FCC Forum on ISP Traffic Management
Posted on February 25, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Industry News, Net Neutrality
Speaking of the Cablecos and their bandwidth, the FCC’s open forum on ISP traffic management is today in Harvard. Speakers will include representatives from Comcast and Verizon, U.S. Rep Ed Markey of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, and Professor Timothy Wu, original coiner of the phrase “net neutrality”.
Comcast (CMCSA) is there to defend its practice of traffic shaping, recently admitted to being done on streams of p2p bittorrent traffic.
The meeting will also address Verizon’s decision last September to deny an abortion rights group access for a IM program on its network. Verizon (VZ) has since reversed its decision and said it was a mistake.
The forum is billed to be the first serious discussion by the FCC, industry leaders, and consumer rights advocates, on the issues and principles relating to the net neutrality debate. I’ll let you know if they draw any conclusions.
Popularity: 95% [?]
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Residential VoIP to Double by 2011
Posted on February 25, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Industry News
The Telecom Industry Association’s 2008 Market Review & Forecast is out, and as previewed on FierceVoIP, the U.S. residential VoIP market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 20% over the next four years. Cable companies will continue to gain market share at the expense of the pure play providers.
Business wise, enterprise spending may see a downturn in the short term due to the present economic uncertainties, but most companies already have plans to convert to voice over IP.
The residential VoIP market is expected to double from 16 to 32 million subscribers, with revenues reaching $10 billion by 2011. Cable companies currently have 73% market share (as of 2007).
Local phone companies are also forecast to gain market share as they begin to bundle VoIP with new video services.
The trend has been for consumers to go for the bundling of services, with 40% now in a bundle, things look bleak for the pure players with the forecast putting bundlers at 82% in 2011.
Data and web services are expected to drive telecom industry for the next four years, and with bandwidth consumption rapidly increasing, some new investment is expected to avoid bandwidth shortages at the end of the decade.
Popularity: 22% [?]
2-22-2008 Technology Week in Review
Posted on February 22, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Commentary, Industry News
T-Mobile’s Fixed Mobile Convergence
Cellular provider T-Mobile USA now has a trial offering of a landline based VoIP service in Seattle and Dallas-Fort Worth, according to an Associated Press release on Thursday. Dubbed Talk Forever Home Phone, for a $10 addition to your $39.99 cell phone bill, customers can make free local and domestic long distance calls over their broadband Internet connection using T-Mobile’s $50 router, which has two connections for standard corded or cordless phones.
Last summer, T-Mobile launched their HotSpot AtHome service, allowing customers to make calls over a WiFi connection with a dual mode WiFi/Cellular cell phone. One phone, one number, anywhere!
The Talk Forever Home Phone plan is aimed at getting customers to drop their traditional landline service, by offering the less scary option of having a “real” telephone at home.
Duke to Deploy 802.11n
In what is deemed to be the largest planned deployment of next generation WiFi technology, Duke University taps Cisco Systems to rollout a campus wide 802.11n wireless network at their Raleigh Durham location.
Over 2,500 Cisco Aironet 1250 series access points will blanket the campus pumping broadband Internet access to every nook and cranny.
During testing, Duke says it experienced a reliable average throughput of 130Mbps per client with the Aironet access point. Legacy 802.11g laptops gained nearly twice the throughput of older wireless networks, indicating that backwards compatibility should not be a problem.
Broadband Balloons? Not Just a lot of Hot Air
This one blows my mind.
A company in Phoenix Arizona has caught the eye of Google, and could be in for a ride as wild as the transceivers they send to the stratosphere on a daily basis.
Space Data Corp. currently provides wireless telecom services to truckers and oil companies in the southwest U.S. Everyday they launch 10 latex hydrogen balloons with a shoebox size payload of what is essentially a miniature cell phone tower. In about two hours they reach their target altitude, between 65,000 to 100,000 feet. The balloons are only good for about 24 hours, when they burst and disintegrate from lack of air as they climb up to 20 miles into the stratosphere. Before that happens, engineers at ground control in Phoenix release the payload from the balloon, which parachutes back down to earth.
The transceivers cover a range of thousands of square miles as they drift over Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma, each balloon covering an area equivalent to 40 cell phone towers. Wow!
