XO Launches IP Flex

XO Communications has launched XO IP Flex, a new converged IP services bundle that upgrades and replaces XOptions Flex, XO’s VoIP services bundle. The new service positions XO as a better provider of voice and data for larger businesses, and also packages voice services as a broadband access feature.

There are a couple noteworthy elements here. The offering is Ethernet-based, and so moves beyond the bandwidth formats dictated by the T1 and SONET frameworks. An organization can buy bandwidth between 1.5 and 45 Mbps, eliminating the abrupt cost and bandwidth jump between a couple of T1s and a DS-3.

Also, the offering positions the new product as "Ethernet access" and voice as an included application. Some will argue this is merely a marketing position, but it is an important shift in positions.

XO IP Flex extends XO’s VoIP services to larger business customers by offering new higher-speed bandwidth options including 4.5 Mbps and 10 Mbps. XO IP Flex works with existing phone systems.

The service eliminates pricing based on the number of voice lines. Unlike other approaches to IP pricing that still are based on traditional TDM services pricing models, XO’s bandwidth-based pricing acknowledges that voice is simply another application on the IP port and offers rates based on the size of the port, not on the number of voice lines.

Standard IP Flex features include:

* Voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, call forward, three-way calling, and one toll free number
* Dedicated Internet Access with Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation
* Unlimited local calling
* Unlimited site-to-site calling for multi-location customers with IP Flex, IP Flex with VPN and XO SIP locations
* Long distance calling with choice of calling plans
* Online Feature Management through the XO Business Center
* Optional features, including Auto Attendant, Call Center, Account Codes and Voice Virtual Private Network.

The company also has launched XO SIP, which delivers converged voice and data services to businesses with IP-PBX systems over a single, high-speed IP connection. XO SIP is a fully integrated solution designed to support the needs of businesses with the most demanding voice and data applications at single locations or multiple locations nationwide.

Session Initiation Protocol uses a native IP-based facility to manage all traffic between a customer’s IP-PBX system, the XO IP network, and the Public Switched Telephone Network. The service provides greater efficiencies by eliminating the need for businesses to maintain multiple access facilities for voice and data services and eliminates the need for bandwidth-consuming protocol conversions, thereby, simplifying the overall deployment and management of customers’ enterprise IP telephony services.

XO SIP includes a broad range of bandwidth options to maintain optimal network performance. XO SIP features include:

* Dedicated Internet Access with Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation
* Unlimited local calling
* Unlimited site-to-site calling for multi-location customers with IP Flex, IP Flex with VPN and XO SIP locations
* Long distance calling with choice of calling plans
* Optional Voice Compression
* Online Feature Management through the XO Business Center

XO SIP is currently interoperable with Avaya IP Office, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco Call Manager Express and Digium Asterisk Appliance. XO SIP also utilizes the BroadSoft BroadWorks VoIP platform to provide customers additional advanced IP-PBX features, including auto attendant, call center and voice VPN.

Customers simply select an IP port speed from 1.5 to 45 Mbps, a calling plan and any additional features. Because voice is just another application on the IP port, customers pay nothing for incremental lines or voice channels provisioned within the port speed they have with their service. The bandwidth-based pricing is now being offered with XO IP Flex, XO IP Flex with VPN and XO SIP plans.

Voice Peering: New Directions?

We might disagree about why the change is occurring, but it does seem that discussions of "voice peering" are moving in a different direction. Early on, there might have been more emphasis on how electronic numbering or native IP interconnection could save providers money, disintermediate legacy carriers or disrupt the voice business. If recent discussions are any indicator, there now is much more emphasis on solving basic interconnection tasks in a world of IP traffic, as well as creating a platform for introducing new services.

That isn't to say all peering supporters dismiss advantages of the disintermediating sort. There is no question but that cable companies as an industry segment are anxious to avoid interconnection payments to telephone companies whenever possible, as GSM-based mobile carriers likewise are interested in avoiding transit costs where possible.

The point is that there is a new practicality about the issues. Arbinet CTO Steve Heap, for example, points out that "peering is interconnection between two or more service providers to preserve quality, lower costs and create new services." In fact, Heap points to new problems created by number porting as a mundane but important problem peering can address. "In the Belgian market, for example, 18 percent of mobile numbers are ported," Heap notes.

