Archive for March, 2006
A good article from Carl Windsor at TeleCity:
It is essential to involve all your company departments in the decision to go VoIP. Understand what the technical benefits are and articulate them across your business in terms of benefits to each department. Buy-in like this will ease deployment and help to generate the business case.
Set your goals and stick to them - VoIP can bring many benefits but it is important to understand what features are available, what can realistically be achieved in your delivery timescale, what features will benefit your company and fix these goals in stone before beginning deployment. VoIP is such a feature-rich technology, if you do not set strict delivery goals, ’scope creep’ will delay delivery.
Don’t forget the infrastructure - When constructing your business case for migrating to VoIP, don’t forget the about the infrastructure needed to support the VoIP system. Traditional PSTN phone lines are able to survive power outages and can function in emergency situations. Even when PABXs are deployed, they are usually protected by UPSs to maintain function throughout the power outage. It is important to evaluate the cost of protecting the VoIP infrastructure from power fluctuations at all points (PoE switches, VoIP Gateway) and include this as part of the business case.
Speak to experts - With the explosion of end-user VoIP services such as Skype, MSN and Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk, home use has overtaken corporate deployment significantly. The drawback to this is that most companies have more ‘domestically trained’ self-proclaimed VoIP experts than members of the IT team. The corporate VoIP market is vastly more complicated so make sure you chose you source of advice wisely.
Understand the risks - Ensure that the risks associated with deploying VoIP have been assessed by your security forum. Whilst most departments may be happy with the security of a VoIP deployment, departments which involve personal information (HR) or credit card information (finance) may have more strict security requirements. It is vital that your company understands the risks and is able to manage and mitigate them appropriately.
Rest of the story
Market research firm In-Stat says that wireline voice revenues are on the decline, with broadband revenues insufficient to make up the loss.
“Voice services, which have experienced persistent pressure from wireless alternatives, are increasingly being challenged by VoIP solutions,” says David Lemelin, In-Stat analyst. “Long distance revenues are increasingly becoming irrelevant as ‘any distance’ calling plans for wireline and wireless services take hold.”
Dual mode mobile phones capable of both VoIP over WiFi and GSM over traditional networks are poised to become "the next big thing." Frequent travelers and frequent talkers alike will be able to benefit from cheaper phone service provided by VoIP when WiFi networks are available, while not giving up the flexibility and broad network coverage of a traditional mobile phone. The VoIP cost saving aspect becomes all the more important when international travel is considered, as bringing your GSM phone abroad can cost you upwards of US$2 per minute in calling charges.
Here, we take a look at some of the best new offerings in GSM VoIP phones:
First up is the Calypso C1250i, with built in 802.11 wireless capability, allowing for not only VoIP audio phone calls, but when teamed up with its 30 frames per second video playback and recording functionality, live action video phone-to-phone video conferencing as well.
Also notable about Calypso Wireless is its “Automatic Switching of Network Access Points” technology which allows seamless voice roaming between GSM cellular networks at WiFi networks.
Next up is Voice Internet Phone Network’s (VIPN) Axia 308. This quadband GSM phone also supports GPRS, 802.11 WiFi, VoIP, and is a PDA running Windows CE. The phone will sell for around US$600.
Finally, Paragon Wireless introduced the first dual mode SIP phone in China this week – the PWTW-1100. The handset boasts a four hour talk / 72 hour standby battery capacity, even when both its WiFI and GSM capabilities are running. It also offers an SD memory card slot and an MP3 player, giving it iPod like functionality. And in terms of security WPA encryption and a VPN (Virtual Private Networking) client are included, as well.
These are some of the hottest VoIP GSM dual mode phones, but clearly they’re not the only ones. Anything better out there that we missed? Post a comment.
Good news out of China on VoIP service. While we were previously worried that China was going to ban VoIP. Now it has reversed course and decided to legalize VoIP service:
The Ministry of Information Industry of China is likely to issue the first Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) license in the country this June at the latest, said a source in the ministry.
The move not only signals that China is loosening its control upon VoIP business, but also could indicate that it will have a significant impact upon the nation’s telecom sector. The opening of VoIP business has become a global trend these years.
The ministry has made an initial scheme for the VoIP development in China, the source said. It plans to issue the first license to a company under the aegis of the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, and makes the company as a pilot VoIP carrier.
Next, the nation will open its VoIP market entirely in 2007 when telecom carriers can also apply for VoIP licenses, predicted the source.
The chosen company is said to be one in Southern China, which needs to be finalized. The source declined to tell the name of the company to have the license, but he confirmed that the company is not a carrier.
