I am glad eBay has decided to spin off Skype. This was also my first choice a year ago. The logic is quite straightforward: there is no reason to beat the dead horse looking for some supernatural synergy with Googles and eBays. Let us give it a rest and recognize Skype in its own right. Besides, Skype should not remain one company’s asset anymore. It belongs to 400 million of us worldwide. It should be declared a World Heritage.

Imagine someone like Google or BT acquiring the asset and then killing it like they usually do! Skype is THE company that took VoIP to consumers. While tonnes of VoIP equipment are deployed in carrier networks worldwide, the predominant consumer VoIP interface continues to be Skype. There are no doubt certain weaknesses in the business model of the company. A year ago I would have pointed out the lack of SME offering and bad mobile VoIP strategy. But I think Skype is progressing well along both those fronts. And these offerings should help it generate better margin revenues and not rely on the PSTN termination alone. There also seems to be some lull in the developer activity. Perhaps web friendly APIs and better developer promotion strategies would come in handy.

I am copying below a link to one of my papers that contains a section on Skype arguing why Skype should be one of the 10 most influential VoIP companies ever:

Click to download paper.

Alvarion announced that it has been selected by Cielux in DR Congo for a new $45 million Wimax deployment. Alvarion has 60 WiMax deployments in 30 African countries including Telkom SA, MTN Uganda, Kenya Data Networks, Microcom Congo, Mercury Angola and Monarch Nigeria.

Cielux will provide voice and broadband services over Wimax. The initial public exhibition of WiMax network is planned for June 2009, with 10,000 subscribers expected on the network by the end of the year. Alvarion has been deploying VoIP over OFDM systems for over 10 ten years and most of its WiMax deployments include commercial VoIP.

The new 802.16e complaint product from the vendor is an advanced version of 802.16d, providing better radio performance by increasing both coverage and capacity of the network.

In Africa, Alvarion is up against companies like Huawei and ZTE that are making significant inroads into Wimax in the continent. Alvarion claims to have over 70 per cent of the market in Africa.

Sonus announced a GSMA-compliant IPX interconnect solution, Mobile SecurEdge. The IP-peering solution engineered for mobile operators addresses security issues related to international roaming and national peering traffic.

Sonus is up against SBC incumbent Acme Packet that sell standalone SBCs, which take care of security issues. In mobile networks, however, Sonus might have the edge having worked on large networks including AT&T Cingular. In these wireless network accounts Sonus has integrated IPX capabilities with MSC elements.

IPX services will launch this year. IPX services are supposed to drive down the mobile interconnection charges, thus enabling mobile operators to maintain margins. Carrier charges for roaming international calls is expected to decline significantly.

There are several GSMA IPX trials going on worldwide. Sonus has been involved in a number these. One of its customer, Tata Communications, recently concluded the IPX trials. Although Sonus did not reveal the remaining customers trialing its IPX solution, our guess is Belgacom ICS and COLT might be other Sonus customers running IPX trials.

ip.access, the developers of picocell and femtocell solution, last week announced that it had teamed up with SPIE, provider of professional services to mobile operators in France, to speed up the deployment of picocells at SFR. The existing deployment at SFR is the first IP-based picocell commercial offering in France.

The offering is part of SFR’s ‘One Office’ service which sets it apart from other indoor repeater solutions. The exact number of picocell users was not revealed by the companies. However they are supposed to include both large (> 10000 employees) and small enterprises. Apart from SFR, over 40 mobile network operators worldwide have deployed ip.access picocells.

SPIE has a broad presence in France with potential to reach SFR customers. Moreover, SPIE will provide assistance in deploying ADSL lines that connects picocells to SFR’s core network.

Repeaters and picocells are designed to solve similar problems: indoor coverage. So where lies the difference? A picocell has the ability to improve data rates and capacity while as repeaters only improve coverage. There is the possibility to offer in-building bespoke tariffs with picocells, which is not possible with repeaters.

Acme Packet, the incumbent SBC vendor, will be providing the security aspects for Verizon Wireless’ new VoIP offering. Multiple Net-Net 4000 series SBCs from Acme Packet are deployed in Verizon data centers at both the access and interconnect borders. The SBC vendor has seen quite a shift – in terms of deployment - from carrier-to-carrier SBC application over to the access application where it supports millions of VoIP end users globally.

This could be for the first time that Acme Packet has found its way inside the Verizon network. However as an incumbent SBC vendor, the company has been providing SBC enabled carrier interconnect solutions to most major telcos. Within the new VoIP offering, for instance, Verizon uses a wholesale e911 provider and Acme’s SBC manages the interconnect between Verizon and that provider, including routing the emergency calls.

Continue reading "Acme Packet securing Verizon’s new VoIP offering" »

Coiler Corporation, Taiwan based telecom equipment manufacturer, is positioning the latest version of its indoor repeater as a potential competitor to femtocell. The company introduced the new indoor repeater last week. Basically, both femtocell and Coiler type products are designed to solve similar problems. They are meant to solve coverage problem indoors, enabling uninterrupted mobile communication.

There is one difference though. While femtocell connects to the wireline broadband networks for data traffic and some voice offload, Coiler product transports all data via cellular networks. However Coiler is right in pointing out that the primary function of femtocell in the present market context is precisely the coverage issue – an issue Coiler claims to address better.

Continue reading "Coiler says its repeater competes with femtocell" »

Enterprise FMC vendor, Agito, has hired Amit Chawla as new CEO. Amit was previously with Veraz. I am not sure if he co-founded ipVerse, one of the original constituent elements in Veraz, but he was certainly the person that orchestrated much of the transition from ipVerse to Nexverse to Veraz. When Veraz was formed, the other constituent element came over from ECI.

ECI contributed the media gateway part of the business (and the DCME stuff too). A lot of those arrangements were made by Amit. Anyway, unless Agito has hired Amit to engineer a favourable exit, the selection raises a couple of questions about Agito strategy. Amit comes from a carrier background and Agito sells to enterprises (sometimes through OEM partnerships with the likes of Avaya). Maybe Agito is looking to sell to carriers after all. FMC vendors have had a tough time deciding who to sell to. Do they sell direct to enterprises (DiVitas) or sell via PBX partners (Firsthand/Counterpath) to enterprises, or sell via carriers to enterprises (OnRelay), or try to sell to both enterprises and carriers (Tango Networks).

Of course there are some more combinations possible there. Having said that, I believe in FMC somewhat. Perhaps we are in the early stages of the FMC and something more simpler and robust needs to evolve to bridge the future fiber and 4g networks seamlessly.

All the VoIP and IM apps developed for social networks have been freebies so far. I think Nimbuzz is the first one that will be making money out of such an arrangement. The mobile VoIP startup had teamed with StudiVZ, Germany’s largest social network with over 12 million members. StudiVZ will exclusively market Nimbuzz. Not just that. Nimbuzz is the first and the only third party application that StudiVZ has integrated.

Nimbuzz should be able to drive increased user interaction and activity on the StudiVZ site thus driving more advertising revenues. Those revenues will not be shared with Nimbuzz just yet and the sharing arrangement applies from 2009 onwards when Nimbuzz stands to get 50% of the advertising revenues resulting from the usage of its application.

Continue reading "Nimbuzz is the first VoIP startup to make money from existing social networks" »

For T-Mobile, it is ok to use WiFi in the US to offload voice traffic (sometimes without informing the customers), but in the UK it refuses to interconnect with Truphone and in Germany it altogether seeks a ban on VoIP over iPhone, whether the call is made over 3g broadband or WiFi. That sounds like more than double standards.

The German court has unfortunately sided with T-Mobile this time. In the UK, it did not have much luck though.

Mobile VoIP is actually not allowed fully in the US. You cannot use 3g mobile broadband connection to make a VoIP call. The wireless carriers are allowed to block such use. Only VoIP-over-WiFi is allowed. Indeed Apple has also sided with the wireless carriers in the US. It is allowing VoIP on its iPhone handset only as long as the call goes over WiFi.

Vivox is planning to open up its platform to third party developers. Vivox provides a VoIP platform for developers of online games and virtual worlds. The first round of apps that the company expects from its developer partners include wide ranging features from lip sync to natural language speech recognition and response. There is also interest among developers in porting the code to different mobile platforms to enable users to connect to their communities from multiple devices.

Vivox provides voice services to a number of games and virtual worlds including CCP Games (Eve Online), Linden Lab, Sony Online Entertainment (Everquest, Everquest II & Star wars Galaxies), Wizards of the Coast, Multiverse, NCsoft and K2 Network. As the network provider to these companies, Vivox serves over 5 million users. Currently the company offers premium services that are often sold directly to end users and include things like voice fonts which give players the ability to morph their voice to match their avatar, i.e. an elf.

Continue reading "Vivox opening up its platform" »

Talking about creative ideas, here is a third idea of the day: A hardware add-on that can be plugged into an IAD (through an Ethernet port) serving as a base station for a DECT phone. That is what I thought SiTel had announced recently. However SiTel is a chip company and I should have known better. The Netherlands based company announced a DECT chip that can be placed in existing IAD applications with telephone connections.

Modem manufacturers have been shipping IADs and cable modems with DECT base stations for quite some time now. Thomson has shipped more than 1 million DSL+DECT to BT for its residential VoIP offering. Starting later this year, BT will be sourcing its DECT enabled IAD from a Germany based vendor in addition. The Germany based vendor uses SiTel chip. SiTel expects about a million of their DECT VoIP chips to be integrated inside IADs by the end of this year. Majority of these IADs will land inside residential customers in Germany.

Continue reading "DECT could win over WiFi for in-house wireless VoIP" »

I guess the first major success GIPS had was Skype. You have been behind Skype which became a big phenomenon. You also have new startups like Nimbuzz as your customers. Who in your opinion has the right strategy in place to emerge as the next major player in consumer VoIP?

I think the competition now is not about emergence of another Skype. VoIP is being added as a capability to almost all the major messaging softclients out there. Most of them are GIPS customers. You also have VoIP integrated into the mobile handsets. If Skype is to see competition, it is likely to come from mobile VoIP companies.

How far has GIPS been able to leverage the success it had with Skype?

Skype was certainly the customer that put GIPS on the roadmap. That opened the doors for many of the deals that we did subsequently. Fortunately the reverse is not true. When we lost Skype as a customer we did not lose other deals. Over the last few quarters we have had some great wins such as Baidu.

I think media gateway wins would have been a bigger source of revenue for GIPS. Why is GIPS not targeting media gateway vendors? Is it because they tend to have their own voice processing solutions?

You have probably not come across our customer list. Out customers include companies like Cisco, Nortel and Avaya. You should assume that we will in the future move from pure P2P client implementations to gateway deployments. That is a logical conclusion to have and you can assume that we are going in that direction.

