Archive for September, 2005
Here’s a good summary of NGN2005 from Networking Pipeline:
Voice over IP may have won the battle of next-generation communications technologies, but there are still plenty of hurdles for it to overcome, according to a panel of industry evangelists.
Network security, regulatory policy and business service issues are just three of the major hurdles that VoIP will have to overcome before gaining ubiquitous acceptance, according to "VoIP’s Next Challenges," a well-attended forum held this week during NGN2005 in Washington, D.C.
"How do we best guard the IP environment from security attacks?" asked Chris Miller, a consultant for Lucent Worldwide Services, discussing the most frequently cited challenge. "Should there be a standard security model to cover all VoIP systems?"
Security threats are numerous, including disruption of service, eavesdropping, unauthorized access and theft of service, said Mike Hluchyj, founder and chief technology officer of Sonus Networks. Of course, those dangers are well known, as are the solutions on the network and session sides: VLANs, firewalls, authentication and encryption, among others.
Nevertheless, substantial security challenges remain because VoIP sites often don’t deploy and employ the available security solutions thoroughly or effectively, said the panelists. To make matters worse, threats sometimes spring up that an organization doesn’t anticipate. For instance, spam is beginning to find its way into networks in unconventional ways, such as through voice calls, said Miller.
Full story
Skype has released a new version of its Windows VoIP service software with some great new features:
- Free call forwarding of incoming calls to other Skype users
- Improved process of setting up conference calls, group IM chats, file transfers and voicemail
- "Personalise Skype" allows people to choose their own pictures, sounds and ringtones when making or receiving calls
Skype also said a user survey found that 76% of members use Skype daily, and 79% wanted to be able to receive calls from landlines.
Thursday, September 29th, 2005 | Posted in VoIP News | No Comments »
From the Financial Times:
Deregulation has led to increased competition, resulting in falls in service fees at a time when customer growth is slowing in maturing regional markets. Unfortunately for the telcos, the industry’s newest popular technology is one that threatens to cut revenues further cheap internet-based phone systems, such as Skype.
The prospect that phone calls could soon become nearly free with the widespread use of “voice over internet protocol” (VoIP) services poses a danger to those Asian telcos that are heavily dependent on voice calls to generate most of their sales and earnings.
The test for the telcos will be how they adapt to a new environment where data and video services, rather than voice, will be the main source of profits.
The growing use of VoIP is already hurting business for Hong Kong’s PCCW and Japan’s NTT among others. Revenues will erode further with the growth of broadband internet networks and the introduction of 3G mobile phones that allow the use of VoIP.
“Telcos are cannibalising their voice business by promoting broadband and 3G,” said Nirgunan Tiruchelvam at Phillip Securities in Singapore. “There is a direct correlation between the growth of VoIP and these services.”
The telecoms ministry in Japan, Asia’s most advanced telecoms market, says the number of subscribers to VoIP services has jumped from 3.1m in 2003 to 8.3m at the end of March 2005, compared with more than 60m regular fixed-line phone subscribers.
Sunday, September 25th, 2005 | Posted in VoIP News | 1 Comment »
The Financial Express in India has an interesting interview with Phil Edholm, the Chief Technology officer of Nortel Networks. Edholm says that the burgeoning call center business in India is spurring global technology development:
Voice over IP is still seen by many as a way of making free phone calls. Do you see it evolving into a full-fledged enterprise communications solution?
We have a very strong vision for VoIP and what I think is even beyond voice over IP. The real value in this is the capability of multimedia to transform how people communicate.
Discussions today are focused more on cost savings because savings are easier to understand. The biggest impact of technology has been productivity. For example, people buy high-speed connectivity not because it is cheap but because of better connectivity that saves on time. The customers I believe are more concerned about effective communication rather than saving on money.
Is India’s emergence as one of the major growth markets transforming the development of technology?
To begin with, language has become important part of development since countries like India and China are driving growth in a big way. Most of the technology that we need might be universal but we have done India-specific changes. We have developed technologies to aid the remote call centre management on requests from India. For instance, companies’ offshoring their call centres to India wanted to have live remote barge-in facility to hear agents’ conversations whenever they want to. And we developed the solution to help the offshoring wave.
Also, Indian accents had to be included in IVRs. Similarly, when you are calling a contact centre and your phone rings longer, you are likely to suspect that the call is going to India and it is an important concern among those farming out call centre jobs to India.
British Telecom is feeling the heat from VoIP services. It’s VoIP product, BT Communicator, is set to slash prices down to 0.5p per minute, versus about 1.2p / minute for Skype, to 27 major countries.
