TDM and VOIP

The top six vendors accounted for 79%of worldwide mobile phone sales in 2005, to the detriment of smaller providers.

By Peter Clarke
EE Times

Feb 28, 2006 06:47 AM

LONDON — Worldwide mobile phone sales totaled 816.6 million units in 2005, a 21 percent increase from 2004, as the leading six vendors increased their share of the market at the detriment of smaller vendors, according to market research company Gartner Inc.

The fourth quarter was strong at 235.1 million units shipped. “Based on preliminary data for the first two months we expect to see a similar trend as in the first quarter of 2005 with a drop over the previous quarter in the region of five to eight percent,” said Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst for mobile terminals research at Gartner, in a statement.

Nokia remained the top vendor in 2005 with 32.5 percent of all mobile phone sales, followed by Motorola on 17.7 percent, Samsung on 12.7 percent, LG on 6.7 percent, Sony Ericsson on 6.3 percent and Siemens on 3.5 percent. Other makers captured 20.6 percent of 2005 unit sales but saw their market share eroded to 16.3 percent by Q4 2005.

The top six vendors accounted for 79.4 percent of worldwide mobile phone sales in 2005. The leaders’ market share increased from 78 percent in the first quarter to 84 percent in the fourth quarter of 2005. However, Siemens was beaten out of sixth place by a fast rising BenQ, which had 4.7 percent of unit shipments in Q4, according to Gartner.

“As competition continues to drive price pressure in the low-end, and a design and technology ‘arms race’ in the high-end, the survival of the fittest depends more and more on economies of scale, or very carefully cut out niche markets,” said Milanesi.

“The industry experienced record sales due to continued strong growth in emerging markets, where falling prices for cellular connectivity — phones and subscriptions — resulted in higher-than-expected sales. In more mature markets, such as Western Europe and North America, replacement sales were driven by users that gave into the charm of highly fashionable devices,” Milanesi said in the same statement.

Market leader Nokia has a market share that is more than double that of its nearest competitor in Europe and Asia, and more than three times its nearest competitor in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After a difficult 2004, Nokia was able to introduce popular products and bounce back. It took the lead in the Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) market with products such as the n70.

Samsung’s static performance in third place was because it preferred to favor margins over market share and a decision not to enter price wars in the emerging markets, Gartner said.

In Western Europe, sales of mobile phones totaled 49.1 million units in the fourth quarter of 2005 and 164 million units in 2005.

In Central Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), as first time subscribers continued to join networks, mobile phone sales for the year reached 153.5 million units. In North America fourth quarter mobile phone sales reached 41.3 million units and 2005 sales reached 148.4 million units. Sales of mobile phones in Latin America reached nearly 102 million units in 2005, a 40 percent increase from 2004.

In Asia/Pacific, mobile phone sales reached 56.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2005 and 204 million units in 2005. Sales in the region were fuelled by key markets such as China and India. Mobile phone sales in Japan totaled 11.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2005, and totaled 45 million units for the year. Music player functionality fuelled replacement sales especially by young users.

Looking ahead to results for the first quarter of 2006 Ms Milanesi said, “Chinese New Year, prolonged Christmas and New Year sales promotions in Western Europe and North America, as well as continued growth in emerging markets, will all contribute to strong sales in the first quarter of 2006.

02.27.06
Doug Mohney

Worldwide IP PBX revenue has risen 23 percent over the last year, while TDM system revenues are down 15 percent, according to the latest Enterprise Telephony report by Infonetics Research (www.infonetics.com).

Together, worldwide TDM and IP PBX system revenue totaled $8.1 billion in 2005, a 12 percent increase over 2004. Over the next five years, revenues are expected to increase at a rate of 43 percent, reaching $11.6 billion as organizations continue to migrate to VoIP. IP PBX revenue will jump up 82 percent while TDM revenue will drop 88 percent.

According to the report, Nortel, Avaya, Siemens, Alcatel, and NEC lead in worldwide 2005 line shipments of PBX/KTS systems. Nortel leads the North American IP PBX market in line shipments for 2005, followed by Avaya and Cisco, but it's a "very close race." Cisco dominates the market for enterprise IP phones with 42 percent market share in 2005. "Hybrid" PBXes accounted for 65 percent of 2005 PBX/KTS revenue, TDM 23 percent, and pure IP 12 percent. Hybrids and pure IP will continue to increase through 2009 while TDM continues to decline.

February 24, 2006

By Dave Molta
Courtesy of Network Computing

The IEEE recently approved a draft of its most significant new standard in the past 10 years: 802.11n, which specifies the means for running wireless LANs at speeds in excess of 100 Mbps. Based on a specification developed by the EWC (Enhanced Wireless Consortium), an association of leading 802.11 silicon developers, the draft was approved unanimously. Even Airgo Networks, whose business might suffer from the standardization of its proprietary MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) technology, voted yes.

