Signal Quality

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February 2006

Monthly Archive

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VoIP
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28 Feb 2006 10:25 pm

Time Warner Cable, Vonage, and the US VoIP bubble

Time Warner Cable is leading the US ISPs in VoIP subscribers, just behind Vonage (who isn’t an ISP). Apparently, Vonage now has 1.2 million subscribers, and Time Warner Cable has 1.1 million. This represents some massive growth. By the end of 2005, VoIP usage in the US hit 4.5 million users, with Time Warner Cable and Vonage seeing just about half between the two of them.

Eventually, of course, the number of subscribers will dwindle, but it certainly makes the argument for the Telcos to be pushing their VoIP services harder.

Comcast has been pushing its Digital Voice service pretty heavily now, offering unlimted local and long distance for $39.95/month (plus a string of fees a mile long, including their own fee that’s neither a tax nor actually required for them to charge) + international long distance fees, etc, etc. With pricing like that, it may not appeal to many people, but most of their customers are going to be pre-existing Comcast subscribers who just want to get away from their phone company and want to do a minimal amount of work researching alternatives.

It is clear, though, that VoIP is growing rapidly in the US, but not nearly as rapidly as it’s growing in Asia or some markets in Europe. Part of this has to do with some of the regulations the US government is putting on VoIP companies that make it difficult to compete in a market already dominated by only a few giant telecoms and cable providers. A good portion of this, however, has to do with the fact that a majority of people still don’t know what VoIP is and don’t care.

Many companies are marketing VoIP products under different names, such as Comcast’s Digital Voice Home Phone Service, or AT&T’s CallVantage. Verizon’s Voicewing services simply calls itself Broadband Phone Service to compete with Vonage’s marketing penetration as the ‘Broadband Phone Company.’ The distinct absence of the word ‘VoIP’ and the sometimes misleading information makes consumers think they’re just getting a new phone service — like their old one but with better rates. Ask a Comcast Digital Voice subscriber if he wants to use VoIP, and he’s liable to tell you no, that he’s happy with his regular phone service. Time Warner Cable simply calls their service ‘Digital Phone’ with no reference to the technology that drives it anywhere to be found.
This has created a huge explosion in VoIP usage without the least understanding of the differences between VoIP and regular phone service. In fact, it’s this misunderstanding that’s fueling the VoIP expansion, with consumers more interested in cheap rates and a phone that works like a phone than in all the technological possibilities VoIP might have to offer.

The question is, will the bubble burst with the advent of something new or will it just flatten out, with every telecom and cable ISP offering VoIP and only VoIP to consumers, and there being little choice left in the market?

Currently, rates for VoIP services from the ISPs are roughly equivalent to the telco charges that people had been paying in the past, but with enhancements such as free (national) long distance or a dozen or so features included in the package. Will they go down, or will the competition become non-existent, leaving us with just a new expected price for phone service?

And we launch.

Late last night, with much of the team incommunicado, asleep, or moving into new living quarters, two of us launched the IdeaSIP site. http://www.ideasip.com

The service is 100% complete (for now), but the site is somewhat raw and will be added to as the week progresses to make it fully in production. I’m quite pleased with the ability to offer free calling to anyone with a broadband Internet connection (and some people with dialup). With the many people I know living in so many different places across the globe, it’s nice to be able to reach out and ring them without worrying about additional costs.

Give it a shot. Join the forum. Tell us what you think about it. What you like, what you hate, where you think we could improve. The IdeaSIP service is a service for its customers, so we’ll endeavor to make sure they get what they need.

Internet& Technology
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22 Feb 2006 07:34 am

Misleading through statistics

ZDNet recently published an article which discusses how Windows has bumped Unix off the top spot for the most-used OS for servers in 2005. What they fail to mention is that their semantics are completely misleading. They state that Linux ranks third in the list, and that Unix ranks second in the list, with Windows being in the top spot, but what the writer apparently fails to understand is that Linux IS Unix.

This has been similarly misreported throughout, as the IDC report on which it’s based is inherently flawed in that it doesn’t recognise that Linux is actually a Unix variant.

Total Windows revenues were $17.7 billion, whereas total Unix (non-Linux) revenues were $17.5 billion. If you calculate actual revenues of all unix, though (including Linux), it comes to $24.2 billion — far outpacing server revenues from Windows machines.

The original IDC report can be found here.