Seems pretty labor intensive, since the balloons have to be launched so often. So just how cost effective can it be?
The balloons cost $50 dollars to make, and are launched from airports and farms across the area. The company pays airport mechanics and dairy farmers $50 per launch. Space Data CEO Gerald Knoblach says dairy farmers are “very reliable people,” They have to “milk the cows 24-7, 365 days a year, so they’re great people to use as a launch crew.”
The electronics payload cost $1,500, and is thus something that you would not really want to lose. Space Data hires “hobbyists” to track and fetch the Styrofoam incased boxes via GPS. The company pays $100 for each box recovered.
Talk about your trickle down economics.
So why would Google be interested in Space Data Corp.? Their main interest is expanding broadband internet coverage everywhere they can. This method covers huge areas at a relatively small cost, making it perfect for serving rural areas, the have nots on the dark side of the digital divide. Googles interest in wireless technology and its open source philosophy has been well documented as of late.
It is rumored that Google is looking to partner with Space Data Corp., or maybe just buy it. Space Data won’t comment on who it’s talking to or about what.
Star Wars Debut?
A little off topic, but noteworthy nevertheless.
This week the U.S. Navy launched a missile that effectively disintegrated a school bus size satellite that was falling to earth anyway. Some say it wasn’t necessary, but we could, so we did, and everybody knows it now.
Ok, so it wasn’t a fleet of missiles launched to intercept an intercontinental rocket with a nuclear warhead arcing towards the western hemisphere, but now we know we can destroy things in space!
Are we getting too smart for our own britches?
Popularity: 19% [?]
Bill Gates on Yahoo
Posted on February 21, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Articles, Commentary, Industry News
Bill Gates was talking this week, specifically to a group of students at Stanford University in Palo Alta Ca. In an after speech interview with CNET News.com, Gates says what makes Yahoo so valuable to Microsoft is its engineering talent. Never mind market share, its products, or its advertiser base, Microsoft wants the engineers. But do the engineers want Microsoft?
It has been said that the two companies have significant cultural differences, Yahoo being very collaborative with a Linux based open source philosophy. Microsoft has never been accused of being a champion of open source technologies. The engineers that thrive in that kind of innovative environment are even now considering bolting.
Yahoo announced this week a new severance package for their employees, with salary and benefits for two years. In order to stem the potential bleeding, MS will offer a retention package, the details of which have not been made public. Speculation has it that they could offer a $500,000 bonus to the top engineers if they agree to stay for say, three years. Mid level employees could get some stock options, while the bottom tier could be encouraged to leave.
Thing is, software developers are generally not just motivated by money. The risk for Microsoft is that in their quest to take on Google, the very engineers they want to get end up going there, just to stay in an open source environment.
Gates says there is no haggling going on between the two companies over the price, and maintains that the offer is a fair one. Nobody doubts that Microsoft is serious about the acquisition, and will go hostile if need be. Yahoo is taking its time with a formal rejection of the offer, saying it is weighing its options.
Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer, among others on a conference call Thursday, says they will not be suing open source developers for products that connect to Microsoft software. In fact, they intend to publish the APIs, initially for Windows Server and Office 2007, in an effort to bolster interoperability.
Is Microsoft going open source? That might be a smooth move if they want to keep the brains at Yahoo.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Mid East Cable Cuts Sabotage? No Way!
Posted on February 20, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Commentary, Industry News
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Tuesday that the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is looking into sabotage as a possible cause of the five submarine cable cuts that affected the Mid East and south Asian Internet and phone services in late January and early February.
While the investigation is ongoing, a spokesman said that the UN agency is not ruling out that it was a deliberate act of sabotage. “We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” said Sami al-Murshed, head of development.
Internet speculators have widely believed that five cable cuts in a two week period is just too much of a coincidence. Richard Stiennon’s Q&A with former counter terrorism advisor Richard Clark on ZDNet sheds some light on the world’s preparedness to handle such outages.
According to Murshed, “Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships.”
Hmmm. Dragging anchors across the ocean bottom - a new form of terrorism?
Popularity: 15% [?]