Continue reading "Interview with Emerick Woods, CEO, GIPS" »

This is Vonage’s second attempt at mobile VoIP. We saw the first iteration some three years back when Vonage teamed up with UTStarcom to offer single mode Voice-over-WiFi. UTStarcom supplied the handset.

Having a handset dedicated for just mobile VoIP might have turned out to be a bad idea in retrospect. You would have restricted yourself to just those customers who would be willing to buy a UTStarcom handset. UTStarcom recently restructured the ownership of its handset business.

Continue reading "Vonage has another go at mobile VoIP" »

Over the last two years you seem to have shifted focus from PC centric communications to mobile centric communications. What opportunities do you see on the mobile side?

Many of our customers are mobile operators as well. So unifying the user experience across desktop and mobile is a big opportunity for us. Apart from the service providers we also have our OEM partners like Nortel collaborating with us across our desktop and mobile product offerings.

You have invested in FMC and handover technologies through the Firsthand and Bridgeport acquisitions. What are the prospects of handover technologies once wireless broadband becomes ubiquitous?

The FMC and handover technologies turn the Internet into a large roaming network. That is very valuable for a service provider. It also enables a service provider to offload a lot of voice traffic over to IP. So from a service provider standpoint there are several benefits at this stage. This kind of technology also facilitates a lot of new wireless data services.

How far have the Firsthand and Bridgeport acquisitions been assimilated into your other product lines? And are there going to be further acquisitions?

We have had two new deployments that involve 3 of the 4 solutions acquired by us. So the integration of the acquired solutions has been satisfactory. There are more things we can enable through a more tighter integration: things like mobile centrex and widgets for various features. We are working on those bits. We were partners with these companies before we acquired them. We validated the prospects of joint products with our existing customers prior to the acquisitions.

On the acquisitions front, making three acquisitions in nine months is a huge task. We grew from 50 people to 150 within a year. So we have to be careful. But if they make sense and they have interesting solutions around mobile, identity, presence, and they add value to our existing customer base and strategy, we are prepared to consider. But it is not going to be our big focus for the next two quarters.

Continue reading "Interview with Donovan Jones, CEO, CounterPath" »

There is one common source of revenue for mobile VoIP/callback companies: cheap long distance calling. Some of them arrange the termination into the public telephone networks themselves. Some do it via Skype. While mobile telephony arbitrage is rather new (except for the calling card market), the barriers to entry into mobile VoIP/callback are not exactly tough. You pay a few thousand dollars and you can be up and running in a matter of days.

In markets with low entry barriers, you have to bet big money on the venture. Mobile VoIP companies do not have that kind of money. I have been exploring the revenue models of these companies for some time. Outside the arbitrage business, you find models such as Nimbuzz that are based on advertising. Nimbuzz will be dealing with text based ads. There are also certain audio based ad models in the market. There is some whitelabelling going on as well whereby a mobile VoIP company enables a cell operator to offer the service.

Continue reading "Will content generate revenues for mig33?" »

My impression is that your revenue model is currently based on advertising and whitelabeling? How soon do you expect those sources to generate meaningful revenues for you?

We don’t do whitelabelling exactly. Although apart from consumer solutions we also have industry solutions, those industry solutions are social networks for mobile operators and device manufacturers. These are outsourced IM and VoIP platforms that we operate for a mobile operator. We also bring mobility to web based social networks.

Is that not whitelabelling?

No. In whitelabelling you would typically charge a certain license fee per subscriber. We do not charge the operator anything. Our solution is used for free. What we do is share the ad revenues.

How many social networks and operators have you partnered with? What is the usage among the operators right now?

We have signed up 10 social networks and 3 mobile operators. One of the operators is using the full Nimbuzz solution. The other two, for now, are promoting our web client to their mobile users. With regard to social networks we will go live with our joint offering with a social network in Germany in August.

You will also have PSTN termination business in place. Which part of your business do you expect to be bigger: ad revenue sharing or the PSTN termination?

Continue reading "Interview with EJ Lugt, CEO, Nimbuzz" »

DiVitas, the FMC vendor, has quietly raised another round of funding. I hear through sources that the company raised $12 million last month. The round was led by SVB Capital. Total funding raised till date is $32 million.

Usually the early stage companies are keen to announce fundings in order to attract new talent. No announcement from DiVitas yet. Is this the sign, therefore, that the company has matured? Unlike most FMC startup vendors, DiVitas has been able to gain some traction in the enterprise segment. It mainly runs into Avaya and Cisco where the latter two are unable to meet dual-mode solution requirements adequately.

Continue reading "DiVitas quietly raises another round of funding" »

See the comments below for a fuller picture ..

Continue reading "Comparision between two enterprise FMC startup vendors: Agito and DiVitas" »

Agito, the enterprise FMC vendor selling direct to enterprises, has raised $13 million in Series B. The startup has focused on verticals such as Higher Education, Manufacturing/Retail, Healthcare, and Energy/Utilities. Over 12 customers have implemented Agito solution so far.

PBX integration has been a major issue resulting in delays in enterprise FMC deployments. PBX makers take a long time in the certification process. Agito has so far achieved integration of its product with IPPBXs from Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Asterisk, and Microsoft OCS. There is tighter integration with Cisco products. To date the company has not announced any OEM relationship.

Continue reading "Agito’s Series B funding" »

While it is all wonderful to sign up a million subscribers and get a second round of funding, I thought it might be a better idea to explore with Nimbuzz what their revenue model really is. I get the impression that for a while, it is based on advertising revenues. And I say that is probably wise!

Starting September this year, Nimbuzz expects to generate meaningful advertising revenues through its revenue sharing arrangement with a couple of large social networks. One of them happens to be the largest social network in Germany (not hard to guess which one). Users of these social networks will be able to communicate across their communities and various IM clouds using Nimbuzz’s web based client. Abril, a media company, will be supplying most of the ads.

Continue reading "Nimbuzz revenue model revolves around advertising mostly" »

Mirror numbers are a nice way to circumvent high calling rates. But they are best applied to apps like Jangl etc (provided you have luck monetizing the service). So when Jaxtr announced ‘offnet’ calling to any phone number for low price, I was a bit disappointed. After all there are over a million companies out there offering convenient low cost long distance calling service.

A 2.0 company such as Jaxtr leads you to believe for a while that we are communicating in (additional) new ways that is something out of this world and then offers simple low cost telephony. I bet you a thousand dollars that Jaxtr did not have plain old telephony in the original business plan. Jaxtr’s offnet calling is somewhat analogous to SkypeOut type services. And yet if you think about what is wrong with Skype, it is the dependence on those termination revenues.

If Skype had sought an alternative direction for monetization, we could have had a true Voice 2.0 company today. Termination business has made Skype complacent and at the same time threatened its prospects due to thin margins. There is something not so graceful about a Voice 2.0 company offering simple termination. This is emerging merging with the ordinary.

Continue reading "Emerging merging with the ordinary" »

Attendance was low for sure. A lot of people walking along the central isle …. But exhibitors along the ends of the hall saw very little traffic.

Lots of Analysts and Press. Announcements were not so exciting though.

Exhibiting companies: mostly infrastructure guys. No startups, no emerging companies ….. and no debates around Telco 2.0 on the floor.

The overall theme appeared to be access again. Not much talk about apps. Some video and IPTV stuff was being talked about. Wimax and LTE ... not much around that topic either.

Continue reading "Thoughts on NXTcomm" »

GSMA IPX initiative could change several things for cell operators. To start with, it can lower down interconnection costs substantially for cell operators. There are several value added services that could be enabled across multiple cell operator networks. Dawn Hogh, VP Marketing, Veraz Networks spoke to me today about her company’s support for the GSMA IPX spec.

The spec support involved enabling features such as certain type of transcoding and end-to-end QoS. Veraz has been pushing its peering solution for the last several months now. With the GSMA IPX support, it is now able to sell the peering solution to cell operators as well. But it will be the VoIP wholesale carriers that Veraz will be targeting first. VoIP wholesalers like iBasis, Telecom Italia and BICS are looking to cash in on the new opportunity (the multilateral GSMA IPX peering contract was awarded to NeuStar some time back). Veraz already has three customers for this GSMA compliant peering solution. BICS is one of them. Veraz will be making the BICS announcement on Monday.

I can see the value that this Echoes platform creates for a mobile carrier. However this is surely not for a wireline operator. If Microsoft’s Echoes is for real and the company is targeting wireline telcos as well, this could turn out to be yet another attempt to pitch applications to a telco without due consideration towards the lack of OSS/BSS integration. Wireline telcos are not slow adopters of fancy apps because they just happen to be conservative to the core. They have a dozen hooks to worry about.

And they prefer to have one humungous underlying platform that can be extended to accommodate all Voice 2.0 services. Echoes does not seem to be that extended underlying platform. It seems to be an extended IM platform, not an extended telco app server, which is what wireline telcos utilize and open up to offer new services.

Continue reading "Microsoft Echoes for wireline telcos" »

Truphone has finally ventured into bridged mobile VoIP i.e. using GSM network for the last mile. In view of the limited WiFi coverage and problems related to VoIP-over-3G, it seems like a sensible thing to do. Mobile telephony arbitrage in form of mobile callback and bridged mobile VoIP is potentially a huge market to tap into and Truphone has to monetize its technology after all. I hope, however, that the story does not end here.

You could, like Jajah, try to generate meaningful revenues, but if you do not have the bells and whistles around your core offering, the industry interest and ultimately the investor interest just evaporates. Arbitrage is a bad long term business to be in. None of the resellers from 90s are in business anymore. Once the cell operators drop their artificially inflated rates for international calls, companies like Truphone could be in trouble. We are probably looking at around 5 years for cell operators to drop those prices. In the interim Truphone has to cook something appetizing. Something beyond cheap ILD calls.

Continue reading "Truphone does the sensible thing" »

VoIP momentum is shifting within Europe with Eastern Europe coming in strong now. The new set of initiatives is driven by the Wimax service providers. There are over 40 Wimax service providers in Eastern Europe if you count the Baltic states as well. Nearly half of them have either launched a VoIP offering or are involved in such trials. (There is a partial list at the end of this post).

The present VoIP traction in Eastern Europe is different than what we saw two years back. Two years back it was all about the network upgradation of the incumbent telcos there. This time it is a bit different. The alternative carriers are going for the broadband telephony type option. Wimax operators seem to be the driving force right now.

Continue reading "Wimax operators in Eastern Europe aggressively deploying VoIP" »

If Nimbuzz is planning to play with social networking and all the buzz words, it might be a bit late in the day. The market is looking for a monetization story, not a mobile VoIP app that hooks into every IM-client / social network / handset on earth. What is the value in that? There are plenty in the mobile VoIP market already signing up customers without much revenue to show. The only time they generate revenue is when a call is terminated outside the community cloud i.e. into landlines and mobile phones that are not Nimbuzzed.