Technology
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22 Feb 2006 07:21 am

The politics of communications

Michael Powell (former chairman of the FCC, and son of Colin Powell) announced on Monday during a keynote speech for the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado that he feels Washington is more broken than ever because of brutal partisanship, and the inability of the FCC to leave well enough alone.
He said that numerous times, Congress can’t or doesn’t tackle a communications issue for one reason or another, so the big telecom and cable companies come to the FCC with their complaints, and the FCC is all too eager to start mandating regulations — further complicating often very simple and better left alone issues.

This sort of thing has certainly been hampering new technologies, as many of the FCC members don’t have any personal experience with the technologies about which they mandate. They rely solely on the advice from the loud voices of the big lobbyists (which have a purely vested interest in a particular outcome, as they represent the largest and most ingrained of the telecom, cable, and content companies) to guide them in their decision-making. This ends up killing or severely hampering technology offerings that in any way threaten the business of the big boys.
The FCC needs to know when not to fix things that aren’t actually broken, and to learn not to rely solely on the word of the richest companies for their information.

Internet& VoIP
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20 Feb 2006 09:54 am

Microsoft’s free VoIP offering.

There has been, recently, news that Microsoft is ‘threatening the cell phone companies’ by offering Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile for phones running Windows Mobile software. The gist is that MOCM allows free Internet-based calling from phone to phone, which seems like an incredible deal and a sure threat to mobile phone companies.

The trick is that it’s NOT a threat to mobile phone companies. What people never seem to understand is that free calling on a mobile phone, be it free Internet calling with Microsoft’s new product, or free long distance, or free roaming NEVER means free. You’re still paying a monthly fee to use the phone, and additional per-minute fees for every minute you go above your monthly minimums. If mobile phone companies are starting to hurt from Microsoft’s free internet offering, they can simply up their monthly fees for Internet usage or up their Internet package fees. Such a free service can really only HELP Mobile phone operators, as it just means that people are more likely to use their service more often instead of opting for a payphone and a calling card.

I love the prophecies of doom just as much as the next guy, but why is it people can never seem to understand that there simply is no such thing as free ANYthing when you’re paying a monthly fee JUST to be allowed to use this ‘free’ service. I mean, it would be one thing if you were paying a monthly fee for something ELSE and got something free as a bonus. But you’re not. You’re paying a monthly fee for phone usage, whether you use that phone service via a traditional PSTN network or over a converted PSTN-Internet VoIP network.

Helio brings MySpace wireless… because it can

Helio, a joint effort between Earthlink and SK Telecom have announced that their two new phones, the Kickflip and the Hero, will also allow customers to connect freely to MySpace. Helio is an MVNO, which means it’s a cell phone company that doesn’t own its own network — it leases its network from others. This has been a pretty common model for computer network access for a while, but it’s just beginning to catch on for cell phones (partly because of the drastic concentration of cell networks under only a few owners), and the new MVNO companies out there are trying to build themselves on their customer offerings.

Helio has decided to cash in on the exceptional popularity of MySpace.com, a sort of web-hosting portal for the Internet generation. MySpace allows its users to easily share content, including pictures, songs, and movies, as well as allowing each user to have a social network of online friends with whom to share. Combining content management, blogging, email, and online forums, MySpace has become an exceptionally popular way for people to keep up to date with each other and to find people with similar interests and tastes around the world.

With the new Helio service, MySpace users will be able to keep in touch and maintain their MySpace pages from their cell phones. The service will incur a monthly fee and per-minute cell charges.

It seems that Earthlink is missing out on a huge opportunity here, though. Earthlink already uses a SIP-based VoIP network for its customers called Earthlink Voice. It seems like they should have figured out a way to work that into the deal somehow — leveraging the popularity of MySpace not just as a gimmick to bring users to Helio, but also as a way to bring the millions and millions of MySpace users to the Earthlink Voice table.

A jump start on digital video delivery

MovieBeam, a company originally started by Disney to explore the avenues of delivering motion pictures digitally to consumers in their homes, has announced that it will now offer videos in HD format. Its content delivery system seems unique, utilising a portion of the Public Broadcasting band to transfer data to a set-top box. The setup comes with the set-top box, an antenna, and a remote, and movies are about comparable to old movie-rental store rates for DVDs (using a pay-per-movie approach as opposed to the flat-rate approach of places like Netflix).

