July 24, 2006
The WEEK IN VON -- JULY 24
The Week in VON, July 24
Summer partnerships: Microsoft/Nortel, MetroFi and AT&T
Story links:
MetroFi Teams With AT&T for Muni WiFi (GigaOM)
Microsoft, Nortel do the VoIP dance (Computerworld)
Posted by paul at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)
July 21, 2006
MetroFi and AT&T: A pyrrhic partnership?
Reading Om's news of a potential partnership between MetroFi and AT&T, I'm not sure I agree with his assessment that "it puts a serious cramp in the [muni Wi-Fi] plans of others, namely Earthlink," simply because I think you have to doubt AT&T's seriousness in this area. This could be one partner who stands to win more by the partnership failing, than succeeding.
Clearly we will know more if and when the details come out, but I'm not sure exactly what AT&T would bring to a muni Wi-Fi partnership, other than maybe not opposing such deployments, as the company has done in the past through various means.
Also not sure what Om means by calling MetroFi a "laggard" in this space -- seems to me they have a pretty good record so far for a starup. You just hope that the "partnership" news doesn't turn out to be a pyrrhic relationship for MetroFi, bogging down its progress while it waits for a the slow steps of AT&T to keep pace.
Posted by paul at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2006
Asterisk -- the dark horse in Microsoft-Cisco phone tilt
While most coverage of yesterday's Microsoft/Nortel VoIP-plus alliance included the cursory "analysis" of Redmond now being in pitched battle with Cisco, I haven't yet seen one report that mentions the telecom dark horse -- open-source PBXer Asterisk -- as even being in the race. At the very least, Asterisk deserves a seat at the table.
Maybe it was too easy for most observers to paint the battle as one between two behemoths, with one (Cisco) selling IP phones like crazy and the other (Microsoft/Nortel) bringing the desktop software leader together with a wounded but still market-leading provider of telephony gear.
And sure, there's meat to carve at that food fight. But might it not be similar to those who thought IBM and DEC (and maybe Microsoft!) might divvy up all the server-software spoils, while ignoring the march of the penguins? While I'm not privy to any solid market stats, the background buzz I keep hearing about Asterisk at events, talking to sources, etc., many who are "just putting in an Asterisk box," reminds me of the early days of NetWare -- and remembering that "cheap, open, easy and it works" are often pretty good selling points.
While I'm not quite as pessimistic about Microsoft/Nortel as Russell Shaw -- remember, M'soft has quite a VoIP market already with its XBox live service -- I do think there's much more to this story than which big beast will carve up the prize. Watch out for those penguins. They can be sneaky.
[Full disclosure: Though Digium/Asterisk is often a big exhibitor and sponsor of VON events, I have no financial relationship with the company and do not participate in any VON show marketing deals.]
Posted by paul at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2006
The big kids (like NBC) join the videoblog crowd
As noted by Jeff Pulver in our videoblog last week, the big incumbents in television are part of the disruptive force bringing TV to the Net. Case in point is a new videoblog from NBC chief anchor Brian Williams, with just-good-enough quality that gives the peacock network instant vlogging street cred.
The NBC videoblog, called The Early Nightly, just started this week, according to the Hollywood Reporter, which will probably become a must-read for the Internet TV crowd going forward. In the segment up now, Williams has a camera follow him down the hallway as he shows off the NBC Tel Aviv bureau, and his body armor. Bonus vlogging points to the NBC employees who don't even bother to move to the side as Williams and the cameraholder come past.
While the "edginess" of these clips is likely scripted, the lack of "professional" broadcast quality in the clip shows that NBC, like CNN before it, is more than willing to put stuff up quickly without too much polishing, meaning perhaps that we will get more substance and less flash. It will be interesting to see if Williams uses the vlog to provide background or his opinions on the news as it unfolds, something the format is well suited for.
Lured in by the videoblog, I found myself watching a few of the related clips, including the well-produced, three-minute segment that fully explained what Hezbollah is, and why the various players in the world's newest battle are up in arms. Great stuff, and I didn't have to wait through NBC's prime-time agenda to get it.
Gee, information on demand, when I want it, in a quick, easy-to-digest format. Done by professionals, who aren't afraid to not look their best anymore because they are confident in the material, not the makeup. Anyone want to bet that this is where videoblogging will really succeed, at least for most of the audience?
BONUS online video link: Dave Winer sees a revolution starting with John Edwards' embrace of BitTorrent. Still think we need AT&T's quality of service to get interesting Internet video?
Posted by paul at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2006
Juniper: YouTube driving need for more edge routing horsepower
They're not officially related, but it's easy to draw a dotted line between today's announcement of a new edge router from Juniper Networks and YouTube's claim of serving 100 million videos a day, with one (YouTube popularity) driving the need for the other (bigger routers in the network edge).