And since every operator has different termination rates, peering can help service providers determine what the settlement rate ought to be when a mobile call is terminated, where to send a call and make those sorts of decisions in real time. Peering can also help with the time-consuming but relatively mundane issues of negotiating termination agreements with hundreds of discrete carriers. "Not every carrier has a relationship with every mobile operator, so maybe you want to route to provider who does have a relationship," says Heap.

One measure of how the discussion is changed is that a major service provider such as Tata views peering as a simple matter of ensuring call quality under conditions of increased routing complexity. "It isn't just about free calling," says Christian Michaud, Tata SVP.

In fact, routing complexity now appears to be a problem in its own right. "There are more choices of endpoints in the IP world," says Georges Smine, Nomin um senior director. There also are codec transcoding issues that will grow as more voice traffic shifts to IP origination.

In a business increasingly using IP transmission, "what we actually deliver changes as well," says Sarina Tu, Telcordia senior director. "These days, you really don't know where to send a call, what the class and quality of service are supposed to be or what the business relationship is between the originating and terminating networks."

Then there is a growing class of "presence" information that has to be exchanged, not simply the bearer traffic and signaling.

Then there's the matter of supporting all sorts of new services and applications over discrete physical networks, says Shrihari Pandit, Stealth Communications CEO. In many cases there will be advantages to terminating traffic without touching the public switched telephone network, especially when some features simply cannot be passed between networks based on PSTN switches.

The general notion of application-aware networks also applies to voice communications. "Types of calls are more diverse" and peering fabrics can provide the intelligence to support that diversity, Smine argues.

"Who can access and control your information and preferences," Tu asks, especially when that information might be scattered among any number of discrete databases?

"Who would be the central repository for the various databases?" asks Heap. "What do you do about conflicting returns if multiple databases provide different results when a query is made?"

"Service providers want all routing information processed internally, not by a third party," says Heap. "The issue is how all that information gets there."

Nor "do we want to create a new monopoly," Michaud adds.

Technological Determinism, VoIP and Video

Time Warner Cable once pondered offering a network-based digital video recorder service called "Mystro." Time Warner decided against introducing the service after legal threats from the broadcast industry. Cablevision Systems Corp. also tried to introduce a similar service before running into a content industry buzz saw.

Comcast now is testing a less-ambitious service like the "Start Over" service Time Warner now offers, allowing users to start a program at the beginning in case they missed the start.

At a recent industry meeting, a question arose: Where is the logical place to put such technology? Should it be in a consumer, edge of the network device or "in the cloud"? From a pure technology perspective, one might reasonably argue such functionality should be "in the network."

Of course, that is a technology answer. The problem is that rights holders fear such a move would damage their control over content and ad revenue attached to that content. In principle, one could strip out the original advertising inserted into a "live" stream and replace it with other advertising sold by the network distributor, not the program originator.

In similar fashion, another question arose at a separate "voice peering" panel about why proponents were spending so much time focusing on voice peering rather than other sorts of application peering or bandwidth.

Legitimate questions both. There is a place where advanced technology intersects with copyright law, national or local taxation regimes, rights of way issues, consumer protection laws and conflicting bodies of law governing voice communications, radio, TV, newspapers and data communications.

Technology enables us to cross many of those old boundaries. What technology does not allow us to do is transcend the legal, regulatory and tax laws that come attached to services, applications and activities. And that is the rub.

There are many things we can do. There are many things we want to do. The problem is that some of these things can only be done in certain ways without running afoul of laws, regulations or business models built on the existence of those rules.

It gets us only so far to say the rules increasingly are illogical in a genuine sense. Some of the rules might change over time. Others might simply have to be endured. The point is that simple logic and technological capability sometimes do not trump legacy ways of doing things.

China, India Drive Mobile Growth

Merrill Lynch forecasts handset volume growth at a 21 percent cumulative average growth rate CAGR from now to 2010. They expect combined India and China will account for 26 percent of the overall handset market in 2007 and 28 percent in 2010, up from 16 percent in 2005, implying nearly 332 million handset units in 2010.

Mobile penetration in India is set to ramp and will reach 35 percent by 2010, up from just seven percent in 2005. This implies Indian mobile subscribers will reach 411 million by 2010, up from just 76 million as of 2005, a CAGR of 40 percent.

