Archive for August, 2005
3Com and Ingate announced today the launch of the 3Com IP Telecommuting module.
With a list price of $80 per user, the module allows enterprise users to gain access to their company’s communication network anywhere in the world they have access to a broadband Internet connection. Communication systems can include instant messaging, conferencing and VoIP services.
With regards to VoIP, users can easily establish connections from their home, hotel room or airport WiFi broadband to their home office telephone network. This will allow them to seamlessly use corporate telephony services from anywhere in the world, just as if they were in their offices. Users will also be able to forward incoming calls to their mobile, hotel or home phones instead of receiving VoIP calls over their broadband connection. While perhaps more convenient, this does have the potential to erode some of the telephony cost savings that could be achieved at a large corporation by encouraging "road warriors" to make use of VoIP services whenever possible instead of more costly circuit switched phones.
While this application is not exactly new, the 3Com’s product offers two major improvements over earlier implementations - (1) low cost and (2) easy of use. The IP Telecommuting module also incorporates high security into the package.
Speaking of 3Com, the company has an interesting VoIP white paper available for free entitle, Taking the Guesswork out of Deploying IP Telephony.
What do you think? Any comments?
A Wall Street Journal report claims that Vonage is seeking a public offering of up to $600MM. With some analysts claiming that the company is strapped for cash, it seems likely that Vonage would be looking to the market for additional funding:
The report that Vonage is planning an initial public offering worth up to US$600 million is evidence the Edison, N.J. firm is "striking while the iron is hot," said Joe Laszlo, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Vonage declined to comment on the report of the potential IPO. But Laszlo said that after spending over $400 million in previous private funding on acquiring new customers, it is not surprising the company needs a cash infusion.
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It remains to be seen where Vonage will choose to disperse the money generated from an IPO. Attracting a large customer base with previously raised private funding leaves open many possibilities for the company to use the cash. "Hopefully, they will build their infrastructure," Stofega said.
The other option for Vonage is to use the cash generated from the IPO to pick up several smaller providers, such as Skype. Analysts don’t see rival VoIP provider Skype following Vonage and floating an IPO. Skype initially offered only computer-to-computer voice calls but now offers full-blown Internet telephony services.
As the forerunner among VoIP providers, Vonage could start taking out some of these guys, Stofega said.
Fearing that approximately 100,000 VoIP service customers would be cut off next week, the FCC has extended the E911 notice response date to September 28, 2005.
VON Coalition, a VoIP industry trade group, had urged the FCC to extend the deadline. Jim Kohlenberger, executive director of the group, said that cutting off customers’ VoIP service could have serious — even deadly — consequences.
Customers who have not responded by September 28th will likely have their VoIP service cut off by "soft" disconnects — 911 calls will be routed to emergency responders, all other calls will be routed to the VoIP provider’s customer service line.
Article from communications firm 2N on the benefits of GSM VoIP gateways:
These days it is not uncommon for a business to spend 50% or more of its telephone call costs on fixed line to mobile calls (F2M) to and from the office PBX. More and more, it is becoming standard that customers and business contacts leave their mobile telephone numbers as their main method of being able to be contacted. This of course makes good sense as most people always have their mobile telephones close at hand.
The problem is that business pays handsomely for this convenience. The GSM carriers charge their customers dearly for the privilege of being able being to contact people on their mobile telephones. One of the reasons for this is that when a call is made from a fixed line to a mobile telephone the call has to go through a PSTN to mobile interconnect facility, also known as the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO). This is an overhead that the PSTN operators have to pay for when delivering calls from fixed lines to mobile telephones. These costs are then passed on to the fixed line customer in the form of increased call rates
Disputing what previous surveys have said, Forrester Research’s new report VoIP Liberates Voice from the Phone claims that most consumers in the US are not interested in switching to VoIP phone services:
Despite a huge media splash, Voice over IP (VoIP) adoption will lag market hype — serving only 11% of US households in 2010. Operators will only realize the potential of VoIP when they move beyond offering cheap phone service to extend voice into other devices like gaming consoles, appliances, and cars.
Forrester’s survey found that 70% of consumers were not interested in switching over to VoIP. The report’s author, Maribel Lopez, argues that VoIP service providers have not made a compelling case of the benefits for switching away from traditional circuit-switched telephone services.
Lopez says that VoIP providers such as Vonage and Packet8, while offering good prices, are not offering anything that consumers cannot get from a traditional telephone service, nor are they offering prices that will save consumers a significant amount of money. Local and long distance prices have been on the decline for some time, so the savings between VoIP and circuit switched are not significant enough at this point.
From Information Week:
The real promise of VoIP, according to Lopez, is the way that it liberates voice from the telephone, and from the telephone network. VoIP will go mainstream when providers and equipment vendors begin to think outside of the box and begin to integrate voice functions in consumer electronics, Web applications and mobile communications. Providers will have to embrace these trends to remain competitive.
"As VoIP deployments accelerate and the market saturates, the market will shift its main focus from cost savings to creating a better voice experience that integrates with the Web and other services like email and IM," Lopes writes. "However, the real power of VoIP over the long term is that any device with an Internet connection can now be voice-enabled."