An IM or a voice chat between Nimbuzz-to-Nimbuzz is not going to generate money. It will remain a challenge to monetize that aspect – I mean for ever! So something is wrong here: You create a community but make money only when you communicate outside that community!!! What incentive is there is expand that community then?!!!

For off-Nimbuzz calls, the company will make money on international calls mainly. Like EQO and iSkoot, Nimbuzz will also re-direct the calls to its local VoIP PoP from where it transports the call over public Internet backbone. So for the amount of time you are on an international call, you are effectively making and paying for a local call in addition. That is like the early PC-to-Phone days when you had dial-up connections. Outside the US, where local calls were metered, you paid for a local call (to your telco) plus the international call rate charged by Net2phone and others. That was not the main factor responsible for slow uptake of PC-to-Phone, but it was a turn off nonetheless.

Continue reading "Nimbuzz: What is the revenue model?" »

Jangl investors should try to sell the company assets to a telecom vendor. Some of telecom vendors are developing features that enable ad supported communications apps. Still early days but a Jangl platform would place them ahead of most competitors.

We are going to see two relevant trends going forward. One is the re-positioning of telecom service providers as some sort of media companies enabling various forms of entertainment, content, and social networking through PCs, TVs and mobiles. The other is the re-thinking among Voice 2.0 companies to productize their platforms.

Continue reading "Who should pick up Jangl assets?" »

A few open questions on the recent Jajah/Yahoo deal, perhaps our readers can answer:

Whatever happened to the Dialpad acquisition by Yahoo? Was that investment a waste then? Yahoo had acquired the company because apparently they needed an insight into the call routing science.

Jajah does not do PC-to-Phone application. Is Jajah going to develop that capability for Yahoo Messenger, or is it going to be a similar application to Jajah i.e. web initiated telephony that does not necessarily use the public Internet? Jajah voice quality is great right now because the company does not use public Internet.

Continue reading "Questions on Jajah-Yahoo deal" »

It has been a while since I heard any major development on the consumer FMC side. I am assuming that mobile VoIP and Femtocell have pushed this thing back a few years. But there must surely be something in store for enterprise FMC during 2008. There is much more activity around enterprise managed FMC solutions. All major PBX makers have announced their products now.

The early adopters here have been healthcare, education, and warehouse operations. But there is interest coming from new segments such as the banks, we are told. With early implementations in particular there was need to have on-campus mobility as well as remote mobility so segments such as warehouse operations - where WiFi access can be very important - picked up some of the FMC first. Hospitality and healthcare also have that campus aspect where you can put dual mode device on campus on WiFi and same number can work on cellular.

Continue reading "Features that could put FMC on FIRE" »

Our survey of MVNOs reveals that nearly one-fourth of MVNOs are already offering/trialling mobile VoIP. By 2010 over two-thirds expect to have a mobile VoIP offering in place. The survey is part of our report ‘Mobile VoIP: 2008 Status Report’ published today.

According to the report, MVNOs could drive the first phase of mobile VoIP apart from the independent startups. The eligible providers are MVNOs, MNOs, ISPs, and Wimax operators. As far as Wimax operators are concerned they have to offer VoIP to differentiate themselves from other broadband providers. Mobile Wimax however is not expected till 2009. Wimax operators at present are looking to offer VoIP over laptops and fixed phones through ATAs.

MNOs can potentially use mobile VoIP feature to dump voice traffic transparently on IP. But they have cannibalization issues. ISPs on the other hand would see this as a completely new service since they have not dealt with mobile services before. So for now, MVNOs are expected to show more interest in mobile VoIP. And since MVNOs are likely to drive the first phase along with the independent startups, the take up is unlikely to be huge as per the report.

Continue reading "MVNOs could drive first phase of Mobile VoIP along with the startups" »

My writeup on Skype Journal posted day before yesterday ........

Skype’s recent mobile VoIP announcement is an admission that VoIP over 3G is not practical yet. This is evident from the fact that Skype has chosen to implement iSkoot type architecture for its own mobile VoIP offering that it announced last week.

http://skypejournal.com/blog/2008/04/skypes_mobile_dilemma.html

Why have you so far stayed clear of direct-to-consumer B2C offering?

That part of our business has not received much attention yet. But that will change and my guess is that millions – if not tens of millions – will be using our direct-to-consumer service. So there is going to be much more emphasis on viral marketing, search engine optimization etc to drive that. There will be more handset OEM deals.

Like your B2B offering, your B2C offering will also be dependent on MNOs somewhat. Right?

Not so much. Rather than hosting the termination management POPs at the operator NOC, we will host them on our own NOCs. We have NOCs around the world that we use for direct-to-consumer business.

How do you make money from your B2C offering?

The SkypeOut feature is turned on in this B2C offering and that is how we generate revenue, generating SkypeOut minutes.

How many B2C customers do you have?

Right now we have hundreds of thousands using our B2C service.

Going over to your B2B solution, why would a mobile operator want to work with you? Are you not cannibalizing their high margin long distance business?

For Skype-to-Skype calls what the operators have determined is that we are not cannibalising their business. In fact we are adding to their business because if I am on Skype and my friend in Hong Kong is on Skype, I was not going to call that person for two dollars a minute anyway. I would have waited to Skype them over PC and completely cut out the operator. So by putting Skype on mobile phone at least the operator is able to use up the free minutes. With SkypeOut which involves calls to a non-Skype user, you probably had no choice but to call with very expensive ILD rates. So some of the operators prefer not to turn SkypeOut on. At least not at first. They are however realistic about the ILD rates substantially reducing over time with the calling cards and callback and Skype etc. At some point therefore they will also turn on SkypeOut.

Continue reading "Interview with Mark Jacobstein, CEO, iSkoot" »

Skype is one of those faces that launched a thousand ships! Its big bang acquisition and open developer program led to the formation of numerous VoIP startups. But the company itself got entangled in a loveless relationship that …. as expected …. never proved synergetic. At this juncture when eBay is understood to be exploring different options for Skype, I am going to suggest a couple of places where Skype could find love.

Let me first touch upon the reasons why the eBay-Skype synergy never materialized. eBay acquired Skype in order to woo large retailers into setting up their storefronts on eBay. That did not happen. Even if it had, the kind of click-to-call capability that Skype would have been able to bring in would not have sufficed. The reason for that is the missing third ‘C’. The Context. Click-to-call in a consumer driven environment is what some of you would call a Web 3.0 application. We are not quite there yet. Translation: Suppose a retailer such as Apple set up a storefront on eBay. In order for its customer services agent to better serve the click caller, the agent needs to know the profile of the caller as well as the caller activity on the site prior to the call. That piece of info flashed to the agent screen at the time of the call is Context.

Continue reading "A telco acquisition could make sense for Skype" »

What made you choose the name mig33?

We wanted something simple, memorable and not tied to a functional name like ‘chat’ so that we keep the flexibility to grow and evolve the product as we like. We wanted something that would translate well across different markets easily too. After evaluating a few options and working closely with our early beta testing group, the name mig33 emerged. Our users love it so it’s worked out well.

What has been the key in signing so many subscribers?

A few factors: The product delivers a compelling proposition of communications and social network features like chat, IM, SMS, picture sharing, profiles, cheap calls and email. This combined with an effective seed strategy helped us grow over 11 million users in over 200 countries.

Has the marketing been mostly word of mouth thing?

Word of mouth, in addition to other marketing.

What is your Facebook strategy? Are those sort of social networks important for you?

Continue reading "Interview with Steven Goh, CEO, mig33" »

Our friends at Infonetics Research put out a press release last week that states that FMC phones made $27 billion in 2007. It is not a typo. So a bit of correction is in order.

I think Infonetics is referring to dual mode GSM/WiFi phones in general. Having a WiFi radio in a GSM phone does not make it a FMC phone. You would require a VCC or a UMA client to turn such a phone into a FMC phone. That is a requirement for a single number service. If you are content with two numbers on the same dual mode WiFi/GSM phone you would still be required to use some sort of a VoIP client for voice usage over WiFi. The two-number service is not really true FMC by the way.

Continue reading "Did FMC phones make $27 billion in 2007?" »

TringMe does not have millions of subscribers yet. Over the last few months that TringMe has been in business, it has managed to sign up over 100k subs. You would normally expect a huge subscriber base prior to open APIs from a VoIP company. But there are not many choices for developers when it comes to flash phones. As of now, apart from TringMe, there is only Ribbit that offers Flash based APIs. Ribbit business model is completely different. Ribbit did not have to wait for a million downloads prior to making APIs public.

There is another difference between Ribbit and TringMe approaches. Ribbit APIs do not come entirely free. TringMe on the other hand does not charge anything to developers for using APIs.

We are beginning to see flash phones come out in the market, but to really see what they offer, you need to peel the covers off of the flash-phone and understand the technology they are using to build them. Some of them are merely a flashy representation to essentially use web to activate a call.

Continue reading "Second set of Flash APIs made available to developers" »

Truphone has acquired SIM4travel, mobile operator focused on bringing affordable roaming to travellers, for a little over $5 million. Truphone is a privately held startup. The company has so far raised $25 million in funding. What could the acquisition mean for Truphone? In short, this acquisition allows Truphone to do two things: (1) offer bridged mobile VoIP to an established SIM4travel customers and (2) offer a more attractive private label solutions package to MVNOs. The other bit I would highlight here is the fact that the combined Turphone-SIM4travel type solution could have a major impact on wifi-gsm handover (dual mode FMC) type services.

With this acquisition, Truphone as an “MVNE” is bringing a more appealing package to the table. It is able to offer MVNOs a softclient based mobile VoIP as well as bridged VoIP. The original Truphone plan was to offer a platform rather than a service. Bridged VoIP picks calls from GSM switch and dumps it on the IP cloud. Truphone will be able to offer its own customers (as well as MVNOs) these two types of VoIP plus low roaming charges – all on one SIM. And it can offer these services worldwide.

Continue reading "Truphone’s acquisition of SIM4travel" »

What is driving mobile telephony arbitrage in form of callback and VoIP?

Skype is not covering mobile VoIP well. There is demand for intelligent and cost-efficient apps on mobile. From user perspective mobile prices are high. So there is an opportunity there. Why should a call from fixed line be nine times cheaper than from mobile?

Xing was the first Web 2.0 company to go public. You were co-founder at Xing. What is common between that experience and your present one at Cellity?

Like Xing, we are developing the market because this is all new. People are not used to things like mobile LCR and mobile callback. Going back to my Xing days, there was no market for social networking. The market was developing while we developed and created it. People were not used to putting up their details online.