BT Communicator, which is available for download online, only has about 50,000 users (versus about 100 times that for Skype). BT has been slow to promote the product, fearing that it will cannibalize the firm’s traditional circuit-switched business. It now acknowledges that VoIP is where the telephony market is headed.
Here’s an interesting development - two South African companies have teamed up to offer a voice over IP over satellite product. The companies are Satellite Communication (SatComm) and HowzItOnline.com.
Using a device which is about the size of a laptop computer and weighs about 1.7kg (sells for about US$500), people can make and receive phone calls over the Inmarsat Regional Broadband Global Area Network (R-BGAN). The R-BGAN offers service across most of Africa, Asia and Australia, at speeds of up to 144kbps — faster than terrestrial GPRS.
A SatComm spokesman said the always-on Internet connectivity had sufficient bandwidth for streaming media, in addition to less bandwidth intensive services such as Web surfing, instant messaging and e-mail.
Prices for VoIP calls to major countries like the US and UK are expected to be less than 5 cents per minute.
Inmarsat’s BGAN is expected to be launched by the end of the year which will offer broadband coverage to most of the world at speeds up to 492kbps. As broadband-capable satellite service becomes cheaper and increases its coverage footprint, this could really bring down the cost of calling from remote areas on land or sea.
Story from The Business:
Takeover predators begin to circle Vonage
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By : Tony Glover
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PREDATORS are circling US-based internet voice giant Vonage, whose attraction as a takeover target was boosted last week by eBay’s $4bn (£2.2bn, E3.3bn) purchase of Skype.
Vonage was launched in 2001 by 34-year-old Jeffrey Citron, the former chief executive of securities firm Datek Holdings. Citron is expanding the service to the UK and other foreign markets, a process to be partly funded by its planned initial public offering (IPO).
There is growing speculation that Vonage may be snapped up before it makes it to an IPO. Players like Microsoft, Yahoo!, eBay and Google are desperate to grab as much of the rapidly growing internet voice market as they can. According to sources close to Vonage, the company has been planning to raise $600m via an IPO that would value it at more than $1bn.
The Skype sale has galvanised the sector. “The internet voice market has gone critical,” said Keith Woolcock, an analyst at Westhall Capital. “We are now in a land grab for market share where communications and media giants see internet voice as something that can be embedded in other offerings to make them more attractive.”
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Broadcom announced a new integrated VoIP processor chip today at the Fall VON 2005 Conference & Expo in Boston. It seems to have a lot of potential:
Announced today is the Broadcom® BCM1161 — a second generation mobile VoIP processor that focuses on low-power and advanced multimedia and telephony functions. The BCM1161’s advanced multimedia features include polyphonic ring-tone support, a 2 Megapixel digital camera, voice record/playback and video clips record/playback. A variety of telephony features are also supported by the BCM1161 including 3-way conferencing and speaker phone support, and high-fidelity voice capabilities through the use of Broadcom’s BroadVoice technology. The new single-chip integrates an ARM9™-based CPU, analog voice codec with a direct microphone and high-output speaker interface, 262k color LCD display interface and a USB 2.0 interface.
In a previous story, we reported that Vodafone Germany was threatening to block its subscribers from using VoIP services.
Today, Vodafone Group Plc says it sees no reason to block VoIP:
British-based Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile phone group by revenue, said on Monday that the only way to wage war against potentially disruptive new technologies such as voice-over-Internet, or VoIP, would be to compete against them.
"Are we legally in a position to put in filters against voice over IP (Internet Protocol)? Well, I wouldn’t think anybody would say we couldn’t do that today," Vodafone’s Chief Technology Officer Thomas Geitner told the group’s annual analyst and investor day.
"But clearly building a business case around this would not be a long-term, sustainable (strategy)… Our view is we need to make sure we are cost competitive rather than trying to stop Voice over IP," he added.
Compete effectively instead of block out the competition? What a novel idea. Hopefully the German subsidiary go the message.
eBay
CEO Meg Whitman outlined some plans the company has for Skype
, which it recently aquired for $2.6 billion:
- Integrate Skype with eBay. Whitman says that buyers and sellers send eachother millions of e-mails each day about products that are up for sale on the auction site. Whitman believes that users would be interested in communicating with eachother over the phone. Personally, I find this argument to be hard to believe. People can already post phone numbers on their auctions if they want to answer calls, but few do. Much of the success of eBay, I believe, is related to the anonymous nature of it.
- Continue to grow Skype. This is pretty straightforward.
- Pay-per-call lead generation. Whitman believes that eBay can charge sellers a fee for receiving phone calls from potential buyers of between $2 and $12 per lead. She estimates the annual volume of this type of lead generation to be $3.5 billion. I’m not sure what to make of this one.