Lopez expects VoIP to begin to "hit its stride" as broadband penetration exceeds 50% of homes in 2007. She expects 12 million American households — that is, 16% of US broadband households and 11% of all American households — to be using VoIP services by 2010.
Skype, which has over 51 million users, has announced that it is opening up its platform to the Web. Developers will now be able to integrate Skype with their Website or applications.
Given the size of Skype’s user base — this will now be the largest open instant messaging platform on the Internet — it should present some excellent opportunities for developers. Perhaps we’ll see some integration in the near future with Google Talk.
From the press release:
Now anyone will be able to benefit from Skype’s platform and will be able to integrate both presence and instant messaging features into websites and applications such as online gaming, e-commerce, communications and productivity tools, instantly building community and connections between people who can chat and alert others to their online availability.
More information is available on Skype’s Developer Blog.
An FCC deadline for users of VoIP services to acknowledge a notice that they may encounter problems when dialing 911 in an emergency looms on Monday. FCC rules require VoIP service providers to cut off any users who have not responded by that date:
The Federal Communications Commission had set a deadline of next Monday as an interim safeguard while providers of voice-over- Internet-protocol, or VoIP, service rush to comply with an FCC order requiring full emergency 911 capabilities by late November.
Qwest spokesman Michael Dunne said the Denver telco had received the proper acknowledgments from only about 75 percent of its business and residential VoIP customers as of Wednesday and was continuing its efforts to contact customers. Qwest wouldn’t disclose its number of VoIP customers.
Dunne did say Qwest could immediately reconnect service if customers give their acknowledgment after the deadline. Traditional telephone customers aren’t affected by the order.
Vonage, the biggest VoIP carrier with more than 800,000 subscribers, including some in Colorado, told The Associated Press that 96 percent of its customers have responded to the company’s notices about 911 risks.
Other leading carriers declined to quantify the response rate beyond the updates they were required to file with the FCC two weeks ago. AT&T Corp. spokesman Gary Morgenstern said customer acknowledgments are "significantly higher" than the 77 percent figure it reported to the FCC on Aug. 10.
The FCC issued its order in May after a series of highly publicized incidents in which VoIP users were unable to connect with an emergency dispatch operator when calling 911.
Google has released Google Talk, its instant messaging and VoIP client.
Presently it’s in beta and only available to users of its GMail mail service. The program offers the ability to engage in VoIP calls with other users, but the interesting news is that Google has said it’s in talks with other companies, such as AOL, Yahoo! and Skype to integrate their offerings.
That last one — Skype — is most interesting from a VoIP perspective. Perhaps it indicates that Google might being offering its own VoIP service to landlines and mobile phones. By integrating with Skype, Google could offer a private label version of Skype - having Skype handle calls to traditional phone networks and sharing the revenue between the two companies.
Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 | Posted in VoIP News | 1 Comment »
Here are some key findings from a new report released by Alexander Resources:
- Mobile phone carriers are looking to evolved 3G architectures (UMTS release 6, with an IMS architecture - based on SIP - and CDMA 2000 EV-DO Rev. A) to combat the growing wVoIP threat. However lengthy deployments of these new technologies may put mobile phone carriers at risk to competitors. Under this scenario, a significant portion of the market could be captured by wireline telcos and MVNOs, particularly with their combined broadband/Wi-Fi/cellular packages.
- Mobile operators will respond to the increased popularity of wVoIP by offering new lower priced rate plans with unlimited calling for a fixed monthly amount.
- The growing use of IP on cellular, Wi-Fi and WiMAX networks enables not only voice calls over IP but several new services as well. Most notable among these new services are IM and presence (possibly combined with global positioning), videophony and video phone conferencing. And, in the business world, VoIP can be integrated into collaborative work software suites.
A report in the Los Angeles times claims that Google will be launching an instant messaging service (IM) this week, while others predict this is a prelude to Google offering a VoIP service:
Citing unnamed sources "familiar with the service," the Los Angeles Times said that Google’s Instant Messaging program would be called Google Talk and could be launched as early as Wednesday.
Google Talk goes beyond text-based instant messaging using a computer keyboard to let users hold voice conversations with other computer users, the newspaper quoted a source as saying.
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s product plans.
If confirmed, a combined computer text and voice-calling service would put Google Talk in competition with a similar service pioneered by Skype, which has attracted tens of millions of users, especially in Europe, to its own service.
The product push also comes as rivals Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL are all upgrading existing instant messaging systems and expanding into Internet phone-calling services of their own.
"We expect major Internet companies like Yahoo, Google and MSN to offer VOIP (Voice over Internet) service, possibly through a partnership" with telecom companies or other Internet-phone service providers," Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy wrote in a note to investors earlier this week.
Recent moves by Google to expand beyond search into Web-based communications have prompted conflicting speculation over the company’s intentions.
A $4 billion secondary offering of Google stock last week, together with $3 billion in cash on hand, has fueled debate among investors and Web pundits over whether Google is content to build its own technologies or is getting set to acquire.