2-15-2008 Communications Week in Review
Posted on February 15, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Commentary, Industry News
Some of this weeks top stories: Microsoft leaps into the low end cell phone market, as the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona. Vonage gains some market share while VoIP Inc. sues for patent infringement and the WiMax forum comes clean about its FDD plans. Also, an awful lot about Comcast in the news this week.
Mobile World Congress 2008
The MWG got underway this week in Barcelona with handset makers showing their wares, and WiMax edging in on LTE turf. The Congress attracts a lot of Asian participants, where mobile technology is more advanced than elsewhere, and will highlight new innovations evolving as the industry shifts from 3rd to 4th Generation technologies.
Microsoft Buys Danger
Software king Microsoft announced its intention to buy Danger, maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick cell phone. The Sidekick has its own mobile OS, and its form and function is popular with low end cell phone users (i.e. kids).
Unclear is what they plan to do with the company, and how this will affect their high end Windows Mobile OS (i.e. business users).
Pure Play Vonage improves to Stable
Vonage posted a 19.3% Q4 increase in revenue over last years fourth, and said it added 56,000 new customers, gaining back some market share lost in a not so good year. Losses were only $11.1 million, a vast improvement over last year’s quarter loss of $117 million.
Not out of the woods yet, Vonage has $250 million in short term debt coming due at the end of the year. Analysts are skeptical that they will be able to refinance that debt in a staggering economy.
At least the bleeding has stopped, for now.
Former Pure Play Ready to Sue
VoIP Inc., who abruptly pulled a SunRocket last week, claimed that its click to call patent is worth $1.25 billion, and has hired a law firm to go after 100 companies it claims are infringing on the patent.
Undisclosed was how they came up with that figure. Good luck with that!
Wimax Goes After 700MHz
The WiMax Forum announced at the Mobile World Congress that it is indeed working on an FDD profile, and with the increased interest in the 700MHz band, they want a piece of it, globally.
Additionally, the Forum announced that 28 products for the 2.3 and 2.5GHz range have been accepted for testing in their certification labs, and are expected to be ready to market later this year. Over 260 Wimax deployments have been rolled out worldwide to date.
Lions and Tigers and Comcast, Oh My!
Comcast announced a 54% increase of $600.2 million in net income for Q4, and declared a 6.25 cents per share dividend. 73% of the increase is attributed to its digital phone service, and 14% to high speed Internet.
Along with Time Warner and Bright House Networks, Comcast filed a complaint against Verizon with the FCC, alleging unfair retention practices. Apparently, the cellular giant has been offering deals on pricing and gift cards to convince customers not to churn. The FCC has banned carriers from trying to persuade customers not to switch.
In another filing with the FCC, Comcast fesses up and defends its bandwidth throttling practices, urging the Agency to declare their traffic management techniques reasonable.
And oh yea, another noteworthy news morsel: The House now has a net neutrality bill in front of them, as they ponder the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008. For those of you who read my last post, I guess you know what I think about that!
That’s the way it is.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Net Neutrality Act Reintroduced in Congress
Posted on February 14, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Commentary, Industry News, Net Neutrality
The Internet Freedom Preservation Act was re-introduced in the House yesterday by Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass, according to an article in the Associated Press. The bill, which is cosponsored by Rep. Chip Pickering (Rep), was originally introduced by the two in a Republican house in 2006, but failed to gain passage.
The IFPA seeks to prohibit ISPs from blocking or interfering with consumers’ rights to access content, applications and services of their choosing over the Internet. Markey’s camp would like to point out that this is not to be considered regulation of the Internet, but a general adherence backed by law of the principals of net neutrality that have spurred the growth and development of the web since its inception.
Under the bill, the FCC would be tasked to monitor broadband service providers for compliance, and to determine whether charging extra for certain services (I’m assuming charging by bandwidth consumption) is lawful. They would also be required to hold eight summits around the country to hear input from groups and industry leaders on competition and services.
The FCC is currently investigating Comcast (CMCSA) for blocking p2p sessions (specifically BitTorrent) by sending a packet, seemingly from the computers involved, to disrupt the stream. Chairman Kevin Martin indicates that he understands traffic management is necessary, but Comcast should be forthright about what and how they are doing it.