China's penetration rate should reach just over 50 percent in 2010, ors 682 million Chinese mobile subscribers in 2010.

China Mobile Says "No" to iPhone

China Mobile has decided it doesn't want to carry the iPhone, and has stopped negotiations with Apple, opening the door to talks with the second-largest mobile provider in China, China Unicom.

It is sais that China Mobile and Apple could not agree on revenue-sharing terms. An unnamed China Mobile source was said by Dow Jones Newswire to be unwilling to pay between 20 and 30 percent of future user fees from the iPhone to Apple for the right to carry the device.

Music Industry "Goes Open" to Make More Money

One of the odd justapositions out there right now is the recent move by music companies to drop encryption measures (digital rights management) online music sales through Amazon.com as a way of increasing sales. Given the general vested interest in protecting content from copying, this is a bit strange.

Why would music labels voluntarily drop DRM measures that make it harder for users to port their music around? In this case, a move that essentially is more open is a competitive measure. Apple, which uses a DRM format to restrict downloaded music to playback on its own devices, essentially has gotten too much market power in the music business, the studios think.

And in this case, one way to wrest back more control is to stimulate sales of unprotected music through rival retailers such as Amazon.com.

Amazon MP3, the DRM-free music store of Amazon.com, now sells DRM-free MP3s from the four major music labels - EMI, Universal, Warner Music, and Sony BMG - and 33,000 independent labels.

Apple iTunes has more than two-thirds market share of paid online music donwloads.

The top 100 songs at Amazon MP3 come at a price of $0.89 each and most other tracks are offered at a range of $0.89-$0.99, underpricing iTunes titles which are sold for 99 cents a song.

It's a bit unusual to find any industry's leaders pushing a trend towards openness, rather than upstarts. But that's what happens when an upstart becomes too successful in a new line of business. If "open" sells better than "closed," they'll try it, despite an obvious interest in copyright protection that might be furthered by DRM measures.

Of course, the problem with DRM is that it angers legitimate customers as much as it deters piracy. It is a blunt instrument.

MPLS over DSL from New Edge Networks

New Edge Networks will offer its managed network customers in April the ability to tag and prioritize data applications traffic over low-cost, high-speed digital subscriber lines commonly used for wide area networks. The move is a challenge to T1 services that sometimes are alternatives to business-class DSL services, and which can offer tagging and prioritization.

New Edge says it also will support tagging and traffic priorities end-to-end through private networks

Businesses in various industry segments can use up to five classes of service to tag and prioritize their applications so that critical services such as VoIP telephone calls or inventory and price lookups move across DSL-based networks ahead of email or other less important business functions.

Currently, traffic tagging and prioritization with class of service are available only on more costly high-capacity T1 lines with MPLS technology, short for Multi-Protocol Label Switching.

New Edge will honor DSL class-of-service tags end to end throughout its customers’ private wide area networks.

The move means enterprise branch offices and remote locations or smaller businesses that cannot justify a T1 line will be able to buy class of service features at a business DSL price.

A typical DSL connection used as part of a managed, private network costs about $150. Monthly costs for T1 lines range from about $500, depending on distance and geographic area.

Mobile Web: The Browser Matters

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times, says staff writer Miguel Helfta. So apparently the design of a mobile phone brower really does stimulate high levels of usage.

The data shows that although iPhone's used to access Google fell back into a more normal range after that, levels of access still were higher than from Symbian mobiles. Keep in mind that Symbian has something like 63 percent of the installed base while iPhone has perhaps two percent.

Yahoo also saysiPhones accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic, Helfta notes.

There might more upside for Web application developers. If they can develop for mobile-optimized browsers, rather than for the details of individual devices or operating systems, there arguably is an easier path to ubiquity.

Telcommuting Downside

Telecommuting may boost morale for telecommuters, but it can have the opposite effect on those left behind in the office, according to Professor Timothy Golden, a management professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

"Those who do not telecommute are more likely to be dissatisfied with their job and leave the company, says Golden. Golden's research suggests that their co-workers tend to find the workplace less enjoyable, have fewer emotional ties to co-workers and generally feel less obligated to the organization.

About 37 percent of U.S.-based and international companies now offer flexible work arrangements, with the number of those programs growing at a rate of 11 percent per year, according to the Society of Human Resource Management.

With a greater prevalence of telecommuters in a work unit, he said, non-telecommuters find it less personally fulfilling to do their work.

