GigaOM » voice over ip

Hey DSL, it is time for good-bye

Om Malik — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:52:17 +0000

As someone whose first home broadband experience was a 256 kbps broadband connection from Verizon’s grammy Bell Atlantic, I have always retained a soft spot for DSL technology. Sure, I was jealous of my friends who got @Home cable-based broadband and its 1 Mbps service, but in Manhattan of the nineties, DSL was the only game in town. If you saw the cables in my East Village apartment block, you too would feel incredulous – how do these creaking, aging old copper wires bring fast broadband. As time went by, the speeds increased.

Cable broadband suffered from too much popularity — too many people shared an infrastructure and as a result the speeds delivered to the home were actually a fraction of what was advertised. And when I moved to San Francisco, I decided to stick with DSL and used Pacific Bell’s (now AT&T) connections. However, somewhere in the mid-2000s, things start to change.

DSL speeds, though nearly 15 times faster than my first connection, started to fall behind the cable broadband speeds. DSL performance became spotty. And I switched to Comcast. Today, I live in the future — I have a 200 Mbps fiber connection, thanks to my local independent ISP, WebPass. It costs a lot less money than what the cable company wants from me. And it is a heck of a lot faster than what AT&T has to offer.

Like me, a whole bunch of people have switched from the creaking DSL offerings to faster connections. I have been writing about the slow migration away from the classic DSL offering for a long time. People have switched in big numbers to cable companies, particularly those who offer better quality, higher speeds such as Comcast and Cablevision.

DSL owners have switched to faster offerings from their own phone companies — Verizon’s FiOS for example — as the demand for consumer bandwidth has exploded thanks to growing popularity of web services such as Netflix, social networks like Facebook. The growing number of in-home devices has started to increase our need for bandwidth.

AT&T and Verizon, two of the largest DSL providers in the world didn’t really keep up with the times, and the speeds like their European peers did. The reasons were complex — our geography was a disadvantage compared to very compact cities in Europe, for starters. But most importantly, the Baby Bells wanted sops from the elected officials.

Whatever the reasons, we didn’t really see speed bumps on DSL like we saw from the likes of Free in France. AT&T built U-Verse, a hybrid fiber-copper network and Verizon built FiOS, but mostly for their richer constituents — the people who could afford to pay couple of hundred a month for a triple-play service. That focus on higher-end customers meant that the classic DSL was left to die on the vine.

The market too was speaking loudly — the people were switching away from AT&T and that did indeed threaten AT&T’s whole existence. As DSL sales swooned, AT&T customers went to Comcast and Cox and Time Warner. AT&T couldn’t sell switchers a phone service, a declining business to begin with. It couldn’t sell them a television connection. The lure of a wireless connection packaged neatly with everything wasn’t a reality anymore.

Today, AT&T essentially put the nail in the coffin for DSL technology when it announced that it was going all-in on IP-based networks and IP-technologies. As Stacey Higginbotham reported earlier this morning, Dallas-based AT&T is spending nearly $14 billion to completely switch from last century’s technologies and put old copper-based network out for pasture. Here is what the company said in a press release:

U-verse. AT&T plans to expand U-verse (TV, Internet, Voice over IP) by more than one-third or about 8.5 million additional customer locations, for a total potential U-verse market of 33 million customer locations¹. The expansion is expected to be essentially complete by year-end 2015.
U-verse IPDSLAM: The company plans to offer U-verse IP-DSLAM service (high-speed IP Internet access and VoIP) to 24 million customer locations in its wireline service area by year-end 2013.
Speed Upgrades: The Project VIP plan includes an upgrade for U-verse to speeds of up to 75Mbps and for U-verse IP-DSLAM to speeds of up to 45Mbps, with a path to deliver even higher speeds in the future.

These investments are a realization of a harsh reality AT&T and to some extent Verizon is living in — everything is going IP. Voice is an app. Video is an app. And even the thermostat is an app. The puny Internet speeds they continued to offer via the old DSL has no part of this bandwidth-hungry future. And even with these upgrades, AT&T is still lagging behind its fiber-based competitors. The need for bandwidth isn’t going away – and for Ma Bell, that is the reality. It needs to figure out how to live with it.

