TDM and VOIP

Buy now, or wait to see how hard a complete integration all the way to the desktop is going to be?

Robert Poe on August 17th, 2006

Those who feel they really need an IP PBX will face a painful decision over the next year or so. The decision won't about what model of box to buy, though. It'll be about whether to buy one at all, or to hold off a while longer. The cause of all this uncertainty will be the new "unified communications" products Microsoft will be introducing through the middle of next year. Some observers think the products could seriously disrupt the enterprise VoIP market, if not dominate it. The million-dollar question: Will they be worth waiting for?

The products, announced in late June, take advantage of Microsoft's key strength in everything it does: the fact that its products are everywhere in the enterprise, and they all work together. Or to use the jargon, they're ubiquitous and integrated.
The centerpiece is the Office Communications Server 2007, a SIP-based communications platform that provides presence-based VoIP call management; audio, video and Web conferencing; and instant messaging, all working in conjunction with existing software and applications. There is also a unified messaging server, called Exchange Server 2007, that integrates e-mail, voice mail and faxing.

A soft phone called Office Communicator 2007 will work with the communications server. Microsoft Office Live Meeting will provide feature-rich conferencing services. And an audio-video collaboration device called Microsoft Office Round Table will incorporate a 360-degree camera that lets participants see everyone in the room at the other end of the conference. Additional software will let IP phones from Polycom, LG-Nortel and Thomson Telecom work with the other products.

The software giant will start shipping the various products between the end of this year and the second quarter of 2007. And the fact that they're indisputably on the way sets Microsoft up for a momentous clash with existing IP PBX makers, according to Thomas Valovic, author of a newly released report by IDC.

The clash has been a long time coming. IP PBX makers have for some time realized that proprietary hardware and feature sets that users couldn't easily customize and integrate with desktop applications weren't the way to go, according to Valovic. To compete in the future, they needed to have features like presence detection, SIP-based services, click to conference, and sophisticated service personalization capabilities. Avaya has done a particularly good job of moving in that direction, Valovic adds.

In short, PBX makers have been "moving up the value chain going beyond voice towards these enhanced capabilities," he explains. At the same time, "Microsoft has had these enhanced capabilities, but they didn't have the voice. So they're moving down the stack."

But until now Microsoft's move hasn't been all that convincing. "The question for years has been how aggressively Microsoft is going to go after voice," Valovic says. "Do they just want to use it as an enhancement or bundle it with some of their other capabilities, or are they going after the primary voice market?" The unified communications announcement was important, he claims, "because Microsoft finally opened the kimono and stated that they are going after this primary voice market in the enterprise."

Each side will have particular advantages — and challenges — in the battle. Microsoft, for example, will have its ubiquity and integration. On the other hand, it's just getting started in the enterprise telephony game. So at least at the beginning, the call control features it can offer will be minimal compared to what the IP PBX makers have on tap.

"The IP PBX makers have been concerned about Microsoft for several years," explains Valovic. "It will take some time for Microsoft to develop their level of feature richness. They have spent millions of dollars and many man hours developing a lot of the feature sets and capabilities and reliability they offer."

On the other hand, the report says the IP PBX vendors will have to work harder to integrate their products with the IT world, and "strengthen their capabilities in SIP-based applications that integrate with applications that are available on the desktop and enhance business processes."

It could represent a tricky balancing act on both sides. Microsoft, for its part, will have to continue to cooperate with the IP PBX vendors, and make sure its applications work with their products. And in fact, less than a month after the unified communications announcement, it announced a major collaboration with Nortel.
IDC doesn't think IP PBX vendors will start to lose much share to Microsoft until 2008, with what it terms "significant" loss coming in 2009 and 2010. But there may be an even shorter-term effect: IDC thinks Microsoft will be able to convince some customers to delay their purchases until it can "beef up" the call control functions in OCS 2007.

That means some customers could get caught between Microsoft and leading IP PBX vendors like Avaya, Cisco and Siemens, with one side encouraging them to wait, the other urging them to buy now. Thus their decisions will depend not just on how good the products are, but how desperate they are. That's never the best basis for a significant purchase, or any other major decision for that matter.

Marin Perez on September 1st, 2006

Testing company Minacom says call quality is increasing for VoIP phone calls, but not for computer-to-computer services like Skype.

VoIP phone services worldwide sound better than the standard public-switched phone network, according to research from Minacom. But, these findings do not apply to PC-to-PC VoIP calling, like Skype, for a variety of issues. The company's data from the last 12 months showed that the quality of VoIP services offered by broadband VoIP providers, cable operators, and telecos has increased , with an average Mean Opinion Score of 4.2, compared to 3.9 for the PSTN. Minacom said, “Based on a MOS threshold of 3.6, only one out of 50 calls in North America were considered to be unacceptable – one in 10 worldwide – while greater than 85 percent of VoIP calls exceeded average PSTN quality of the same period.”

Additionally, VoIP phone calls were found to connect quicker overall, 8.2 seconds on average compared to 8.7 seconds on a PSTN. Minacom's findings did not apply to PC-to-PC VoIP services, like Skype.

The study comes as Brix Networks recently indicated that 1 in 5 Internet phone calls were classified as unacceptable, and that call quality was declining.