Comcast complied. On February 12th they submitted an eighty page filing with the FCC, disclosing their traffic throttling practices, and asking the Agency to declare them reasonable. On January 25th they revised their Acceptable Use Policy and updated the FAQ page in an effort to become “more transparent” to consumers.
In early January, Time Warner Cable (TWC) announced that they would begin charging new users on a per usage basis, effectively eliminating unlimited access. TW says that only 5% of users would be affected, and most would not even notice the difference.
The Fox Guarding the Hen House?
Since the beginning of the net neutrality debate, ISPs have agued against “regulation” of the Internet. In an effort to stave off legislation, the industry agreed to abide by the Commissions Internet Policy Statement, a rather toothless document as “Comcast respectively reminds the Commission…of its own words”:
“that the Internet Policy Statement expressly sets forth “guidance and insight in its approach to the Internet and broadband,” not legally binding rules”.
With the failure of the first attempt of the Internet Freedom Preservation Act to pass, the ISP industry has effectively been regulating itself to conform to the vaguest principals of net neutrality. And the results are clear.
The practice of bandwidth throttling clearly violates the principal that consumers have the right to access any legal content, device, or application they choose.
Comcast says, “Independent research has shown that as few as 15 simultaneous BitTorrent sessions . . . in a geographic area served by a single node . . . can severely slow down the time it takes for all users in that area to surf the Web and can degrade the quality and reliability of VoIP calls below the threshold of what is considered to be on par with traditional phone service.”
While traffic management does need to be done to prevent network congestion, spoofing computers to break off a file sharing session is not the way to do it. If a node in a neighborhood is regularly getting congested, then add another node. Tampering with traffic from a specific application is effectively determining what the user can or cannot access. Find other ways. Spend some money.
Paying for bandwidth usage is currently practiced in other countries, with consumers complaining about having to budget their monthly allotment. While it may only affect 5% now, new applications and technologies are being implemented now with more on the horizon.
Public acceptance of streaming video and VoIP is growing, with apps like AppleTV and Netflix’s unlimited streaming plan coming to market. IPTV and Unified Communications are going to be pushing the limits of your pipe, deal with it. Penalizing consumers by making them pay for bandwidth will only serve to stifle development of these emerging rich media technologies.
Without a net neutrality law in place, publicly traded service providers will always straddle the fence between their customers and shareholders. More often than not, they will opt for the bottom line, leaving consumers rights by the wayside.
It is exactly the absence of such legislation that has allowed the cell phone industry to wall in their gardens, offering dumbed down browsers that only access the content that the provider wants you to see (and pay them for). Left to their own devices, ISPs could be headed down the same road. If it starts with BitTorrent, where does it stop?
I have been reading some of the comments around the blogesphere, and have found that many that are against the passage of the IFPA seem to be worried about all the bad things that could happen from a free and open Internet. To them I say, if you’re scared, don’t go there, but don’t deny the millions of consumers their freedom of choice.
When this Democrat Congress took office in 2007, they said a Net Neutrality act was on the agenda, and now it is here. As might be expected, generally Republicans are against it and Democrats for. Read my post Where the Candidates Stand, Technicaly Speaking to find out where our Presidential hopefuls fall on the issue.
For consumers that feel as I do, and believe that legislation preserving the Internet as we know it should be in place, visit SaveTheInternet.com, type in your zip code, and urge your Congressman to vote Yes on the Internet Freedom Preservation Act in 2008.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Microsoft, Yahoo, Nortel and Danger
Posted on February 12, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Industry News
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has been in the news a lot of late, most notably due to its unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo. Progress in their unified communications partnership with Nortel was charted this week, and they also announced on Monday that they were acquiring the Sidekick cell phone maker Danger.
Microsoft vs. Yahoo Not Over Yet
Although Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) flatly rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover bid, nobody seems to think M$ is going to walk away sulking. According to a report in Cnet news, analysts say Microsoft has two options: up the ante and hope the offer gets accepted, or take it to the shareholders with a tender offer and a proxy fight for control of the board. Interestingly enough, the window for electing board members opens tomorrow, and closes on March 14th. Anybody see a pattern here?