For me, it is a bittersweet moment — for I can only remember being blown away by the 256 Kbps speeds and dreaming of a future when I could have 100 times the speed.

The first mobile operator to go VoIP? Try MetroPCS

Kevin Fitchard — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:53:55 +0000

There’s a lot of recent talk of mobile operators launching their own voice-over-IP services, but what may surprise you is which carrier is on the leading edge of that trend: MetroPCS. FierceWireless has confirmed with Metro SVP of engineering Ed Chao that the regional carrier will complete the necessary core network upgrades and start selling its first voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) handset in the second half of 2012.

MetroPCS in general has been ahead of the curve when it comes to new network technologies. It was the first U.S. operator to turn up LTE services – beating Verizon Wireless to launch by several months. It quickly expanded its 4G service to cover its entire 14-market footprint, and almost immediately began transitioning its SMS and MMS traffic from its CDMA networks to its all-IP LTE systems. It has attempted to be just as aggressive with the voice transition – originally announcing the VoLTE service would launch in the current quarter – but it’s apparently run into a few snags, forcing it to delay until later this year.

The sooner, MetroPCS can migrate voice to LTE the better. MetroPCS is much more strapped for spectrum than its bigger counterparts. Instead of using big unencumbered chunks of new 4G airwaves, Metro has resorted to shaving off slivers of its CDMA spectrum to use for LTE. Consequently, Metro’s current 4G service can’t match the big fat mobile broadband pipes Verizon and AT&T are offering in most places. Once it starts moving the lion’s share of voice traffic over to LTE, Metro can start shutting down portions of its CDMA network, using those frequencies to build bigger 4G pipes.

Once it does launch the VoIP service, however, don’t expect MetroPCS to suddenly start acting like Skype. The operators are moving to VoIP not to offer free or cheap Internet calling but rather to streamline their network operations and give a legacy service in desperate need of a facelift. MetroPCS may drop it’s voice pricing slightly, but don’t expect anything radical – the operator is already one of cheapest in the business offering unlimited voice plans at prices far below the national carriers.

But MetroPCS may also use its VoLTE’s new multimedia and presence capabilities to spice up tired old voice services. Mavenir Systems (see disclosure) is supplying the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) gear that will migrate its SMS and voice services to IP, and it has the ability to layer on a bunch of integrated video and messaging services as well. MetroPCS could also use its LTE-IMS combo to offer a service similar to Rogers One Number, which allows customers to extend their mobile phone number across a broad range of devices.

Disclosure: Mavenir Systems is backed by Alloy Ventures, which also backs GigaOmni Media, the parent company of GigaOM. Alloy’s Ammar Hanafi is on the board of both companies.

Image courtesy of Flickr user colorblindPICASO

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Twilio lets iOS app makers add VoIP as a feature

Ryan Kim — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:00:40 +0000

Twilio, the cloud communications platform, is arming app makers with the ability to add Voice over IP (VoIP) features to their iOS apps. With a new Twilio Client for iOS, the company is making it easy for any app with connectivity to incorporate Skype-like functionality.

This should help give rise to even more VoIP apps that can offer free or cheap Wi-Fi calling and even replace traditional phones. But it can also can help transform existing apps that want to add voice interactivity.

This is a natural extension of Twilio’s goal of providing communications tools to developers so they don’t have to have deep telecom skills. The company started out hooking into the old copper-based phone system to help developers add voice and SMS. Last year, it added the ability to support VoIP calls but that was from the browser. Now, it’s extending support for VoIP calls to mobile developers, starting with iOS devs.

“I think this is going to be even bigger (than the previous VoIP Twilio service) because there are so many compelling use cases and activities around mobile application development,” Thomas Schiavone, Product Manager at Twilio told me.

Schiavone said the SDK could be used in gaming apps to help competing players communicate in real time or through voice messages. Or a commerce company could use it to add customer service support to their shopping apps. Perhaps, a developer could build a social phone connected to Facebook and Twitter that allows people to just dial using names. A call center could just arm its workers with an app and an iPad to handle calls. Twilio Client for iOS offers support for presence detection and also has tap-to-call features within apps that can feed information to CRM, advertising or analytic partners.

