HNS Launches SpaceWay Satellite

Hughes Network Systems has successfully launched and deployed its new Spaceway satellite, expected to enable high-speed IP data networking across North America at rates of from 512 Kbps up to 16 Mbps upstream and as fast as 30 Mbps downstream. It is one of the largest telecommunications satellites ever built, and its design includes onboard dynamic multi-beam switching, which will deliver bandwidth-on-demand and direct site-to-site mesh networking.

In a small business application, Spaceway is expected to operate at about 2 Mbps in the upstream. It's a different sort of satellite, using on-board routers to control 780 downlink beams and 112 uplink beams aimed at U.S. market customers. Unlike earlier generations of satellites, Spaceway uses nothing but spot beams, allowing a high degree of frequency reuse. What that means is that a single Spaceway satellite offers capacity equivalent to eight to 10 conventional birds using a single beam with continental coverage.

Commercial operations are expected in early 2008.

Spaceway might not be a game-changing network in the broad consumer mass market, where cable and telephone companies are expected to dominate the access market. But it might well have significant impact in the enterprise market, for customers who need distributed, IP-based, broadband mesh networks, where Spaceway will excel.

Spaceway also sets up head-to-head competition with Wildblue, another provider also offering satellite broadband to customers largely based in rural areas.

Channel partners might also want to take note that HNS, for the first time in its history, has created a channel program and is willing to sell to enterprise customers with fewer than 500 to 1,000 sites, its traditional market, using its existing VSAT network. That doesn't mean HNS is terribly interested, if at all, in two-node networks. But it undoubtedly is willing to entertain service for networks with as few as 20 to 50 nodes, something it never has been willing to do before.

DirecTV Adds Broadband Over Powerline

DirecTV will wholesale broadband over powerline broadband access services from Current Group no later than the beginning of 2008. The move gives DirecTV the ability to create a triple play bundle of voice, video and high-speed data access in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, reaching 1.8 million homes and businesses over the next several years.

The move shows the necessity of providing a triple play offering in the mass market, whether one approaches that market from the legacy voice or legacy entertainment video business. Both DirecTV and EchoStar have been weighing their terrestrial options for some time, though both have marketing deals with the leading incumbent telephone companies as well.

DirecTV might have additional concern about those relationships since at&t bought BellSouth, which had been a DirecTV partner. It isn't clear yet whether EchoStar or DirecTV will continue to be at&t's partner in the future, but EchoStar's longer history with at&t (formerly SBC) should carry weight.

Interesting bit of trivia: The just-launched Hughes Network Systems Spaceway satellite was originally supposed to be the third bird in the fleet of IP-enabled spot beam satellites. But when DirecTV was sold off to News Corp. by the holding company that still owns HNS, the first two birds went to DirecTV.

Perhaps sadly, those two birds are used for conventional TV broadcasting rather than the mesh networking applications the satellites originally were designed to support. Linear TV, including the high-definition sort, obviously is the foundation for businesses consumers consider important.

For some of us, though, broadband Internet access is the most important application, if one could only choose a single service remain available (and that includes landline voice, mobile phone, television and fax). The spot beam and on-board router capabilities of the first two of three "Spaceway" birds wound up in the dustbin.

I don't know that the owners of those two birds would have made more money, or garnered more strategic advantage, if all three Spaceway satellites could have been used for their original intended purpose. I will say that given a choice between devoting scarce spectrum to television, when it can be used for communications (including IP and Web applications), seems like a suboptimal choice.

That said, there's little question but that DirecTV has used the capacity provided by those two former "Spaceway" satellites to shore up its competitive position in the high-definition TV area, compared to its cable competitors. "Highest and best use," I believe property assessors call it.

Learning to Deal with Failure

Virgin Mobile, the only customer for BT Movio, will go dark at the start of next year. So will BT's Movio service, which provided the transport for Virgin and it was hoped, other mobile TV services.

Tier one carriers are going to have to get used to such failures, as that is the price of experimenting with new services for which demand is unproven. Fixed-Mobile Convergence services have not fared any better in western Europe of late.

