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" »