hitting the wire*

IT & Telecoms trends in 2007

At the beginning of March I was asked to distil my thoughts on what trends are likely to emerge during 2007/2008 in the local Information & Communications Technology market. I’ve held back on posting until now while Storm's overworked Marketing team get the customer newsletter out to avoid stealing all their thunder. As usual, this is a mix of “duh, of course, like that's news?” type stuff and some “what are you smoking!?” ideas that may well be way off the mark! Here goes:

Obviously the desktop hardware technology “refresh” will get going as IT budgets are approved and laptop and desktops using Intel’s new super fast core 2 duo chip’s start hitting corporate desks in earnest; followed closely by the early adopters of Microsoft’s much awaited new operating system ‘Vista’. (The more cautious of us will wait for Service Patch 1 or even 2 to appear!)

On the bandwidth front - Broadband, now far from broad, will continue to drop in price, but I doubt as much as we have seen in the last 18 months. I can't even recall who started the argy-bargy, but at one stage MTN appeared to have created a new benchmark at around R0.20/MB. It was allegedly intended to be a limited duration half-price special, but showed what could be done.  Sentech announced they planned providing more bang for buck;  Vodacom then dropped their price (by 61% according to their ads) after being almost double everyone else’s price. iBurst also dropped their pricing, but remain more expensive than Sentech for equivalent packages (sub HSDPA theoretical speeds). The unlicensed players like Amobia and Uninet are still an order of magnitude cheaper but don’t have the coverage advantage. It is all a bit confusing for the man in the street, but ultimately these changes will make getting online and staying there permanently, more affordable. Offerings should start to differentiate on quality (reliability of throughput) and you should be able to get fixed IP addresses – currently not available to ADSL users. This will facilitate hooking up remote offices for voice and data over IP.

More telco’s will announce moves to converge their voice and data networks onto IP based New Generation Networks like British Telecom’s 21st Century Network project. This will make networks more intelligent and flexible, but will unfortunately not impact on customers for some time to come.

Video on Demand is growing overseas (where real broadband exists) – people are prepared to pay a premium over the likes of Mr Video et al to choose their viewing for the evening from their armchair. Don’t hold your breath here – we’re too spread out geographically to make it profitable just yet (maybe satellite will save us). And Telkom still dominates the local loop.

IPTV is being touted by vendors as the next big thing. Again, dependent on broadband, and ownership of content will be key! It will not be over the Internet, but over managed IP networks.

Music and video downloads, both legal and illegal, continue to grow. More cell phones with better mp3 players will eventually make people wonder why they have a CD player, but probably not this year! Apple’s iPhone will develop a cult following but will hardly make a dent in Nokia’s global market dominance.

Instant Messaging (IM) will continue to grow. Local mobile phone based instant messaging service, MXIT (Think MSN messenger on your phone) will find ways of “growing up” and becoming more respectable. IM will start making deeper inroads into corporate culture with IT managers needing to develop policies on IM usage.

WiMAX equipment will drop in price as the economies of scale kick in and more networks other than Sprint Nextel in the USA do mass roll-outs. It will continue to disappoint those who believed all the hype w.r.t. 70Mbps @ 70 miles @ 70mph. Some Meshed WiFi networks will appear here in SA, whether legal or not, and we’ll continue to see a LAN technology play in open spaces it was never intended for. Unlicensed Mobile Access, with VoWiFi phones following along behind, causing Mobile Networks to get edgy.

Spectrum is being fiercely fought over. It is a scarce resource and it is unlikely that anyone other than a few established players will get licenses. There will be many frustrated wannabes.

Municipal networks are coming to the fore, with the Cape Town tender awarded, but challenged, eThekweni ready to roll but caught up with legalities, and City of Joburg now out on tender. They are unlikely to have any real impact this year. They do not really have much of a sustainable advantage in the long run, as they will have to allow others access to infrastructure and will find that building a telco is not trivial.

The Mobile networks will announce HSUPA with great fanfare. Mobile broadband will then be about as broad as it gets for a while, but as up- and down-load speeds will be around 5Mbps, it will make quadplay (or fourplay?) possible – mobile/voice/internet/video.

