DSP Group is one of very few companies out there that is promoting an alternative to VoIP-over-WiFi. It has significantly enhanced its processor to handle advanced VoIP functionalities. DSP Group DECT VoIP processor will, for instance, enable D-Link to develop features including PBX function, use of Cordless HS for reception, issue VoIP calls, having Wideband audio calls, having data over the cordless etc.

DECT is up against VoIP—over-WiFi in the residential market. However DECT admittedly provides better quality, longer stand-by, longer talk time and much better range than WiFi.

There are a few new applications where DECT is / will be integrated over the coming year. These include IAD (integration of DSLx with Home routing), eMTA, Infotainment Tablets/Handsets. These new applications will boost again the growth of DECT, which had otherwise seen a steady decline in Europe, its primary market.

DECT is also able to compete with WiFi in FMC, according to DSP Group. The company is cooperating with few OEMs and a big operator in a development of CDMA Mobile Handset that has DECT function. This Handset will use DECT in the home and CDMA outside of the home. This solution will surely have an edge in terms of voice quality at home.

Hosted VoIP provider, Alteva, recently started deployment of its in-house developed FMC solution. Most FMC applications hand the call off to a PSTN number such as cell phone. Once the call is answered on this device there is – in majority of the cases - no way to have the call transferred back to the employee corporate phone system. Alteva FMC solution makes a small improvement. A call can be transferred from cell phone to office phone and then back to another extension on the customer’s corporate phone system, enabling a better FMC experience.

There is however a little inconvenience. If the user drops desk phone and picks mobile phone, the transfer is done manually. But Alteva us looking to make this feature automatic one day.

According to Alteva, it is North America’s largest enterprise hosted VoIP provider, with clients in all 50 US states and 9 countries. The customers come from a variety of different verticals including retail, finance, accounting, broker dealers, private investigation, call centers and more.

According to the shipment numbers we have from vendors, there was an appreciable sequential decline from 4Q08 to 1Q09 in the volume of carrier VoIP equipment sales. Softswitch components, which comprise the bulk of carrier VoIP equipment, saw sales decline from $897 million in 4Q08 to $708 million in 1Q09. That represents a Q-o-Q decline of over 21 percent.

The worst hit among the softswitch components was the Class 4 softswitch which saw sales declining by over 40 percent.

Continue reading "Carrier VoIP equipment market shrinks during 1Q09" »

KT Networks, part of Korea Telecom group, will be adding VoIP features to its Windows Mobile smartphone. The company will be using GIPS voice processing solution which includes HD voice capabilities. GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile for Windows provides support for de facto wideband standard, iSAC and iPCM-wb.

Currently GIPS is a supplier of core voice processing for the following mobile VoIP providers: LG-Nortel, Nimbuzz, GreemPacket/Telecom Malaysia, Tencent, Optimobile and Movial.

GIPS made a name for itself providing voice processing codecs for unpredictable (wireline) IP networks. VoIP over 3G and 4G adds a few more challenges. Therefore VoIP processing solutions such as the one provided by GIPS will be a crucial component to provide quality voice offering. A bigger challenge according to GIPS will be the education of all divisions within carriers.

We wrote about the possible use of 3G-324M standard for VoIP over 3G. GIPS believes that 3G-324M “is an appendix for a dying technology - circuit switch.”

Ever since Skype announced support for IP PBXs, we have seen some interest in how best to tie in Skype in the PBX environment. Integrating Skype can be tricky because Skype is a P2P application. XCast Labs is a hosted VoIP provider that recently announced $2.7 million funding. This is how they tie in Skype:

1. Skype user dials Skype-to-Skype call using Skype username of matrix.us.
2. Call goes to XCast hosted platform, where the company has a gateway that does Skype to SIP translation.
3. XCast then prompts the caller to enter the XCast phone number they wish to call. Thereafter there is an onnet transfer. Pretty much like calling a PBX auto-attendant and entering a long extension number.
4. XCast platform sees the Skype user name that is calling and assigns them permanently an internal XSID (XCast-Skype ID). XCast customers can dial that XSID and XCast platform translates the SIP call into an outbound Skype-to-Skype call to the Skype user name that is linked to the XSID. The XSID is a number that has no possible conflict with any PSTN number.

Dialing with a username other than your own is obviously not convenient. Gateway translation, which is how most developers have so far been handling Skype integration, sounds like old days of PC-to-Phone. Assigning unique number to Skype caller sounds like inefficient use of resources.

XCast has obviously made a bold attempt to integrate Skype into its platform. I am sure the funding is not for the Skype integration. We have not seen any platform companies that have been able to seamlessly integrate Skype due to its P2P nature. Ideally speaking Skype would have to build PBX features by itself and sell a virtual PBX services package.

XCast is a voice+video telephony service provider serving 50,000 voice lines. It carries about 50 million minutes of traffic per month. With the help of recent funding the service provider plans to triple its network capacity to be able to handle 10m minutes per day. The company also plans to target Apple iPhone users with video telephony apps.

