Category: Telecom Industry
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Don’t Miss Friday’s Live VUC Call! – Martin Geddes on “Rethinking Broadband and Voice”
Continue Reading: Don’t Miss Friday’s Live VUC Call! – Martin Geddes on “Rethinking Broadband and Voice”What are you doing tomorrow, Friday, December 6, 2013, at 12noon US Eastern (1700 UTC)? Would you like to join in to what should be an excellent conversation about the future of broadband networks, IP communications, telecom, etc.? If so, make plans to join the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call happening live at 12 noon where the guest will be the ever-interesting Martin Geddes. The topic will be “Rethinking broadband and voice: Network Science and Hypervoice” and should prompt some vigorous discussion!
I’ve known Martin for many years now and have been a great fan of his analysis and writing ever since back in the days of his “Telepocalypse” blog. He’s truly a great thinker in the space and is also quite an enjoyable and fun speaker to listen to. We know each other well from the early days of VoIP blogging as well as the conference circuit, and I regularly read his email newsletter and other great content he puts out. He’s very active on Twitter as well.
Having said all that, I do have some fundamental disagreements with some of what he is advocating these days. I wrote about some of this disagreement last year and he and…
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Microsoft Buys Nokia – Was There Really Another Choice?
Continue Reading: Microsoft Buys Nokia – Was There Really Another Choice?Microsoft accomplished something today they haven’t done for a while (at least in my memory) – they dominated the main page of Techmeme and had a great amount of the tech media talking about them.
The news, of course, is of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s Devices and Services business and licensing of Nokia’s patents and mapping services.
Is anyone truly surprised by this?
Consider:
- Microsoft is being beaten in the market by Apple and Google as everything moves to mobile. Their only hope was Nokia, who provided a hardware platform that would run Windows Phone.
- Nokia is being beaten in the market by Apple and Google as everything moves to smartphones. Their only hope was Microsoft, who provided a different mobile operating system for their devices that gave them a competitive angle.
Given those conditions, the marriage makes a certain amount of sense.
But… you only have to scroll down that Techmeme page (captured at 1:30pm US ET today) to realize how desperate a situation this is for both companies.
First, news is out that Apple is holding an event one week from today on September 10 where they are widely expected to announce new iPhones, including potentially a lower…
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10 Years Of Skype – Massive Disruption… But Will Skype Remain Relevant?
Continue Reading: 10 Years Of Skype – Massive Disruption… But Will Skype Remain Relevant?Ten years ago today, on August 29, 2003, a group of entrepreneurs and developers from Denmark, Sweden and Estonia unleashed a small software program that would fundamentally and irrevocably disrupt telecommunications and just communications in general. Everything would change. Skype has a 10th anniversary blog post out today that highlights some of those changes that have been brought about by Skype, although I personally find their 9th anniversary infographic a bit more interesting because it traced back the history of Skype.Massive Disruption
There is a GREAT amount for Skype to celebrate on it’s 10th birthday. The disruption that has occurred within telecom is truly massive:
- The cost per-minute of international phone calls has been commoditized to near zero. (Indeed, how many people actually make real “phone calls” internationally anymore?)
- Telcos – and governments! – who depended upon those per-minute fees have seen almost that entire revenue stream evaporate, or at least show that it is rapidly fading away. Economic disruption on a massive scale!
- Skype came to be a prime example of how “over-the-top (OTT)” apps could exist on top of the existing telecom networks – and take both marketshare and revenue from those networks.
- Skype introduced the masses…
- The cost per-minute of international phone calls has been commoditized to near zero. (Indeed, how many people actually make real “phone calls” internationally anymore?)
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Reminder – Opus Codec Presentation Streaming LIVE From IETF 87 in 2 Hours
Continue Reading: Reminder – Opus Codec Presentation Streaming LIVE From IETF 87 in 2 HoursWant to learn more about the Opus codec and why it is so important? As I mentioned at the end of my last post about why Opus matters, there will be a special presentation about Opus as part of the IETF 87 Technical Plenary happening in about 2 hours starting at around 17:45-18:00 in Berlin, Germany (Central European Summer Time, UTC+2, 6 hours off of US Eastern time).
There are three options for watching and participating live:
- using a WebRTC-capable browser (latest editions of Chrome and Firefox) and connecting to: http://www.meetecho.com/ietf87/tech_plenary
- listening to the audio stream at for either Potsdam 1 or Potsdam 3 (the plenary is in the combined room and I don’t know which stream will be used)
- watching a video live stream at: https://new.livestream.com/internetsociety/ietf87techplenary
The technical plenary begins at 17:40 but there are some other reports before the Opus section. The agenda can be found online and includes:
1. IAB Chair Report
2. IRTF Chair Report
3. RSE and RSOC Chair Report
4. Technical Topic: Opus Codec
a. Introduction
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b. Overview of Opus
c. Testing
d. History of Opus in the IETF
e. Opus Deployment Panel
f. Future Work -
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Why The Opus Codec Matters – Even If You Don’t Care About Audio
Continue Reading: Why The Opus Codec Matters – Even If You Don’t Care About AudioWhat makes the Opus codec so interesting? Why is there such a buzz about Opus right now? If you are not in telecom or doing anything with audio, why should you even remotely care about Opus?
In a word…
Innovation!
And because Opus has the potential to let us communicate with each other across the Internet with a richer and more natural sound. You will be able to hear people or music or presenters with much more clarity and more like you are right there with them.
Opus can help build a better user experience across the Internet.
You see, the reality is that today “real-time communication” using voice and video is increasingly being based on top of the Internet Protocol (IP), whether that communication is happening across the actual Internet or whether it is happening within private networks. If you’ve used Skype, Google+ Hangouts, any voice-over-IP (VoIP) softphones, any of the new WebRTC apps or any of the mobile smartphone apps that do voice or video, you’ve already been using IP-based real-time communication.
