All the VoIP and IM apps developed for social networks have been freebies so far. I think Nimbuzz is the first one that will be making money out of such an arrangement. The mobile VoIP startup had teamed with StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social network with over 12 million members. StudiVZ will exclusively market Nimbuzz. Not just that. Nimbuzz is the first and the only third party application that StudiVZ has integrated.

Nimbuzz should be able to drive increased user interaction and activity on the StudiVZ site thus driving more advertising revenues. Those revenues will not be shared with Nimbuzz just yet and the sharing arrangement applies from 2009 onwards when Nimbuzz stands to get 50% of the advertising revenues resulting from the usage of its application.

Continue reading "Nimbuzz is the first VoIP startup to make money from existing social networks" »

Breaking the silence of 40 long days today, a silence protesting the ugly 8 long years of telcom recession. That is one reason. The other reason is that I have been working on some custom research projects while you guys were watching the markets throw those familiar tantrums. Anyway, the blogging will be light for the next few months, but we will have a full-time blogger for you sometime in December. I have not recruited for over a year now. In India, that means attenuation to the tune of 50%. Almost an organized attrition. And that is a killer especially if you have to do the baby sitting while they stay!!!

Some comments on the major developments over the past month or so:

US elections: Easier to say things when you are out of power. The moment you assume it, you get a microscopic view of things you were previously seeing with your naked eye. Anyway, as long as the US produces innovation, there should not be a major problem. In the context of communications industry, the problem is to monetize that innovation. In ICT, some new and equally competitive pockets of innovation are opening up - areas like Eastern Europe and Ireland. I would probe the BRIC countries next.

The financial crisis: not quite Correction 2.0. However, I wish the VC model would implement some longer term correction. There is at times excessive optimism among the young entrepreneurs about their business plans (in the ICT industry). The VC model of nineties has also cultivated the culture of ‘let us work ridiculously hard for 18 months and then market ourselves as an acquisition target’. That sort of culture just defeats sustainable entrepreneurship. I wish that could go away. Other than that I think the financial crisis of Oct 08 could precipitate something that has been cooking over the last few years. A couple of telecom giants will fall. Their places will be taken by Huawei and ZTE. Open Source could gain importance in communications. I wish the landline could make some sort of a comeback with the fiber deployments. I can’t stand Internet over wireless, especially time sensitive apps. The crisis has also been conveniently used by some companies to do layoffs.

Continue reading "Breaking the 40 day silence" »

There is currently no forum out there that promotes partnerships among the three main parties in Voice 2.0: the operators, developers, and platform providers. While events like eComm have focussed on direct-to-consumer offerings, other event organisers have paid little attention toward this new ‘evolved voice communication’.

My personal belief is that Voice 2.0 startups alone will not re-invent voice communication. Viral marketing alone will not suffice, no matter how innovative the services. For an efficient distribution of new services and adequate monetization of those services, the industry requires partnerships among all three parties (mentioned above).

Forging those partnerships is the main purpose of our Voice 2.0 Summit. We welcome all progressive telecom professionals to the event. Details can be found here.

What is Jaxtr all about?

Our mission at Jaxtr is to enable new conversations by letting people link their phones to the web.

So the value you bring in is the integration of PSTN and web. What happens when people start to bypass PSTN more and more using broadband? You would then have to re-invent your business dramatically.

That scenario is way off. The cell phone companies are not going to go out of business anytime soon. But as the voice communication moves to IP more and more we will terminate sessions on IP device. That does not matter much to us. It is in fact cheaper for us.

But when most voice communication is IP to IP, it is likely to be Skypes and Gtalks and MSN Messengers of the world that would be on the minds of consumers. It will be difficult situation to compete in.

Not necessarily. Jaxtr offers a unified way of communications whether it is SMS or voicemail or real-time voice. Consumers prefer having one consistent communications identity.

Is that one consistent identity going to be the mirror number that you offer whereby users are able to keep their numbers private?

The consistent identity is the Jaxtr link. Numbers that get generated depend on the device you are calling from. So it is not the number that stays consistent. It is the Jaxtr link that stays the same. A mirror number is not so flexible when you are travelling. A link is much more flexible.

Continue reading "Interview with Konstantin Guericke, CEO, Jaxtr" »

IPTV equipment sales in 2Q08 reached $229 million. The equipment sales tracked by iLocus include those of IPTV specific STB, Middleware, VoD, Encoder, and Security products.

