination).

Parties should try working these issues out amongst themselves before asking the FCC to get involved. No where in Vuze’s petition do they say that they tried to work it out directly with Comcast. Perhaps if they did, they would find a mutually beneficial solution. Perhaps not. But that doesn’t mean “there ought to be a rule.” As I said the other day, there are a host of relationships that need to reach equilibrium before the Internet matures. It would be a shame to freeze some of these relationships in place just to grease the squeaky wheel.

A number of bloggers have been blogging about on Google's mobile plans for the better part of the year.

Recently I blogged  as to how Google may be able to take their may ad revenue  business model into the mobile space.

Well today, Google made it very clear with their mobile alliance announcements .

The interesting part of the discussion revolves around Verizon. Specifically, Verizon may be in talks with google in joining Sprint and T-Mobile as part of Google's plans.

But is this the same Verizon that sued the FCC after the FCC adopted Google's open access  motions?

Yes it is the same Verizon.

It may be that Verizon needs to be involved and not get blindsided as they did when they choose not to support Apple's iPhone, and lost a tremendous branding opportunity.

Or, it may be that Verizon needs to be involved to make sure it's part of the disruption as mobile business models change.

Another score for the open source business model and for the public as we should see innovation at as faster velocity.

Time will tell!

The broadband investment debate is also taking place down under in Australia.  On one side is Sol Trujillo, veteran of the old U.S. West, who now is the CEO of Telstra, the Australian incumbent.  Sol never misses an opportunity to blame regulators for his company’s poor performance and has tried every which way to get the Australian government to insulate his company from risk.  On the other side of the debate is Communications Minister Helen Coonan who thankfully sees right through his argument as is evidenced by her latest comments on this debate. 

Evidently, Telstra has written its 1.6 million shareholders accusing the Australian government of “excessive, costly regulation” and “letting Australia fall behind in broadband internet technology.”  To which Ms. Coonan replies “regulation is not holding Telstra back, the only thing holding Telstra back is its own commercial decision to go on a capital strike, to not rollout broadband.” 

Truer words were never spoken.  It is refreshing to see someone of Ms. Coonan’s stature and position challenge Telstra in this manner.  It is even funnier to see her go on to say with regards to Telstra’s gaming of the regulatory process “In my way of thinking that is not a sensible use of executive time, it is not a good use of shareholder’s funds and I really wonder at what point shareholders are going to contact the board and say ‘what are you doing with this American management structure?’”

If only the Americans and the Europeans had a similarly skeptical ear for incumbent claims about broadband investment. 

This weekend I read a commentary by PC Magazine’s  editor and Chief Lance Ulanoff “Don’t Give Google 700Mhz”

I posted  a response at their website and I am still bothered by the position he has taken.

“ The position that 700Mhz digital data services may require antennas as broadcast analog TV is totally off base.  An analog broadcast !=  (not equal to) digital data, broadcast TV is just that a broadcast signal without any protocol between the receiver and transmitter, whereas digital data receiver and transmitter have defined protocols that optimize reception given the available data rate e.g. WiFi, GPRS etc …

Some  of the biggest advantages of wireless digital data at 700Mhz is not needing line of site ,  not prone to moisture (water in leaves) and a huge chunk of to be available spectrum.

The position that Verizon, Sprint and ATT know the business and can do better for the American public is weak at best.

“The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.”

The FCC’s job is to manage American spectrum for the country , e.g. the people.

When was the last time Verizon, Sprint and ATT acted on behalf of the people?  Checkout your Verizon RZAR and you’ll find out they feature lock Motorola’s features (like local access to Bluetooth to transfer files), whereas T-mobile does not.

Google is acting to further itself , but there’s a difference here.  Google’s advocacy on Open Access to Spectrum is disruptive   and will create innovation in the wireless industry that will benefit the people.

Google’s greatest strength is their  success, their greatest challenge is maturing as a regulatory influencer against the incumbents who have decades of experience on playing the game.”