Broadcom and Atheros--which, along with Intel, currently dominate the market for enterprise notebook and AP wireless modules--quickly proclaimed the standard a victory for the industry. They congratulated themselves for driving 802.11n, then for announcing products based on the draft, and then for suggesting that the new chips will be compatible with the final standard, which isn't likely to be approved for another 12 months. Still, it's great to see heavyweights Atheros and Broadcom--not to mention Marvel, Intel and Airgo--getting ready to slug it out in the wireless silicon and network reference designs market, where competition is the key to its long-term success.

Products based on the 802.11n draft will first appear in the consumer wireless router market, then in the enterprise, where the standard's speed will favor making wireless the default LAN. It could take three years for 802.11n to become the dominant WLAN standard, but get ready: You could be doing pilots as early as next year.

February 27, 2006

Combining VoIP with Wi-Fi is a natural for most networks. Here's why you should make the move --- now.
By Matthew Friedman

Voice over wireless local area networks (VoWLAN) might just be one of those technologies whose time has come. Combining voice over IP (VoIP) and wireless networking -- the two headline network technologies of the last couple of years, VoWLAN is, quite simply a natural.

"There's a lot of pent-up demand for VoWLAN, and particularly for dual-mode cellular and wireless VoIP phones," Forrester Research principal analyst Ellen Daley says. "There's a pent-up demand because of a fear and concern of wireless phone costs. Companies are saying that 'we see people using their cell phones on office hallways,' and they're interested in reducing those costs."

Indeed, at one level, the equation is quite simple in a carpeted office environment. If you have a wireless network anyway, and your employees are using their company cell-phones to talk as they move from desk to desk and from conference room to cubicle, then you might as well see if you can put it all together and save airtime charges. With the imminent market availability of reasonably affordable dual-mode phones, it's a no-brainer.

However, Daley is quick to point out that company executives who think that it will all simply be a question of giving everyone a new phone will be sadly mistaken. The one thing you can count on, in fact, is that most companies that are thinking seriously about VoWLAN are probably underestimating the complexity involved in actually deploying the technology.

"Just look at wireless LANs," Daley says. "Most are deployed casually, providing guest-access. They're not integrated in the network infrastructure as a whole or scaled-up to be able to support voice. There will be a rude awakening. A lot more of a design process goes in to supporting VoWLAN."

The main issue with mobile phones, at least as far as IP networking is concerned, is that they're, well, mobile. People invariably use their laptops sitting in one place, but the whole benefit of a mobile phone is that you can make a call while walking through a corridor, or standing in some place other than an office. "We might know where mobile data users are -- they're usually sitting at a desk," Daley says. "But with voice, we really can be mobile."

That means that a telephone conversation can move from one access point (AP) to another. If there's a dead zone, because of a wall, or because the radius of one AP doesn't quite overlap the next, calls can be rudely interrupted as the caller strolls between them. Moreover, APs have to be configured to quickly and efficiently hand-off the connection as the caller moves.

It's not so much that hand-offs are such a massive technological hurdle, Daley says. It's just that no one has actually proved its feasibility in a real-world situation. "Vendors are proving this out," she says. "But there has been no high-capacity deployment yet. I think it's going to work, but it's going to need some working-out first."

Indeed, voice is a synchronous form of communication. A connection hiccup when you're downloading e-mail, even to a handheld, might be a minor annoyance, but if you're making a deal on the phone and the connection goes dead, you have a big problem. The connection has to be seamless.

It also has to be smooth and trouble-free. One thing that VoWLAN absolutely demands is reliable quality of service (QoS). "When you're running VoWLAN, you really have to make sure that you have QoS on your wireless LAN infrastructure," Daley says. "Though many products do have the old wireless QoS standard, many don't have 802.11E."

Many of the potential problems associated with voice quality and network pervasiveness can be avoided with careful planning, Daley says. Wireless networks that were set up for convenience and grew organically from there have to be examined for holes and optimized to deal with the special demands of voice.

"You don't necessarily have to invest in new infrastructure," Daley says. "A lot of wireless vendors support voice, but you might need to add some new access points. You have to be much more serious about design and deployment and use tools to plan for high capacity usage instead of just data usage."

The bottom line is that, although its is carried as packets along an IP network, VoIP is not just data. That means that organizations eager to surf the coming VoWLAN wave have to consider carefully how they will move to the new technology and, perhaps more importantly, how dependent they will be on it.

"It's not rocket science," Daley says. "But there is a big difference between what works in the lab and works in the real world. We still have to see how well it will work out."

