Following the acquisition of Lucent, and Nortel unlikely to emerge through bankruptcy in one piece, there is a telecom vendor vacuum in North America. It just so happens that Huawei – which has literally started 2009 from zero deployments in the US - is gearing up for a major marketing push in North America following its initial success with the cable companies there. I think the company has a good chance filling the vendor vacuum. I discussed these and other related issues with Huawei’s Ron Raffensperger recently at their Analyst conference in Shenzhen.
We need Web type APIs into IPTV middleware for tighter integration of applications on TV. There is already a wealth of apps available on Web. While some of these could be offered by CATV using DOCSIS transport, they are optimised for IP networks. The key to making them available over an IPTV subscription is leveraging the ergonomics of a TV remote control rather than let subscribers access these applications by browsing Web over a TV screen. Using something like Flickr on a TV with the help of a remote control calls for open APIs to the client and server side middleware. This is why Microsoft’s recent announcement (to open up its middleware) seems important.
The video conversation with Brian Caskey from UTStarcom below discusses some of this. We started by briefly talking about IPTV prospects in general. UTStarcom has so far adopted an end-to-end solutions approach to IPTV deployments rather than open APIs to its middleware.
There are over 1.3 million live IPTV subscribers on ECI’s MSAN product. The biggest such platform deployment for ECI is at France Telecom. Not all FT’s IPTV customers are on ECI MSAN though. Some are on Alcatel-Lucent platform. I am in touch with some other MSAN providers and will do a post early next month that provides a breakdown of IPTV subs by the type of MSAN they are being served by.
In a recent short report on Voice 2.0 we took an early look at how various vendors and service providers are approaching the delivery of these communications aware mashups. I think it is fair to comment that the delivery models are yet to be established. These short interactions with Sylantro and MetaSwitch present a couple of contrasting views and should be viewed along with posts like the ones on Broadsoft and Ribbit.
There are several approaches to prioritizing multiple applications on a converged network. Zeugma does it with a product that analysts are beginning to call Service Delivery Router. One of the major issues – going back to the RSVP days – in convergence is how to offer a multi-tiered service. For example, it would be plausible to assume that somewhere down the line a service provider would offer a two-tiered voice service … one that is a high-quality high-price HD voice service, and the other that involves an inexpensive best efforts voice service. Zeugma product does exactly that sort of thing for multiple application types.
Robby Benedyk, Senior Manager Global Marketing, Tekelec co-authored PacketCable ENUM Server Provisioning Specification that deals with the way ENUM is handled in Cable networks. Tekelec has announced a commercial ENUM solution, which Robby discusses in this video. Cable MSOs are very active in the area of VoIP peering.
The specs have also been submitted to the IETF and as a result could be extended over to the GSMA IPX project initiative. Once that happens, Tekelec will substantially increase its target market for the newly announced ENUM solution.
It seems plausible to assume that IP-In-IP-Out could have a major impact on the IPTV encoder business. IPTV encoders are somewhat analogous to media gateways in VoIP business. As the IP-IP peering in the VoIP world grows, the media gateway business should go away along with the change because the hardware needed to do the legacy-to-IP conversions are not required.
However just like VoIP media gateways are re-inventing in VoIP along the lines of transcoding etc, something similar is happening in the IPTV business. IPTV encoders are moving towards a more sophisticated mpeg2/mpeg-4 transcoding in addition to the conversions. So even in an IP-in-IP-out world, the encoder is at the center of the deployment. There are also compression challenges where a high bandwidth (HD) stream may be required to be compressed in order to cater for lower edge data rate.
Thierry Fautier, Director Telco Solutions, Harmonic discusses the subject in this conversation. He also lists some of the major IPTV market trends.
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.
Verimatrix is among very few IPTV vendors that are able to re-use the existing wireline IPTV solution architecture to support Mobile TV. Extending the same architecture means that a telco – offering IPTV and looking to add mobility play – will be able to offer Mobile TV utilizing the existing Verimatrix content security solution in the network. No additional investments from security standpoint.
Other IPTV vendors, especially the middleware and the encoder vendors, have found it hard to replicate the wireline IPTV capabilities over in the mobile TV arena. Maybe things will change once IMS standards are in place for IPTV.
Verimatrix content security platform supports over 5 million end devices receiving IPTV services. I spoke to Steve Oetegenn, Chief Marketing Officer, Verimatrix at NXTcomm today. Steve thinks a standalone mobile TV offering may not be a huge market but when bundled with other services, it can create substantial value.
