Archive for March, 2006
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.
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.
Governments have been a bit slow on the uptake (as they always seem to be with technology), but here’s the largest project we’re aware of:
The (Australian) Northern Territory (NT) government is targeting user support and governance as critical to the success of a looming state-wide Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) rollout.
The government is this month scheduled to complete the last step of a pilot project, a deployment at the Department of Corporate and Information Services in Palm Court in Darwin. The pilot has since its inception in October reached a limited number of sites, including the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Community Services.
The project will eventually see most government sites — encompassing around 12,000 public servants — use a VoIP solution from Telstra. Only some remote sites will continue to be serviced by traditional public switched telephony network (PSTN) offerings.
Garry Haigh, director of IT service management, NT government, said the pilot was designed to make sure change management aspects of the project were covered off, with the technical side already well in hand.
The greenfield rollout to the Department of Justice in October was done to "satisfy our technologists", said Haigh, but deployments since had focussed on securing support from users.
"We’re confident the technology works. But we have to be satisfied from a governance perspective on changeover," he said.
Via Om Malik:
What a whopper of a year for cable telephony!
Cablevision, the last MSO to report its fourth quarter earnings added 130,000 new VoIP customers, up just 7,000 from the previous quarter. The company also added, 94,000 new broadband customers, up from 81,000 adds in the previous quarter. For 2005, Cablevision added 341,793 broadband subscribers and 458,653 VoIP subscribers. Time Warner had also experienced similar growth for its broadband and VoIP services. Some of the smaller players are experiencing triple digit growth in their voice subscribers. According to UBS research estimates, there were 5.1 million cable voice users at year end, up 63% annually and 14% sequentially.
Seems like the cable broadband VoIP service providers have really taken advantage of their unique position to bundle VoIP. Their savvy has got to be making things tough for the VoIP pure-plays.
