"Heard on the Net"
- MCI Internet Telephony Patents
On February 2, 1999, MCI was awarded two IP Telephony Patents -
US Patents 5,867.494 and 5,867,495. You may want to have your patent
attorney take a look at these patent claims. If you know of any \"prior
Arts\" please contact the US Patent office.
The title for patent 5,867,494 is:
"System, Method and Article of Manufacture with Integrated Video
Conferencing Billing in a Communication System Architecture\"
The title for 5,867,495 is:
"System, Method and Article of Manufacture for Communications
Utilizing Calling Plans in a Hybrid Network\"
Details regarding these patents are viewable at:
http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html
- ART Call for Comments: Should IP Telephony be Regulated in France?
ART, the telecommunications regulatory authority in France, launched a
public call for comments last week concerning Voice over IP.
ART invites users and all market parties to contribute to this study. The
public call for comments is available on the following web site:
http://www.art-telecom.fr
Responses should reach ART by noon on 13 March 1999 (see details on their
website regarding the public call for comments).
It seems that ART may take a harder look at regulating IP Telephony then
the \"hands off\" approach the FCC and the EU has taken to date.
- Bellcore's General Requirements (GRs) for IP Telephony
Bellcore will be presenting their new General Requirements (GRs) for
IP Telephony at a summit they are running on February 25-26.
It will be interesting to watch if and how these new GRs for IP Telephony
effect the standards work within the Industry.
- Consolidations Continue to Drive the IP Telephony Industry
In 1998 we saw many Strategic Relationships help drive the
IP Telephony Industry. While Strategic Relationships continue to drive
the 1999 Industry forward, look for pending announcements regarding
the continuing consolidation within the Industry.
(3Com's recent 90 Million dollar acquisition of NBX is just the beginning...)
For the latest IP Telephony News, please visit http://pulver.com/news
or subscribe to the weekly IP Telephony News Digest by sending email
to: majordomo\@pulver.com. Leave the subject blank, and in the body of the
email write: subscribe iptelephony-news-digest
Announcement:
pulver.com's IP Telephony Test Network
To help promote end-to-end interoperability within the IP Telephony
Industry, pulver.com is announcing our protocol agnostic,
IP Telephony Test Network. The pulver.com IP Telephony Test Network will
offer the industry free virtual access and an opportunity to be apart of
our
virtual IP Telephony Lab.
The purpose of the pulver.com Test Network is to provide equipment
vendors with the opportunity to have \"public\" endpoints on the
internet that
can be used for demonstration and testing purposes. With the advent
of
our test network, vendors will no longer have to worry about RAS'ing into
a competitors office to conduct end to end testing or having to deal
with security and firewall issues. Hopefully, this will mean that
engineers will be able to follow up and perform more end to end testing
in between scheduled interoperability events. We would welcome and
are
looking forward to having an open working relationship with any and all
of
the IP Telephony Labs involved in doing similar work.
Our plan is simple: to provide, for free, 19\" rack space to qualifying
equipment vendors in a designated area of our office. pulver.com will
also provide access to administrative staff for rebooting and making minor
changes to the equipment. All of the equipment provided will be attached
to a separate LAN with a dedicated T1 connection to the Internet.
Qualifying vendors may need to send staff to
our Melville, NY office for the initial setup of their endpoints.
I'm currently looking for equipment vendors who would like to participate
in the test network to join in an official press release announcing
the launch of the test network at Spring '99 VON.
If you are interested in being a part of this - please email:
testnetwork\@pulver.com with your contact information.
The pulver points on Internet Telephony - version 2.0
I've decided to chisel some of my current observations about the trends
in
the 1999 Internet Telephony space in digital stone since I hate being
misquoted by the press (or at least quoted out of context).
1. H.323 and MGCP are two non-competing standards in the IP Telephony
Industry.
As the IP Telephony Industry continues to evolve, look for multiple
standards to be developed. Equipment vendors need to plan to
be able to support multiple standards as there will not be just one
standard in the industry.
2. The IP Telephony Industry Needs a Lightweight Protocol Agnostic IP
Telephony Client.
3. The Telephony Industry has Settlements. The ISPs community needs
to adopt a similar Settlements model in order for
the widespread availability of Quality of Service (QoS) for telephony
routes on the public Internet. Without Settlements, QoS on the public
Internet may never get better then what is currently experienced today.
4. IP based Telephony will evolve as a free service on the Internet and
will become known as a service just like the Web, Telnet, ftp and Usenet.
Like it or not, there will be such a thing as a \"free phone call\".
5. Look for many PSTN/IP Gateway Vendors to support flavors of Unix as their
customers demand \"Carrier Grade\" solutions.
In fact, look for most traditional
switch vendors to announce in 1999 that Windows NT is not a Carrier
Grade platform.
6. The true value of Internet Telephony to carriers and Service
Providers will become apparent only after the next generation of
\"Applications\" become available.
Short term profits are in Rate Arbitrage. Longer term profits comes
as
part of the payback for an investment in IP infrastructure. Once IP is
supported, it will be the wide range of X over IP Services that will
offer the obvious competitive advantages to support IP. By then, IP
Voice
will be just one of the applications. Innovation will continue to
drive
the IP world.