Peter Blackmore is actually going to take charge as CEO of UTStarcom from July 1st. The present CEO - Hong Lu, an equally charming guy - updated us yesterday on NGN voice and the service providers they are trying to win over. Hong revealed that one of its softswitches in China (just outside Shenzen) is serving around 3 million subscribers. That is perhaps the biggest single softswitch POP I have heard about.
Anyway, back to the interview with Peter. I caught up with him right after the company’s analyst event here in New York today. We talked about (1) UTStarcom’s ability to cross sell its complementary triple play product lines to customers, (2) company’s strong focus on IPTV, (3) reasons for offloading the IP CDMA business, (4) strategy to address opportunities in Eastern Europe, and (5) strategy to address the issue of lower gross margins in the handset business.
Apart from the video content above, I would add the following notes from his presentation that we sat through earlier during the event:
Charlie discusses managed services model for IPTV advertising, the trials PacketVision has so far been involved in, and how the company's solution matches buyers and sellers of advertising time thus effectively operating a clearinghouse. Charlie also talks about the IPTV advertising benefits for the emerging new channels.
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.
Gareth talks about SIP trunking integrated with Microsoft OCS, possible hosted model for OCS, and Arena. Arena is a service offered by Interoute that includes things like switch partitioning and VoIP peering. This is a much shorter version of the video conversation. A full transcript of the interview will follow later this month.
You had a quiet launch. Is the obvious name of the company - phone.com - compensating for the quiet launch?
Obviously when you hear the company name it stands out. That is what attracted me as well. If you have a quality product with such a name it lends added credibility and perception of a bigger company. All of that leads to a lower marketing cost direct and indirect. We are three months into our launch. We see steady growth in traffic and customer acquisition. There is direct typing traffic and search results traffic via Google where the word phone is one of the most searched word. People find us very little advertising.
Do you think some of these visitors could be people who want to purchase phone.com domain and their search leads them to your page?
I don’t think so. The history of this domain name is interesting. It used to belong to a company that was acquired a long time ago and it sat idle for few years. After it was re-purchased and I came in, we kept a sign-up page where we did a survey of visitors asking them why they came to the site and what kind of phone related services they are interested in. We got statistics. Among those answers, there were a few questions about purchasing the domain. But whoever is serious about purchasing a domain knows how to find the owner. A vast majority of the traffic we had pre launch was people looking for phone services.
If you are getting good amount of traffic you could monetize that by offering advertising space. Is that a possibility in the future?
When you hear the name phone.com everybody has suggestions what to do with it. We took a decision to offer services ourselves rather than being a referral site for telecom services of other companies. Looking at advertising models, the answer is yes this is definitely something we will be exploring.
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.
We have published an interview with Ivar in the past as well. However this time you get to actually see him talk about things. He talks to me about mobile PBX. Ivar discusses the evolution of the PBX product, how companies including Microsoft and Asterisk could define the value chain in mobile PBX space, and the impact his company - OnRelay - could have on the business of PBX/handset vendors.
OnRelay is actually one of the very few companies that have commercial mobile PBX deployments. Ivar talks about the number of licenses they have sold so far. We also talked about the types of mobile PBX service models that OnRelay enables: models including enterprise hosted, carrier hosted, or hybrid mobile PBX set up. I had a somewhat similar discussion with Alastair Westgarth, CEO, Tango Networks a few days back. I will be posting that video interview next week. Alastair was not allowed any make up either.
So we got the video bug too! We had originally planned to make short documentaries on various topics relevant to us. But I don’t think we have the resources just yet to embark on such ambitious projects. So we will instead be posting these near-uncut video interviews. The Q&A video interview series kicks off with discussion on carrier choices with regard to EPON and GPON. I am interviewing Yukihiro Fujimoto, Head Supervisor, Optical Access Systems Project, NTT. There is some background noise and the volume might not be adequate. I am afraid that is the sort of presentation you will have to put up with for some time till we get our technical person to acquire some video editing skills. And depending upon how you like the content, we are willing to improve presentation for sure. One thing I would request however: It is not feasible to travel all the time for these interviews. If some of you would be willing to do these things off the webcam that would keep the video content going. Thanks. JR
Obviously when you hear the company name it stands out. That is what attracted me as well. If you have a quality product with such a name it lends added credibility and perception of a bigger company. All of that leads to a lower marketing cost direct and indirect. 