Mobile interconnect prices are due to come down by 20 to 25% shortly. This should allow Telkom to drop the price of calls to mobile phones – whether they will pass on the full benefit or not will have to be seen. Mobile packages are unlikely to change as a result though. Least Cost Routing will become more and more marginal and the shift to Communication Service Providers using VoIP will be become more obvious.

Asterisk, the open source “IPPBX” will continue to make some serious inroads into the PBX market, with damage being done at a “higher level” in the market than originally proposed – medium to large corporates instead of SME’s. Watch the call centres here – they’re the weather vane of change.

Hosted IPPBX’s will start emerging as broadband improves and investors in some of the early VoIP entrants who committed large capex in these sorts of solutions seek to get ROI moving.

Social Networking using web based applications like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Second Life etc will become more widely known and used as people get used to being online 24*7. We’re seeing South African flavours of these appearing.

DSL and SSL VPN’s will become more popular as DSL prices drop and quality improves and mobile broadband grows. Business will seek help to set up and manage increasingly complex networks of devices.

As broadband improves in throughput, price and reliability, ASP services will become more popular, with companies seriously considering (but possibly not committing to just yet) such things as Getting Things Done, Gmail and Office packages from the likes of Google rather than Microsoft (from one evil empire to another!?).

VoIP will start emerging as more than just a cost saving exercise with some of the first real value adds starting to come through, with integration into calendars, address books, CRM’s and PBX’s.

There will be a lot of consolidation in the next few years, with bigger players buying smaller, more niche players to fulfill the need to have broader voice and data offering.

Oh, and Neotel will start taking on Telkom in the retail market and Infraco will make its clumsy and controversial way onto the stage…

(and if I look back on my 2006 predictions... if we see half of these during 2007, we'll be doing well! :( )

Dave Gale

March 2007

VoIPTopia - when VoIP gets funky.

When it comes to VoIP, we've all got a bit fixated on the means to the end instead of the end itself, which is to make communications not just cheaper (a definite fixation here in SA), but easier and more productive. VoIP is a technology.  Actually it is a protocol, which in turn is only a predetermined method of communications between devices. 

This post is long overdue and I apologise to those who had given up hope of me ever providing a version of the animation we used at the SA Broadband Summit in Feb this year.  Truth is, I've been busy and I couldn't get the HTML right first go.  I've finally hacked it (helps to follow the programmer's instructions to the letter!)

Here it is, a maybe not so futuristic view of what (Vo)IP can enable for the knowledge worker.  There is much it can do for the consumer, but that is another story.  If it seems the narrative is a bit rushed, it is; MeshSmith, the animator, begged me to cut it as short as possible - after all I did give him an impossible deadline - which he made.  Hit the play button below and adjust the sound for optimal listening pleasure! ;)

that's me.  and no one yelled "fore!" dammit!

Madam Minister, what were you thinking?!

There are times when politicians say the damnedest things.  Sometimes they are actually intelligent things.  Most of the time (as was observed by one wit in the chamber the other day) one could make use of the resulting hot air to help Eskom out of their energy crisis.  And then there are times when comments are made that are breathtakingly and gob-smackingly straight from the other side of Lewis Carrol’s looking glass!

If the report in ICT World which came out on Friday is correct, our Minister of Telecommunications is either highly disingenious, badly informed or ignorant of her own affairs (and as I have yet to renew my subscription to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, I cannot verify her words). In a parliamentary briefing last week she allegedly excused the poor progress that the country is making toward market reform in Telecoms, and the desired drop in the price of telecommunications on the private sector.  Apparently we are “not coming to the party” on Self-Provisioning and VoIP among others.

This after ICASA, the industry and a good few telecoms lawyers interpreted her September 2004 statement as allowing VANS to self provide, which she then changed her mind on one day before the 1 February 2005 effective date.

ISPA have quite rightly called for clarification, and if the Vodacom fellow I was sitting next to on the plane to Joburg tonight is correct, she may have meant the Mobile Network Operators when she talked about Self Provisioning… but then, why didn’t she say so?  And aren’t they still waiting for spectrum?

