Category: Telecom Industry
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The 2 Big, Glaring Failures of the “Voice 3.0” Manifesto
Continue Reading: The 2 Big, Glaring Failures of the “Voice 3.0” ManifestoToday Alec Saunders posted a truly brilliant piece: Voice 3.0: The Emergence of the Voice Web. It’s a much-needed update to his 2005 “Voice 2.0 Manifesto” and very nicely brings together much of the thinking about telecom today. (And yes, I had a chance to review it and provided feedback before it went live.)It’s brilliant. It’s long. You really need to go and read it. It includes many of the themes we’ll be talking about next week at eComm. It’s right about so many things.
IT’S ALSO VERY WRONG.
The document as written has two big, glaring omissions.
Voice Doesn’t Matter… As Much
First off… the piece is all about voice. Which is great. But here’s a reality check:
People do NOT want to communicate by ONLY voice.
I spend my day communicating with people all over the world… in pretty much constant “real-time” communication. But almost NONE of it is by voice.
Instead it is by IM… by Twitter… by Facebook… by SMS… even by email. All text-based mediums.
No voice.
Now occasionally I do actually speak with someone – and usually get startled when my phone or Skype actually rings. But the majority of my…
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Google TechTalk: A Brief Prehistory of Voice over IP
Continue Reading: Google TechTalk: A Brief Prehistory of Voice over IPWant to understand the history of Voice over IP (VoIP)? To learn about the various protocols and standards efforts that got us to where we are today?Shawn Merdinger recently posted to the VOIPSEC mailing list the link to this Google Tech Talk back in August 2010 about the history of VoIP. The video runs close to 2 hours but provides a really good background in terms of the protocols and efforts starting with ARPA work back in the 1970’s and moving up to today… well worth a viewing if you want to gain some historical context for where we are today.
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How Does IPv6 Impact Telecom Networks? Join This Free Online Session Tomorrow To Learn…
Continue Reading: How Does IPv6 Impact Telecom Networks? Join This Free Online Session Tomorrow To Learn…How does IPv6 impact telecommunications networks? How will IPv6 affect the SIP protocol? If you work in telecom, what should you be aware of with regard to IPv6? With World IPv6 Day only a week away, if you have been wondering about these kind of questions, please feel free to join me live in a free session hosted by the US Telecommunications Association:IPv6 and Telecom Networks
Thursday, June 2, 2011
1:00pm US EasternRegistration is free and if you are unable to attend it will be recorded for later viewing. (And if you register now, you’ll be notified when the archive is available for viewing.) The description of the session is:
The networks that make up the Internet and IP communications are in the middle of a sea-change with the transition to IPv6. What impact will IPv6 have on telecom and communications networks?
Join USTelecom and Voxeo for a look at the various challenges that telecom and broadband services providers face in keeping their communication services working while transitioning to IPv6.
I’ll be explaining briefly why there is all the attention on IPv6 then getting into the basics of IPv6 addressing. After a brief overview, I’ll then dive into…
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China Passes 900 Million Cell Phone Users!
Continue Reading: China Passes 900 Million Cell Phone Users!Fascinating stats out of an article at TheNextWeb this week:China has become the first country to reach the 900 million mobile phone user milestone after amassing about 11 million mobile phone users in April alone, according to a report by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The report itself is available in Chinese. Looking at it via Google Translate did back up the numbers quoted in the article (assuming Google Translate was accurate).
By any measurement, 900 million is a staggering number of mobile phone users. TheNextWeb’s article goes on to say that India is second worldwide with 811 million mobile phone users followed distantly by the US with 303 million users.
Said another way… China has almost 3 times as many mobile phone users as the US.
Consider, too, that China’s population is 1.3 billion… and you have to imagine that like folks here in the US some % of people have multiple mobile phones… so there’s obviously plenty of room to grow.
I found this intriguing from the article:
China’s 3G networks, which launched in 2009, are still used only by a small portion of the country’s total mobile phone populace. In April, China had…
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Voxbone To Work with United Nations To Deploy New 888 Country Code For Disaster Relief Efforts
Continue Reading: Voxbone To Work with United Nations To Deploy New 888 Country Code For Disaster Relief EffortsCool news from the good folks at Voxbone yesterday that they have been chosen by the U.N. to implement a new “888” country code for agencies offering disaster relief.It’s not clear from the news release exactly how this would work, but Alec Saunders spoke with Voxbone CEO yesterday and wrote this in a post:
As Ullens explained to me, +888 is a real country code assigned by the ITU to the UN. In cases of humanitarian need, where telephone systems may be inoperable because of natural disaster, the first teams on the ground would deploy a local GSM antenna, connected via satellite to the rest of the world. Then Voxbone would simply forward calls to the +888 country code via satellite to the local GSM station on the ground. The impact is that UN inter-agency, intra-agency, and external users will be able to dial a +888 number assigned to a relief agency from anywhere in the world, and be immediately connected to that relief agency in the field, in whatever country being served. Not only that, the numbers need never change. Relief staff will be reachable on the same numbers in whatever location they are currently assigned.
