IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

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.

It's apparent that in order for FMC to really take off, there needs to exist a reasonable variety of handsets that provide the functionality and user experience that we've all come to know and love.  Just because your phone is one of those expensive dual mode Windows Mobile jobbers doesn't mean that it is capable of "seamless mobility".  In fact, when the OEM first integrated WiFi on these smartphones, they were never intended to use VoIP over WiFi.  Sure, they dabble with Mobile Skype and PCTel
has announced recently that they will begin outsourcing in earnest VCC-compliant WiFi-Cellular handoff client software but for the most part, WiFi is mostly relegated to faster web browsing.

However, a good FMC client software is only as good as the handset itself.  I've experienced numerous stability problems with the WM5 OS.  I'm fairly confident that I'm preaching to the choir on this one.  I've performed the traditional "windows two-step"; rebooting the phone often to resolve unknown glitches and freezing.  Aside from rebooting the phone, the battery life of these phones in WiFi mode is horrible.  2-4 hours from a full charge renders the phone practically useless.  After all, if one is to experience seamless roaming between WiFi and Cellular, one would need to leave the WiFi radio on, wouldn't they?  I personally do not want to obsessively spend my time checking the battery status on the phone and sprinting to the nearest outlet.

These two basic aspects of the phone need to be overcome prior to FMC (from a VCC perspective) becoming palatable to the broad user-base.  In order to move past novelty to usability Microsoft and the OEM's need to listen up!  WiFi chipsets are rapidly coming down in price, which is moving the handsets from the $400 range to the $300 range, but the OEM needs to work on an integration of this radio into the phone that is optimal for VoIP over WiFi.

With any hope, Nokia will help accelerate the usability of dual mode capabilities, but it still seems that we are another year from experiencing panacea with WiFi-Cellular convergence.

Although I support and wish them luck, a call to action to remove VoIP barriers internationally is a daunting task.

In Jeff Pulver's blog dated December 15th, 2006,  I quote my comment dated December 18th, 2006:
"Jeff [Pulver], I wish you and the VON Coalition good luck.

However it may be an up hill battle that is based on each countries political and bureaucratic process. Let’s not forget that the incumbents grew out of the PT&Ts (Post Telephone & Telegraph) and they would act in the best interest of a country and not the market.

History has many examples of how this played out, remember the proprietary signaling protocols across international boundaries, remember that some PT&Ts were successful in blocking entire NPAs in an effort to stop international toll bypass.

Countries like India have embraced VoIP as a technology enabler to grow their share of the outsource call center market, but stop short of allowing VoIP to originating or terminating within their PSTN.

Other countries like China have adopted a policy of licensing and setting the cost at (un)reasonable level – estimates as high as $2M US.

Take a look at a Global view   VoIP regulations as developed by the Global IP Alliance.

Typically, countries have taken an open market approach to spur innovation, a middle ground approach to control innovation and a  “not in my back yard”  approach to stifle innovation.

A PT&T approach of stifling innovation is a near sighted perspective to protect tax revenue and the incumbent’s control – far a market perspective the market will move those calls via VoIP to countries that are either in the open market or middle ground approach.

For example,  US and Europe are open market countries,  India is a middle ground country,  and China is “not in my back yard”  country.

So how can you move China into the middle ground?

I think we should use India’s logic, in  providing cost effective communications (VoIP inbound/outbound)  to support outsourcing while  leveraging low cost labor.

I read an interesting article tonite entitled “Universal VoIP Peering Faces a Rough Road “

VoIP peering is not a flip of the switch. Look back at history as to how the PSTN was built – over time and by market forces.

Bell’s initial success was in local operations, and over time these local operation islands were connected as part of “ATT long lines”. In the US , Bell didn’t have a lock on all local operating markets, there were numerous independents: GTE, United, SNET, Rochester Telephone, etc.... The success of the early PSTN required an ability to terminate calls outside of a LEC footprint, and even required diplomatic functions for international termination.