That hasn't stopped researchers from predicting a robust market for mobile TV services.

Informa Telecoms and Media predicts that there will be 124.8 million broadcast mobile TV users worldwide by 2010, with an inflection point expected in 2009 as network rollout and device availability allow for the market to reach some level of critical mass.

for the next few years, the most advanced networks will be S-DMB and T-DMB services, dominating broadcast TV handset sales worldwide from its strongholds of South Korea and Japan.

By 2010, there will be 18.11 million terrestrial DMB subscribers, compared with 15.02 million satellite DMB users worldwide.

"Despite its slow start, DVB-H will become the dominant format in 2008, reaching significant levels worldwide reaching 74.03 million users by 2010, equating to almost 60 percent of all broadcast mobile TV users", says David McQueen, Informa analyst.

It didn't help that the European Commission has backed a rival transmission standard for mobile broadcasting. The EU chose Digital Video Broadcasting — Handheld (DVB-H) as the standard it wants used. BT Movio was based on the rival Digital Audio Broadcasting — IP (DAB-IP) standard, which reused digital radio spectrum to deliver a handful of TV channels and a range of digital radio stations.

Service Not Entirely Restored

"Make it 10 (days without service), says TeleBlend customer Fred Potts. "Last Friday, Bill Fogg of Teleblend posted a reply after a comment I made on your blog. He sent an email follow up asking for a number where he could reach me. I sent my cell number and have sent follow up emails to him each day. The silence is deafening."

Free "In Community" SME Calling from Fonality Trixbox

Trixbox Pro by Fonality Inc. is free software for enterprises with up to 20 employees that runs on any computer and nearly any phone, including IP and analog models, and providing IP PBX functions.

An Enterprise Edition upgrade for $9.99 per employee per month will provide some business features such as conference bridging, and a Call Center Edition costs $19.95 per call center agent per month.

TrixBox launches with TrixNet, a free in-network calling service to let any TrixBox Pro user call any other TrixBox Pro user, using their regular phone numbers, Lymon said. TrixNet will be extended in the near future to TrixBox Community Edition, a popular open-source software based on Asterisk.

The offering might make most sense for the reseller and value added reseller community, since it assumes some technical skills to deploy.

Resistance is Futile: IP PBX Has Killed TDM

Forrester Research recently interviewed 516 landline voice decision-makers in North America and Europe and found that enterprises plan to increase budgets for IP telephony or IP PBX systems and services during 2007.

This is not surprising, nor shocking. It is getting hard to buy systems based on older platforms, just as it now is very hard to buy a new PC that doesn't have Vista loaded as the operating system.

New shipments of IPT outpaced those of traditional PBX systems three years ago, and the installed base of IPT lines is expected to outnumber traditional PBX lines within the next few years.

North American and European enterprises indicated that in five years most will have completed their migration to IPT. All of which continues to create a window of opportunity within which non-telco providers can sell hosted VoIP services into the consumer and smaller business markets without fear the telcos will massively convert to VoIP.

Someday, when they have lost enough share, telcos indeed will stop offering POTS and themselves become VoIP providers. But only after VoIP has completely reshaped customer expectations about what a voice service is, and how it should be packaged.

The SME customer segments remain the most promising opportunities for most competitive providers, though the cable companies have real advantages in the consumer markets.

TeleBlend Restores Service

Finally! TeleBlend has got service back up for customer Marc Kruskol, who I would say was one of the maddest TeleBlend or SunRocket customers I have heard from. Kruskil says his outage lasted from last Monday, August 6 until approximately 2:30pm PDT Aug. 14. The problem, I am pretty sure, has to do with termination partners in the Van Nuys area who either took some time to come to identify and strike business deals with TeleBlend, and then to get all the portability and software issues ironed out. Nice to hear that Kruskol now can use his VoIP service.

Yesterday, customer Fred O. Pitts reported that he still didn't have service. "I am now eight days and counting without incoming service." Pitts now says (Aug. 14) that his service still hasn't been restored. That's disappointing. Make it nine days.