Your application is based on Least Cost Routing.

Yes it is based on LCR and no VoIP. That app is available to German consumers only because you need to have a German SIM card. Another offer we have is mobile callback which you can use in any country. We also do SMS via GPRS.

Continue reading "Interview with Sarik Weber, CEO, Cellity" »

The name iPhone conjures up images of early internet telephony. One of the earliest products made by Vocaltec was named iPhone. I am not sure how the name changed hands from Vocaltec to Cisco to Apple but it would be nice to give iPhone its original meaning. And that is what some of the smart VoIP developers will be doing this summer.

One such developer, Jajah, with a hip Bollywood name and a tremendous following at iLocus, has derived great encouragement from its callback application that it customized for iPhone users a while ago. The company is now developing a blended VoIP-Callback client for iPhone.

True to the great North American tradition, the press release is out well before the guys start work on the product. In the meantime, Asian developers are wondering why their bosses stack up their press releases for the Hereafter. But jokes aside, Jajah has already developed a native mobile VoIP client for an MVNO called EMobile. The company delivered Windows Mobile 6 based native VoIP client which now ships pre-installed with all Sharp EM One Alpha devices. It seems that all the technology is in place, and Jajah is re-designing the same for the Apple iPhone based on the SDK.

Continue reading "Jajah’s blended VoIP-Callback client for iPhone" »

You have introduced CDMA Femtocells. What is the addressable market given that it only works on CDMA networks?

CDMA operators control some 15% of the mobile handset market. But in the US, 60% of all users are CDMA. So the majority uses CDMA. Moving forward, most operators will evolve towards LTE standard. The next Femtocell that we will launch will certainly be an LTE base station.

Among the CDMA operator customers you have, what level of interest have you seen in Femtocell?

Tremendous interest. RFPs are coming out from all the major tier 1s and tier 2s. We have been responding to RFIs on a regular basis over the last one year.

What is happening with Sprint’s femtocell trials?

Sprint began trialing the technology last year, and now offers femtocells in Denver, Indianapolis and Nashville. The company announced when it began the trials that it planned to make the offering nationwide during 2008, but hasn’t yet announced specifics.

Several operators are also reportedly moving away from the softswitch architecture. How do femtocells fit into that move?

Continue reading "Interview with Serge Pequeux, CEO, Airwalk Communications" »

Since we increasingly use dial-by-name rather than dial-by-number, the use of phone book (contacts) on your handset is perhaps the most utilized application. And there is plenty of room to enhance it. The phone book could be engineered to be more proactive and be able to make suggestions to the user. For instance it could let me enter 10 most important contacts that I call at least once a week, and then have it send me a reminder in case I forget to call one of those 10 numbers during the week.

There are countless such features that could be engineered into a phone book. You could also let the phone book application automatically monitor the calls received, missed, dialled out, the duration of the calls etc – the entire calling behaviour of the user, and then suggest actions or, eg, alert the caller to any extreme variation. For example if you talk too much, it could alert you something to the effect that your average call duration is 3 times the average in this country … sort it out.

Some of the things that an intelligent phone book could do:

Continue reading "Intelligent phone book" »

The tips are inspired by conversation with Blyk. Blyk has less than 100k subscribers right now but its usage data points to proof-of-concept that it is pushing: the concept of using mobile networks as a new media for advertisers. Blyk has facilitated response rate of 29% compared to industry average of 5%.

So the tips ….

• Use mobile media rather than PC or landline. There will be around 5 billion mobile phone devices by 2015. This is potentially a huge advertiser media that has remained unexplored

• The concept of conversations-beginning-with-ad has been tried before. It failed. We wish the concept good luck but believe that ads pushed via SMS will have better acceptance

• Don’t offer all minutes free. Carry out research for typical Minutes-of-Use per month in your target audience and typical number of SMS they send each month. Then offer that for free in return for users agreeing to receive certain number of ad SMS

Continue reading "Ten tips for successful ad based telephony" »

How would you categorize various flavours of mobile VoIP?

I would say there are three main categories of mobile VoIP players. Providers like Fring I will place under voice-over-data category. Then there are players like EQO. The third type include the likes of Rebtel that predominantly provide voice only.

You are one of very few mobile VoIP players that are getting some traction. How would you compare your offering to other successful mobile VoIP plays such as Fring and iSkoot?

Like Fring we believe that VoIP is one of the capabilities but certainly not the only one in our context. The power is actually in the aggregation model services. At some point in time our paths will firmly cross but in the meantime we are offering services on top of a variety of handsets and not just the high end $400-$500 handsets.

iSkoot is very much involved in developing applications around Skype system and establishing deals with MNOs. We focus on multiple networks, the ability to connect to any type of network whether public IM or private MNO users.

Why are you not productizing your solution like others?

It defeats the whole notion of the calling experience that we enable. Licensing your platform to an MNO is no different than being able to connect to just one public IM service such as MSN. Your friends may not necessarily be on the same network or subscribe to the same MNO. That was something that we wanted to avoid specifically from the outset.

Continue reading "Interview with Bill Tam, CEO, EQO" »

What are carriers doing in the area of mashups?

There has been a lot of activity going on over the last few months. They are keen to grasp the mashup movement and it is changing really fast. In North America big operators are investing in this area. BT is certainly much ahead. At least in their reference architectures carriers already have it in place. It will take some time though. We are certainly seeing something we have not seen before.

How many customers do you have trialing your SCIM?

There are more than 10 in Europe and North America.

Out of those how many will leverage your SCIM for mashups?

In most of them this is one of the capabilities our SCIM is providing.

What is the role of SCIM in the mashup game?

The role of SCIM is providing an enabling point. SCIM by itself does not provide a service. It allows services to be delivered to fixed and mobile networks whether they are legacy or non-legacy networks. In some of the cases SCIM is embedded in a solution - more often embedded in an SDP or an application server. In some cases it is a standalone element carrying out the service mediation.

Continue reading "Interview with Dr. Ayal Itzkovitz, CEO, Convergin" »

Grandstream Networks, a hot ATA startup few years back, has secured a supply contract with Pakistan’s Wateen Telecom. Wateen is supposed to be world’s largest WiMAX network lit up by the likes of Motorola and Sylantro. The service provider plans to offer the whole bundle: data, voice, and video.

Grandstream will be supplying its ATAs and video phones. Video phones represent a smaller but emerging line of Grandstream business. The vendor saw video phone sales grow 300% last year. Units figure is “tens of thousands of phones”. Wateen is one of the two tier 1 service providers it is counting on to achieve another triple digit growth in video phones this year. The other tier 1 provider is a European carrier.

Continue reading "Grandstream to supply video phones to Wateen" »

Mobile VoIP is in for a rollercoaster ride. If you have been looking to try mobile VoIP but the cost of handset is an issue, you may not need to wait much longer. Infineon has introduced a VoIP-enabled WiFi chip for low cost phones which essentially expands and multiplies the reach of mobile VoIP 20 times over. Right now, only high cost smartphones are VoIP capable. In fact only about 75 million mobile phones can do VoIP. Infineon chip will expand that capability to, potentially, over a billion handsets.

So what sort of impact should we expect from the wonder chip? I would expect the following:

Continue reading "WonderChip for mobile VoIP" »

What is the total addressable market for mobile VoIP?

There are about 75 million phones in the market today that can do mobile VoIP. Over a billion can do some sort of bridged mobile VoIP solution.

What has the traction been for you geography wise?

We have customers in 149 countries. So the interest is broad. Our number 1 country in UK, followed by US and Italy.

With fixed VoIP you need ATAs to get going. With mobile VoIP, if you have a smart phone you don’t really need any other adaptors. So in that sense mobile VoIP is going to be even more disruptive than fixed line VoIP.

Yes. It is relatively easier to use. You don’t have to locate any junction boxes and find sockets to plug things in and out. You press a couple of keys on your phone and set it up and use it. So yes, a lot more disruptive than fixed line VoIP.

There seem to be four major mobile VoIP players out there in the market (apart from Skype): Fring, iSkoot, EQO and yourself. What are the ingredients of success in mobile VoIP?

Mobile VoIP is technically quite complex, both on the server side as well as the handset side. There are lots of developers that have announced support for Nokia phones that come with VoIP capability. They give you username and password which you can put into the device. And that is way too hard. So basically very few companies have been successful in doing the integration work and making it work. You need to be smart. Apart from that you need to be well funded. The ones that you mentioned are all well funded. Hopefully we are smart too.

Continue reading "Interview with James Tagg, CEO, Truphone" »

COTS hardware has been around for more than a decade. What is keeping equipment makers from deploying these solutions?

A suitable COTS architecture has only been available for two years. Other COTS architectures like Compact PCI were basically enterprise technology. So COTS suitable for core telecom applications that can support five nines did not exist until ATCA availability. And ATCA availability goes back a couple of years.

I do see ATCA growing to be a multi-billion dollar business, but, as with all things in telecom, it will take time. The biggest complexity has not been about ATCA itself. It is about porting applications over to ATCA and, in particular, making a move to Linux. So moving to ATCA hardware is quite easy to do, but a lot of legacy applications simultaneously moving to ATCA are also moving from proprietary, 20-year–old, home-grown OSes to Linux.

One of the biggest motivations for using COTS hardware is the time-to-market factor. How far have vendors been able to achieve that in practice?

We have customers, who, using ATCA, have brought applications to market in under 12 months versus classic 24-to-36 month development period. We have a customer in Asia that chose our ATCA platform in Spring 2007 and, before the end of 2007, had live service up and running for a wireless application.

Can you perhaps name some of the application categorises that are being enabled by COTS hardware such as ATCA? How would you generalise the type of applications being ported over to ATCA platform?

ATCA will be the hardware of choice for a wide spectrum of applications. Over the last few years we have seen particular strength in the wireless arena: media gateway, RNC, SBC, and IMS applications like media server. IPTV has also been a very good adopter of using ATCA. From the fixed network side, we are seeing elements like access consolidator and echo cancellation as prime candidates.

Continue reading "Interview with Scott Grout, CEO, RadiSys" »

• 3.2 million residential broadband customers. Same number of VoIP subscribers in theory
• 750K IPTV subscribers, up from 600k at the end of June 2007
• In business VoIP, 40% of new data link customers take up VoIP
• 300k mobile customers which includes a small proportion of WiFi-GSM subscribers

T-Mobile USA has gone ahead with its fixed line VoIP service with the commercial launch last week. While its parent company T-Mobile is testing Femtocell based convergence elsewhere in several countries, the US based arm decided to leverage the ubiquitous WiFi instead.