“Minacom felt is should be clarified for both those in the VoIP industry, and individuals and enterprises considering VoIP service, that (Brix's) report evaluated computer-to-computer Internet phone service, similar to those offered by Skype, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo Messenger,” The company said in a written statement. “The quality and service reliability of these applications does not compare to that of the VoIP phone services offered by telecos, cable operators, and broadband VoIP providers who carefully deploy, monitor and manage the the quality of their services.”

“PC-PC VoIP quality is subject to many diverse impairments, including firewall settings, computer performance, antivirus installations, high-compression codecs, and Internet bandwidth shared with gaming, file downloads, Web surfing, and e-mail. By contrast, VoIP offered by service providers is switched using telecom-grade equipment, uses lower-compression codecs, and is prioritized over regular Internet traffic using sophisticated, standards-based multimedia telephone adapters maintained and monitored by the operator.”

VoIP call quality is a very important and sometimes frustrating thing. A report by Telephia showed that more than 27 percent of VoIP subscribers who are likely to change providers do so because of network quality. Adding credence to Minacom's report, J.D. Powers & Associates had their own report which found cable TV providers who offer telephone service ranked higher than traditional phone companies in customer satisfaction.

Still unsure what's all the fuss about VoIP? Please visit here to see if VoIP service is right for you, and here to see 10 questions to ask before you sign a VoIP contract.

By Ed Gubbins

Sep 1, 2006 1:41 PM


The shedding of Nortel Networks’ UMTS access business adds more clarity to the company’s priorities as it continues to evaluate which markets it will invest and compete in and which it won’t. The company will continue to focus on mobility in the areas of CDMA, GSM and LTE, with a greater focus on 4G. Meanwhile, it will aggressively pursue enterprise markets and the services business.

In a note issued this morning, UBS Investment Research called Nortel’s UMTS access sale “the first major step from [Nortel’s Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski] consistent with his strategy of focusing only on areas where Nortel can be a meaningful player.”

In February, Zafirovski vowed to commit Nortel only to markets in which it could hold a 20% share. But he also highlighted three areas in particular that he felt were critical to the company’s future: WiMax, IMS and IPTV.

Since that time, Nortel’s optical business has been growing (up 30% sequentially in the second quarter and up 7% from a year earlier), and the company created a new metro Ethernet division. Both areas fall outside the three Zafirovski listed as priorities, leading some analysts to wonder aloud whether Nortel is still reaching too broadly.

As Nortel’s chief strategy officer, George Riedel, explained in June, “Those three areas--WiMAX, IMS and IPTV--aren’t the three pillars of the company going forward. I’d characterize them as important new investment areas we launched earlier in the year that fit in the broader context of the strategic plan--a subset of the strategic plan.”
Backing out of the UMTS access business--where Nortel has only 2% of the market--lets Nortel focus more intently on other mobility areas. The company will continue selling UMTS core gear.

Although some employees dedicated to Nortel’s UMTS business will be transferred to Alcatel as part of the deal, remaining resources that were previously dedicated to UMTS will now be redirected to other Nortel efforts, Zafirovski said today. UBS estimated the company’s UMTS access business--which is being sold for $320 million--generated annual revenue between $400 million and $500 million and losses up to $200 million.

When asked today whether Nortel would need a partner in order to continue selling its core UMTS business without the access portion, the company pointed to a sale of strictly core UMTS gear to Cingular Wireless earlier this year.

The sale of the UMTS business follows another step toward clarifying its business focus Nortel took earlier this summer. The company affirmed its commitment to enterprise markets with a Microsoft partnership aimed at co-developing and cross-licensing intellectual property to bring unified communications solutions to business customers.

“This is part of our business transformation,” Zafirovski said in a press conference today, citing both the MicroSoft alliance and the sale of its UMTS business announced today.

By Kevin Fitchard
Sep 8, 2006 4:03 PM

Nortel Networks is stopping development of its own presence server for its IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) portfolio in favor of using that of a third-party vendor, Followap.

Rob Scheible, leader of Nortel’s VoIP product and technical marketing group, said Nortel developed its own presence solution four years ago and has sold it as part of its multimedia portfolio to some 40 customers. “We decided, though, that is was not a technology that we wanted to continue to develop,” Scheible said. “We wanted to focus on our core IMS products.”

Scheible said Nortel chose Followap because it had the most complete portfolio of presence products, leaving Nortel free to focus on the critical components of the IMS architecture, the call session control function and home subscriber server as well as its VoIP and session initiation protocol expertise.

The Economist Group is using a complete Nortel IP communications solution at its second London office in Red Lion Square to allow its editors, analysts and business staff to communicate more effectively. Nortel's IP-based voice and data network for TEG delivers a simplified personal communications management system to its staff. This allows users to access telephony, fax, e-mail, voicemail and wireless through personal computers and IP telephony handsets anywhere in the TEG office.

The converged solution, which is capable of supporting Quality of Service (QoS) from the edge to the core of the network, was completed in conjunction with Allnet, a Nortel channel partner and is based on Nortel end-to-end enterprise portfolio.

Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 at the core, Nortel Ethernet Routing Switch 5520 at the edge, and Nortel Communication Server (CS) 1000 IP telephony solution provide The Economist Group with a system designed to handle 'mission critical' information cost effectively and with high reliability. Nortel solution for the media Group also includes wireless local area network capability.

The Economist Group also chose to converge its network to enable its entire staff to benefit from a flexible, mobile environment using 400 Nortel 2004 and 2002 Internet Phones.