For the Juniper nitty-gritty on gearhead details like line-cards, capacity, etc., look here. What caught my attention most during my briefing call with Juniper last week was the inclusion in the presentation slides of the idea of large enterprises as potential customers for the ~$100,000-plus M120 router.
With more companies and consumers consuming more video, there's going to be a need for more capacity and control closer to the end user, said Juniper product marketing manager Alan Sardella, who sees Net traffic growing rapidly.
"It [the traffic growth] is partially a function of video, with the ascent of YouTube," Sardella said. "There's already a lot [of video] starting to stream across [the Net]. There's a general increase in traffic that is felt a lot more deeply in the core."
Whether or not regional telcos, the big players or even large enterprises will need Juniper's M120 anytime soon is something we'll be able to watch once the box becomes generally available in October. One of its features, according to Juniper, is the ability to extend QoS to Ethernet, making it "more like Frame Relay or ATM," according to Sardella. Does that mean that Juniper foresees a future with more SLAs, perhaps SLA to the home?
"SLAs are more or less guaranteed to happen on a larger scale," Sardella predicted. "One size fits all [bandwidth services]are not going to fit for much longer."
Posted by paul at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)
When a T-1 just ain't enough: Mid-band Ethernet to the rescue
Ed Gubbins over at Telephony says that mid-band Ethernet has reached a tipping point with BellSouth's addition of 2-, 4- and 8-Mbps metro Ethernet offerings. Worth a read to understand why there may be more equipment demand, as more businesses outgrow their T-1s but don't need 10 Mbps links just yet.
Bonus Ruckus links: Telephony covers a Ruckus announcement of new rural IPTV contract wins, while Telcommunications provides the down-and-not-so-dirty details of wireless customer-premise installations, which sure beats crawling under houses.
Posted by paul at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2006
Online poker ban? Don't bet on it
Fresh from the more-Republican-pandering-for-votes-with-meaningless-legislation dept.: The House votes to ban online gambling! Hooray! Maybe next they'll vote to ban spam, and viruses too! With about the same effectiveness, we might note.
Probably the most effective thing the House vote did was win a bunch of headlines, courtesy of the 24x7 news media monster that simply doesn't have time to analyze such efforts for the froth they are. It's easy to be a bloviator like Bob Goodlatte and proclaim that "Internet gambling is a serious problem that must be stopped," but how exactly does that jibe with politicians' willingness to be duped by gaming interests in meatspace? Oh, right, not a serious problem because after all those tribes are campaign contributors.
Hypocrisy smackdown score: 1.0 for Rep. Bob and his pals, who should stick to more relevant issues like flag-burning.
Two questions need to be asked: Are any voters fooled by such frothery? And does anyone in the House really think they could make such a ban work?
And maybe a third question: Isn't there more important work for our elected officials to be concerned with? Maybe we will find some answers from voters who are tired of such pandering come this November.
Posted by paul at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2006
USF -- The new telcom battleground
With network neutrality now safely a mainstream topic, it's time to look to what will be an even messier battlefield: the specter of reworking the Universal Service Fund, a billions-large taxing infrastructure that now appears to be the big telcos' latest weapon against innovators, especially Voice over IP providers.
Our own Jeff Pulver has been sounding the alarm for the VoIP industry on the FCC's latest how-can-we-please-you-AT&T move, an "interim" order that uses the idea of USF payments as a club to VoIP business plans. The quick take is that the 150-page-plus order will undo most of the "light touch" regulatory stance toward VoIP, replacing it with legacy telecom taxation burdens for the sole reason of covering an expected coming shortfall in the USF budget.
While Jeff (with the assistance of Pulver.com wartime consigliere Jonathan Askin, our man in D.C.) has detailed the main outrageous points of the pending order here, don't just take his word for it. The telco analysts at Stifel, Nicolaus (which include former FCC chief of staff Blair Levin) recapped the order in a recent research note by calling the interim rules "more problematic for VoIP providers than advertised, complicating their ability to avoid regulatory traffic assumptions that providers believe will inflate their payments."
(That's "more problematic" as in the way your car-repair payments become "more problematic" when the garage owner tells you "the problem isn't just a loose screw, it's something somewhere in the transmission." For VoIP providers, the potential bill just got a lot bigger.)
Great -- let's cut off innovation by saddling it with fees that perpetuate the old monopoly models of business. Dan Berninger, in a guest post on Jeff's blog, argues against the recent order and USF in general at length here. Worth a read to get your bearings.
What's especially interesting about the latest order is that it seems (according to Jeff Pulver's reading) to eliminate some of the protection of VoIP from state-by-state regulation that many thought was already decided in VoIP's favor with the Nov. 2004 Vonage order.
After that order came out, an industry source noted that current FCC chairman (then just a commissioner) was the only commissioner not to release a statement (scroll down to Nov. 12) about the Vonage order. Perhaps because he knew he'd try to change it in the future, so he didn't want any words to use against him? Lawyers and conspiracy theorists, start your billable hours.
Posted by paul at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)