Microsoft OCS Starts to Disrupt

Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 is going to disrupt market share in today's business phone system market. It also is going to take share and rearrange markets in other areas you might not expect, such as the test and measurement space. Huh? Isn't voice quality testing, on both qualitative (subjective) and quantitative (mean opinion scores, for example) dimensions, something that specialized test and measurement firms do? Well, yes.

But Microsoft also is bringing to market its own "quality of experience" server that automatically tracks end user voice quality no matter where a call is placed--from inside the enteprise or at a hotel. No network test probes are required.

That's just one more example of how incumbents are finding their core businesses under threat of rearrangement from upstarts with deep pockets, strategic motivation, different visions and deep expertise in software and networking.

Microsoft OCS Managed Service for SMEs?

Microsoft's Office Communications Server hasn't begun shipping in general release. But that hasn't stopped OCS from garnering significant mind share among enterprise information technology managers. Some recent surveys by the Gartner Group and Wainhouse Research show OCS in the top spot among unified communications providers, according to Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft corporate VP.

Pall positions OCS as an alternative to private branch exchanges (business phone systems) in either the time division multiplex or Internet Protocol or hybrid flavors. But Pall also notes that OCS obviates the need for a PBX of any sort, though it interoperates with IP and TDM systems. That's one reason Microsoft is introducing a new line of desktop phones that work with OCS.

Less attention has been paid to the issue of how small and mid-sized enterprises will some day be able to use OCS. Warren Barkley, a principal group program manager at Microsoft, says a hosted service ulitmately will be made available to SMEs.

Barkley simply noted that small organizations generally lack the IT resources to set up and run an OCS style unified communications system. It wouldn't be the first hosted service Microsoft offers.

Microsoft already offers a hosted collaboration platform, LiveMeeting, and is moving to offer applications such as customer relationship management as services.

Linked In is Like Email; Facebook is Like IM

I've never been a fan of LinkedIn (I'm not a "head hunter," and it undoubtedly is a useful tool for people who do that for a living). It might be a nice utility for updating contact information for a small subset of the people you actually know and communicate with. Beyond that I've never had occasion to use it.

Facebook seems like a better version of LinkedIn, though. I was able to get my son's new address when he went back to NYU without using LinkedIn. To be sure, the information wasn't pushed to me. I had to go view his Facebook page. But I got what I needed without emailing or calling.

So why is LinkedIn like email? It's a tool "older" people use for work. Why is Facebook like IM? It's a tool "younger" people (and increasing numbers of "not so young") use to keep up with other people they actually care about. In some important ways, IM also is a "richer" experience, as Facebook is.

Skype: The Ultimate Windows Externality

"On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption triggered by a massive restart of our users’ Windows-based computers across the globe within a very short time frame as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update," Skype says.

Not everybody buys that explanation. But, if true, it has to rank as the most massive, unexpected software interaction Windows ever has inadvertently caused.

The high number of restarts apparently caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction, Skype says. Some have argued that the outage proves peer-to-peer networks are inherently unstable.

It's hard to test that assertion since Skype uses a modified P2P architecture with a sign-in process that is more "client-server" and centralized than most other P2P networks.

Some think there was some sort of hacker attack, but Skype denies it. "We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed."

If the Microsoft routine updates were, in fact, contributory or causal, it would rank as the most significant network-wide interaction anybody ever has seen. Just another example of the way applications are reshaping the way global networks perform.

As some of you know I have recently been dealing with interactions caused by a Vista upgrade, mostly of the "we don't talk to Vista" sort. I will say one thing, however. Vista seems to be much more robust than XP was about handling "hibernation" operations. XP used to become unstable after several hiberation operations, at least on my machines. I have not found that to be the case with Vista.

Is Wireless Cable's Achilles Heel?

In the early 1990s, Comcast and other cable partners invested in an earlier version of "SpectrumCo," a business that would eventually become Sprint PCS, only to pull out later in the decade when the going got tough. Cablevision, for its part, also flirted with creating its own PCS network, but ultimately decided against it.

In 2005, Comcast, Time Warner Cable (TWC), Cox (COX), and Advance/Newhouse Communications banded together with Sprint Nextel to creat the "Pivot" service.

Sprint CEO Gary Forsee says that it took longer than expected to get Pivot off the ground and subscriber numbers haven't been released. That logically suggests uptake has been slow.

Recently, Sprint abruptly withdrew from SpectrumCo, the entity that in late 2006 snapped up $2.37 billion worth of licenses to wireless airwaves. The acquisition had spurred speculation that together, Sprint and cable companies were planning their own wireless network.

All of which might suggest wireless continues to be the platform telecom competitors can use to parry cable's wireline thrusts. It is, after all, a simple line extension to add voice and broadband access to a cable network. It is a discontinuous jump to offer wireless services over a completely distinct network. And cable execs dislike discontinuities as much as any other exec.