And VoIP?  I thought things were rolling along very nicely thank you!  At least they are in our neck of the woods.  But VoIP and Broadband are tied at the hip in many respects and broadband is… well, not very broad and then when it looks that way, it suddenly shrinks again without notice.  And the ADSL regulations that came out last year from ICASA were not very helpful and have no implementation schedule attached…

You could start with a Broadband Policy?  Oh, you’re too busy working with the DPE to build the broadband network to solve all our problems? 

And if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly were you expecting Ma’am? We’ve yet to see some real leadership, clear policy and directives coming out of DoC.  If you keep making ambiguous statements and then retracting/correcting them with equally ambiguous statements… we’ll just have to “kyk noord en f** voort” neh?

aluta continua.

VoIPTopia at Broadband Summit 2007

I’m presenting at Broadband Summit 2007 on Tuesday 27^th Feb (next week).  The title is “VoIPTopia” a concept that Sarah Rice and I developed (OK, so she suggested it and then watched in amusement while I got carried away and went MontyPythonesque). We started to think about ‘OK, so we’re doing VoIP. It works. The environment is a bit restricting. Now what?’  So we decided to go right over the top. Indulge the secret SciFi wannabe in each of us.  Go Shatner, go Skywalker, go Buzz Lightyear, <sound effects please> …!

What if the environment was conducive to VoIP-to-the-max?  What if we all got really creative and leveraged the power of IP?  Where it was no longer a world of “so, how much will this VoIP dingus save us eh?”, but where VoIP is used because the quality is better and it enables us to be so much more creative with our communications. 

 

 VoIPTopia was born.

I’ll make the .ppt and the associated movie clips (yeah, we really did go OTT) available here after the 27^th (if you checked the link above you will have noticed the entry fee is just short of the GDP of a small country).  Adam Lange of SignPost has put together an really cool intro.  Andrew Bayley of Quirk succeeded in trimming it down to a barely emailable size (had to sacrifice a but of quality, but all in the interests of fun!  ) and Adrian Berger (aka Meshsmith) worked 24*7 to meet my ridiculous deadline despite trashing his hard drive and RAM on the way to create the cartoon of a dude called Dave, living and working in VoIPTopia.

Thanks guys – will give you some feedback after Tuesday.  I can just hear “Thunderguts” from “Men from the Ministry” (for those of you old enough to remember lying on the lounge carpet listening to Springbok Radio) yelling “AND DON’T MAKE A MUCK OF IT!”

that’s me.

Free VoIP handbook

Bronwyn from Sentient pointed me to this article on Tectonic, which in turn gives details of what seems to be a very usable guide to using Asterisk to implement IP telephony particularly in parts of the developing world where one can often get an internet connection more easily than you can get dial-tone!

"The idea of using the internet as an alternative to the telephone network is not new, but the software that makes it possible certainly is revolutionary."

This is according to the authors of a new free book, VoIP-4D primer - building voice infrastructure in developing regions released yesterday.

Funded by the International Development Research Center of Canada, the book's primary target is users in the developing world but it has enough detail and hands-on information to be useful to a broad range of users new to free software Voice over IP (VoIP).

The free guide to VoIP, available in four major languages, is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions.

If it is all just to tech for you, you can always call on the likes of Connection-Telecom to set it for you.  If they can save Metropolitan Health Group (MHG) R4.5 million in the last two years, think what they could do for you? ;)

TelFree to take over the South African VoIP market! (or "when we were very young")

I love start-ups.  I hanker after the days of chaos, uncertainty and that feeling of creating your world each day you get up.  Hang on, what am I saying... it's not that much different to today?  Well maybe a little. 

I also love it when people launch their start-up with not just confidence, but enough bluster to be undecipherable from bullsh*t!  Not that I'm underestimating the disruptive nature of VoIP and the ability of new entrants to make a serious ripple in the telecoms market, but really, today's announcement by TelFree (tell who?) that within 6 months (including 2 of the deadest sale months of the year) they intend to have 70% of the South African corporate VoIP market sewn up is somewhat excessive even by Toby J standards.

