Verizon Business has released a new managed unified communications and collaboration solution via Cisco Unified Communications Manager 6.1. The managed platform allows workers to integrate voice mail, email and instant messaging seamlessly.
“Today’s enterprise is faced with many new challenges, including how to enable employee productivity, do more with less and be environmentally responsible,” said Nancy Gofus, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Verizon Business. “Unified communications helps companies address these issues, enabling them to fully realize the power of their Internet protocol networks as they deliver advanced IP-enabled applications.”
A simple comparison, now that the new iPod Touch has a microphone and there is at least one working VoIP application to use with wifi. For the purposes of this comparison I am going to skew every single decision in favor of the iPhone as much as possible.
But first, the VoIP calling details. Fring has a free iPhone/iPod Touch app in the Apple app store that is smart, can call via Skype and via several SIP clients and knows enough to offer you all available calling options (including cellular on an iPhone). The significance is that with a global Skype Out plan you can call pretty much anywhere in the world for very very little. Note that you cannot use the VoIP calling portion over 3G – so outside wifi range you are going to have to make cellular calls and pay the freight.
Price
iPod Touch
$229 (for 8GB model)
Total - $229
iPhone WITHOUT plan (buyout)
$199 plus $18 fee plus $30 first month (as far as I can make out in the legalese you are stuck with the first month no matter what you do) plus $175 buyout. Note that this gets you an iPhone with no cellular capabilities – essentially an iPod Touch with a camera. Of course, if the plan is to switch to another carrier, then this is likely your way to go.
Total - $422
iPhone WITH plan
$199 (for 8GB) plus $30 per month (for two years) plus one time $18 upgrade fee. I am not including the cost of the cellular plan since I will assume that it is replacing my existing plan.
Total - $937
Feature Differences
Ipod Touch
Our baseline.
iPhone WITHOUT plan
Has camera.
iPhone WITH plan
Has a camera. Can make cellular calls and access the data network from anywhere 3G works – a significant amount more than any wifi coverage.
What does this mean? First – despite a few heated comments on bulleting boards and forums, it is a complete waste of time to buy out of an AT&T iPhone contract unless you are moving it to a different cellular plan.
Second. If you spend most of your time near wifi, you can save yourself over $700 by buying an iPod Touch and using Fring. Just don’t expect it to be more than an iPod outside of wifi range.
NeuStar, Inc. has successfully trialed its SIP-IX VoIP Interconnection Exchange service. The company used four competitive local exchange providers for the trial.
“We’re glad to have been working with NeuStar during this trial,” said Jerry James, CEO of COMPTEL. “Our members that participated in the trial have told us that NeuStar’s VoIP Interconnection Exchange service performed exactly as NeuStar promised it would. We look forward to the next phase of this project.”
FYI:
A detailed panel discussion regarding the benefits and technical aspects of VoIP interconnection will be held on Tuesday, October 7 at 11:00 a.m. at the COMPTEL Plus Fall 2008 Convention & Expo. The COMPTEL event will be held October 5-8 at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida. Tim Cody, NeuStar’s Senior Director of Product Management, who conducted the SIP-IX Interconnection Exchange service trial with the COMPTEL members, will be one of the presenters on this panel.
There’s a new solution from Alcatel-Lucent. The 7705 SAR - Fixed Form Factor offers more bandwidth and scalability at a lower operational cost.
According to Alcatel-Lucent:
This innovative solution reinforces Alcatel-Lucent’s Mobile Evolution Transport Architecture (META) as the industry’s most comprehensive and cost-effective architecture for evolving mobile networks to all-IP. The 7705 SAR-F enhances a fully managed, complete end-to-end solution for carriers moving from TDM/PDH transport for mobile backhaul to Carrier Ethernet and IP/MPLS networks. New features and functionality of the single-rack unit 7705 SAR-F include: cost-effective scaling, resiliency/redundancy covering synchronization, uplinks and power feeds as well as extreme temperature hardened characteristics (-40degrees C to +65 degrees C).