IP STB formed majority of the sales generated. IP STB sales touched $146.8 million, down from $186 million in 1Q08. Motorola led the IP STB market with 36.4% market share during the quarter (by the number of units shipped). The total number of IP STB units shipped during the quarter was around 1.7 million.

As of the end of 2Q08, the total IPTV subscriber base worldwide is estimated at 17.8 million.

ENUM look up system is also part of the IMS blueprint. Are the IMS projects implementing ENUM in practice? Where are ENUM servers being deployed today?

Some of the IMS projects are becoming smaller due the present economic conditions. Public ENUM has gone by the wayside. But there are a host of new applications for ENUM server products. There can be wholesale applications like our deployment at Telus where our product is being used for arbitrage route plans. Having said that, we have a number of IMS wins. France Telecom is one of our larger ENUM deployments where they are using our solution along with NSN’s IMS solution. We see a lot of inside carrier federation projects where you might have multiple or heterogeneous softswitch environment. ENUM servers there are being used as aggregation point for route plan data. That data is then made available to softswitches and SBCs. So you provide one provisioning and aggregation point for route plan data and push that out to networking elements. When you do those type of projects you naturally look into LNP kind of possibilities. So the scope is vast in theory as well as in practice.

Could there be some overlap in functionalities i.e. an SBC or a softswitch subsuming some of the ENUM routing functionalities?

We could have some overlap in deciding where in the network the call routing decision is made, for instance. Other than that we don’t expect much overlap as different network elements evolve and scale as per particular functions. IMS could live or die. But one of the things it is going to teach us is how to architect new generation networks. IMS defines the specific roles of various different network elements and I think that is the trend we are likely to see.

I guess the prospects for your solutions depend upon the extent to which a carrier in the future wants to keep the control at the core of the network. When you have more and more intelligence migrating towards the edge such as a peer-to-peer scenario like Skype, what kind of role would your product be playing?

Your instincts are spot on. When I talk to carriers I tell them this is the platform that delivers control. What carriers realize is that the external services, such as the peering fabrics, are essentially there to provide layers of reliability, disaster recovery, backup and storage – things of that nature. There is a paradigm shift going on inside carriers. Only when the burden of managing the data that they want to manage internally becomes huge, only at that point will they go out to an outside service provider. At the same time, with centralized infrastructure, there are certain costs that can be reduced. For instance you can centralize LNP and centralize provisioning of multiple softswitches.

Continue reading "Interview with Tom Tovar, CEO, Nominum" »

I have been following this thread on Yahoo Message Boards today. A few lines about what this could mean for Sonus ...

So … Sonus has for a long time bet on hosted VoBB i.e. its vision of Class 5 VoIP has been that of an over-the-top voice over a converged broadband pipe. That was until the BT deal came along. BT vision says broadband and narrowband voice will co-exist for a long time. In terms of architecture that translates into a bridging technology, the one that bridges narrowband and broadband. As such you will find the Access Gateway + DSLAM kind of technology deployed in BT exchanges. If the customer is an over the top VoBB user, the voice hits the DSLAM direct. If the user is a narrowband customer, the voice is packetized by the Access Gateway in the same box before it moves over to DSLAM for IP dumping. The combined Access Gateway + DSLAM box technology is what they call MSAN.

So why am I pretending to be technical? Just to tell you that Sonus now has the hots for these MSAN type deployments. BT might not be alone in implementing this architecture. I think even France Telecom - that has over one-third of its landline users now subscribing to over-the-top VoIP - has realized that not all its customers will move away from POTS. And the regulation will never allow FT to ignore those that keep using POTS. Conclusion: use the BT model.

And therefore ….. what good is Sycamore as a merging partner for Sonus? Well, Sonus has the Access Gateway product and the Access Server. Sycamore brings in the access equipment for data. That means Sonus gets to keep all the money for the access POP that handles both data and voice access. Going forward, this access POP might be the only POP a telco deploys as Class 4 and Class 5 functions get integrated into a single server. So the merger makes sense. Besides, Sonus has been too conservative in terms of acquisitions. It needs to diversify in order to move ahead.

Continue reading "Sonus Sycamore merger" »

For T-Mobile, it is ok to use WiFi in the US to offload voice traffic (sometimes without informing the customers), but in the UK it refuses to interconnect with Truphone and in Germany it altogether seeks a ban on VoIP over iPhone, whether the call is made over 3g broadband or WiFi. That sounds like more than double standards.

The German court has unfortunately sided with T-Mobile this time. In the UK, it did not have much luck though.

