Remarkable Calm Despite TeleBlend Snafus

Given all the challenges new VoIP provider TeleBlend has faced since deciding to make a major play as a continuity provider for former SunRocket customers, including at least one significant service outage in the first couple of weeks, there isn't much squawking by disaffected customers in the blogosphere. It's somewhat odd. For an operation that jump started itself fast, and then had to transition customers from another provider, there were bound to be transition problems. Billing issues here and there, administration portals not displaying real time data, password issues or adapter resets were almost certainly to be expected.

Having worked at start up operations where we had to support Cisco networking gear, Nortel phone systems and the circuits to support them, I know what it is like when all the systems are not fully baked. And, in fairness, there is simply no way TeleBlend was going to have its back office fully baked before stepping right into the customer support morass.

I'll be willing to bet, however, that I've encountered more software problems setting up a new Vista PC than most SunRocket customers have had getting their transitioned services to work.

Maybe customers are more unhappy than they appear to be expressing. If so, we'd like to hear about it. But we aren't hearing all that much. Which might simply mean most users might have encountered a glitch here and there, but that service for the most part is working the way it was before.

The adage we are fond of repeating is simply that customer satisfaction and loyalty do not correspond all that well for mass market communication services. Happy customers will desert. Conversely, it is well worth noting, somewhat unhappy customers will not necessarily churn. I wouldn't say I am happy having to use Vista. Neither would I say I am ditching Windows for a Mac, though I have been considering it for at least a year.

Maybe I'm just not hearing what is going on in SunRocket land. But I am neither surprised there have been porting and support issues, nor concerned TeleBlend will fail to get its operational processes in enough order to support the services and price points it has chosen. How much support can a user really expect for a $12.95 a month service? That's no slam on TeleBlend; just a recognition that price points that low will not allow for much support infrastructure.

Still, I have been surprised at the relative calm, despite all the difficulties.

Movie Download Business Won't Be That Easy

Until now, most consumers have been reluctant to purchase movie downloads. There are lots of reasons. It is a new behavior, and learning to do things in a different way takes time. There's little compelling reason to change current behaviors, either. Whatever else one might say, the ability to rent or buy movie material is not a pressing problem.

So Web downloads of the same material consumers easily can get is not a winning proposition for most people: it simply doesn't solve a big enough problem, or save enough time or money. Not when DVD retail, Netflix, Blockbuster rental channels, IPTV and video on demand are so easy to use, both absolutely and comparatively.

And so far, it would be hard to argue that paid movie content delivered over a Web connection for viewing on a standard TV actually saves either money or time.

Download-to-burn services offer a way to get around these limitations and might prove more appealing to consumers, says The Diffusion Group. But not for a while. The number of titles available for D2B services is extremely limited, and that won't be an easy problem to fix.

Not for any technical reason, but because movie content owners are acutely tuned to the distribution methods that net them the most money. And there's no way they'd take a chance on harming existing channels by aggressively deploying a new channel before they have some assurance that cannibalization is minimal and new markets can be created.

CinemaNow and Movielink, both of which offer who offer D2B services, have found uptake to be poor. The problem is pretty simple. Movie rentals and purchases are all about the content, and when the content can be had. Since the studios are cautious, the content D2B offers is widely available elsewhere, through the traditional channels.

While 49 percent of adult Internet users are to some extent familiar with online movie stores that offer downloads, less than five percent report having purchased a movie download.

Not surprisingly, those most interested in D2B services are also the heaviest DVD buyers. On average, D2B potential users purchase 55 percent more movies than users who say they won't, or probably won't use D2B services.

Price sensitivity for B2D services also is significant as well. Still, the biggest problem is simply that the hassle factor is too great, the content selection available elsewhere and the price or time savings minimal to non-existent. This is going to be a tough market to jumpstart.

Joost will provide a new test, of course. But it still is hard to see how the incremental value outweighs the hassle, at least for most consumers. Non-traditional content likely will be the more important factor, ultimately.

Free Version of CommuniGate Pronto! Now Available

CommuniGate Systems has two new initiatives for free IP-based communications addressing consumers, SOHO and very small business uers. CommuniGate Systems is offering free versions of its Flash-based client Pronto! and the CommuniGate Pro Internet Communications platform.

CommuniGate’s new portal, www.TalktoIP.com, gives consumers a free live account of Pronto!, a flash based user interface that integrates e-mail, calendaring and secure IM in a single dashboard. Users can create their individual accounts @TalktoIP.com in just a few simple steps.

In addition, the CommuniGate Pro Community Edition is available for a complimentary download giving up to five users free full-service accounts installable on any computer or server inside their home or small business.

The product is compatible with any operating system—Windows XP, Windows Server Edition, Apple OSX, and Linux. The Community Edition allows small businesses and home users to enjoy the power of a carrier-grade technology through a simple and easy-to-manage package for e-mail, IM, and VoIP technologies for free, the company says.

I asked about Vista support and haven't heard back, yet. I suspect Vista support is not yet available, so though I would love to try it out, I will have to wait.

The Community Edition provides email, groupware, VoIP, IM(SIP/Simple & XMPP), a virtual PBX with free CG/PL application source code, conferencing server, voice mail and mobility support, the company says.