Femtocell has been in vogue throughout 2007. Faced with the prospect of possible GSM-to-WiFi traffic substitution due to FMC, nearly all major cellular operators have been exploring the Femtocell based FMC that helps you stalk your customer all the way around his house. However, Femtocells are not widely deployed yet and they deal with licensed spectrum making management rather complex. WiFi on the other hand is unlicensed and ubiquitous.

Continue reading "T-Mobile USA gives Femtocell a flick" »

The car stereos that come with USB ports can take in the wireless Internet USB sticks. In theory you should be able to add a chip inside the stereo that links to online services like iTunes to download music while driving.

A better option would be for car stereo makers to develop an operating system that can incorporate any 'music dialer' that connects to particular music site(s). That could be just the start. On top of this car stereo OS, you could then unleash the developer program and let people develop applications on top of this ‘platform’.

If you think about how much time you spend with the car stereo, the usage time would surely exceed your talk time on your mobile. Surely this ‘platform’ could be better leveraged.

Continue reading "When car stereo opens its APIs" »

If we are to believe in the upcoming applications renaissance, then we have not seen anything yet. New Web 2.0 / Voice 2.0 applications will keep coming every day. And while I have tested over a hundred so far, I am not going to test one every week, let alone one every day. One of the reasons is that for a lot of these services there is a downloadable. As such I have to go through the ritual of downloading and installing and testing and uninstalling (if I decide not to keep the application).

There has got to be a more efficient method of testing these new services. Perhaps a site that hosts a test account where feasible. The developers could work directly with the site owner to arrange a test account (or several such accounts). People like me would certainly want to use such sites rather than download-and-install things all the time.

Continue reading "Hosted test bed for applications involving downloads" »

I have not come across a lot of companies with an ASP model that are offering VoIP as well as IPTV.

That is right. We are trying to unify three services into one, which include communications, information, and entertainment. We have designed our IPTV services to incorporate social networking from day one. We enable real-time opinions and real-time ratings and multiple ways to communicate around the content.

You don’t own the last mile. So how can you reliably offer IPTV with all the QoS issues?

Our technology accommodates for a great deal of latency. We are also very light on the bandwidth consumption for IPTV delivery. Most services out there require 500 to 600 kbps kind of bi-directional connection. We don’t need that kind of bandwidth. We operate in about 280kbps kind of range.

You have over a million users. How does that subscriber base break down by the application subscription or usage?

We have near about 3 million users now. I would say that over 80% of our subscribers use the communications side which includes IM and VoIP. The IPTV side and Video-on-Demand is utilized by about 60% of the subscribers. There is obviously an overlap.

Continue reading "Interview with Greg Parker, CEO, Raketu" »

I am not yet clear if stress leads to a creative outlet or creative exhaustion. For me the months of Jan and Feb are always stressful in terms of workload. And I have noticed that I am not able to generate any micky mouse ideas these days that I could feel excited about. So although I have only one data point here to make an inference, I would say that extra workload is not good for creativity. There is another thing that is not good for creativity. I am officially (and regretfully) a smoker but my average is like 5 cigarettes per month. When I have a smoking streak (like in Jan and Feb), I lose it all. I mean creativity :) The fags just do not work for me. They make me dumb. Not sure how Freud and Einstein managed!

Anyway, I will blog about a few ideas that my smoke infested grey matter came up with. One is a mobile VoIP aggregator. Since you are going to see dozens of mobile VoIP offerings during 2008, why not develop a Least Cost Routing softclient that interfaces with various mobile VoIP offerings out there. Making cheap calls has to be one of the main motivations for using Mobile VoIP. And a single provider can never ensure best rates for all long distance routes. The LCR softclient can also similarly aggregate the mobile callback offerings out there if the APIs are available from companies like mig33 and Jajah. And while you are at it, you can make this a flash phone client so that we do not have to download anything.

Alastair discusses factors determining FMC growth and reasons for slow FMC uptake so far. Tango Networks claims that its hybrid FMC architecture is a win-win solution for both the PBX vendors and carriers thus avoiding possible cannibalization of revenues of these two important players in the FMC game. You can hear more from Tango Networks during our upcoming webinar on FMC security.

I am not sure how familiar you are with the name CounterPath, but the mouse just swallowed another little cub from the FMC zoo. Bridgeport Networks is the second FMC vendor acquisition of the week for the relatively lesser known CounterPath that licenses out its softphones to vendors and service providers. The first acquisition of the week was Firsthand Technologies that also falls under the FMC category.

So where would CounterPath be taking its FMC assets? Neither of the two acquired companies offer UMA flavour. So there are not going to be any consumer FMC deployments just yet. The only successful consumer FMC offerings that can be seen out there are UMA based which is a more mature FMC option. The company will have to perhaps wait one more year to see VCC gaining traction. It now has both an enterprise FMC product (Fristhand) and consumer FMC product (Bridgeport) under its belt. I would guess that the company will perhaps target MVNOs that are the ideal VCC target customers.

On the enterprise FMC side it is likely to continue working with OEMs like Nortel, a channel that Firsthand had secured prior to their acquisition. A better strategy would be to target the SOHO service provider breed such as Vocalocity, Phone.com, and Toktumi. GIPS, another softphone vendor like CounterPath that powered the early versions of Skype, is also changing direction somewhat and offering feature server capabilities geared toward the SOHO service provider segment. GIPS’ first customer is Toktumi.

Continue reading "CounterPath on a roll" »

Note: This interview was done a few days before CounterPath acquisition of FirstHand was announced.

What is the update on your commercial deployments?

Through the second half of 2007 we had thousands of seats out there through beta tests and trials. And those tests and trials across multiple OEMs have gone well and there have been related announcements related to general availability of PBX products integrated with our solution towards the end of 2007. We have pipelines built up with all our OEMs to supply our products for large enterprises as well as SMEs as we go into 2008.

There was a lot of interest in FMC at the end of 2006 but during 2007 there has been a lull although there was relatively more action on enterprise FMC side.

On the carrier side there has been a lull due to the fact that wireless carriers are asserting their control. And the way they are doing that is by exploring other FMC options like femtocell. However we did see some offers being launched in 2007 such as T-Mobile UMA based FMC service. On the enterprise side we have seen FMC continue to march forward. The delay there has been due to delays from PBX vendors in integrating this and bringing it to market. Nortel’s CS1000 which is their main PBX platform took six months till the end of 2007 to integrate our product. There are 3000 test cases just from the mobility aspect to validate a product for CS1000 platform. So it is a very strenuous process. We have also seen similar delays with Cisco and Avaya. But all major PBX vendors have announced their products now and hopefully that lull will disappear during 2008.

What percentage of IP PBX extensions do you expect to add FMC capability to, going forward?

Three years out we are looking at estimates of anywhere between 8% to 24% of enterprise PBX extensions being installed as mobile or FMC enabled. For 2008 I expect adoption of under 1% range. And that is a large figure. Enterprise PBX market is a huge market and we are looking at something in the region of 100 million lines per year being shipped worldwide.

Continue reading "Interview with David Hattey, CEO, FirstHand Technologies" »

Telecom Italia has separated the handover part from the FMC equation with its revamped UNICA offering what was re-launched in October 2007.

The new service is basically a Voice-over-WiFi offering for fixed Voice-over-Broadband customers. UNICA is therefore effectively a way to put on the same handset a mobile number and a fixed number. It is not a single number service as one would typically expect from an FMC offering. There is no handover involved between GSM and WiFi. So if you start the conversation with WiFi phone you initiate it using your VoBB number. When you move over to the GSM cloud you disconnect and redial using the mobile number.

Continue reading "Telecom Italia not keen on the handover part" »

FMC during 2007 has mostly been about the femtocell trials. UMA based consumer offerings did gain a little ground. But no way near what the industry had expected. SIP/VCC based FMC offerings have altogether been a disappointment. It is the latter category of FMC that NewStep enables. New funding for a VCC based vendor is therefore a bit of a surprise for me.

NewStep however sees things differently. According to the vendor, the market is moving in terms of FMC adoption. In particular it sees encouraging signs in Europe. And that is where most the new funding will be spent. Last time NewStep announced finding was in October 2006 when the company closed its Series B round. The $9.5 million Series C round it announced yesterday takes the total funding to $36.5 million. The company is also bringing in the new CEO.

Here are a few data points related to NewStep:

Continue reading "NewStep funding says FMC is kicking" »

T-Mobile USA has sold over 250k FMC integrated handsets. The company does not reveal how many of those have actually taken up the FMC service. Sources suggest that about half the people who buy the phone sign up for the service.

If half those who bought the FMC pre-integrated handsets subscribed, that would still make T-Mobile the second biggest consumer FMC provider after Orange. There are not many commercial FMC offers out there. The ones offered by the fixed operators did not bother iLocus number crunchers too much. BT is still going at around 50k subscribers. The last reported figure that came from Orange was 573k FMC subscribers at the end of October 2007.

Coming back to T-Mobile dual mode FMC service Hotspot@Home, which is offered across the US, it is possible to buy a dual mode FMC integrated phone and not subscribe to the FMC service. There is a subtle point however. If you buy a dual-mode handset, it will work over WiFi anyway (clever T-Mobile …. we will tell you in a minute why). So you effectively get to “try” FMC. For example, you can buy Samsung dual mode phone through T-Mobile and operate it over WiFi at home. You don’t get any additional calling benefits. The calls that you make over WiFi are just like the calls you make over GSM network. They still come out of your bucket of minutes. This is T-Mobile conveniently offloading calls to WiFi thanks to the fantastic FMC technology.

Continue reading "T-Mobile sells over 250k FMC dual mode phones" »

Here is NSN view on why FMC has not cemented itself just yet. This in reply to a question posed by an analyst during a recent briefing.

Most of the operators are still in their early phase with convergence and there haven't been many commercial FMC services offered to the subscribers. FMC has two main aspects for the operators; cost savings through network simplification and new revenues through converged end-user services. So far the focus has been more on planning and implementing the network simplification, bringing in IP backbone networks into use for all the access networks. In network simplification there are lots of early phase activities going on.

For the end-users the voice convergence has not yet really started. Operators are modernizing the PSTN networks and VoIP is being used more and more for the fixed voice. But in the mobile networks circuit switched voice is still the most efficient way of providing the voice services. Converged services have been based more on non-voice services like email and browsing, where we have started to see increasing usage amongst the smartphone users.

Continue reading "NSN view on lacklustre FMC" »

(A) Cable companies have one of the best IP infrastructures in the carrier space. (B) Cable companies in the US are buying wireless spectrum and it seems wireless is very important to them going forward. Put A and B together and you will have Cable companies in the US utilizing their IP networks for wireless backhaul.