The company will operate the VoIP business nationwide and build platforms for VoIP technologies and operation, according to the source.
Its first VoIP technology platform is expected to be completed on March 20, said the source. Officials from the ministry visited the company several days ago, he added.
A bit of humor, but also seriousness, from Russell Shaw at ZDNet:
Would you really buy a 150-line VoIP solution at CompUSA? by ZDNet’s Russell Shaw — Yesterday at Spring VON 2006, CompUSA announced its partnership with Bandwidth.com and Sylantro Systems to offer what it called the first full-featured hosted VoIP service for small and medium-sized businesses in the retail industry. Target audiences will be businesses in need of 10 to 200 lines. I have one word for this strategy. Two words, […]
This is good news from the CEO of Qwest, but as noted at the end of this article snippet, there seems to be some question as to how committed Qwest is:
Qwest Communications CEO Richard Notebaert on March 15 voiced his company’s commitment to "net neutrality," saying his company would never block traffic or degrade network performance as a way to maintain competitive advantage.
But with the next breath Notebaert said that government regulation shouldn’t prevent service providers from negotiating "commercial agreements" that allow them to deliver different types or grades of service at a specific price. The market should be allowed to determine how it will package and charge for network services, he said.
"My job has never been to degrade service or to give any customers less capability than they asked for and paid for," Notebaert said, speaking at the VON (Voice Over Network) Spring Conference here.
However, Notebaert’s position raised questions in the audience about Qwest’s commitment to net neutrality if these commercial agreements might tend to restrict the public access or raise the cost of accessing Internet services or content.
Of course, if there’s question about Qwest’s commitment and it comes out in favor of net neutrality, what does that say about the Internet service providers who don’t make such announcements?
Via Forbes:
Few American households use voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) services as their home phone but adoption is growing — up 20% since June 2005 — and most users are satisfied with their service.
About 3.9 million U.S. households used VoIP as home-phone service in January 2006, according to a study released Tuesday by Telephia, a market research firm. That accounts for about 3.5% of U.S. households, up from 2.9% using VoIP in June 2005. However, the survey didn’t include digital-phone offerings from cable companies like Comcast (nasdaq: CMCSA) and Time Warner (nyse: TWX), which hawk "triple-play" packages of television, high-speed data and phone service.
Of the non-cable VoIP services, Vonage leads the pack with a 47.5% market share, up from a 40% share last June. Vonage had almost four times the U.S. share of its closest competitor Skype, a unit of eBay (nasdaq: EBAY), which placed second with an 11.8% share.
Market share doesn’t necessarily lead to profitability, though. Vonage, which announced IPO plans last month, lost almost $190 million in the first nine months of 2005.
We’ve been waiting for Phil Zimmermann (the inventor of PGP) to come out with his VoIP encryption software known (at least for the time being as Zfone) for over a year now.
The good news is that he’s released a free beta version. The bad news is that there’s no Windows version yet - we’ll have to wait another month for that:
I’ve just released Zfone, a new product that takes a new approach to make a secure telephone for the Internet.
I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another Zfone client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.
Lucent’s Chief Marketing Officer says we have to wait at least another year for mobile VoIP:
Internet telephony over mobile phones is on the way - but don’t hold your breath. There weren’t be many commercial offerings until operators have made a major enhancement to their infrastructures, said John Giere, chief marketing officer with Lucent, and that won’t be until 2007 at the earliest.
He said that most operators have uplink speeds that are too slow for quality VoIP calls and that they should be looking to upgrade their networks with HSUPA (high speed uplink packet address). The technology’s downlink equivalent (HSDPA) is being slowly introduced.
However, Griere said that the uplink technology is yet to be standardised and doesn’t expect it to be commercially available until 2007 or 2008.
However, that timing does not fit into the VoIP-over-mobile plans of Skype Technologies and the Hutchison 3 Group.
Last month, the two companies announced a partnership to provide the world’s first commercial VoIP service for mobile phones. The companies aim to begin offering service in select markets as early as this year, said Christian Salbaing, managing director of European telecommunications at Hutchison 3G.
Great article from Russell Shaw:
CEO of VoIP equipment and systems supplier Avaya Inc., Peterson said that some IT managers should not deploy VoIP as a way to lower communications costs. Instead, he said, ITs should look at the technology as an operations enhancer.
"We don’t believe IP telephony is a cost-reduction case," Peterson said. "I fundamentally believe that the real value is not cost reduction but how it changes the business."
My first thought was that statement bordered on the heretical. But as I have learned,part of being a thought leader is learning to lead yourself in thought. So I started processing just what the Avaya CEO said and why he said it.