February 24, 2006

Cisco enjoys fat-and-happy profit margins for its routers and other networking gear, but an open source startup may sound the death knell for such high-profit hardware. Vyatta is building routers and other net gear using open source software, and has its sights set squarely on Cisco.
So reports Om Malik in this Business 2.0 piece. Malik says that the company's routers, based on open source software, will go into beta this summer, and that prices for them may only be a fifth of what Cisco charges.

The article says that the routers are state of the art, and will handle video on demand and VoIP.
The routers are based on XORP -- extensible open router platform. What makes XORP a potential Cisco killer, Malik note, is that "The versatile open-source application can direct data traffic for a giant corporation as easily as it can manage a home Wi-Fi network."
So it can run not just routers, but any kind of networking gear, to home routers, firewalls and beyond.

The bottom line? Cisco, Juniper, Nortel and other high-margin networking hardware makers may be in for trouble.

Posted by Preston Gralla

Good to see Nortel coming out ontop of the pile for IP line sales. They have in my opinion one of the best Converged IP PBX's available on the market. Every line that Cisco sells is IP. Nortel sells IP where it makes sense. Never discount TDM. TDM makes alot of sense to have in your arsenal when deploying a new Greenfield PBX or upgrading an existing PBX.

Dell'Oro Group sees the writing on the wall for TDM lines

Robert Jaques, vnunet.com 23 Feb 2006

Voice and data convergence is speeding up, according to newly published research from Dell'Oro Group.

The analyst firm reported that sales of PBX IP lines increased 42 per cent year-over-year during the fourth quarter of 2005, while sales of traditional circuit-switched TDM lines decreased by two per cent.

"The momentum is building for IP line sales. For example, the rate of growth in the fourth quarter 2005 was about 50 per cent higher than the past several quarters," said Steve Raab, director of IP telephony research at Dell'Oro Group.

"This new level of growth is sustainable because manufacturers have enhanced the feature richness of their IP products, and users are more familiar and comfortable with voice over IP."

The Dell'Oro Group's IP Telephony Enterprise Quarterly Report showed that Nortel edged out Cisco as the number one supplier of PBX IP lines, with Avaya in third position.

The report also predicted that Nortel is on track to generate more PBX sales from IP lines than TDM lines in the next two quarters.

It is interesting to see that people still buy CISCO voice...nobody disputes they are dominant in data, but that does not mean they know anything about voice. Cisco has many years of catch up ahead before it can even begin to compete with the feature richness of a Nortel or Avaya IP/PBX. It is a testament to Ciscos ability to market and sell Ice to their Eskimos.

February 17, 2006
By David Greenfield Courtesy of TechWeb.com

Next month, Cisco will introduce the next release of Call Manager, version 5.0, at the VoiceCon show in Orlando. Lots of changes are to be expected, including support for Linux in addition to Windows Server, and finally support for SIP clients.
That last fact is a big deal. Unless you've been comatose for the past few years or otherwise blissfully ignorant of the VoIP industry, you know Call Manager is the only major IP PBX to not offer SIP client support. Cisco has offered SIP trunking and offers a SIP server for the carrier market, but has no such offering for the enterprise.

The official reason, according to Cisco, is that SIP isn't mature enough for the enterprise. But the scuttlebutt says that 18 months ago internal politics at Cisco killed the SIP efforts to produce an enterprise-class SIP server. Fingers pointed to Marthin DeBeer, then Cisco’s vice president and general manager, and Richard Platt, then Cisco’s vice president of engineering, for eliminating Dreadnaught, a prototype enterprise SIP server. The two were responsible for Call Manager's development and supposedly were threatened by the Dreadnaught team’s ability to add 80 percent of Call Manager's ability within six months, or so the rumors go.

Adding features to CCM has been cumbersome. It took two years to add Music on Hold, for example. Even today, CCM uses its own Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP), which lacks presence and isn't well suited for a distributed architecture.
Cisco's SIP adoption may well address at least some of those problems. With SIP support, clients will be able to carry rich presence, reflecting various states and not just whether they’re online. Mobility will also be enhanced as next generation mobile services use IMS, which is based on SIP

What's more, SIP will help IT reduce upfront telephony costs because companies can purchase low-cost SIP phones—at least that's the theory. Enterprise IT will want to look carefully at whether it’ll receive the same level of telephony functionality from a third-party phone that it would receive from Cisco phone.
I
T also must look at how much money can be saved by choosing a third-party telephone. The different interfaces and functions on the phones may save a few dollars upfront, but could well carry higher operational costs over the long run.
Posted by David Greenfield February 17, 2006 05:35 AM