What has that got to do with their relationship with Sprint through the joint venture Pivot? Imagine if a joint Sprint-Comcast customer (Comcast effectively operating as MVNO here utilizing Sprint’s wireless network) used a dual mode phone within a WiFi zone and migrated the call over to IP using Comcast’s FMC server thus bypassing Sprint’s wireless network? That would leave Sprint high and dry. Sprint is apprehensive about the FMC related converged offerings being tested by Cable companies. Basically Sprint is not allowing for dual-mode single-number type of services within this joint venture.

Continue reading "Why Sprint’s Pivot remains frozen" »

As part of eBay strategy to make money from Skype, the VoIP provider’s softphone has found place on Sony PSP. Although it is widely believed the Sony is getting no revenue out of this, it is more likely to be the opposite. Skype icon on PSP is not going to drive PSP sales. That is almost for sure. Those who play games are not after cheap calls, or do not want to talk when they play. There is some use of voice avatars among the gamers but I am not aware of Skype offering such capability just yet.

Sony has since long been apprehensive about its business of consumer electronics items like cameras which are conveniently becoming part of mobile phones now. Since the likes of Nokia have been invading its territories, it is only fair that Sony has a go at telephonizing its gadgets. They will certainly have kids on their side. And who knows when those kids grow up with PSP as their companion, they might decide to stick to it rather than buy the mobile phone.

Continue reading "Skype on Sony PSP carries little significance for now" »

What kind of businesses can potentially sustain free over-the-air, country-wide, Internet access over WIMAX enabled devices? I have been doing some math here. But let me touch upon the last part of the previous sentence. WIMAX enabled and WIMAX integrated devices are expected to become common by 2010. You would require WIMAX integrated phones/devices if you want to push ads down those devices. And you would have to wait till around 2010.

A country wide WIMAX network: Let us consider the United States. The operator would need around 40,000 base stations and it would cost around $300-400 dollars per site including installation. So the cost of laying down the network would be around $5 billion. Let us leave aside the OPEX for a while (likely to be slightly under a billion dollars per year, by the way). For such a network, one would need spectrum of around 50 – 70 MHz and getting that would cost anything in the range of $7-10 billion.

So the initial set up cost of such a network would be in the range of $12 – 15 billion. If we assume a realistic RoI of 10-20%, we are talking about revenue targets of $1.2 - $ 1.5 billion a year on the lower side and between $2.5 billion to $3 billion on the higher side.

Continue reading "Requirements for free over-the-air Internet using WIMAX" »

Indoor coverage is a challenge and WiMAX is no exception. Even with WiMAX we are talking about using complementary indoor technologies like WiFi. 3G operators are looking to solve the issue with Femtocells indoors. Some of the WiMAX providers have been asked in the past to address the problem by increasing the density of macro and micro cells.

WiMAX vendor Redline’s pitch is that increasing cell density can be avoided for a while. They are pushing an interim solution, an unconventional approach. Redline believes that the optimal approach is to build a macro base station that delivers high power (4 to 10 Watts depending on frequency), then add on Matrix A and Matrix B MIMO support to provide statistical power enhancement of 6 – 10 dB for coverage and capacity and finally further enhance the system with beamforming to create an adaptive macro WiMAX base station solution.

Continue reading "Redline’s roadmap for improving indoor WiMAX coverage" »

Ubiquisys, the Femtocell maker, is involved in 8 operator trials within Europe. The vendor also runs a few of its own trials in order to study how consumers react to the technology. Trial data collected so far suggests that 'coverage' ranks very high among the users. The second highest ranking feature is the 'simultaneous calls' (you can make 4 simultaneous calls through the Femtocell). Most of all, it is the mobile data in form of Internet browsing that has turned out to be a big hit in the trials. And since the trial participants have become used to fast Internet browsing on their cellphones inside their homes, they have shown preference to extend the usage (Internet browsing) on macro networks as well.

That could bring about a behavioural change among Femtocell users. Also read this on the subject.

In the video below, I am speaking to Keith Day, VP Marketing, Ubiquisys. I shot this around evening time out in the open. You will notice the video getting progressively darker as you play it. Enjoy the fountain in the background. One day – hopefully some time soon – you will start seeing HD quality videos from iLocus. But we would rather you looked at the content than the jazz we add around it. For now, I have an excuse for the noisy video.

Expanding services revenue is one of the main reasons why Nokia and Siemens merged their telecom infrastructure units. In the video we discussed how far the services side would develop at NSN going forward. We also talked about Voice 2.0 and the impact of Nokia’s OVI Internet services model on NSN. Other bits included areas of improvement such as NSN’s market position in North America. I am speaking to Jyrki Holmala, Head of Sales, and Martin Blades, Head of Marketing, Service Core and Applications division within NSN.

The background 'noise' is Pekka Ala-Pietilä, CEO, Blyk speaking next door. Pekka was the former Nokia chief. I am also trying to get some input from Blyk. Perhaps a post after the holiday period.

Market: Redline Communications serves fixed / mobile wireless broadband access and backhaul solutions.

Deployments: The company presently has around 50,000 installations in 80 countries across 6 continents. It works with a network of more than 100 partner distributors that support voice, data and video services.

Scale of Deployments: A typical deal for Fixed WiMAX ranges between $250 - $500k in the beginning and can go upto $2 - $20 Million for a commercial deployment over a period of several years. For Mobile WiMAX the company expects larger trials with multi-city rollouts similar in investments to current 2G/3G mobile coverage at 50% of the CAPEX involved in a 3G network It has currently 130 networks globally testing and trailing its solution. 33% of these networks are commercial deployments. Some of the commercial WiMAX networks running on Redline solution include Personal in Paraguay, Saudi Telecom and MTN. Personal has around 4000 subscribers presently and expects to reach 10,000 by the year end. Similarly Saudi Telecom has installed around 500 base stations and MTN is targeting around 10,000 subscribers with the launch of services by the year end in two cities.

Continue reading "Company Profile: Redline Communications" »

I shared with you some of the results on December 4th. In addition to the results mentioned in that post, here are some interesting findings revealed by Nokia:

Where are outbound calls being made: On the move 47%; At home 29%; From office 24%.

Where is packet data being consumed: On the move 35%; At home 44%; From office 21%.

Data traffic use by survey panellists: Increased from 6mb/month in 2006 to 14 mb/month in 2007. If we look at the distribution of data traffic by bearer, WiFi/WLAN accounted for 31%, WCDMA 54%, EDGE 7%, GPRS 7%. Not all panellists had WiFi. WiFi sessions were longer with an average session duration of 4.5 minutes.

Continue reading "Nokia Smartphone 360 Panel survey results, Part 2" »

I wrote last time about how various service providers are waiting for Sprint’s launch of mobile WiMAX. This launch is affecting decision timeframe of many other providers exploring WiMAX. There is no doubt about that. Even some of the fixed WiMAX projects seem to be on hold, playing the wait and watch game. But they are surely not watching Sprint only.

In fact if we look at the WiMAX services today, the landscape is dominated by emerging markets. There are around 100 countries among the emerging markets where broadband penetration rate is under 5%. These countries are seriously looking at WiMAX as the alternative. They include Saudi Arabia, Paraguay, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia etc. Looking at the market requirements of these countries, WIMAX is going to be a multi billion dollar game. BSNL in India has announced that it will spend around $1 billion on WIMAX in coming years.

Sprint is not the only provider that has budgeted over a billion for WIMAX. VSNL (India), Optus (Australia), NTT DoCoMo (Japan) and Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan) have all set aside a billion or over for WIMAX. These projects amount to expected investments of nearly $10-$15 billion till 2012 in these countries.

Continue reading "Sprint is important for WiMAX push, but so are the emerging markets" »

There are quite a few companies providing mirror numbers now. Where are we headed with this interesting new business model?

Rebtel was actually one of the first ones that created a local phone number for (both) the party to be called and yourself, and then to either connect the two local calls or enable direct calling. That concept of telephony has now been applied in various different contexts. The nice thing about this service is that it is viral. You invite a friend into the service and they can invite you and that way it spreads, so the market for this service is quite big.

But with SIP, these mirror numbers were possible several years ago. Right?

It is not about getting the local numbers and using the latest voice technology. It is about leveraging the internet for an ordinary mobile phone.

Is this model going to scale? If this trend catches on, we might probably need a trillion phone numbers worldwide?

People today are not calling phone numbers they are calling the name associated with number, which is a major behavioral change. We are using numbers in a smart way. The usage pattern of our subscribers shows that those who call international numbers, they only tend to call their top five contacts frequently. And for business callers they spent 90% of their calling time with top five contacts too. It is easy to type these five favorite numbers in the address book.

You must be paying to procure the numbers. How do you make money? Is it mainly through the phone charges you put on calls or is there any ad insertion as well?

There are phone charges. But we also get a small share in the interconnect revenue which offsets the cost used in connecting the numbers and in converting TDM to IP.

Continue reading "Interview with Hjalmar Winbladh, CEO, Rebtel" »

Nokia is in the process of publishing its Smartphone 360 Panel survey results. The company gave a sneak preview today. As they hurried through the slides I could note down only a few pointers. There is going to be an analyst webcast (probably on 18th of this month) which discusses the results. So I will update you when these results become available. Basically Nokia has embarked on a permission based user behaviour study which seeks to establish smartphone usage patterns. The company does publish some results from the survey from time to time. I could find one old link here. Anyway, following are the survey pointers the company revealed today:

Users spend an average of 48 minutes per day on their mobile phones (smartphone). 12% of the time is spent on making voice calls. Messaging consumes 37% of the time; multimedia 16%; PIM 14%; Games 4%; Browsing 8%.

Continue reading "Nokia Smartphone 360 Panel survey results" »

If you compare FMC with voicemail, both accomplish something common: they increase the call completion rate. If seen from that angle, FMC should ideally be a big hit, just as voicemail became big in the eighties. Is it therefore just a matter of time then?

Voicemail benefits consumers because they do not entirely miss their calls. It has been particularly important for the business users. Missed calls could mean lost business. Service provider on the other hand can increase call completion rate and increase revenues. When you make an unanswered call all the way from LA to Taiwan, and the other party is not equipped with voicemail, the service provider still incurs a cost – cost of engaging the circuits and switches all the way through. And you are talking about at least 2 or 3 corresponding carriers that relay the call onward. Surely the service providers would love to complete the call to realize the revenues. So the point is that voicemail brings benefits to both service providers as well as end-users by increasing the call completion rate.

Continue reading "Voicemail and FMC" »

Does the market have a workable business plan for leveraging femtocell topology for WiMAX?

I believe we do. If you look at Sprint WiMAX plans they are putting femtocells in McDonalds and various such places. It is definitely part of other service provider plans as well, such as in Korea. These service providers realize that having just the macro cell infrastructure is not enough for WiMAX.