And the evidence is growing that mobile is way people "do voice."

BitTorrent Throttled by Comcast

Internet Service Providers don't like BitTorrent because it basically destroys their business model (flat rate access) and stresses the very part of their network most vulnerable to high usage (the upstream). Many ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic. Cable operators that now seem to include Comcast go a bit further and disupt the "seeding" process that allows BitTorrent peers to act as better upload nodes. In Canada, Cogeco and Rogers Cablesystems also "step on" BitTorrent traffic.

If P2P traffic keeps growing the way Cisco predicts, and if no changes are made in the dominant retail pricing model, throttling of P2P applications will happen on a wider scale. P2P attacks network capacity at its weakest link.

Cisco Predicts Exabyte Networks

Cisco's recent forecast of global IP bandwidth consumption suggests a 37 percent cumulative average growth rate between 2006 and 2011, or about five times the 2006 level. That's aggressive, but you might expect that. You might even have expected the prediction that consumer usage will outstrip business usage, though business dominates at the moment. You wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that video will drive overall global usage.

You wouldn't necessarily be surprised to learn that Cisco forecasts at least 60 percent of all traffic will be commercial video delivered in the form of walled garden services. And a significant percentage of the remaining 40 percent of IP bandwidth will be consumed by IP-based video applications.

The next network, in other words, will be a video network that also carries voice and non-real-time data.

That would be a stunning change from the originally envisioned view of the Internet. But I think we have to recognize at this point that virtually none of the key developments in communications technology have developed as industry insiders, public policy proponents, technologists or entrepreneurs had supposed.

To be sure, all of the diligent work on Session Initiation Protocol will have a significant payoff. But that didn't stop Skype by rocketing past SIP using a proprietary approach.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to lead to an explosion of innovation by dismantling restrictions on "who" could be a provider of Class 5 switch services. Instead, innovation came from the Web. Perhaps despite the Telecom Act, all sorts of innovation has happened.

VoIP was supposed to transform the nature of communications. Instead, mobility, instant messaging and social networks are doing so. One might arguably look to all manner of text communications as the disruptive communications development of the past several decades, not voice.

And then there's electronic numbering and voice peering. Perhaps these approaches still will have some dramatic impact on global voice communications prices and ability to circumvent the "public network." But it's starting to look as though ENUM might be a next generation to provide the signaling system 7 function. That's not to say it is unimportant: only to say it was not what many had intended or expected.

So far, it would seem that the most disruptive impact of the whole basket of new technologies has been to disrupt our ability to predict the future. We've been wrong more than right, as we always are. IP networks are not now, and never will be, as closed as the old public network was. Neither are IP networks going to be "open," any-to-any networks in the old manner, with no intelligence or policies operating in the core of the network.

Lots of things can, and should, be done "at the edge." But increasingly, lots of things cannot. The transition of the global IP network to video also means a shift to real time services (and we aren't even talking about the same process at work for voice and visual collaboration). That spells the end of the completely "dumb network."

DHT Behind Skype Crash?

Not that anybody really claims to know, but there's some thinking that the Skype outage was caused by some failure of the Distributed Hash Tables that Skype Supernodes apparently maintain. Some say "this is normally very slow and done over UDP," so restoration, even once the problem is identified, will take some time. So even as the ability to send instant messages and set up voice sessions is restored, other niceties, such as correct "presence" information, might take a little longer. The immediate problem, some say, is that if a Skype client cannot find a Supernode (and I am not a techie, but understand a DHT corruption would have something very serious to do with that sort of failure mode, then even if a client is authenticated by a central server, the user would not be able to get onto the Skype network.

All I know is that this failure mode would explain why I can communicate using text, and send audio, but my presence shows as "offline," when I am "online." I will test a live conversation tomorrow morning and see what happens.

This is a crisis management professional's dream: when your client is getting lots of bad press, some other bigger event occurs to overshadow it. So Skype now is sucking all the oxygen out of the "I'm mad my VoIP doesn't work" room.

Skype Sorta, Kinda Up

Though my status shows "offline" to Rich Tehrani, my Skype client seems to be up, though sending incorrect status information. Not many contacts seem to be visible at the moment.

Skype Outage Not Over

Skype initially said its outage is over, but that clearly is not the case everywhere, and we are nearing 24 hours since the log-in problem began. Now Skype warns that the outage is likely to continue through Friday. My U.S. log-in still hangs.

The service had been sporadic but gradually improving during the business day in Asia on Friday, some report.

"There are about 2.5 million people logged in right now, where normally there would be over 8 million, and it's been going on and off every 10 minutes," says Mark Main, senior analyst at Ovum in London.

You may draw your own conclusions about which other application or service providers might benefit, but urges to gloat should generally be suppressed. Nobody whose service uses IP and the public networks is safe from outages or service disruptions.