I had to rewrite the post several times just to get my emotions out.

Google has and will change the wireless industry.  The position they have taken on open access on spectrum will create innovate  environment , which will open the markets to more companies that develop hardware, software or services (content).

The big three will need to be competitive to protect their base, this is no different than the FCC open market position in the 90’s that opened local markets which benefited users with more choices and lowered costs.

The release of a white paper by ETNO (the Eurpean Telecommunications Network Operators Association, a coalition of incumbent network operators) purporting to demonstrate that network investment would increase if policy makers would just stop insisting on unbundling and allow “inter-platform” competition to flourish is of course a re-packaging of the same arguments put forth here in the U.S. by the Bell Companies (unfortunately with great success). 

Thankfully, ECTA (the European Competitive Telecommunications Association, a coalition of competitive carriers) has offered a rebuttal to these arguments.  Like their U.S. counterparts at Comptel, ECTA must now counter what is sure to be a huge political and public relations push by the incumbents to roll back the regulatory progress made over the last ten years. 

We have seen this investment debate before and it runs a predictable course.  Let’s hope that ECTA has learned from the mistakes of the past that allowed the incumbents to be successful in the U.S.  These lessons include –

1.            Establish a political constituency.  If the debate is about what price competitors pay for access to the incumbent’s network, the competitors have already lost.  Incumbents are typically one of the largest employers in a country and those employees vote.  Moreover, incumbents are typically some of the largest political donors.  Competitive carriers do not match up well in this regard for the simple reason that they do not have a bloated payroll from a century of political largesse.  So, competitive carriers need to establish a political constituency of their own.   Ideally, competitive carriers will be able to rally the business, academic, and scientific community to their cause.  After all, these are some of the most telecommunications-intensive industries in the economy who surely have benefited from the improved service and reduced pricing that competition has spurred.  Competitors need to encourage the business, academic and scientific community to be active participants in the debate.  Of course the incumbents have the advantage here as well since they often are large contributors to universities and scientific organizations who are naturally loathe to antagonize such generous benefactors. 
2.            Simplify the debate.  The incumbents have a very facile argument – if carriers want to compete, let them build their own network.  Competitors shouldn’t expect to have subsidized access to the incumbents’ network to compete.  Inter-platform competition between stand-alone platforms is more robust than competition “created” by forced resale and unbundling.  Unfortunately, when rebutting this argument competitors fall into the trap of trying to explain how access prices are cost-based and how unbundling works.  The better response is to simply say that if government wants to grant carriers free access to public and private rights of way, give them 100 years of advertising and public relations support, and commit 100% of their telecommunications business to them, then competitors will indeed build their own networks.  Since that is what government did for the incumbents, it is only fair they do the same for competitors.  After all, how are competitors supposed to compete with a bunch of “welfare queens?”
3.            It’s not about investment, it’s about risk.  The incumbents always talk about investment incentives, but really what they are asking for is risk insurance.  They don’t want to place their capital at risk.  They want a guaranteed return on investment.  You can’t blame them for asking.  It’s the policy makers that are to blame for actually minimizing the risk.  But the reality is no politician wants the largest employer to cut back on spending and initiate layoffs.  Moreover, in the competition for broadband penetration rankings, there is no easier way to increase broadband penetration than to give your incumbent carte blanch.  With tens of millions of subscribers, a minimal sales and installation effort can result in millions of new broadband subscribers and an uptick in the rankings.  So the lesson for competitors is not to present themselves as such a threat to the incumbents.  Unbundling and resale is not about taking market share from the incumbents.  It is about improving service to consumers and maximizing the value of an aging asset (the old copper network) and guaranteeing sales on a new asset (next generation networks).  Incumbents should embrace a business model that allows them to monetize their aging asset in the form of resale and unbundling while investing in next-generation networks that easily out-compete legacy networks.  Competitors would be foolish to rely on unbundling and resale as a long-term strategy if they knew the incumbents were aggressively investing in next generation networks.  So naturally they too will invest in new networks and if they don’t, shame on them.  And if the incumbents are concerned that unbundling and resale of their next generation network will erode their market share, then they are admitting that competitive carriers are better at sales, marketing and customer service. 
4.            It is not a zero sum game.  Telecommunications traffic continues to grow at phenomenal rates.  Competitive gains do not equate to incumbent losses.  It is a growing pie that all parties can share.
5.            It’s a national security issue.  In today’s world, telecommunications is a critical component of everyday life for individuals, for business, and for government.  Major telecommunications outages have as great an impact as power outages on economic activity and the conduct of government.  Moreover, control over the flow of information should be as dispersed as possible in order to ensure an informed electorate.  Consolidation and control of the telecommunications infrastructure in the hands of a single incumbent is a poor strategy for protecting critical infrastructure and ensuring the free flow of information.  Nations need robust telecommunications infrastructures that are only possible when you have a “network of networks” seamlessly interconnected.  The more interconnection points you have, the more robust your network of networks is.  And if you have interconnection at all levels of the network (which is what unbundling is all about), your network of networks is more robust still.