Do you see CPE vendors working right now on integrating Mobile WiMAX with the existing residential gateways so that it could be affordable to a certain extent?

Absolutely. Most of the CPE guys are on it. WiMAX started initially with fixed nomadic deployments which is really CPE based. On the CPE side you have many types of devices which are either just for data or the residential gateway. Many of them, particularly ODMs in Taiwan like Quanta, Alpha, Gemtech, etc. have some kind of residential gateways for this.

Right now how mobile and fixed WiMAX end users do you see?

If I talk about pure WiMAX it’s around half a million subscribers.

What sort of subscriber forecasts are you working around?

Take Sprint again as an example. Sprint will cover 100m users mid next year. Let us say they have 10% penetration. That means about 10 million subscribers that you can reach in North America quite quickly. This is all a question of timing more than a question of technology. Within our plan we see around 30 million subscribers by 2010 which is not very aggressive in reality.

Continue reading "Interview with Dr. Georges Karam, CEO, Sequans" »

It is the quarterly reports time so I am all engrossed with vendor shipment and subscriber data (number crunching on steroids). That leaves little opportunity to update you on interactions with the gurus. I wanted to however do this short post on Raketu.

I had a chance to interact with Greg Parker, CEO of Raketu, yesterday. Raketu (which by the way means Rocket in Czech language) provides VoIP, IPTV, and some social networking capability – all off the public Internet. Kind of Triple Play ASP, if we take social networking aspect as the third play in the bundle. I have been struggling to coin new terms for some of the Voice 1.5 companies. But this one fits like dosa on flat pan.

Continue reading "Triple Play ASP model" »

Are the wireless networks going to migrate over to VoIP in much the similar way that fixed networks did: core first and then the edge?
That is one logical path of pushing packetization to the edge. But in the wireless market, the end user VoIP is taking off in parallel. That is something fixed networks did not see in late nineties.

There are various flavors of end user mobile VoIP. How would you categorize them?

Well, apart from mobile callback, which is not necessarily mobile VoIP, you have the likes of Skype and Fring that are targeting PC based VoIP users more and trying to transfer or migrate them over to mobile VoIP. They are looking to leverage the existing PC VoIP user market to build their user base. We view mobile VoIP as a new standalone market where PC is cut out of the equation. Truphone type companies leverage SIP client capability of existing smartphones. They are not able to control user experience. Those three approaches determine the various flavors of mobile VoIP you see out there.

Would you consider FMC providers as part of the mobile VoIP thing?

There is definitely a space for them. But the FMC services rely on hardware based solutions which make it difficult to upgrade in terms of functionality and dynamically change according to the market needs. A software application on the other hand can be upgraded more frequently and allows you to brand and give you so much more control. It is much easier to add value added applications to software based mobile VoIP service.

Do you see companies like yourself adding handover capability in the future?

We can do so. It is not beyond our capability. However the users are still trying to understand difference between GSM call and a VoIP call. It becomes very difficult to communicate with the FMC user why the cost of the call changes, when it changes, and why it changes. It just complicates things a bit more for the service provider.

Continue reading "Interview with Rapelang Rabana, CEO, Yeigo" »

The commercial launch of Sprint’s mobile WiMAX is expected in 1Q08. Most other service providers are expected to formulate their WiMAX strategies accordingly. There are several small commercial WiMAX services around. However they are mostly fixed in nature. Mobile WiMAX is largely confined to trial networks. There are many skeptics who believe that mobile and WiMAX cannot go hand in hand.

A more important question is whether Sprint will be able to drive new subscriptions or are we mostly talking about migration from one service plan to the other. Nevertheless, we are looking at a major test bed. Sprint made investments of $73 million during 3Q07 into its WiMAX project. One of the tests Sprint will carry out for us is whether mobile WiMAX can be something beyond data centric. Once it is established how mobile WiMAX fits in the existing telecom ecosystem in terms of user experiences it will be touch clearer for others to have a go at the service.

Sprint expects revenues of over $2 billion per year by 2010 from mobile WiMAX and majority of that is expected to be new business.

Is mobile VoIP part of overall mobile telephony arbitrage that includes mobile callback, FMC, and Voice over Wireless Broadband (VoWB)?

So far as termination into traditional public network is concerned, you could view it like that.

How long have you been providing mobile VoIP?

We have been around since 2001. By 2004 we had our VoIP softphone ready. We have built our technology around SIP, and not any proprietary technology. We offered the downloadable version for mobiles in 2005 and also combined that with callback solution so from the softphone people could initiate callback.

What is the advantage in building a SIP mobile client?

Nokia and other handset makers are coming out with WiFi-GSM dual mode phones supporting SIP. This will drive the mobile VoIP market and serves as just one of several reasons for building a SIP mobile client.

When exactly did you decide to focus more towards white labeled mobile VoIP?

We launched our mobile VoIP retail service called Challenger Mobile in December 2006. During 2007 however we changed the focus towards white labeling our offering.

Who are your potential customers for white labeled offering?

We believe that players like MVNOs and wireless ISPs will be interested in providing this service to their customer base. MVNOs will be the first ones to move in this direction. As soon as we see one MVNO success, the others will follow.

Continue reading "Interview with Christina Sundman, CEO and Co-Founder, Challenger Mobile" »

Skype timing of PC-to-PC calling in 2003 was great because broadband had arrived. The type of mobile VoIP offering that Skype is enabling and its related phone launch with Italy’s 3 is mistimed, however. And that is because wireless broadband has not truly arrived yet. If you look at consumer mobile VoIP market, it is being approached by three broad types of offerings: mobile callback, FMC, and (what I call) Voice over Wireless Broadband (VoWB). Mobile callback is plain old voice. FMC can be about multimedia provided there is continuity of multimedia sessions. Companies like Azaire and Stoke are able to offer that. Other vendors like OnRelay who make your cellphone your only phone are also able to facilitate this. However within the mobile VoIP offerings it is the VoWB offering that will ultimately prevail on the consumer side.

If we look at Voice over Broadband (VoBB) in the fixed line market it is slowly replacing land lines. That is what VoWB will do to cell connections. Once cell operators start offering reliable broadband services, there will be a steady migration from GSM accounts to VoWB accounts. So VoWB has much bigger potential. And Skype is tapping the right mobile VoIP option. However the timing is not right.

Continue reading "Skype is mistiming its phone launch" »

It is usually the telemarketers based in India that have to be careful about the Do-Not-Call registry in the US. However, the Indian telecom regulator, TRAI, has recently taken a swing at this in India as well. TRAI recently came out with UCC (Unsolicited Commercial Communications) regulations whereby service providers have to maintain a Do Not Call (DNC) register. Users are allowed to register their number for which they don't want to receive any telemarketing calls. The telemarketers would be required to check this list before making calls to the users on single or multiple operator networks. This register will be centrally maintained by National Informatics Centre (NIC) India.

Continue reading "TRAI UCC regulation needs to be flexible" »

Click here to read Part 1 of the interview.

Any issues with TRAI? They recently came down hard on the tele-callers?

First of all, TRAI is more concerned about the telemarketers who make voice calls. Text based messaging is not that an issue. Secondly, their recent regulation is for Unsolicited Commercial Communications (UCC). Ours is completely solicited. The user permits us to send messages. So we have no issues with TRAI.

Any issues with service providers? You could at times be competing with them for mobile advertising revenue?

Not at all. Infact most of them that we met are very happy with such a service, because they think we are kind of subsidizing the users' mobile bills. We are getting calls from them to ensure that subscribers on their network do get our messages.

Do you have your own sms servers?

No we go through SMS aggregators.

Continue reading "Interview with Chaitanya Nallan, CEO, mGinger (Part II)" »

mGinger, a garage startup, introduced solicited mobile advertising services in India based on social networking. In a short span of time the company has near 1 million users whom it pays for reading the campaigns. The services are being offered across the country over all major cellular operators.

Click here to read Part II of the interview.
What sort of response are you getting from the advertisers? Who have you signed up so far?

Since 4 months of our launch we have done around 150 - 200 campaigns. We have 70-80 advertisers signed up so far. Besides this we are getting advertising enquiries from all types of advertisers, from small outlets at the street corner to the big boys like HLL. Big names advertising with mGinger would be Taj Gateway Hotels, Tanishq, ICICI prudential mutual fund, Pritish Nandy Communications, etc.

Is there any particular segment you see more advertisers from?

We are seeing a good traction in segments like Hotels, pubs and education. However there is no single category we are confined to.

Continue reading "Interview with Chaitanya Nallan, CEO, mGinger (Part I)" »

You are one of very few FMC vendors that do not care about the WiFi part. Why is that?

We did not start with the WiFi-GSM handover solution. We were always focused on extending PBX features on to the cell phone. We never approached the market with the WiFi angle. You must have noticed that in enterprise FMC, there has been a shift from plain handover to extension of features on to cell phones. That in a way substantiates our market positioning. FMC in enterprises is not about saving costs by routing calls over WiFi.

But FMC and mobile PBX can save costs on calls. Why not highlight that aspect?

Yes, you will see most of our competitors pushing savings on mobile calls as one of the key drivers for mobile PBX. And we too did that early on. But we realized fast that the savings are really not big enough, if any at all. When you drive the use of mobile telephony in the business segment you actually drive up the talk time. So even if you could do some toll bypass and WiFi substitution what we see in effect is that mobile bill remains roughly the same.

Continue reading "Interview with Ivar Plahte, CEO, OnRelay" »

Azaire Networks is one of the most experienced startup vendors in the FMC space. The company has worked with carriers for several years for implementing FMC. Its solution mainly enables multimedia session continuity. However the vendor also added the voice call continuity (VCC) feature in the first quarter of this year. According to Azaire, the market has been lukewarm to the VCC implementation in general. And we can substantiate that observation. There is perception in the market that we are still facing the lack of VCC compliant handsets.

Three is also some confusion among some service providers who regard IMS as a pre-requisite to do FMC, which is not true the way most FMC vendors including Azaire have engineered the product. In addition to that, the prevailing opinion is that VCC standards development is behind IMS development timeframe.

Continue reading "FMC vendor update: Azaire Networks" »

I am surprised to find out that there are no vendors out there offering an off-the-shelf package for mobile callback. Previously confined to clumsy calling cards, the arbitrage is knocking hard at the doors of mobile telephony. And the form it is taking is mobile VoIP and mobile callback. There is a huge opportunity – even though short term – just like the fixed line resellers and callback operators flourished post deregulation in countries driving international calling rates down.

And among the existing mobile callback providers there are none working on white labeling mobile callback.