For those who don't know Toby, he was Storm's first Sales Manager, and a more enthusiastic, expansive, creative fella you be hard pushed to find.  Jupiter Drawing Room creatives have been known to listen to his ideas. 

His take on the TelFree announcement : "Even in my prime I couldn't come up with such fantastic kak!!!! Well done mate!!!!"

OK, enough taking the p*ss now, better go and wind the mechanisms on the VoIP machine...

That's me. finished!  ;)

Voice over IP – Quality matters.

“Sorry…. you’re breaking up… Hello? could you repeat that please?”

What price Quality of speech? What is acceptable speech quality on a phone line to you? What influences your perception at any one given moment?

I often get asked : “why should I pay you for a VoIP service when I can use Skype?”. I thought I’d write a bit about my take on VoIP quality.

There’s VoIP and there’s VoIP. There’s good quality voice and there’s not so good quality voice.  When Storm kicked off our VoIP offering back in February 2004, our Sales team were often faced with some serious skepticism – especially from IT Managers who had “been there, done that, wanna see my scars?”, referring to some voice over IP solution they’d tried and failed. The guys who often took the plunge in 2004 were the FD’s – keen to cut costs.  It did help that our solution was capex free for the customer and ROI did not need to feature.

Our customers being businesses, many of whom depend on their voice comms to keep the daily bread coming in – we’ve a fair portion of the BPO market here – will not tolerate bad quality voice. But the problem is this : quality is in the ear of the hearer. How often do I witness people battling to get a good signal on a GSM phone, accepting “poorer than PSTN” quality, calling back once or twice during a call and seldom thinking of logging a fault. I do it myself. But let my desk phone be faint, or noisy, or break-up, and my blood pressure starts to rise! Unconscious perceived value in the mobility of the GSM handset and acceptance of a norm that has arisen.

In a bandwidth-lean environment like South Africa, where uncontended last mile IP connectivity for an internet services provider is still prohibitively expensive (in November 2006), we have had to resort to an actively managed IP network. MPLS based virtual private networks with QoS, the order of the day. Quality VoIP, but at a price.

So it was with interest that I read two articles, reporting research into recent trends in the quality of VoIP over the open internet. Both coming to different conclusions.

One, referenced on the Gartner blog, quoting a recent VoIP study conducted by Brix Networks indicating that VoIP (not over a managed IP network) quality is erratic. The study asserts that quality has gone down over the past couple of years, but Gartner’s reading of the data leads them to think otherwise. They point out that a cut of the most recent data shows that VoIP quality is improving – but then it’s still 5% down on Feb ’05. Brix have a cute little app you can run on your desktop that measures and plots MOS scores to various difference global destinations – I ran it for a day or two until Google Desktop (which is it requires) irritated me enough to get rid of it. Some of the screenshots I’ve pasted into a Word doc if you’re interested - check under "Recent Presentations".

The 2^nd, a study by Minacom, seems to indicate that “VoIP phone service worldwide "now sounds better and connects faster than the standard public-switched phone network (PSTN)."” Better than the PSTN?!? They go on to point out that Brix’s tests were based on PC-to-PC type of VoIP, rather than VoIP such as we at Storm deploy, where we manage the IP network from the Gateway attached to a PBX to the last point before it is converted into a TDM signal again (if at all).

Better than the PSTN though? That brings me to an interactive white paper I love to quote (it’s a bit like a party trick for geeks! ;). The guys at Global IP Sound (who developed the iLBC codec used by Skype) put it together. I love it. VoIP has the potential to deliver broadcast quality audio on a voice call if all the elements (including bandwidth) are in place. PSTN cannot and will never. In the interests of squeezing every last drop of bandwidth out of the “pipes” we use, we purposefully degrade the quality of a VoIP call to the point where it is efficient, yet only just acceptable. That’s the line we have to walk, until the price of decent quality bandwidth falls..

That’s me.

Btw. If anyone can point me to the results of some guys who have been doing regular pings around the world for the last decade or so and publish the results, please drop me a line.