The move behind VoIP peering is a uni-lateral move by all providers to be free of PSTN regulations, tariffs and government.  The benefit for providers is lower cost and competitive freedoms;   the benefit to consumers is greater options.

Let’s look at a more recent example of technology based islands, ISDN. ISDN early promises of adoption were plagued by a lack of national (and international) standards,  both ATT (now Lucent) and Northern Telecom (now Nortel Networks)  had competing  technology implementations, both fought within the standard bodies to have a lock on the accepted standard that bonded LEC ISDN islands. And in the US National ISDN2 became the standard bodies that provided a pathway to ISDN connectivity, add ETSI and the ITU international interoperability became a reality.

It took a fragmented ISDN standard to become a ubiquitous service almost 10 years.

VoIP, SIP, IP are interoperable today and had become a pathway for VoIP peering.

The road to VoIP peering is not a rough road but a known road.  The early pioneers who provide that vehicle will be part of the new VoIP based “long lines”.

There has been a great deal of discussion this year questioning the value of IMS in carrier implementations. This is primarily due to the perception (rightfully so) that IMS has network integration implications, is heavy on signaling, operationally complex, and in summary too complex. These issues lead to cost in so many ways, which we will get to in a moment.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think that IMS is necessarily a bad thing. However, I have been hearing some discussion about "trimming the fat" associated with the IMS standard, and diverging from many of the traditional vendor implementations.

A majority in the industry agrees that the standard is complex. As such the vendor stands to gain in many ways from selling hardware, testing, integrating into the back office, and deriving revenue from adding applications, not to mention port charges and session-based billing. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I get the feeling that IMS is starting to put the power of the network in the hands of the vendor moreso than the operator.

What is IMS lite? This new approach essentially allows the operator to take the piece parts of the standard which provide the most value, and implement them in a way that maximizes value and streamlines network efficiency. This differs dramatically from the 3GPP standard which details interactions between the network elements in order for the most basic call flows to function. And while there are disagreements on the specifics within the standard, the basic principle and documentation have a great deal of merit. The main thing here is that what works for one carrier may not work for another. Not all carriers are implementing the same services nor do they have the same network environment. Mobile operators may have a great reason for implementing the full IMS standard for their own reasons, but the wireline operator follows an entirely line, from services to architecture.

An example of an IMS Lite implementation would be breaking down the P-I-S-CSCF into a single call state machine (a Soft CSCF) which provides the essential registration, authorization, service invocation and filtering functions and acts as the application proxy on the northbound interface and interacts with an HSS which manages subscriber profiles. These functions account for the majority of benefit from IMS anyways, so why not save some headache, not to mention a bundle of $$$$? The 3GPP standards provide a great deal of value in the principles not the details of the architectural functions of how integrated IP services can be invoked and managed. My vote is that these be used to the advantage of the service provider to take advantage of IMS without all of the associated cost.

I will be speaking on IMS Lite at the IMS Services Forum next week in London. For those responsible with network and product strategy, this event shouldn't be missed.

This is a great time for thinking out of the box in terms of defining the next generation network strategy. Out of complexity comes opportunity and in this business the stakes are increasingly high. Perhaps IMS can taste great while being less filling!

What a day it has been. The show here in Boston has really been an eye-opener on a number of different fronts. Firstly, the show floor was impressive with the quality of products and offerings, but not so much in the quantity. In past shows I could easily get completely lost due to the size, but this year, the show floor was much more "manageable".

One of the more intriguing offerings comes from http://www.polycom.com with an announcement they made regarding "High Definition VoIP". The basic idea behind this development is an enhanced voice sound experience. This is a step in a direction that has not been achievable in an old-school TDM network. With announcements like this, and others like it, we start seeing vendors and offerings taking advantage of voice over an IP medium. The main advantage is that there's more bandwidth available to voice, and that voice is treated more like an application on the ip network. The demos on the show floor were impressive and the sound was spectacular, especially when compared to TDM and cellular experiences. Think of watching a DVD with the sound coming from a 10 year old TV speaker versus surround sound. I think you get the picture.