Continue reading "White labeling Mobile Callback" »

I have been doing a brief polling round with the FMC vendors on the current market size of FMC. I have not interacted with service providers on the subject since they are still very secretive about it. The aggregate feedback I have from vendors is as under:

As of September 2007 ….

Number of FMC (WiFi-GSM) subscribers worldwide: approx 900,000, with UMA based subscribers accounting for the majority

Number of data continuity subscribers: approximately 400,000

Continue reading "FMC subscriber estimates" »

WiMAX opportunity in Cambodia is compelling. The country has just recovered from the war it had in 70s as well as the civil war in the 80s. Most of the fixed line infrastructure is in shambles. There are only 25,000 fixed lines in Phnom Penh compared to a population of 1.5 million.

When Mediaring, Asia’s VoIP pioneer, obtained WiMAX license from Cambodia regulator in December 2005, the company installed pre-WiMAX equipment (as WiMAX was not standardized at the time). Along with the local partners, a trial got going in January 2006. The 20 companies that were selected for the trial all subscribed to the services when the trial turned into a commercial offering on May 4, 2006. These companies include banks and the government sector.

Continue reading "Mediaring turns WiMAX into a profitable business in Cambodia" »

FirstHand Technologies has OEM go-to-market business model which allows it to pre-integrate with PBX systems. Integration and provisioning is a big issue in enterprise FMC. Another unique feature about Firsthand’s approach is the fact that it is not that excited about the dual mode handover type FMC. It is more focused on extending PBX features to cell phones over cellular networks. Extending PBX features over WiFi phone is an easier task in comparison. If on the other hand you have to extend them over the cellular cloud you have to deal with slow speed packet data of cellular. The technology piece is explained towards the end of this post.

In terms of the business update Firsthand has so far signed up three main OEM partnerships: NEC, Nortel, and 3Com. The three of them ship about 25% of the PBX lines worldwide. Firsthand supports both IP PBX as well as traditional PBXs, the latter being carried out through CTI interface. These OEMs are in various stages of product introduction including beta testing. Firsthand expects full product launches in Q3 and Q4 this year.

Continue reading "FMC vendor update: FirstHand Technologies" »

How many mobile WiMAX users would there be at present and what percentage of that is served by SOMA Networks platform?

Many analyst firms have estimated the size of the Mobile WiMAX market and according to analyst firm Visant Strategies, there will be expected 12 million subscribers using 802.16e powered services in 2010, with well over 50% of these being primarily "fixed" wireless customers.

As Mobile WiMAX is not yet a certified standard, there are no subscribers on certified Mobile WiMAX systems. Estimates by another analyst firm, Maravedis, count approximately one million current broadband wireless subscribers using WiMAX-ready technology. Many of these will have an upgrade path to Mobile WiMAX, but such statistics are not well understood at the moment. The industry is currently at an inflection point and is poised to take off. We anticipate this to be a multi-billion dollar market within a few years, and SOMA Networks will command a sizeable share of the market.

Continue reading "Interview with Yatish Pathak, CEO and Founder, SOMA Networks" »

Once upon a time, data was doing the catch up and voice was the king. Then data took over. Further down the line data and voice started to merge over a common network. Today, you won't find any major fixed line service provider in the world with voice-only offering. However voice still rules in the wireless world. It remains to be seen which generic path wireless operators take with regard to data services.

Asian and North American operators are more inclined towards WiMAX and that is why the regulators in these countries are opening spectrum for WiMAX. Compared to this the European regulators are not so sure just yet. The result is that WiMAX is still weak in Europe. There have not been any major deployments in this region for WiMAX.

Continue reading "WiMAX has a weak case in Europe" »

Some three months back, 4 big operators got together and put out a joint procurement RFP. They listed out their feature requirements for dual mode FMC devices from entry level, to mid-tier to smartphones, and submitted RFP to 30 different handset ecosystem companies, which includes platform suppliers as well as handset suppliers.

Continue reading "Handset availability may no longer be an issue in FMC" »

BT is not going anywhere with its residential FMC service. And this, according to some, has to do with perception. People do not think of BT as leader in mobile services. Those who subscribed to the FMC service or were part of the trial have gone back to the regular mobiles.

Continue reading "BT FMC flat at 40k" »

Around 1000 customers are testing WiMAX in Pakistan. Operators carrying out the trials include Wateen Telecom and Warid Telecom.

Trials reveal that the main problem that could limit the WiMAX potential in Pakistan is the cost of CPE, which is very high. The cost of CPE is more than 200 US dollars. In Pakistan a GSM handset starts at around $20 while a CDMA set would start at $50 or so.

Continue reading "WiMAX trials in Pakistan" »

You can throw away your bluetooth dongles and data cables connecting mobile with PCs, because I just had a neat idea. We should develop a 'Mobile Phone Anywhere' kind of application that will give access to your mobile phone (and its applications) over any net connected PC (and maybe TV as well, why not?) and let you use those applications. The connection between your cell phone and the PC will be over Internet connection (cell phone connected through GPRS or EDGE or Wifi to the public Internet) to the PC (or indeed to a TV connected to net). This is like PC Anywhere application of early Internet days whereby you accessed your net connected PC over a telnet connection.

Continue reading "Mobile Mobile" »

FMC does not have a bad business case. It is in many ways like VoIP in its early days. VoIP took a bit of time to get established because those service providers who could better promote it felt that VoIP would instead cannibalize their revenues. They only started VoIP at retail level because it was eating away their lunch. And so ‘if someone is going to eat my lunch, it might as well be me’.

We are likely to see something similar with regard to FMC. Big wireless carriers will not push it unless they start losing lines to FMC offerings. These carriers regard FMC as a threat to their traditional revenue streams.

Continue reading "Who should be taking FMC to the market?" »

Can you give us some background information about your company? When did you get started with VoIP?

We are based in Germany. The company was formed in the year 1999 to develop software based IPPBX. We have an installed base in Europe where we deploy and deliver our solutions to the small and medium enterprise markets.

Within the SME segment, what is your focus area?

Our focus is business set ups ranging from 20 users up to 1000 users.

You obviously compete with the likes of Cisco. But what is your perceived position in the SME IP PBX market in Europe?

I believe we are leader in the space in Europe followed by Cisco and Siemens.

Continue reading "Interview with Günter Junk, CEO, Swyx" »

There are well known pull factors shaping the concept of future home gateway. These include the Analog Telephone Adaptor, the IP TV Settop box, the WiFi router, the fixed line broadband modem etc. Where exactly does the Femtocell fit in within this plan? Clearly a customer will prefer only one box at home in the future.

Well, for now Femtocells are definitely going to be standalone products for a lot of reasons. The first reason is the cost. If we are lucky, we are looking at $200 range for a Femtocell and that too by the end 2008. That is just for the 3G radio access component (or even 2G if the Femtocell is designed as such). For the Femtocell market to get started therefore, it will have to be standalone product unless the vendors get the costs down significantly.

Continue reading "Femtocell as part of a home gateway" »

Practically all cellular service providers are using legacy technologies. Practically all communications is TDM. The IP based high speed data network or voice communications is a long way off. There is no incentive today for mobile carriers to do it because of the cost and technology.

So although we have VoIP based cellular applications like Push to Talk, Instant Messaging, or video telephony/messaging but the traditional voice communications in cellular world is going to take a long time to start transitioning to IP. That project most probably does not fit in within the 10 to 15 year phase of migration. In the mobile world, it might be shifted out over an even longer phase.

Continue reading "Packetized wireless trunking: a long way to go" »

Looking at some of the old writeups on VoIP, it seems like headset (mic and speakers) was a major turn off. So how did Skype overcome that? It did not. It is still an issue. However with a VoIP client installed on your mobile handset, that problem does not arise. So with that bit of inspiration, I am going to get creative.

Imagine if inside a household we had multiple users of mobile VoIP clients connected via some sort of a device (toned down version of home PBX) enabling us to call transfer etc between family members. The device would need to be compatble with the VoIP client on our mobile handsets. It could be femtocell/WiFi compatible, whatever. One could then make a much better use of buddy/family lists on mobile VoIP clients. Is there such a device out there? Would love to write about it.

I have been hearing for a long time that WiFi and WiMAX are complementary technologies and that both will coexist. Turns out that companies like BelAir are already established players in offering a mix of WiFi, WiMAX, and Wireless Mesh networks. The value in WiFi is that there are millions of devices available in the world that have a WiFi chipset whether it is a PC, a camera, or a dual mode phone.

We are in a position today to say that a critical mass of WiFi devices exits. It is now a very common technology, and also an inexpensive one. It also remains unlicensed. Coming over to the value WiMAX brings to an end user, not many have raised any questions here. And companies like BelAir show that the two together play very well.

Continue reading "WiFi-WiMAX marriage: half licensed half unlicensed" »

Part of my interactions with companies enabling public mobile VoIP clients ….

SoonR is about mobilizing desktops …. Remote Desktop Connection … a concept that is gaining traction among the business VoIP users as well. There are some companies that are offering solutions to roaming users providing access to their desktops when they are remote. The concept is that a user's handset with a data connection - wherever the user travels - can have access to all the applications that are on his desktop (including Skype).

Continue reading "SoonR profile" »

NewPhone is a triple play service provider offering services in Norway and Sweden using the incumbent service providers' broadband and mobile Internet. The company has grown from a turnover of SEK 8 million in 2004 to SEK 51 million in 2006.

You are a mobile service provider in Sweden. To what extent have you utilized VoIP so far?

We integrate the IP PBX with mobile phones. If you have a fixed line phone, we can take the fixed line numbers, put them in the PBX and when somebody calls that number the PBX will divert the call to the mobile phones. Between the PBX and the mobile phones we send calls through a SIP tunnel and that is where we use VoIP. Being IP based, subscribers can take calls on their handsets anywhere in the world provided they have IP connection and our wireless IP Phone.

Which VoIP vendor do you work with?

We have deployed Broadsoft solution.

How would you compare fixed line VoIP with the mobile VoIP in Sweden?

All the research we have done so far tells us that the market here in Sweden is going mobile and that makes it even more relevant to just go mobile with VoIP from the beginning.

Continue reading "Interview with Andreas Khoshnou, CEO, NewPhone" »

I am getting started on the theme ‘Public Mobile VoIP Clients’. Let me define the segment: these would be the likes of Fring, Barablu, Nimbuzz, Mig33, Jajah, Skype etc i.e. public mobile softclients that have VoIP capability. First off, a question pops up whether these services will impact cell operator revenues?

It seems logical to assume that a subscriber can potentially substitute calls of his/her cell operator with the help of these clients. However, right now, there are two issues. The bandwidth available for wireless internet connections is not adequate just yet. The other issue is the overall context in which these softclients reside on a mobile handset.

Continue reading "Impact of mobile VoIP clients on cell companies and FMC providers" »