Dropping The Shackles Of The Legacy PSTN
Part of the beauty of the move to IP is that we no longer have to worry about the…
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Moving Beyond Telephone Numbers – The Need For A Secure, Ubiquitous Application-Layer Identifier
Continue Reading: Moving Beyond Telephone Numbers – The Need For A Secure, Ubiquitous Application-Layer IdentifierDo “smart” parking meters really need phone numbers? Does every “smart meter” installed by electric utilities need a telephone number? Does every new car with a built-in navigation system need a phone number? Does every Amazon Kindle (and similar e-readers) really need its own phone number?
In the absence of an alternative identifier, the answer seems to be a resounding “yes” to all of the above.
At the recent SIPNOC 2013 event, U.S. Federal Communications Commission CTO Henning Schulzrinne gave a presentation (slides available) about “Transitioning the PSTN to IP” where he made a point about the changes around telephone numbers and their uses (starting on slide 14) and specifically spoke about this use of phone numbers for devices (slide 20). While his perspective is obviously oriented to North America and country code +1, the trends he identifies point to a common problem:
What do we use as an application-layer identifier for Internet-connected devices?
In a subsequent conversation, Henning indicated that one of the area codes seeing the largest amount of requests for new phone numbers is one in Detroit – because of the automakers need to provision new cars with navigation systems such as OnStar that need an…
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You Can Now Call Into Google+ From Regular Phones – Google Connects Google Voice To Hangouts
Continue Reading: You Can Now Call Into Google+ From Regular Phones – Google Connects Google Voice To HangoutsWant to hear the sound of Google further disrupting the world of telecom? If you have a Google Voice number and also use Google+ (as I do) with the Hangouts feature enabled, you’ll soon be hearing this new sound if you haven’t already.
UPDATE: I have written a follow-up post responding to several comments and expanding on several points.An Unexpected Ringing
Yesterday a random PR person called the phone number in the sidebar of this blog to pitch me on why I should write about her client. This phone number is through Google Voice and I knew by the fact that my cell phone and Skype both started ringing simultaneously that someone was calling that number.
But as I was deciding whether or not to actually answer the call, I realized that there was another “ringing” sound coming from my computer that I had not heard before. Flipping quickly through my browser windows I found my Google+ window where this box appeared at the top of the “Hangouts” sidebar on the right:
Now, of course, I HAD to answer the call, even though I knew from experience that most calls to that number are PR pitches. I clicked…
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Watch/Listen Live – FCC CTO Henning Schulzrinne on “The End of Plain Old Telephone System (POTS)” at 5:30pm EDT Tonight at IETF86
Continue Reading: Watch/Listen Live – FCC CTO Henning Schulzrinne on “The End of Plain Old Telephone System (POTS)” at 5:30pm EDT Tonight at IETF86In about 15 minutes, at 5:30pm US Eastern At around 6:00pm US EDT, Henning Schulzrinne, CTO of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be speaking on “The End of Plain Old Telephone System (POTS): Transitioning the PSTN to IP” at the technical plenary of the 86th IETF meeting happening this week in Orlando, Florida. You can listen or watch here:
- Audio stream – either Caribbean 3 or Caribbean 4
- Jabber chat: plenary@jabber.ietf.org
- Meetecho conferencing (webinar)
Henning’s slides are also available for download.
It should be quite an interesting session!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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WebRTC Passes Huge Milestone In Rewiring The Web – Video Calls Between Chrome and Firefox
Continue Reading: WebRTC Passes Huge Milestone In Rewiring The Web – Video Calls Between Chrome and FirefoxThis week the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative passed a HUGE milestone in adding a real-time communications layer to the Web with achieving interoperability between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Google and Mozilla celebrated with a pair of blog posts:They also published the video I’ve embedded below. On the surface, the video doesn’t appear terribly exciting: two guys having a basic conversation over video. But consider this:
- The video conversation was initiated from within web browsers.
- There were NO plugins used… no Flash, Java or anything else.
- The entire conversation was securely encrypted.
- The call used “wideband audio” (also called “HD audio”) to provide a much richer experience that far exceeds any kind of conversation you can have on traditional telecom and mobile networks.
- The call did not have to involve any external telecom networks or services and could have been initiated directly from one browser to the other. (I don’t know exactly how they set up this call.)
And perhaps most importantly:
Any web developer can now create this kind of real-time communication using a few lines of JavaScript and other web programming languages.
As I’m said before, WebRTC will…
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Oracle Buys Acme Packet For $2 Billion To Gain SIP Session Border Controllers (SBCs) And More
Continue Reading: Oracle Buys Acme Packet For $2 Billion To Gain SIP Session Border Controllers (SBCs) And MoreFascinating news today out of Oracle that they have purchased Acme Packet in a transaction estimated to be around $2 billion US. For those of you not really tracking the VoIP security space, Acme Packet is probably the world’s largest vendor of “session border controllers (SBCs)“, devices that are used to securely and reliable interconnect VoIP networks. SBCs also provide a very important role in helping with interoperability of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling between the SIP products and networks of different vendors.As Andy Abramson writes, the fascinating aspect of this acquisition is this:
This is an interesting grab by one of the tech world’s true giants because it sqaurly puts Oracle into a game where they begin to compete with the giants of telecom, many of whom run Oracle software to drive things including SBC’s, media gateways and firewall technology that’s sold.
This acquisition does put Oracle VERY firmly into the telecom sector at a carrier / large enterprise level, as Acme Packet’s products are widely used within that tier of companies. As the news release notes:
“The company’s solutions are deployed by more than 1,900 service providers and enterprises globally, including 89 of world’s top 100…