“The one unit aggregation router product category is an important one for many 3G and 4G operators looking to migrate to IP backhaul,” said Patrick Donegan, Senior Analyst, Heavy Reading. “It enables the cost and performance benefits of IP to be extended out from the core of the network all the way to the cell site.”
The company also released version 1.1 of its 7705 SAR family software today.
“As mobile operators look beyond 3G to long-term evolution (LTE) their networks will move to all-IP for its operational and cost efficiencies. To enable this Alcatel-Lucent is delivering the industry’s most comprehensive and integrated mobile solution, from the IP backbone through to the cell tower,” said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent IP activities. “The introduction of the new 7705 SAR-F and enhancements to our SAR family demonstrate our commitment to continuous innovation and technological leadership in the IP/MPLS market for mobile service providers.”
Last month’s deployment of AT&T’s U-verse Voice in my home represented a fundamental shift in the way I look at my residential telephony service. And now, with today’s introduction of its HomeManager™ product offering, the phone company as we no longer know it, is extending the value chain in helping me integrate and manage all of my IP services in the home.
Overview The AT&T HomeManager consists of three devices: the HomeManager Frame, HomeManager Handset, and HomeManager Base.
The HomeManager Frame is a cordless touch screen device with a vivid 7 inch color display that provides easy access to your address book, as well as your call logs, voice mail, Yellow Pages and White pages, weather, news, email calendar digital photos and videos – and it’s a speaker phone. It has the look and feel of a scaled down tablet PC and could be a hint of form factors to come, especially in light of Intel’s recent announcement of its Urban Max prototype displayed last month.
The HomeManager Handset is what it is- a handset but with the feel of something more like a Cisco, Nortel or Avaya office IP phone you see in the enterprise.
The HomeManager Base which hooks into the Residential Gate way serves as a means to connect to the Frame and Handset.
First Impressions: It looks really cool. Especially the HomeManager Frame.
It was easy to install.
I was up and going in about 10 minutes. The directions are easy to read and follow.
The HomeManager Frame got me thinking about how I consume and apply information. In the case of Yellow Pages, the HomeManager Frame is a great application – and a better application than having Yellow Pages on U-verse TV. Frankly, Yellow Pages on U-verse TV is slow and cumbersome. But on the HomeManager Frame it’s fast and easy to use. Oh- by the way, I still use the paper version of the Yellow Pages which sits on a shelf in the kitchen.
While you can get your email on the HomeManager Frame, it’s sort of clunky and not as elegant as checking or composing email or texts on my iPhone. The HomeManager Frame also comes with a pen stylus for tapping text instead of using your fingers.
The address book is a good idea, but you are out of luck in trying to sync it if you have an iPhone. If you are a subscriber to the AT&T Mobile Backup Service, you can set your address book to automatically sync with your AT&T mobile phone address book on select phones. (If you have an iPhone, I highly recommend the MobileMe service which syncs your PC/iPhone/and your .Me account in the cloud).
One thing that the HomeManager Frame does display – and can be your screen saver, is the weather. This is a case where this type of device lends itself best for a certain type of information that I want to have at my disposal.
The lesson here is that there is no one device or communications platform that can be all things to all consumers. The other lesson is that slowly but surely, AT&T is helping me build out a small-scale enterprise network in my home with service options that can be deployed on a variety of hardware platforms. At the end of the day, it can be my TV, my PC, my wireless device, or now my Frame.
Pricing: The basic HomeManager offering is on sale starting today for $299. Additional handsets are available for $69 each. I wonder why AT&T doesn’t offer a $100 rebate if you sign up for U-verse, or at the very least, let you put 10 non-interest payments of $29 per month on your phone bill.
Availability:
You may purchase your HomeManager today in the following major AT&T markets: Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. I assume others will follow as they roll the product out.
A new softswitch has been unveiled that is intended for delivering unified communications with multimedia over IP. The Coral Sea Softswitch 3.0 is from Tadiran Telecom. It’s presently available in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and Australia. It’s expected to become available in North and South America later this year.