Veraz will be offering a joint prepaid wholesale settlement/billing solution in partnership with Comarch. Prepaid wholesale must be gaining traction given the current economic recession. It becomes a requirement for carriers looking to offer service to those carriers that would not pass the necessary credit checks for a post-paid account. Pre-paid billing is also attractive to the wholesale carrier’s customers as a way to manage their interconnection costs.

According to Veraz, there has been a fairly limited deployment of carrier pre-paid billing systems, mainly because of the expense and complexity of traditional IN SCP based solutions. Those are some of the technical challenges that the vendor solves.

Veraz is also able to offer the prepaid wholesale billing solution as part of its IPX offering. Veraz’s SBC platform can be deployed as part of this solution.

The Veraz Service Broker provides standards compliant SIP and INAP interfaces for integration with VoIP softswitches and legacy PSTN switches. Between the Veraz Service Broker and the Comarch application the interface is DIAMETER. Comarch’s billing application supports relevant OSS/BSS standards and has been deployed in tier one carriers.

A general criticism leveled against Microsoft IPTV solution is that it is too feature rich and therefore requires lots of hardware. Microsoft is solving the issue through virtualization. Microsoft’s Mediaroom will be the first IPTV platform to offer virtualization support.

The benefits are as usual. However it is worth pointing out that virtualization can particularly bring benefits when the size of the deployment is small – “actually even when it’s relatively sizable such as serving around 30,000 subscribers in a large town or small city.” According to Microsoft, virtualization will help its IPTV customers speed time to market by up to three weeks.

Where large operators are concerned the virtualization can potentially help those looking to extend an existing service into new markets to serve lower density communities that serve up to 30,000 households. Additionally, for deployments of greater than 30,000 subscriber homes, a mix of virtualized and dedicated servers can provide the efficiency benefits.

Virtualization support in Mediaroom involves sharing the resources of a physical server – things like memory, disks, CPU cycles, and so on – among several “virtual servers”. This is possible because not all the services required by a Mediaroom deployment need all the hardware resources (CPU, memory, etc) all the time. So, virtualization allows Mediaroom to optimize the use of the available resources.

Reservation Telephone Cooperative is likely to be the first service provider to deploy TV services powered by Mediaroom with virtualization. Currently, there are more than 3 million subscribers to Mediaroom-powered TV services worldwide.

Agnity recently announced deployment of its nextgen SCP and applications such as LNP, Advanced Toll Free, Voice VPN, Account Code, Least Cost Routing, etc at Mexico’s leading telco, Alestra. Agnity has implemented its nextgen SCP solution at various telco networks worldwide.

There is certain overlap between nextgen SCP and SCIM. Agnity’s SCP works as an Application Server with SCIM functionality included. SCIM on the other hand provides only the service brokering functionality in IMS environment.

The business case for nextgen SCPs has been debated over the years. You have carriers who want to offer IP services across their TDM networks. But you also have those who want to utilize their existing IN applications within the TDM cloud and extend them over to IP networks. Nextgen SCPs and SCIMs are used to achieve that. If the service runs in network agnostic environment, this can result in huge CAPEX and OPEX reduction.

There are actually certain applications like LNP that mandate the use of nextgen SCP technology e.g. a carrier looking to offer LNP of a VoIP line/number over to some TDM line and vice versa. LNP is just an example of its kind. Nextgen SCPs are able to migrate most legacy applications to nextgen environment.

One SCP feature that we would like to see is to port a consumer wire line number to a wireless phone since it is all IP in 3G. In case of Agnity’s solution, the LNP feature provides the generic application logic and DB implementation. It is the carriers who own and manage the specific deployment aspects. As of now, the LNP DBs of wire line and wireless phone numbers are maintained separately.

BigBand has won a supplier contract with Chunghwa Telecom for an IPTV advertising platform. BigBand was up against companies like Packetvision. Alcatel-Lucent (IPTV supplier to Chunghwa) also has its own ad platform. Factors leading to BigBand selection include the ability to facilitate a smooth migration path to future personalized SD and HD video services, scalability in media processing in MPEG2, and H.264 format, better interworking with Multimedi-On-Demand (MOD) SD and HD content, close collaboration with the MOD STBs (such as Hwacom STB models), encoders, etc.

It is not clear if the BigBand product will provide features like pay-per-click or whether there is any ad insertion available for local businesses. However according to the vendor, “the initial deployment will support Chunghwa’s advertising requirements.”

BigBand has implemented over 700 million advertising transactions a year, in more than 60 programming networks. In the IPTV market, besides Chunghwa, BigBand’s IPTV advertising solution is also deployed at LG Powercom, the operator in Korea, and is in trials with North American operators.

It has proven to be very difficult to make advertising money on VoD. Especially IPTV VOD since the subscriber numbers are still small. However operators are looking toward a more personalized approach to add greater value and bring in new entrants who thus far did not see the ROI. Targeted and addressable advertising, in addition to other personalized services, support this business imperative.