Another very strong and dominant theme at this VON show is SIP/VoIP Peering. More and more, interconnections between carriers, enterprises, homes, etc is starting IP and ending IP with IP in the middle. Call flows typically took an IP -> TDM (PSTN) -> IP path, and things like HD Voice end-to-end weren't possible with that TDM "hop". By keeping a VoIP call on an IP network end to end, HD Voice not only sounds great, but is actually practical to implement.

**Note - if calling the PSTN from an HD Voice capable device, the quality will be degraded to the lowest common denominator, in this case TDM. :(

The big picture here is that the VoIP experience is getting BETTER than the PSTN/TDM experience. VoIP is better than TDM, and our VoIP network is better than our TDM network.

Adam Uzelac

As a followup to my last blog, I wanted to share my experience of Jeff's video-on-the-net keynote from within Second Life.

The presentation itself went quite smooth. The video stream started promptly at 6:00am, and the already full room of avatars took their seats.

My Avatar, Tek Guru

When it was time to put second life on the screen and to interact there was a pretty bad delay, which was a bit awkward, but eventually Jeff got through to us on audio, I'm pretty sure via Vivox. I didn't have the Vivox client installed, but even so I probably would have turned it off or I would have had a double audio feed, one from Vivox and one from the video stream.

Despite a bit of clunkyness, I'd say that overall it went very well. I really appreciated the chance to see the talk, and I wished that it could have gone on all day. I would have popped in and out of the pulveria center in between my meetings during the day to catch what I could.

The best part of the experience for me was after the keynote talk. Just like in a real conference, several people lingered in the back of the room and started chatting. Some of these people were employees of Electric Sheep, the company that helped Jeff Pulver put together the island as well as do the A/V and streaming aspect of the keynote broadcast into Second Life. Also present was a Second Life journalist/blogger by the name of Miller Copeland who was asking a few questions of the 'sheep' for an article she was writing, which you can see here. Her blog In The Grid is just getting off the ground, but it has some interesting content already, so you might want to pop over to it and have a look if you're interested in more of Second Life's flavor.

After Miller Left I continued chatting with Sibley, Electric Sheep's CEO, and I learned that the source code for Second Life had always intended to be released open source. At what point and fashion that may happen is anyone's guess, but it would make some of the ideas I spoke of in my last post possible, in particular the secure enterprise-hosted server. If you add to the mix companies like Electric Sheep who are willing to build the perfect 3D environment for corporate collaboration, will you have the recipe for the next generation of collaboration?

I fraps'd two sections of the second life experience. The first was near the beginning of the keynote where I just looked around in first-person mode in my avatar to see who was there.

Click Here to Watch (or right-click and save to watch later)

The second part I grabbed as soon as Jeff mentioned Second Life.

Click Here to Watch (or right-click and save to watch later)

I will apologize in advance if the video is a bit of a hack job. The frame rate in the auditorium was pretty slow, probably as a result of having to render the 3D, stream the quicktime video feed and record both at the same time (roughly 6fps). The raw files were over 200MB's in size, which I then re-spun down to around 10MB's with a program called VirtualDub.

Tags: VON, Second Life

I had an interesting conversation this morning with some folks from a carrier oversees.

Them: "I thought that Global Crossing was a bandwidth/transport company?!?!"

Me: "Well, we are.... but we are also a company that currently has 140 Sonus VoIP gateways that carries ~2.5-3.0 Billion minutes a month. We started building the network in 2000. We are one of the first service providers that did VoIP. We are one of the first to deploy and use Acme Session Border Controllers. We know VoIP with all of it's complexities and nuances better than most."

Them: "wow"

Adam Uzelac

PS - I just love the people's when the learn about Global Crossing 2.0!! ;)

I've had a blog article at the tip of my fingers ever since we started this blog site on the subject of the future of collaboration. The idea seemed a bit crazy to just float out there publically, so I spoke to several of my colleagues about the idea instead of blogging it. Hey, sounding boards are a good thing to have when wandering into unknown territory. During one such conversation I tried to paint a picture of what the Global Crossing virtual work place might look like.