Using broadcast bands allows MovieBeam to bypass any Internet bandwidth issues, but of course, has its caveats with availability in certain areas, as the antenna must be able to pick up a signal. MovieBeam also requires the use of a phone connection, presumably to send data back on which movies have been watched and to set up program listings for new movies.

While the delivery format is probably not the ideal, that major movie studios are beginning to embrace digital movie delivery is a positive sign. Right now, however, you don’t get much choice with MovieBeam. The movie studios choose which movies they deliver to your set-top box, and the box can store about 100 movies. If you rent a movie, that movie is accessible for 24 hours only, and you can watch it as many times as you want during that time frame (much shorter than even traditional movie rental shops, and far shorter than the flat-fee online shops like Netflix), after which you no longer have access. The set-top box costs about $200 after a rebate, plus another $30 activation fee, plus the per-movie rental fees.

MovieBeam was just about dead before Disney, Intel, and some other investors tossed in another $48 million in investment capital, but their current format is not conducive to mass acceptance, and the prices are such that, unless you’re an avid renter of all the latest blockbusters, or you desperately want only the HD format, you’re not liable to find the service terribly worthwhile. We can hope that, should MovieBeam prove to be a flop because of its delivery format or its pricing, the big movie studios don’t assume that it failed simply because people aren’t ready for an online format of content delivery, or worse, continue their claims that the only reason people aren’t renting movies is because of Internet piracy.

A nice idea with a lot of problems

I was reading recently about the new startup company, Fon, which both Google and Skype have dumped money into. Their concept is to create a bandwidth-sharing world-over Wi-Fi network. You buy a router from them, and run their software, and then people get access to your internet bandwidth and you get access to theirs should you be near one of their routers on the road.

I see a lot of potential problems with this, but it’s a nice idea.

First and foremost, sharing your connection violates the service agreement of most of the major broadband providers out there. Broadband providers don’t WANT freeloaders. Fon intends to get around this by giving a percentage of their revenue to the providers, but I’m not sure how lucrative that will be for providers, so there’s no telling whether or not they’ll go for it.

Secondly, even though no one who shares your network will have access to more than 50% of the bandwidth, that’s still 50% of your bandwidth you may not have at any given point in time. In order for this to be worthwhile, you’re going to have to be both altruistic and highly mobile. I mean, if you don’t travel around a lot, lugging your computer with you wherever you go, then what’s the purpose of paying money to cut your bandwidth in half? What do you get out of it? In a selfish world, this is going to be a hard sell.

Third, this creates a SLEW of problems in the US (one of their major markets) for VoIP companies, which will now no longer be able to adequately provider E911 services for their nomadic users. Currently, the companies that are working to provide E911 service to VoIP users are still working off the concept that, for the most part, users are stationary, and if they do move, it’s only because they’re changing addresses from one permanent residence to another. You usually have to give notice 10 days in advance of changing addresses in order for them to update your location. This is all to conform with the FCC regulation that says VoIP providers must know where their customers are at all times. If customers can roam freely across the city, state, or region, it shows the glaring flaws in the FCC’s desire to mandate non-existent technology. The FCC will simply say ‘get over it’ and the VoIP companies will have to either quickly come up with a technical solution akin to a GPS in everyone’s laptop (one that functions indoors as well), or they’ll simply have to forbid their callers from using those roaming networks — taking away one of the largest consumer bases that Fon is attempting to grab.

It might work swimmingly in Europe, where Fon is based, but because of somewhat backward regulations in the US, the US is not liable to be an excellent market for this. Yet another way the US will be left behind in tech because of huge lobbyists pushing poorly thought-out regulation and legislation.

I guess we’ll see how it all pans out, but there are going to be some tremendous hurdles to overcome for such a grandiose scheme.

Internet
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07 Feb 2006 07:03 am

The Internet Toll Road

John Thorne, a senior VP for Verizon attempted to muddy the waters with rhetoric right before the Senate Commerce Committee discusses net neutrality today. He started off using Google, a well-known big name on the Internet, as an example of someone who would get a free ride at the expense of the phone companies. The idea being that the phone companies put up these high speed networks for Internet access and then Internet companies can actually use them.

This seems to be yet another way that the big telecoms are trying to squeeze people for money, essentially charging money to content providers any time someone passes content along their network. While on the outside, it may seem cut and dry to some — they own the network, they should be allowed to charge for what goes across it — it’s far from that simple.