BigBand’s network-based platforms support linear, zoned advertising for geographic targeting, enable addressable advertising based on demographic and/ or behavioral information, and provide reporting and monitoring capabilities for feedback and statistics. Integration with the STB provides viewership information.

In a recent company announcement Clearsight introduced their latest version of network analysis solution that helps wireless operators test VoIP-over-3G readiness. The solution contains test algorithms based around 3GPP protocol for video telephony – 3G-324M. It is interesting to note that early version of VoIP on wireline networks also leveraged a video telephony protocol, H.323.

Clearsight believes that the 3G-324M standard will gain traction popularity among operators looking to add VoIP to their 3G networks. There is already some traction among operators in Japan and Europe.

There are usual quality related issues for handling VoIP over 3G: echo and broken speech. VoIP can particularly be problematic in traditional wireless networks – particularly 2G and 2.5G ones. 3G-324M is designed to support conventional two way video telephony in mobile handsets over traditional circuited-based networks but provides for guaranteed fixed-delays. Thus 3G-324M should in theory have acceptable levels of voice quality.

While latencies of 80 ms or lower are acceptable, perhaps what is even more important is jitter which is simply a measure of latency variance. 3G-324M has guaranteed fixed-delays – minimizing latency but eliminating jitter.

Clearsight develops solutions for wireline networks; specifically Ethernet. The company provides support for 3G-324M so that when those packets enter an Ethernet based (backhaul) network (from the cellular base station back to the central office), Clearsight solution will be able to perform fundamental protocol analysis on these voice packets.

Voipum, a three year old mobile VoIP startup, has recently geared up its reach. There have been the iPhone and Blackberry announcements recently. And some kind of an award from Frost & Sullivan. Apparently the Vopium war has been going on since 2006 and the startup happens to be listed on Euronext (with over Euro 16m market cap).

There was a slight confusion about the Blackberry announcement. I know at least Raketu, Iotum, Eqo etc which are also VoIP clients and work on Blackberry sets. However, as Vopium clarified, it is the world's first mobile VoIP company to have an application on the Blackberry App World. Raketu, Iotum and EQO all have applications for various BlackBerry models - as does Vopium. In fact, Vopium works on more than 500 handsets.

Key to Vopium success is the LCR across various calling options including GSM call, a VoWiFi call, a pure Voice over 3G call, and (I imagine) hybrid GSM-VoIP call. According to Vopium, PSTN termination is a sustainable business model. However the company is looking to launch more value added services over the coming months. It is also exploring white label services for MVNOs. Vopium is the world's first mobile VoIP provider to offer mobile backup - a service which allows Vopium customers to store their address book contacts and calendar online.

Gartner predicts that half the mobile voice calls will be VoIP in ten years time. Obviously they have a tremendous knowledge of the mobile VoIP market. And if they turn out to be right Vopium could afford to smoke some grass too.

ZTE signed a major IPTV contract with CANTV recentlly. I talked to Jason Ying at ZTE about the company's perspective of IPTV potential in Latin America. CANTV target subscriber base for their IPTV offering is 1.26 million. We discussed couple of other issues as well .. such as ZTE's R&D investment in IPTV. Apparently ZTE has over 1,000 developers focussed on IPTV.

Tellme is mixing its Speech apps capability, Aspect’s contact center solution, and Global Crossing’s carrier VoIP services to offer a turnkey VoIP contact center solution to enterprises. While Tellme integrates with Global Crossing’s network using SIP technology, Tellme customers have a choice: integrating with Global Crossing with either VoIP or TDM interconnections. Transition from TDM to VoIP is possible at a later stage.

Since Tellme operates as an on-demand service, the new capabilities are immediately available to enterprises across the company’s platform.

Although Tellme has been on the radar of several large VoIP carriers like Level 3 (due to Tellme’s capability to generate voice traffic), it was Microsoft that acquired the company some time back.

There are a couple of on-demand (VoIP oriented) speech application platform start-ups in the market. These include Twilio and Ifbyphone. The success of these companies depends upon their ability to serve enterprise customers with complex IVR needs, sometimes with hundreds of toll-free numbers accessing different voice applications for a single client. A typical Tellme customer, for instance, handles over 10 million calls a year on the Tellme platform.

On the minutes-of-use side, Tellme will probably not face many problems. Global Crossing has a large carrier grade VoIP network in place. The integration with Global Crossing provides Tellme customers low-cost toll-free service and an opportunity to leverage local service to take per-minute costs out of our telecom spend, which according to Tellme is typically one of the single largest cost in contact center environments. Additionally, the Tellme-Global Crossing solution provides the capability to blind transfer calls to customer contact centers without additional fees.

Global Crossing is the first carrier that has been able to offer Tellme an integrated local number DID solution, allowing customers to answer not only toll-free calls on the Tellme platform but local calls as well. Customers with local branches or stores will be able to examine consolidating call traffic from many local numbers to a central voice service on the Tellme platform.