If this…
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Mitel Reorganizes – President Leaves, Business Units Simplified, More Changes
Continue Reading: Mitel Reorganizes – President Leaves, Business Units Simplified, More ChangesMitel today announced a series of organizational changes, including the departure of Paul Butcher, Mitel’s President and Chief Operating Officer. The news release indicates they are merging together various sales organizations and simplifying the business units into three:- Mitel Communications Solutions: responsible for delivering unified communications and collaboration products and services to businesses.
- Mitel NetSolutions: responsible for network and hosted services, mobile services, and broadband connectivity.
- Mitel DataNet: responsible for the distribution of third-party products to partners and customers.
It also briefly mentions the departure of Paul Butcher as of Saturday. From a product point-of-view, there were two statements I found interesting:
- “a re-direction of our R&D investment to products serving the high-growth market of 100 to 2,500 user organizations.” Which makes sense, given that this area is one in which Mitel has traditionally done well.
- “we intend to exploit our significant market leadership in voice virtualization.” i.e. continuing their partnership with VMware. Again this also makes sense given that people are looking for solutions to deploy more applications with less hardware… and looking at virtualization as one of the potential solutions.
To me, all of this is naturally to be expected after Mitel appointed Richard McBee the new CEO…
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The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?
Continue Reading: The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?Multiple people have pinged me asking if I was going to weigh in on the news last night that AT&T is acquiring T-Mobile USA.Seriously?
It’s been ages since I’ve seen this kind of online and offline media feeding frenzy[1] … I mean, look at Techmeme this morning:
Pretty much everybody and anybody who writes online with anything remotely to do with communications has generated posts on the topic.
I think at this point all we can really do is watch what the regulators say… and realize that this will take a year or more to actually happen. I’ll perhaps have more to say at some future time, but right now I’m just reading Om and all the many other comments out there…
[1] Well, okay, maybe we haven’t seen this kind of media feeding frency since, oh, the iPad2 launch 😉
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Nokia and the Ongoing “War of Ecosystems”
Continue Reading: Nokia and the Ongoing “War of Ecosystems”Is Nokia about to drop its entire mobile platform for Android or Windows Phone 7? Yesterday the buzz in the telecom space was all about an apparent memo to employees from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop that said Nokia was on a “burning platform” and needed to make some hard choices. The text of the memo, which Engadget has in full, is brilliantly written. The metaphor of the worker on a burning oil platform is well done… and I expect we’ll hear more usage of that in the future by others.
The memo is also a very well done and brutally honest assessment of where Nokia stands in the mobile market and where the competition sits. What I found most compelling, though, was the commentary around the “war of ecosystems” (my emphasis added):
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we…
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And Thus Dies The “VON” Name…
Continue Reading: And Thus Dies The “VON” Name…For those of us who have been around the “VoIP industry” for some time now, the “VON Conferences” put on by Jeff Pulver were the place to be in the early days of VoIP. We were all mostly early adopters and embraced with enthusiasm this idea of sending voice and later video over the IP networks… there was a real community of both attendees and speakers… all of us chasing that vision of real-time communications over the Internet and other IP networks.
“VON” as a name continued to morph and evolve… it became a series of conferences… the “V” included “video”… it spawned the VON Coalition on public policy issues… Jeff and his Pulvermedia team launched “VON Magazine”, issues of which can still be found online in some places… www.von.com became a media hub around VoIP issues… “VON” became many things…
And then it all ended in early 2008 with Pulvermedia’s investors seizing assets and then with Jeff’s resignation. Fast forward to December 2008 and the VON brand was reborn through Virgo Publishing. I and many others wondered if Virgo could recapture and rebuild the VON community. They tried. They had a VON conference in 2009 (and I was a…
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Meet My Spam Honeypot for Telemarketers (Otherwise Known As My Desk Phone)
Continue Reading: Meet My Spam Honeypot for Telemarketers (Otherwise Known As My Desk Phone)The phone on my desk rang a second time today. I glanced at the console, didn’t recognize the Caller ID and simply ignored the call. A minute or two later a text message buzzed on my iPhone with a transcription of the voicemail left by the caller. I took one look and knew right away:
Yep, another telemarketer!
Just like another call earlier today. As I did my little glance-ignore-wait-for-text-message routine I realized yet again how my communications channels have changed over the years. Here is the reality:
I pretty much NEVER answer my desk phone.
Why not? Pretty simple, really:
The people who I want to speak with already know how to get in touch with me!
And the “how” comes down to: unified communications and mobile.
Unified Communications
For instance, we’re huge users of Skype internally at Voxeo. I have everyone in the company as a contact, and am in a zillion various group chats with internal employees. If someone within the company wants to reach me, they will:
- Check my presence on Skype. Am I online? If so, am I “away”? or “busy/Do Not Disturb”?
- Send me an IM – asking if they can call me if…
- Check my presence on Skype. Am I online? If so, am I “away”? or “busy/Do Not Disturb”?