The Internet’s major design was to allow an end user to reach content regardless of how it got there, with no control from either the end user or the content provider on how that data travels. Google pays a hefty amount of money to its Internet service provider to allow it to serve data, and the users pay money to their Internet service providers to be allowed to get to the Internet, whether they download something from Google or not. As neither of them have control over which networks they travel along in order to talk to one another, it’s bordering on monopolistic to allow a network in between to charge money for data that goes across. There’s no choice to the consumer and no choice to the content provider.

What would end up happening is that content providers would no longer be able to afford serving content to some people, and those people would be blocked — a scenario that the big telecoms are hoping for, as it would allow them to create their own Google-like services that more people would use. Instead of having to create a better service in order to attract customers, they could just rely on pricing their competition out of business — a situation that is no good for either consumers or content-providers. It only ends up in favour of the big telecoms.

The Senate Commerce Committee is mulling over the idea of writing laws that ensure that such a situation could not occur. If they don’t, it will give carte blanche to the big network providers to double-charge anyone they’d like. Imagine paying for Internet access from Verizon and then discovering that you can’t access your favourite site because that site has to pay extra if you do, so they’ve cut you off. That site is paying extra money to their own Internet provider already each time you access their content, but they’ll have to pay even more as their data flows from one network to another, with each network provider trying to add a little toll onto each one.

It’s akin to living in a world with nothing but toll roads, but instead of the roads’ owners charging you to drive, they charge whomever you’re going to see. It doesn’t matter who you are, no one is going to want you to visit. Not unless you pay them more than they’re having to pay the owners of all the little toll roads.

It’s a complete breakdown of the way the Internet works, and the visions Thorne is trying to put into the Senators’ heads, saying that Google will be able to freely ride into people’s homes, is just another way of trying to confuse the issue. Google doesn’t ride free. It has to pay just like everyone else does, but it has to pay business rates for allowing billions of people to hit its servers. I assure you that’s more money per week than most of us make in a year. To imply that they are getting to do anything they want for free is duplicitous at best, and close to fraudulent.

Let’s hope the Senators on the Commerce Committee aren’t as easily swayed by rhetoric as the appointees they confirmed to the FCC.

Another substandard 911 VoIP solution.

I should be glad that companies are at least coming up with 911 solutions for VoIP, but the solutions so far, while they technically meet the criteria that the FCC put forth in its regulation show clearly how much the regulation stifles the technology itself. InstaTelecom, inc., a subsidiary of Instadial, has announced that it will provide 911 service for its customers in compliance with the FCC regulations. The drawback, however, is the same as all the other solutions: nomadic customers are left out in the cold.

The FCC regulation stated specifically that nomadic customers (those who have no fixed location) needed to be provided for with any solution, and so far, the solutions have worked to the letter of the law, so to speak. Unfortunately, the way it works is that in order to get 911 service, you need to give your address so that the call centers know where you are. If you move to another location, you need to give 10-days advanced notice of your move so they can update your location.

In such a scenario, one of the most powerful facets of VoIP, the ability to use it from any Internet connection anywhere, is completely done away with. No longer could you do what I’ve done before — wander down to the pub with a laptop and a speakerphone — and carry on your business conference calls while relaxing in an atmosphere of your choice. No longer would you be able to connect from anywhere within a city-wide WiMax network or within a city-wide wi-fi rollout. You’d be limited in your coverage, and your mobility would essentially be only based around a semi-permanent to a permanent move.

So far ALL the solutions have this drawback — mostly out of necessity because the technology still isn’t there to provide another solution. But this is where it shows a gaping flaw in the regulation itself — the concept that, because a decision was made rather arbitrarily about what sort of things the VoIP companies should provide, without any understanding of the underlying technology, the basic technology itself suffers.

Already, the US is falling behind in adoption of VoIP and many other Internet technologies, and here is just another area where the consumer will suffer because the options are being taken away at a legislative level for the sake of having a solution for a problem which doesn’t really exist.

If there had been this sort of rigid, unyielding regulation when cell phones were first coming out, I can guarantee that the US would have never developed a cell phone market, and we’d be even further behind the rest of the world in our cell phone technology than we are today (we’re only a half decade or so behind Europe and Japan with our current cell phone tech). Now, the US is going to fall drastically behind the rest of the world in its VoIP technology, too.

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