Yoomba Hits 500,000 Users

Yoomba Ltd. says it now has 500,000 uses since officially launching about a month ago.

Yoomba’s peer-to-peer application sits on top of every email network and turns any email address into a phone or instant messenger. Once Yoomba is activated buttons appear inside a user’s chosen email application, providing one-click access to talk to friends, family or colleagues around the world and on any network for free.

It works, though users may notice some slowdown of their email client. That, at least, is what seems to happen when Yoomba runs over Microsoft Office.

Free Phone For Reseller Partners

All resellers who sign up for the Flat Planet Phone Company yearly $199 Reseller program will receive a free Cisco Linksys SPA942 phone and a $200 rebate on purchases of IP telephony equipment from VoIP Supply, says Moshe Maeir, Flat Planet Phone Company CEO.

FPPC offers resellers a brandable, SIP-based platform supporting hosted PBX service, voice mail and fax-to-email features, call recording, calling cards, disposable numbers, Iotum integration, local international phone numbers, reduced roaming expenses, virtual IVRs and click to call.

FPPC resellers are supported by an integrated rating and billing engine, customer self care portal capabilities and full customization of offered features.

Are Landlines Becoming a Giffen Good?

Widespread use of VoIP tends to cause voice prices to fall. And classical economic theory would suggest that consumption of wireline calling should increase, as a result. In some cases that seems to be what happens. People call globally more often when the prices are lower.

But it just is possible,under some specific circumstances,for price declines to cause reduced consumption.

A Giffen good, for example, is an “inferior” good for which a rise in its price makes people buy even more of the product as its price rises. Conversely, there is less demand as price falls. To be sure, such Giffen goods are exceedingly rare. But one is tempted, when looking a mobile versus fixed line calling, to ask whether there are not some similarities.

Mobile calling now leads wired connections by a three-to-one margin globally and more people are shifting to "wireless only" calling. And though it is a loose analogy, perhaps we might think of mobile calling as a "superior" product and wireline calling as an "inferior" good, not in terms of intrinsic worth but in terms of the way people consume each product.

Giffen goods are named after Sir Robert Giffen, who was attributed as the author of this idea by Alfred Marshall in his book Principles of Economics. The classic example of potato consumption during a famine now is viewed as unsupported.

But in July, Robert T. Jensen, an economist at Brown University, and Nolan H. Miller, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, published an article for the National Bureau of Economic Research on Giffen goods.

The two economists say they have located a real-world Giffen good, namely rice and wheat flour in the central Hunan and Gansu provinces of China.

As Giffen suggested more than 100 years ago, goods whose price and demand move in the same direction are most likely to be essential products such as food on which households spend a large part of their incomes (and that's why neither VoIP nor landline voice service can be called Giffen goods in a formal sense).

Wheat flour and rice fit the bill in central China. When the price of the good falls, households appear to shift buying to meat. So lower prices cause less consumption.

Jensen and Miller look at poor Chinese consumers and demonstrate that they consume more rice or noodles, their staples, as prices go up.

Still, neither VoIP nor landlines strictly meet the criteria for consideration as Giffen goods. But it is an interesting notion. Might lower landline calling prices caused by VoIP actually lead to lower usage, in the presence of mobile alternatives that might be likened to “superior” goods, as compared to landline which might be thought of as an “inferior” good?

If so, lower landline calling prices will simply hasten the transition to more preferred mobile calling. I wouldn't push the loose analogy too far. But there some parallels.

As the chart suggests, consumers can buy either commodity Y or commodity X (line MN,where M = total available income divided by the price of commodity Y, and N = total available income divided by the price of commodity X).

The line MN is the consumer's budget constraint.

If there is a drop in the price of commodity X, the reduced price will alter relative prices in favour of commodity X, known as the substitution effect. This is illustrated by a movement down the indifference curve from point A to point B.

At the same time, the price reduction causes the consumers' purchasing power to increase, the income effect (line MP where P = income divided by the new price of commodity X).