According to the company:
Utilizing the most commonly used protocol for VOIP in the world (SIP), the Coral Sea Softswitch enables enterprises to connect to their service provider directly, through a pure IP connection, thereby preserving quality of service and reducing costs. Unified messaging, voice and video conferencing, soft phones, dual-mode phones, IP phones - regardless of the source, users will be able to receive information in real time, conduct consultations and correspondence with colleagues, and make timely well-founded decisions. This assortment of communications features transforms every location into a fully operational workstation, considerably increasing efficiency and productivity by reducing process/communications latency.
“Customers have already lined up to enjoy next-generation communications features with complete mobility and reliability.” said Eitan Livneh, President and CEO of Tadiran Telecom. “Tadiran Telecom has aligned its vision with the global demand for truly unified communications and multimedia over IP. Today is a milestone in the fulfillment of this vision. The leap towards a comprehensive unified communications solution expands our reach through an ever-growing network of distribution channels.”
Published on September 16th, 2008
under IM, IP, Media, S, T, UC
Click-to-call patents are up for auction in the U.S. on September 16. Companies including Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Sprint and Vonage has been invited to partake in the auction.
“We are extremely excited about the opportunity to bring these patents to market for the first time. We strongly feel that our ‘click-to-call’ portfolio of patents is uniquely positioned to facilitate growth and add value to the online advertising space,” said Ernesto Liebster, President of CLICK.
The use and popularity of click-to-call applications is expected to ponly increase with time.
• Do not try this at home. • Batteries not included. • Demonstration as shown, performed by professional stunt car driver.
Light Reading’sPhil Harvey, has a great post entitled “Raising Ruckus with U-verse." In Phil’s piece, he talks about the idea of running U-verse in HD on a wireless network using Ruckus Wireless’ new MediaFlex 7000 gear, noting how well it actually worked.
I’m not here to challenge Phil’s technical expertise, or the notion that in theory (repeat theory) that you could do HDTV over a wireless network, not only making it more convenient for consumers, but much easier and less expensive and time consuming for the AT&T installation crew when the come to your home.
I am here, though to challenge what amounts to nothing more than pure common sense given the following issues:
1. Phil’s house is not my house. I don’t know his set-up, how far the TVs are from the set top box, what kinds of walls he has, and where his microwave oven, let alone the hair dryer in the bathroom may sit. I live in a two-story home. Maybe Phil lives in a one-story ranch-style, or a mansion. Or a condo. Or a reconverted warehouse. The key is WiFi performance varies dramatically by home. Just because it works in Phil’s home doesn’t make it scalable to every home.
2. Phil is an exception and not the rule. Just like any early adapter, it sure looks and sounds cool to do this, but AT&T (and Verizon) are after millions of customers who reliably want TV, not just a few who want to push the limits of technology.
3. While WiFi’s capability is growing, so are bandwidth demands. Telco’s like AT&T and Verizon are already been requesting 400 mbit/s of performance. You have to ask yourself, why do they need that much bandwidth? It’s probably because they are planning new applications we don’t know about yet. The reality is this: WiFi doesn’t even get us reliability to today’s requirements. It won’t for tomorrow’s either.
4. Service providers are all about service. As long as my service flows seamlessly, I never call them. And if they can’t fix or diagnose a problem over the phone (or on my wired home network) then a costly human intervenes, or even worse has to pay a service call to my home. WiFi is not ready for prime time as a backbone for IPTV services.
5. WiFi simply doesn’t deliver the kind of reliable performance telco’s like AT&T require. To achieve the kind of reliable performance telcos demand, they need 100% excess capacity. This means if you need 40 mbit/s, you gotta have have 80 mbit/s always available in throughput. Today’s WiFi can’t deliver that kind of performance. Not now and as AT&T starts to add more service offerings to my U-verse package, not in the future either.
In concluding his article, Phil begs the question: how much are consumers willing to subsidize the privilege of having a wireless network for the IPTV service?