That's why businesses and networks have redundancy. People who scream and yell about losing their service have only themselves to blame if they didn't build some level of diversity and redundancy even into their personal communications. Use Skype, other IM applications, mobiles, POTS-replacement VoIP, and POTS, email and anything else you can get your hands on. Some of us use multiple mobiles from different providers and multiple broadband providers. But never hang everything on any one service or provider, especially if your business depends on it. Personally, I wouldn't even hang my personal communications on a "single provider" strategy.

Dark Skype

Skype Ltd. early today blamed an unspecified "software problem" for an outage that might make the service unavailable for as long as 24 hours. At 9 a.m. EDT Skype said the outage might last 12 to 24 hours.

Most people are finding it impossible to dial out or open an instant message session with any of their contacts. A "Connecting" message just hangs.

Skype rarely goes offline. The last reported outage resulted in the service going dark for several hours in October 2005.

Fred Pitts Back in Service with TeleBlend

It took 10 days, but TeleBlend customer Fred Pitts FINALLY is back in service.
"My first try to call home this morning continued with the "fast busy" signal; by midmorning, however, it was working," Pitts says. "So, while disappointed to have been without incoming service for such a length of time, I am thankful today that I am back up. I hope everyone else will be back in service soon as well."

A gracious comment, I'd say. At least some disgruntled SunRocket customers who picked TeleBlend as a replacement say they have churned to other providers such as Packet8 and Vonage.

A harrowing experience, to be sure. Perhaps it is only fair to note, though, that of the 60,000 transitioned customers, nearly all made the flash cut without much apparent disruption. Call it 99 percent. But one percent of 60,000 is still 600 customers, and it will be scant comfort to know that (hypothetically) 54,000 customers had no real issues.

That's the devil with mass market services, though, isn't it? Getting 99 percent of things right still generates thousands of trouble tickets (I'm not suggesting TeleBlend had issues with as many as one percent of its accounts, by the way. Just making the point that a very small failure rate in a mass market application or service can result in huge trouble ticket queues.)

Skype apparently still is having a major outage itself today, and as older posts today note, at&t and Cisco have had issues this month as well. S*** happens even to companies as large and sophisticated as Cisco and at&t.

And Cisco Goes Down, Also...

Cisco's main www.cisco.com page was offline at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Aug. 8 and stayed offline for more than two and a half hours. It returned at about 1:45 p.m. The outage was an unintended byproduct of routine maintenance.

at&t EDGE Network Outage

See what we mean? AT&T Inc. acknowledged a brief outage of its EDGE network Tuesday, Aug. 14, which was blamed on routine router maintenance. The EDGE network was also down on July 2 for about six hours.

EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) is the wide area wireless network that services iPhones and many other devices, providing data service but also carrying voice traffic over the GSM protocol.

Voice Quality is Getting Worse: What Would You Expect?

Those of use who grew up with one phone company got spoiled by the reliability and quality of its communications network (despite "customer service" so bad it became an oxymoron)," says technology journalist Mark Stephens, whose pen name is Robert X. Cringely. "Those of us trying to save a few bucks by piggy-backing voice services on the Internet are starting to get what we've paid for."

Skype itself now is experiencing an outage that might take 12 to 24 hours to fix (Aug. 16).

There's a larger trend at work here, and it happens in virtually all formerly highly-regulated businesses when deregulation and new technology hit. Remember when airlines were highly regulated, and could not compete on the basis of price? How did they compete? Amenities and other non-price differentiators. Of course, prices were high and not that many people flew.

Deregulation hits and all of a sudden price becomes a key competitive weapon. Of course, when people start paying lots less, something has to give. Like amenities. But more people fly now.

So here's the problem communications service provider executives face: they can't afford to run "gold plated networks" for the same reason airlines cannot. Obsessive concern about voice quality and service availability are one thing in a highly regulated environment. Such concern is quite something else in a highly competitive marketplace where customers in fact choose to pay money for service that is quite a bit less intensive than it once was.

In a nutshell, the business problem is that operators cannot afford to maintain the same obsessive levels of quality when customers demonstrably don't care. Mobile communications is the best example. Everybody uses mobile service. And everybody knows it simply is not as reliable as wired phone service. Nor is the audio quality as good. But it's a wild success, anyway.

If people will not pay you to maintain a higher quality of service, can you afford to do it? That's the problem the global communications business faces. People are voting with their pocketbooks: buying services with lesser quality on some metrics because the overal utility of mobility is so high.

In other cases, such as over the top VoIP, they are voting with their wallets to buy cheaper services with less reliable service.

Get used to it. In virtually every deregulated, formerly monopolistic industry, overall quality will drop. Of course, there's another trend as well. New, higher cost alternatives will develop. Because some people need high quality enough to pay for it.

IP communications are very valuable. They are very useful. But they are not as robust as the old public switched network, if only because of things like latency. The services can be made more rugged, of course. It just costs money.