Finally, European policy makers should recall that during the 1980s and early 1990s the United Kingdom resisted efforts at unbundling in favor of inter-platform competition.  At the same time, the U.S. was implementing unbundling.  The result was enormous growth and investment in the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure and nominal activity in the U.K.  This caused the U.K. to change course and pursue its current policy path.  So the experiment in inter-platform competition was already tested and abandoned as a failure.

OK, so Web Services has been around for some time now.  XML and SOAP have been used as an easy to implement mechanism to serve as an API for distributed applications.  However, only until the last year or so has web services come to the forefront of telecom services, and I believe it will be used as a foundation for many innovative solutions that will be built under the Unified Communications/Integrated Communications umbrella.

VoIP has traditionally been relegated to basic telephony services in the telecom industry, such as VoIP/SIP Trunking and Hosted IP Telephony services.  However, with the advent of Unified Communications (check out the Unified Communications Conference at the Fall VON Show in October), which brings together telephony, messaging, collaboration, data and mobility into an integrated solution, we begin to see services using VoIP as becoming more visual in nature, bringing telephony into web interfaces rather than to phones, and using multiple distributed applications which are blended to create solutions.

Global Crossing has announced that it is providing innovative Unified Communications solutions to the UK Government.  These services will soon be expanded to provide even greater capabilities to the Enterprise, and globalization is a key element of this strategy.

Does this mean IMS?  Not necessarily.  Many solutions in the market have built interoperability through vendor partnerships using SIP from a voice signaling perspective, and Web Services brings another element into the mix which greatly improves interoperability and improves usability.  IMS is not nearly as innovative as Web Services, and certainly not as easily implemented.  However, IMS can be combined with Web Services to anchor control, signaling, and provisioning of multiple applications in a standardized fashion.  My belief is that it will take the industry some time to pull everything together using IMS.

As an example of how web services can be introduced into telephony, clients can be built into web pages using internet API's which use click to call functionality.  In addition, web services can be used in a unified communications "Dashboard" interface where a user can view presence status, conference attendance, manage services through voice portals, and trigger entirely new communications business models.  Two innovating vendors highly leveraging web services in the telecom space are Sylantro and Iperia, which bring call control and management extended to web communications, and provide visual voicemail and unified messaging services as a solution.  Very cool stuff.

Web Services brings easy programming interfaces to industry standard transport (HTTP) to bring innovation to telecom services.  As enterprises become more distributed in nature, with remote offices in multiple countries, their key workers are also becoming more distributed and mobile.  Telecom needs to keep up with these trends and the increading demand for requirements of the changing workplace with real time communications.  This is bringing traditionally separate applications together via Unified Communications, and the "unification" or blending of these distributed applications can use a combination of signaling techniques and web services functions to bring a highly visual element to the solution.