7. Enterprise Users will demand Management Systems
IP Telephony Products must support SNMP and provide proactive monitoring
tools to Enterprise Network Managers. Without such Monitoring tools,
most Enterprises will not move IP Telephony Trials into Production.
8. Not a 1999 Threat to Service Revenue.
Despite the Hype propagated by some of the media and a few mis-informed
market
analysts, in the current US 400 Billion Dollar Global Minutes Marketplace
- 1999 Revenue for IP Telephony Minutes will be under US 150 million.
9. The IP Telephony Industry Needs to be able to offer Equal Access
All NextGen Service Providers should be given the opportunity to have Equal
Access. Available Equipment in the Marketplace needs to support this.
Single Stage Dialing for Gateways needs to become the norm. The
Industry needs solutions that help Service Providers determine whether
an incoming call is: Voice, Fax or a Modem Call. (Donít assume
that a
64k channel will be available for the modem call.) Embedded DSP may
help
solve this
10. 2000/2001 may be the year of Gateway Interoperability.
As of Feb, 1999 there are very few PSTN/IP Gateways that interoperate with
PSTN/IP Gateways from Multiple Vendors. The iNOW! initiative is a tactical
move that if adopted by the industry will provide a platform for
demonstrations of Interoperability before the end of 1999. Work still
needs to be done to ensure widespread interoperability between all vendors.
11. Internet Telephony Technologies will become a part of embedded systems
of future IP devices. Look for many more Hybrid IP Telephony Appliances
in 1999. Examples include the work Cisco, 8x8, Com21 and Symbol have
been doing in the industry.
12. By the year 2000, look for IP to be a supported protocol on all
Class 5 and Class 4 switches. Look for even larger revenue opportunity
in the next generation of Class-less switches.
13. Run Internet Call Center applications on well managed Corporate IntraNets
and ExtraNets. Forget about using the Internet for customer Care unless
you
really don't care much about caring for your customers.
The Internet is the worldís largest test bed. It is not an
environment
anybody can directly control and make QoS guarantees. The QoS on the
Net
is predictably unpredictable.
14. Java is quickly becoming the default platform for IP Telephony
Application Development.
During 1999 look for Application Developers to continue to develop and
deploy Java based IP Telephony Applications.
Follow up - re:
Qtalk: A Lightweight IP Telephony Client
In response to the Qtalk story from the February 1, 1999 issue of
The Pulver Report, Jonathan Rosenberg <jdrosen\@dnrc.bell-labs.com>
writes:
> For those of you who are interested in ICQ and in \"Presence Notification\"
> you might also be interested in an ongoing effort within the PIP group
of the
> IETF of using an extension of SIP for presence notification, allowing
a
> seamless transition between presence notification and making Internet
> phone calls. Details regarding this is available in the
Internet draft at
> http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/sip/drafts/draft-rosenberg-sip-pip-00.txt
A clarification here: the PIP group (recently renamed IMPP - Instant
Messaging and Presence Protocol) has not decided yet whether or not to
use SIP extensions as the basis of the protocol. They are right now in
the requirements phase, focusing particularly on security issues (very
critical for this application). There are numerous protocol proposals on
the table, of which SIP extensions are just one.
- Feedback from Fremont, CA - The Home of Cable Telephony in the US
For all of those readers of the Pulver Report who properly corrected
me, I apologize for referring to Fremont, CA with two ee's (Freemont).
Fremont, CA is the home for Cable Telephony in the United States.
One thing that I was surprised to learn from a Pulver Report reader
was that AT&T/TCI is marketing their beta service as a telephony service
without a data service.
Maybe I'm just too data centric - but if I had a cable modem in my
home, I'd be more focused and interested in getting high speed internet
access rather than being part of a pilot from a company promoting cable
based
telephony services.
If you are also located in Fremont, CA and would like to share your
experiences with AT&T/TCI - please feel free to email: fremont\@pulver.com
Recap from Sophia Antipolis IP Telephony Retreat -
\"Issues Effecting the Widespread Deployment of IP Telephony
Gateways\"
By: Carl Ford - <carl\@pulver.com>
After feedback from the participants, from now on the annual meeting in
Sophia Antipolis will be referred to as a \"Summit\".
The meeting brought together many of the senior executives responsible for
building the IP Telephony Industry with a strong representation of both
Service Providers and Equipment vendors including:
Alcatel, Analogic, Aplio, Arelnet, Ascend, AT&T, Audiocodes,
BCH Telecommunications, Bellcore, CESS/DOL,
Cable & Wireless, Charles River Ventures, Cisco, Clarent,
Computer Protocol, CosmoLine, Delta Three, Dialogic, elemedia,
e-Phone Telecom, Ericsson, Fisher Wayland, France Telecom,
Fujitsu, Glocalnet, GRIC, Hewlett-Packard, HotHaus Technololgies,
IBM, IDT, Inter-Tel, ITXC, Lucent, Marconi Communications,
MCI Worldcom, Metatel, Mitel, Natural Microsystems, Negodis,
Netcentric, NeTrue, Nortel, OzeMail Interline, Open Port,
Patria Finavitec Oy Systems, PopTel, QuickNet, RADVision,
RADware, Rideway, Siemens Telecom Networks, Sonus Networks,
Telia, Transnexus, US West, VIP Calling and Vocaltec.