Imagine something like Second Life, but on a private enterprise server. You could re-create the various offices of the Global Crossing campus and integrate it with the other communications systems like MS Communicator. You could launch to a virtual discussion among avatars from communicator, or knock on someone's virtual office door and they'd be notified by IM that you were looking for them in VR.

This idea would most likely be laughed at by most everybody, especially office workers, while telecommuters like me would remain silent, but hopeful.

"Why not just use video conferencing?" the skeptics will ask. "Isn't that the next generation of communication? Why not just use your camera more?"

I don't know, that's a great question! Why does my $50 Logitech camera sit on top of my monitor and never get used?

It's because I like my barrier. I like having conversations on the phone where I can scan email, refresh my google home page, or stare out the window at the beautiful Tucson desert landscape. This is harder to do with a camera watching me...it forces me to be engaged in the conversation 100%, and while communication may be greatly suffering from the short attention span generation, people still want what they want.

This is why I read Jeff Pulver's recent blog entry with such delight. At his talk at VON tomorrow he is going to bridge reality and virtual reality in what's called a mixed world event. A group of VON attendees who couldn't be there in person will congregate in Second Life and view a real-time streaming broadcast of the event. Either they couldn't attend the show in Boston (like me) or they are in Boston but had too bad of hangover to make it downstairs before 9am. The plan is for the group of Second Life Residents to be visible on the screen in the auditorium, so their questions should be viewable by everyone in the audience.

Jeff's even gone to great efforts to create a venue for the people to congregate called the pulveria. It's quite a fancy little place on it's own little island.

I even rushed out to buy a hawaiian shirt for my avatar in honor of Jeff's Birthday. Hat Tip to Andy Abramson.

If this works well it'll be virtually living proof that this whole concept of virtual reality over real reality has merit and a place in the business work place. I also came to find that I wasn't the first person to think of using Second Life in their business. In this article in the September issue of Popular Science, I quote:

Although no major brick-and-mortars are doing business from within SL yet, they are taking note. The banking giant Wells Fargo built its own branded island inside SL, designed to train young people to be financially responsible. Wal-Mart, American Express and Intel are looking at using SL for their corporate training. And why not? With its natural interactivity and open platform for creation, Second Life, or some­-
thing like it, may very well be the next generation of the Web.

The only issue that I see with full-blown corporate adoption is security. It is highly unlikely that most corporations will encourage their employees to discuss potentially confidential material on a public server. It's too easy for complete strangers to even accidentally overhear conversations, so this brings me back to the concept of having private Second Life server for enterprise environment. This would also make integration with other platforms in the private enterpise network, such asMicrosoft Communicator, more feasible.

First, let's see how the event goes tomorrow morning. Even though I have to get up at 5:30am local time, I'll be there bright eyed and bushy tailed, just like I am every morning in Second Life.

See the followup blog along with videos of the event here

The VON conference emphasizes the things that make the telecom industry exciting, and Global Crossing is right in the middle of this excitement. Some of the current buzz words are IMS, FMC, VoIP Peering, SIP Applications, & Presence, etc. This excitement translates into a lot of work, but also a lot of fun and "disruptive" products and feature-sets to build.

We are at a point in time with our offerings and network that has been a long time coming. We have been prepping our VoIP network over the past 5+ years for new features and services in numerous ways. For instance, enhancements to VoIP interconnection/interoperability processes and VoIP monitoring tool-sets ensures that we can deliver VoIP services effectively and proactively monitor the experience for our customers. As you read the numerous press releases that come out of VON this week, just keep this in mind... SIP Trunking = been there, done that. VoIP Peering = been there, done that. Transcoding = been there, done that.

We are sure to get the Global Crossing name out in the marketplace as a leader in this space, both from a technical perspective (of particular interest to me) as well as a leader of innovative products. We will be participating on a number of speaking panels - ranging from VoIP, IMS& transcoding to regulation of VoIP. We have strong experience and opinions on all of these topics. This is going to be a good conference. I plan on posting updates throughout the week. Stay tuned…

Adam Uzelac