So far, 2,000 of Twilio’s 75,000 developers have signed up for Twilio’s mobile SDK beta program. Pricing will remain the same as the previous VoIP offering: a quarter of a cent per minute. Not every app will be able to add this functionality but it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of added pressure this pust on the existing mobile voice business of carriers. Operators are already seeing more pressure from VoIP alternatives and they’re testing out their own VoIP options. Now, there’s going to be even more need to figure out how to move forward in a world in which all kinds of apps will have cheap VoIP calling.

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VoiP market growing as Rebtel crosses 15M users

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:05:39 +0000

Mobile VoIP provider Rebtel has hit some key milestones on Friday, indicating that the VoIP market is quickly gaining momentum. Rebtel, which offers low-cost and free calls over 3G and Wi-Fi, has cracked the 15 million user mark and claims its average revenue per user is three times greater than that of Skype.

Rebtel made a smart decision early on to bring its communication service to multiple mobile and desktop platforms. The company has apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows. Similar to Skype, calls can be placed to other Rebtel users for free, while calls or messages to landlines and mobiles around the world are priced as low as $0.01.

Building up an audience of 15 million users with such products shows that consumers are looking for less-expensive ways to stay in touch with one another by leveraging the Internet as a conduit. Obviously, calling a mobile or landline with Rebtel isn’t a full VoIP solution, as the call is routed on a carrier voice network or an old telephone line.

But support for Wi-Fi and 3G calling lessens the need to use traditional cellular voice minutes. Sadly, there are few ways to have a data-only service plan on a phone in the U.S. I am doing just that with VoIP and SIP support on my Galaxy Nexus with a data-only SIM, but I am certainly in the minority.

Most people will still pay for a voice service these days, but with services such as Rebtel, folks can cut back to the lowest voice plan with their carrier, using Rebtel as a cheaper substitute. That is apparently happening, as Rebtel has now delivered 500 million connected calls and 2 billion minutes of international calls while boosting revenues in 2011 by 55 percent.

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Harmon.ie adds social collaboration tools to Outlook

Charles Hamilton — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:00:44 +0000

Harmon.ie, a Microsoft Outlook add-on that’s intended to make corporate email more social, is rolling out new social features to aggregate communication, connection and collaboration tasks in one place.

Harmon.ie provides an interface for Microsoft SharePoint directly within Outlook. It simplifies collaboration and document version control by letting users send live links to SharePoint documents, rather than emailing individual docs that are hard to manage. Users can edit, rate, or tag documents, and see and manage previous versions, all directly inside Outlook. According to the developers, enterprises that have large investments in SharePoint have found that using Harmon.ie has increased end-user SharePoint adoption from 30 percent to as high as 80 percent..

Harmon.ie 3.0, being released Tuesday in beta, adds social features that recognize that collaboration is about people as much as documents. The new “people” tab in the Harmon.ie sidebar lets users see colleagues’ profiles and availability. Presence notifications are geared toward work environments, since they can be used to show what project or document an individual is working on. The people tab also displays a multi-threaded activity stream, and lets workers call, chat or video conference using Microsoft Lync/OCS, Lotus Sametime or Cisco UC.

Harmon.ie 3.0 also simplifies the creation of ad-hoc groups centered around a specific task. The “suggested colleagues” feature recommends possible group members based on the frequency of interaction (by email, chat or voice) and by whether they have co-authored or co-edited documents in the past.

Since Simon wrote about Harmon.ie a few months ago, several other apps have added some similar features to the email interface, for the simple reason that many workers in the enterprise spend a lot of their time there. Xobni, for example, offers “gadgets” for such enterprise collaboration tools as SharePoint, and several services, notably Rapportive and Gist, provide social connections directly from the email interface. And for organizations that don’t use SharePoint, Egnyte recently announced tools for file-sharing within Outlook.

Harmon.ie 3.0 is currently available in beta. The free version includes the SharePoint interface, but does not include the social features. The enterprise version of the software, which includes the social components, is priced at $125 per user, or on a subscription basis for $50 per user per year. In addition to the SharePoint version, the developer also offers a version for Lotus Notes, and another for Google Docs, although the latter does not currently include social features.

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