Mobile VoIP is actually not allowed fully in the US. You cannot use 3g mobile broadband connection to make a VoIP call. The wireless carriers are allowed to block such use. Only VoIP-over-WiFi is allowed. Indeed Apple has also sided with the wireless carriers in the US. It is allowing VoIP on its iPhone handset only as long as the call goes over WiFi.

7.7 million VoIP access lines shipped during the quarter, down from 7.9 million lines in 1Q08. This represents second sequentially quarterly decline from 4Q07. Of the 7.7 million lines shipped during the quarter, estimated 6.8 million went towards residential VoBB. The remaining were deployed as IP Centrex lines.

6.8 million Class 4 VoIP softswitch licenses shipped during the quarter, down from 7.1 million in 1Q08.

8.9 million service provider media gateways ports shipped during 2Q08, up significantly from 8.1 million ports in the previous quarter

5.2 million SBC sessions capacity shipped in 2Q08, down from 8.9 million in 1Q08. Revenue, however, did now show such a depression Q-o-Q. Revenue decreased 1.3% sequentially.

Marginal improvement in IP media service business Q-o-Q

385.4 billion VoIP minutes handled by carriers during 2Q08. Breakdown: 23.3 billion ILD, 270.2 billion NLD, 91.9 billion Local.

(Source: iLocus 2Q08 quarterly reports)

Please note that iLocus does not track IP upgrades to TDM ports. We only track pure VoIP deployments which in the context of Class 5 NGN includes VoIP hosted telephony implementations (such as hosted PBX and VoBB), new Greenfield VoIP deployments, complete replacement of legacy switches with VoIP, and extension of existing legacy networks with VoIP equipment in new geographies.

When I first looked at VoIP I thought it was a great technology to reduce your ISD bill. What was the first thought that crossed your mind when you first stumbled upon VoIP technology?

Back in 1996, there were a handful of VoIP products in the market. It wasn’t really an industry. So you could not envision all the other pieces in the puzzle. But you got the sense that it was a new way of communications. By 1997 we had decided to start a magazine in this space called Internet Telephony that has been dedicated to VoIP only. So we thought this was going to be big.

Did you work with the first generation VoIP vendors?

Absolutely. We worked with companies like Vocaltec, Dialogic, Natural Microsystems and others. Strangely enough, Microrsoft also entered the market early with their Netmeeting. You would not expect them to enter the market that early. That further cemented the feeling that VoIP was going to change communications.

And then nothing happened in the area of Netmeeting for a long long time. In fact nothing in the area of VoIP from Microsoft up until the recent introduction of OCS.

The people that I spoke within Microsoft tell me that they shifted a lot of people from VoIP projects over to Internet services side. And they have become a leader on that front. Some three years back they realised that there was an opportunity in communications on the enterprise side. So they re-invested in the communications.

VoIP has been reasonably disruptive. But VoIP architecture itself has evolved quite a bit over the years: from monolithic boxes to softswitches to IMS and further onward to Voice 2.0. What do you envisage to be the impact of VoIP from here on? How can something evolve and yet be disruptive at the same time?

Continue reading "Interview with Rich Tehrani, President, TMCNet" »

• 745k subscriber lines.
• Net additions were 41k for the quarter, of which approximately 13,000 were migrations from the circuit-switched platform.
• Cable’s Internet subscriber base at the end of the quarter was 1.5m.

Vivox is planning to open up its platform to third party developers. Vivox provides a VoIP platform for developers of online games and virtual worlds. The first round of apps that the company expects from its developer partners include wide ranging features from lip sync to natural language speech recognition and response. There is also interest among developers in porting the code to different mobile platforms to enable users to connect to their communities from multiple devices.

Vivox provides voice services to a number of games and virtual worlds including CCP Games (Eve Online), Linden Lab, Sony Online Entertainment (Everquest, Everquest II & Star wars Galaxies), Wizards of the Coast, Multiverse, NCsoft and K2 Network. As the network provider to these companies, Vivox serves over 5 million users. Currently the company offers premium services that are often sold directly to end users and include things like voice fonts which give players the ability to morph their voice to match their avatar, i.e. an elf.

Continue reading "Vivox opening up its platform" »

• 800k IPTV subscribers as of end 2Q08. Added 100k subscribers during 2Q08.
• hanaTV IPTV revenue was KRW 82 billion in 2Q08.
• Hanarotelecom has achieved a market share of 9% through strengthened VoIP.
• Wireline operators launched TV Portal services to prepare for the commercialization of IPTV.