While nobody thinks some serious competition for Google in the search engine market would be a bad thing (Microsoft + Yahoo = Big Mess?), the Justice Department has already said it will look at the deal for anti trust issues.
Popularity: 10% [?]
2-8-2008 Week in Review
Posted on February 8, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under VoIP News
The first week in February ends with another pure play closing shop, new product announcements, more cable cuts, and the FCC auction creeping up on the 20 billion mark.
Another Pure Play Bites the Dust
Florida based VoIP Inc. has closed down it’s network operations and laid off 25 engineers according to a report in FierceVoIP. The company has told the SEC that it plans to write off about $24 million dollars. The announcement comes a day after the company revealed deals with Google and Ebay to use their patented pay per call ad software.
With VoIP Inc. going the way of SunRocket, the field of pure play VoIP service providers narrows as cable giant Comcast takes the lead over Vonage in residential VoIP, another pure player whose future is dubious.
Cisco Teams with iSkoot for Mobile VoIP
iSkoot will demonstrate its mobile VoIP solution on Cisco’s AS5000 Gateway and the PGW 2200 Softswitch next week at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. The Cisco carrier class Softswitch performs call control and signaling functions between IP networks and the PSTN.
The iSkoot software will allow users to make and get VoIP calls on their cell phone, circumventing the cellular networks. While not real good news for the walled gardens, iSkoot believes the pent up demand for VoIP capable cell phones makes their technology the next killer app in the cellular market.
Fujitsu WiMax, picoChip LTE Design
On the wireless broadband front, Fujitsu launched its first WiMax outdoor base station. Weighing in at 44 lbs, the BroadOne WX300, first in the WX series, claims to be the world’s smallest outdoor micro-cell base station, and is expected to ship in the second quarter. Fujitsu’s WiMax base stations will be operating in the 2.5GHz and 2.3GHz range.
WiMax company picoChip and mimoOn are collaborating on an LTE base station reference design that is supported on the same platform as picoChips WiMax products. Vice president of marketing Rupert Baines says, “The reuse from WiMAX to LTE is about 70 percent. For our customers, they can reuse virtually everything. They’ve already designed the hardware and they just need to download a new code. There is a huge commonality.”
Five Cable Cuts in Two Weeks
Two more submarine cables were cut this week, one near Malaysia, the other off the coast of Iran. Internet theorist are crying conspiracy, while the powers that be say the more likely cause is dragging anchors over the ocean floor due to inclement weather. Rich Terani’s blog reports that the three cuts last week of the coasts of Egypt and the UAE should be repaired by the weekend.
FCC Auction Tops $19 Billion
Slow moving this week, the auction had to be put on hold at one point for technical difficulties. The E band met its reserve on Thursday. Commercial Block C looks like it won’t be gobbled up by one company, as the bidding for individual licenses raised more than the package deal. If they want the whole thing, its $5 billion in the next round. The FCC ups the ante, making the bidders use 95% instead of 85% of their bidding units per round, making it more difficult to sit out.
Public Safety Block D sits lazily just under $500 million, far from the $1.3 billion reserve.
Popularity: 10% [?]
VoIP Call Control Whitepaper
Posted on February 7, 2008 By: Mike, VoIP Facts: The Blog email author
Filed Under Whitepapers
I am pleased to announce the first in a series of Whitepapers from VoIP-Facts.net is available for download on the home page, or, right here!
VoIP Call Control: The Signaling Protocols of Voice over IP Telephony explores the history of the signaling protocols and their technical differences and similarities.
Starting in the mid nineties, when it became clear that voice was coming to IP, standards committees began working to segregate call control from the actual media streams. This whitepaper starts with describing the physically decomposed multimedia gateway concept, and the various protocols that followed.
Technical specifications of the Simple Gateway Control Protocol, MGCP and Megaco, the ITU H.323 Protocol, and the Session Initiation Protocol are all discussed in detail. The paper ends with a look at the future of the signaling protocol, the ITU’s Advanced Multimedia System project slated for standardization in 2010.
This first whitepaper is written from a technical perspective for a technically oriented audience. I hope that those that are interested will take a look. Comments and constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated, as well as pointing out any inaccuracies that may exist. I look forward to hearing from you.
Mike
Popularity: 5% [?]
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