The summit started with a year in review. Jeff pointed out that this
year represented an overall acceptance that the network infrastructure
was going to be packet - based, and, therefore, Voice over IP was a given.
In fact the vendors have merged into a unified market. The packet
and
switch manufacturers are no longer separate camps (i.e., Ascend /
Lucent, Bay / Nortel and Cisco / Summa Four). But when you look at
the
capacity the industry has deployed in the billions, the Next Gen
demand is still only in the millions. One possibility is that even in the
billions the gateways there are still islands. As islands it is hard
to
establish critical mass. The usual suspects were mentioned as issues,
interoperability, quality of service, and system signaling seven
connectivity.
Last year many of the problems identified still exist, but the general
sense was that they were being worked. Last year's discussion of
Intellectual Property Rights was still relevant but livable as long as
you can tolerate it representing half the cost of the boards. On the
H.323 front, general progress was being made in the development of
gatekeepers, and the effort to use Annex G as point of interoperability
had many companies interested. In general, it was also agreed that
H.323
and M+CP were protocols trying to solve different problems. A question
that needs to be determined is where the two protocols would meet.
In
general, it was stated that as the industry looks at some of the legacy
protocol problems with SS7, new alternatives need to be explored or else
there will be
a complete replication of telephone industries protocol problems.
Some of the carriers stated that their objective was to be better than
the PSTN, not merely duplicate it. To this end they expressed a desire
to add features and functions through APIs accessed by database /
directory interfaces. Additional requirements were better solutions
for
management and provisioning. The Clearinghouses offered as a solution
a
willingness to act as an intermediary between companies with vendor
specific equipment, and in one case was willing to bring in support
staff to place the vendors' equipment. The iNOW presentation suggested
that the adoption of Annex G would enable interoperability to occur
amongst different vendors / service provider networks. Other concerns
addressed the need for VOIP to also support fax and modem calls. The
ITSPs had similar requirements and felt that the time had come in which
cheaper minutes would be less than PSTN quality.
Part of the problem is that few tools are designed for circuit and
packet-based management. Even the principles that are being applied
do
not reflect a full view from a uni-market perspective. PSTN tools
examine calls while packet tools look at devices. Getting a combined
viewpoint was thought to be a critical road map for the industry.
While
the management tools were in transition, the billing systems could
provide better customer care, fraud prevention and marketing with web
tools and interfaces.
As an industry, we then discussed features from both the IP side and the
PSTN side. A need to display to the commissions a service that was
clearly black phone to black phone but enhanced would be valuable in
showing the benefits of allowing internet telephony to stay
deregulated. This was accompanied by several discussions about enabling
the services to develop and establishing a framework for evaluating the
services. Some of the companies offered open APIs to enable customer
development.
Last year, the summit yielded a few action items that included the
development of a CDR that is designed to enable gateway vendors to
interface to legacy billing systems and the formation of the minutes
exchange which includes a vendor section. It was agreed that a MIB for
VOIP would be valuable. Jeff and I also expressed a desire to
receive the open APIs from the industry, but the support was not as wide
spread as the MIB definition. (However, Jeff and I would still like
to receive the APIs from any willing participants).
The intention is now to establish a work effort and meet again through
the year to get a definition that matches to the industry requirements.
Volunteers were requested to aid in the work effort and a meeting place
will be selected in the near future.
Copies of the presentations from the meeting are available for download
from http://pulver.com/gateway99/request.htm
New pulver.com Newsletter: Multimedia on the Net
Starting this month, I have started publishing a new monthly newsletter
called: \"Multimedia on the Net\" which is being written by Doug
Mohney.
Multimedia on the Net addresses topics ranging from Streaming Audio and
Video Technologies and the latestest MP3 craze to the future of net
broadcasting and the implications these technologies have on the future
of the Net.
To subscribe, please visit: http://pulver.com/mutimedia/subscribe.html
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Websites on the pulver.com Watchlist
The following URLs have recently been added to my bookmarks:
- http://www.netswitcher.com - For those of you who ever had
to handle multiple network configurations on your computer and
wanted a program to automate the swapping of IP address configuration as
the laptop is moved around, I would strongly suggest you take a look at
NetSwitcher.
- http://www.nessoft.com/pingplotter - I've found Ping Plotter
to be a very useful tool when traveling when I wanted to have a
real-time visual indication regarding the connectivity between
two endpoints. For those of you who are using IP based communications,
Ping Plotter is great for getting relative indications on the
conditions of the network you are using.
- http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts - AT&T's Voice Demo
is a pretty damm impressive demo of Text-to-Speech technology.
For those of you looking for key enabling technologies for IP
based services - think about the possible implementations for
this IP based text-to-speech technology.
Jeff Pulver
Tel. +1.516.753.2640
The Pulver Report
Fax. +1.516.293.3996
February 25, 1999
© 1999 pulver.com, Inc.
http://www.pulver.com/reports