Good question, but the wrong question.
I think the real question should be what kind of new and innovative services would consumers pay for, via their TV on a wired network? How can AT&T leverage a small-scale enterprise network in one’s home to further differentiate its product and service offering from cable and satellite providers?
All of the above aside, I personally think we are used to, and gladly accept the use and functionality of WiFi for a computer or laptop in the home.
I think we are also conditioned to having a TV wired to “something” that brings us even higher resolution images, new applications, and at a time when the cost of gas is beginning to make a permanent impact on our society, new ways to work and play from home.
Published on July 29th, 2008
under EA, S, U-Verse, UC, US
China VoIP phone manufacturers are planning to raise prices. Fifty-nine percent of manufacturers there said that export prices will increase and they expect sales to continue to grow too, according to Global Sources’ China Sourcing Report: VoIP Phones.
“Fierce competition has driven half of Greater China’s VoIP phone manufacturers out of business over the past two years, especially those who relied mainly on competitive pricing to gain orders,” said report publisher Mark A. Saunderson. “Higher production costs, the appreciation of the Yuan, mainland China’s domestic inflation and intellectual property rights fees are among the factors that have led many manufacturers to focus on value-added models, which bring better margins.”
Meanwhile, seventy-four percent plan to produce more phones.
“Survivors in the industry have learned that they need to move upmarket to maintain profit margins,” Saunderson said. “This is good news for buyers who can expect to find higher end models with more value-added features coming out of Greater China.”
VoIP, wireless, security, RFID and portable data collection distributor WAV is going to begin selling Azalea Networks’ network intelligent broadband wireless infrastructure products.
The Azalea technology, which is patent pending, is intended for enterprises, government agencies and service providers that deliver voice, video and data.
“WAV’s strengths in value-added distribution and wireless technical expertise will provide a key link between Azalea’s innovative technology and the applications that can best benefit from it,” reported John Elms, CEO of Azalea Networks.
“Partnering with Azalea Networks expands our reach and enables the delivery of cost-effective and innovative solutions that our customers are looking for,” said Norm Dumbroff, president and CEO of WAV, Inc. “We’re excited to continue to offer our solution providers, and the wireless and mobile VAR communities, outstanding technologies, as well as our full portfolio of value-added services.”
Published on July 17th, 2008
under du, EA, S, T, TRI, UC
With all the hooplah about the new iPhone 3G, and the touch / multi-touch features of the device, there is another technology platform from one of my day-job client, N-trig
Dell was one of the first major vendors to introduce capacitive touch and is now bringing multi-touch capabilities to the Latitude XT.
The new capabilities include:
Scroll – by placing two fingers on the screen and moving them horizontally or vertically customers can easily navigate in web browsers and productivity applications.
Zoom – by touching the screen with two fingers and moving them together customers can zoom various content in and out, such as pictures or Web pages.
Programmable double-tap – customers can program a command, such as launching a Web browser or turning the screen off to save power, that will respond to two taps with two fingers.
Loxbit Public Company Limited will now be selling the full Envox Worldwide product portfolio in Thailand. The portfolio includes Envox Communications Development Platform, Envox VoiceXML Studio, Envox CT Connect(TM), and Envox CT ADE(TM). Loxbit will also have use of Envox’s professional services, training and technical support.
“We are pleased to be partnering with Loxbit,” said Leo Casey, president and CEO of Envox Worldwide. “These types of distribution partnerships are a key element of our global growth strategy. We’re looking forward to working closely with Loxbit to build strong customer relationships and broaden our presence in the rapidly expanding voice solutions market.”
The companies say that the agreement addresses regional demand.
“Working closely with Envox will enable us to leverage their corporate strengths, while utilizing our own market and customer development capabilities across the region. We expect this relationship to provide a significant boost to our communications business,” said Suwit Attajarusith, vice president for Loxbit.
Published on July 1st, 2008
under du, envox, S, T, UC, vox