CommuniGate Pro Community Edition can be downloaded at www.communigate.com, or for the online live version visit www.talktoip.com to get a free account.

Global VoIP Keeps Chugging...

Worldwide VoIP service revenue jumped 66 percent to $15.8 billion in 2006 after more than doubling in 2005, and is expected to more than triple by 2010, says Infonetics Research. Worldwide revenue from residential hosted VoIP services jumped 68 percent between 2005 and 2006 while managed IP PBX service revenue grew 45 percent.

Hosted VoIP services continue to outpace managed IP PBX services by far, with residential services fueling the market, but the business segment is also growing, and will continue to, Infonetics says.

“Asia Pacific has been leading the VoIP services scene for a couple of years, with Japan’s SoftBank pioneering the service and taking a strong lead, but the EMEA and North America regions have gained some ground at the expense of Asia in the last two years. The Latin American-Caribbean region is also posting impressive growth and gaining share,” said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics Research and lead author of the report.

The number of worldwide residential/SOHO VoIP subscribers nearly doubled between 2005 and 2006, to 46.5 million, 46 percent of which are in the Asia Pacific region.

About 71 percent of worldwide VoIP service revenue came from residential/SOHO customers in 2006, 29 percent from business customers.

SoftBank is the world's largest VoIP service provider with 18 percent subscriber market share, followed in order by NTT, Vonage, France Télécom, and Time Warner Cable, Infonetics says.

FiOS Takes Share from Satellite, Overbuilders and Cable

An examination of wireline video subscriber patterns in 34 Massachusetts cities and towns after the introduction of Verizon Inc.’s FiOS TV reveals three key findings, according to analysts at OneTrak, a firm loaded with cable TV trade journalists I used to work with.

FiOS tends to capture at least 10 percent penetration by taking cable customers (mostly Comcast in the study area). If there is an overbuilder in the market, the hit can be larger than that (RCN being the case in point). And as many as 40 percent of FiOS TV subscribers could well be coming from DBS.

In most markets there will not be an overbuilder with any significant market share, so FiOS gains should easily top 10 percent.

Private Line, Ethernet Might be Complementary

One of the confounding thing about "public network" services and platforms is that although many new services logically should displace older services, quite often they do so only in part, acting mostly as a brake on the growth of the legacy services, but not displacing them.

Ethernet and IP, for example, "logically" should replace older private line services based on SONET, SDH or optical carrier. Ethernet offers vastly lower price-per-bit performance and is transparent to the connectionless nature of IP. SONET, SDH and optical carrier can be made to encapsulate IP packets, but at the risk of additional overhead, cost and payload efficiency.

In fact, as IP-based broadband services proliferate over wired and wireless networks, one logically expects that older connection-oriented transport protocols will wither. But nothing in public networking ever seems to work so linearly. Oddly enough, as real time apps start to drive broadband services, connection-oriented transport has appeal, as that's what such protocols were created to do.

Over the past several years there also has been much emphasis on the role of wireless backhaul in driving new demand for private line capacity. Which might strike you as odd, given the relatively small percentage of total private line sales that particular application represents. Of course, there are other forces at work.

Though it clearly is broadband demand that is driving wireless backhaul demand, that demand is spread across traditional private line, Ethernet over copper and optical connections.

"Private line emulation" over optical or metallic media, for example, often makes sense. So does encapsulation of connection-oriented traffic inside a connectionless transport. Though "converged networks" are the future, today it often makes sense to add high capacity connectionless bandwidth for 3G and 4G services, but leave the connection-oriented voice on a separate logical network.

"Private line" sales can grow even as IP bandwidth grows in the backhaul application because a huge existing voice revenue stream has to be supported as incremental broadband apps using IP are layered on. Still, wireless backhaul is a fraction of total private line sales.

So why the buzz? Volume. A single sale to a wireless network provider can involve thousands of sites. A service provider obviously can make a lot more money selling one customer thousands of T1s or hundreds of optical carrier or Ethernet links, rather than thousands of customers single T1s.

Then there is the matter of urgency: wireless carriers have an immediate need that won't wait, and have to put up hundreds to thousands of links at a time. Wireless backhaul is really important to sellers because a handful of buyers represent such enormous volume.

NEC Acquires Sphere Communications

NEC is acquiring Sphere Communications, the latest in a series of consolidations affecting the business phone system market. Mitel and Inter-Tel, as well as Lucent and Alcatel earlier announced mergers. One has to expect more mergers involving companies specializing in small and mid-sized business phone systems, as Cisco and Microsoft are going to muscle their way into the SME segment of the market.

Though managed and hosted services are growing, SMEs still overwhelmingly seem to prefer premises-based solutions, say researchers at Infonetics.

As more voice features and applications are integrated with existing business processes, and as unified communications starts to be seen as the "function" voice is a part of, we can expect similar sorts of ripples throughout the current ecosystem supporting voice services for the SME segment. The ability to design and support a network running voice and communications applications as well as other business apps will become more important in the value added reseller space, as an obvious example.

Channel partners who can handle the "desktop" side of the premises demarc will gain at the expense of partners who only can work on the trunk side of an interface. And more of the value will derive from applications support rather than infrastructure support.