THE PULVER REPORT: March 10, 1999

In this Issue:

Heard on the Net:

People on the Move:

From Intel to MetaTel - Jim Toga has recently left Intel to join MetaTel as a co-founder. Jim joins Chris Lamb (ex-3Com) and Scott Petrack (ex-Vocaltec) (http://www.metatel.com )

Ohad Finkelstein has recently left Vocaltec and has joined InterRoute as their President and CEO. Interoute Telecommications Ltd is a Pan-European and US Telco headquartered in the UK. ( http://www.interoute.co.uk )

Jim Kwock has recently left AT&T where he was the General Manager of Global IP Telephony Services to join the growing list of ex-AT&T executives now working at Netspeak. Jim is now Netspeak's Vice President of Marketing. ( http://www.netspeak.com )

Gary Andresen has recently left AltiGen and has joined StarVox as Vice President of Marketing. ( http://www.starvox.com )

Names on the Move:

The company formally known as Bellcore is now known as Telcorida Technologies. As part of the contractual agreement related to the company's purchase in 1997 by SAIC, Bellcore was required to change its name. Rumor has it that emails sent to bellcore.com will continue to be delivered to their intended recipients. (http://www.telcordia.com ) ( http://www.bellcore.com )

Please feel free to email company news and related gossip to: editor\@pulver.com

For pulver.com's daily IP Telephony News please visit http://pulver.com/news

Feedback re: The pulver points - version 2.0

Since the last issue of The Pulver Report, I have been receiving feedback regarding some of the pulver points. I've included responses below from three readers of the Pulver Report: Ivar Plahte, Telnor Nextel, ( http://www.nextel.no ) and Tom Flanagan, Telogy Networks ( http://www.telogy.com ) I appreciate Tom's heads up regarding Telogy. Sorry Tom, seems Telogy may be a well kept secret. Hopefully it won't be for much longer. And as always, Ivar's comments are enlightening.

 


From: Tom Flanagan
JP> 9. The IP Telephony Industry Needs to be able to offer Equal Access
JP> All NextGen Service Providers should be given the opportunity to have Equal
JP> Access. Available Equipment in the Marketplace needs to support this.
JP> Single Stage Dialing for Gateways needs to become the norm. The
JP> Industry needs solutions that help Service Providers determine whether
JP> an incoming call is: Voice, Fax or a Modem Call. (Don t assume that a
JP> 64k channel will be available for the modem call.) Embedded DSP may help
JP> solve this

\"Jeff, Are you aware that Telogy has the software that you describe in your recent newsletter (quoted as 9 below)?Ý We now support Voice, real-timeÝ Fax and V.90 in our Golden Port software suite.Ý Now a single line, T1/E1, T3, whatever can dynamically handle all three calls as a gateway to an IP,ATM or frame relay network. By the way, we now have nearly 80% market share for software used by companies embedding VoIP in their products.Ý Companies like Cisco, Nortel and 3COM (not unix or nt server based). We're the voice in the Routers, switches and central office devices. I'd be happy to speak about the architecture at any of your upcoming events. I look forward to hearing from you.\"

From: Ivar Plahte

Hi Jeff, You know I like to comment on your points - here I go again, hope you don't mind.
JP> 1. H.323 and MGCP are two non-competing standards in the IP Telephony
JP> Industry.

H.323 is just an umbrella for several non-competing standards/protocols anyways. SS7 is important in the H.323 scope as well. Why couldn't MCGP be part of that same established standardization and interoperability-testing process?

If there is one thing to be learned from the European mobile market it is that the full cooperation between all the major vendors and operators to define and use the GSM standard (Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel +++), while competing on _implementing_ it, has been vastly more successful in terms of market growth than the US model of competing on both standards and products.

It seems like a similar geographic difference in the way of thinking is becoming visible in the IP-telephony market as well - which if I am correct will lead to more rapid growth of these services in Europe than across the Atlantic.

JP> 2. The IP Telephony Industry Needs a Lightweight Protocol Agnostic IP
JP> Telephony Client.

The client will not be lightweight if it has to implement all these different standards... :-) The faster there becomes a single standard, the sooner the development community will create a positive cycle to drive more creative and efficient implementations of this.

JP> 3. The Telephony Industry has Settlements. The ISPs community needs
JP> to adopt a similar Settlements model in order for
JP> the widespread availability of Quality of Service (QoS) for telephony
JP> routes on the public Internet. Without Settlements, QoS on the public
JP> Internet may never get better then what is currently experienced today.

I completely agree. But again, widespread deployment of such agreements will not happen until a single standard has been defined.

I think you'll also see IP-telephony being a disaster for the small ISPs, since they won't be able to control the end-to-end quality of the calls that larger ISPs may do - by keeping most of the calls within their network and/or have private peering agreements with other large ISPs that have similar control.

JP> 4. IP based Telephony will evolve as a free service on the Internet and
JP> will become known as a service just like the Web, Telnet, ftp and Usenet.
JP> Like it or not, there will be such a thing as a \"free phone call\".

It might be possible to place free phone calls with proprietary solutions over IP, but I think the calls that follows the established standard will be controlled by the operators. The financial incentive to do this is just too great.

JP> 12. By the year 2000, look for IP to be a supported protocol on all
JP> Class 5 and Class 4 switches. Look for even larger revenue opportunity
JP> in the next generation of Class-less switches.

It seems to me that the market window for new operators offering cheaper voice calls has already been closed. I've been surprised by the ability and willingness by the PSTN operators to reduce their international rates much quicker than expected.

However, there will still be a market opportunity for _vendors_ selling equipment enabling existing operators to produce their telephony cheaper. These PSTN operators will gradually replace parts of their infrastructure with IP equipment, much as they replaced their analog infrastructure with digital lines. But it seems that the old telcos will prevail, my guess is that no NextGen telcos doing only voice will become large enough to substantially challenge the \"old-guard\".

The new market opportunity for NextGen telcos lies in offering more advanced multimedia communication services between IP-adresseable terminals. But this is really a complimentary, not a substitute, market, and the ISP's are in the best position to do so. I guess this is nothing new....

JP> 14. Java is quickly becoming the default platform for IP Telephony
JP> Application Development.
JP> During 1999 look for Application Developers to continue to develop and
JP> deploy Java based IP Telephony Applications.

I agree, the Interfon PC launch included heavy development with Java from both us and Ericsson. We didn't have downtime the first month after the launch, and the small development teams actually beat their time plans and implemented more than they were supposed to - much of this can be contributed to the choice of Java as SW platform. My experience is that the test phases are much calmer in a Java development project - the hard to find bugs that take days to resolve are not there anymore.

Carl Ford's report on: The Bellcore Summit

Bellcore recently held a summit in Orlando inviting the IP Telephony industry to participate in the development of Generic Requirements.

Bellcore Generic Requirements have been the primary reference for the Regional Bell Operating Companies since divestiture. Since the Telecom Act of 1996, participation in the development of these documents are open to other companies participation.

The audience consisted of approximately 80 companies (with 3 to 1 vendor to service provider ratio). The primary focus was to define nine statements of work regarding next generation network. The voice of packet architectures has at its starting point the MGCP protocol.

The meeting had no speakers from Cisco, but had speakers and representatives from most of the major vendors. Bellcore's professional services organization which is not the part of Bellcore that is developing product associated with previous Cisco and Sprint announcements. Bellcore's professional services will act as the facilitators and will manage the project which aims to complete by the end of the year. The nine work areas range from equipment specifications to guidelines for operations and control. Companies can participate in any or all of the Generic Requirement projects.

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