The substitution effect (point A to point B) raises the quantity demanded of commodity X from Xa to Xb while the income effect lowers the quantity demanded from Xb to Xc.

The net effect is a reduction in quantity demanded from Xa to Xc making commodity X a Giffen good by definition.

Verizon FiOS Blows Away Competition

A recent survey of ComputerWorld readers has Verizon's FiOS service topping the satisfaction rankings in virtually every measured category. Overall, 96 percent of FiOS customers rated the service "excellent" or "good." And though cable modem services scored better than Digital Subscriber Line overall, Comcast fared poorly as a provider. All that noted, and for all the grumbling one tends to see on blogs and discussion boards, about three quarters of the respondents think their services are "excellent" or "good." Upload speed remains the single biggest gripe.

GooglePack Adds StarOffice

GooglePack has added Sun's Web-based productivity suite StarOffice. I don't see any icon for Google Docs & Spreadsheets in the Pack any more, so apparently Google has decided that the more robust StarOffice functionality warrants the switch. I suppose I would have to agree about that. If you are a heavy Microsoft Office user, StarOffice arguably will operate more along the lines of what you are used to, feature-wise. It's the small things, in many cases. The big thing is the presentation tool in StarOffice that wasn't part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Microsoft Vs. Cisco

For an unfortunately old telecom sort of guy, it really is something to watch the coming battle Cisco and Microsoft will be waging over voice services. If you've been around long enough, it seems discomforting that the key battles are not to be waged between Nortel and Lucent, or Avaya and Nortel.

In fact, it also is discomfiting that the coming battle won't even really be about voice per se. Instead, everything now hinges on capabilities in the unified communications or collaboration areas. Communications requires dumb pipes of high quality, to be sure. Beyond that, most of the heavy lifting now can be done by the applications.

So in some genuine sense, the whole global telecom business is about dumb pipes. Not completely, but largely.

Still, voice and real time communications remain challenging disciplines, though that generally is under appreciated by most people.

Microsoft probably is going to discover that, as Cisco has.

T-Mobile Prepping FMC Service?

T-Mobile, which has launched a dual-mode (GSM plus Wi-Fi) Hotspot@Home service, looks like it is getting ready to integrate landline service as well. T-Mobile is working with Linksys on a router that integrates home phone lines into the service along with providing VoIP service over cell phones, according to documents with the Federal Communications Commission.

In June, T-Mobile launched its Hotspot@Home service, which allows T-Mobile cell phone subscribers to transfer calls seamlessly between the T-Mobile cellular network and a Wi-Fi hot spot in the home.

My issue with the implementation is that it only supports two phones: the Samsung t409 and the Nokia 6086. So far, no tier one provider has found its dual-mode service very attractive to users when device limitations are that stringent.

The new router, not yet available but already bearing the model appellation WRTU54G, also has two slots that support two GSM SIM cards, allowing users to add up to two additional mobiles.

If T-Mobile wants to unify the access to VoIP and other IP-based communication services, over Wi-Fi in the home, wired connection in the home, at a T-Mobile Hotspot or on the GSM network, that might be more interesting. But there still is the handset issue. Given a choice between the tri-mode feature (even with seamless VoIP across all devices)and relatively unrestricted handset choice, I think handset choice wins, just about every time.

Global Crossing Didn't Do It

TeleBlend's VoIP network had an outage in late July and there was some confusion about why. Perhaps it was as simple as a temporary financial issue between trading partners. Global Crossing and Level 3 Communications, as major suppliers to SunRocket, likely got stuck with significant bad debt when SunRocket went dark. So you might understand why the providers might be worried about further bad debt exposure related to an account that had just gone south.

In all likelihood there was simply a period where a single payment got a bit delayed and at least one of the underlying carriers moved to protect themselves. We understand TeleBlend had been making incremental payments to the underlying carriers, obviously to limit their risk.

That's not to say there couldn't have been issues related to the SunRocket and TeleBlend back office processes. Under the circumstances, a late payment makes the most sense.