Greater face-to-face contact between co-workers when all employees are in the office and granting greater job autonomy can help, Golden argues.

He studied a sample of 240 professional employees from a medium-sized company.

Consumer Electronics Trumps Other Retail Sales

It doesn't appear to have been a good Christmas selling season, as this graphic by the Wall Street Journal illustrates.

But Best Buy says its December sales were up 1.5 percent over last year, compared to an increase of about seven percent in the 2006 over 2005 comparison. The company says the slower growth rate is due where the post-Thanksgiving week data was recorded. This year, that key week fell into the November numbers, instead of in the December reporting period.

Best Buy affirmed its 2008 guidance, suggested the company really did have stronger sales than it might appear. The contrast in sales might point to the increasing importance of consumer electronics as a component of discretionary spending.

That would accord with increasing broadband and mobile penetration, plus continuing interest in high-definition and flat screen TV displays, gaming, digital audio and even personal computers.

Over the past decade, for example, the percentage of disposable income now going to communications and electronic entertainment goods has been rising in virtually all North American, Far Eastern and European regions.

iGoogle for Mobiles Now Live

If you are the sort of user who uses iGoogle, and you put Real Simple Syndication feeds on the iGoogle page, this is helpful. Also, Google has authored a number of its other applications, including Docs and Spreadsheets, the RSS reader, Picassa, Gmail, Google News and even the basic search function in ways that are compatible with a mobile screen. Very nice.

Business Phone Systems: Still Lots of TDM

After dipping one percent in the previous quarter, enterprise telephony equipment manufacturers saw an 11 percent jump in worldwide sales in the third quarter of 2007 to reach $2.6 billion, according to Infonetics Research. But IP-based phone systems did not get all the growth. In fact, Infonetics researchers say the rate of growth in the legacy time division multiplex segment actually outpaced that of the IP PBX segment.


In fact, hybrid PBX systems account for 64 percent of all PBX and key system line shipments worldwide. Pure IP lines account for 18 percent of shipments while TDM lines represent 17 percent of total.

It looks like lots of buyers still are hedging their bets or have reasons to support TDM systems even as they migrate to IP.

Mobile VoIP Proliferates

One wonders how long mobile carriers will wait before launching their own lower-cost global calling plans. At some point they will. The only issue is how much market share they are willing to tolerate losing to VoIP providers before they counterattack. Raketu is the latest contestant in the business calling space, by virtue of its compatibility with RIM BlackBerry devices.

What is emerging now is the IP equivalent of "over the top long distance" calling plans that used to be prevalent in the U.S. market. Under such plans, created in large part for reasons of regulatory compliance, users selected one provider for local calling and then another provider for long distance. At one point, one could not select one's local voice carrier for that purpose.

So you see the business effect: a regulatory framework creates an entire "long distance calling" business. It lasts for a while, as competition knocks prices way down. Then, at some point, regulators decide markets are competitive enough to allow the local phone companies back into long distance.

And then the independent long distance industry collapses.

VoIP over mobile, indeed VoIP itself, is headed for such a day of reckoning, at least for that portion of its use as a substitute for landline or wireless calling. Nobody knows when the day will come. It might come carrier by carrier. But at some point, mobile and wired service providers are going to reach a point where it makes sense to offer much-lower global calling from their existing services and devices.

That isn't to say independents will not gain share and build businesses in the short term. Nor is it to say VoIP features embedded into other experiences are likewise susceptible to telco repositioning and pricing. It is to say that past telco responses to regulatory and technologiccal change offer some obvious clues about what they will do in the future.

As scale players, they tend to ignore new threats and markets until some critical mass or clear strategic interest emerges. Then they move, and fairly quickly. They'll do so again.

Raketu Launches VoIP over BlackBerry

Raketu has launched a new peer-to-peer VoIP application designed to run on Research in Motion Blackberries. The app furthermore is intended to be used by enterprise, small and mid-sized business users.

Raketu does not require a client download and is accessed from the BlackBerry's Web browser at www.BlackBerry.raketu.com.

The application obviously will make most sense for business users who need to send and receive text messages from international locations, as well as users who need voice communications in a global context.

FiOS Best, Says Consumer Reports

The February issue of Consumer Reports features a survey of broadband access providers, and names the Verizon FiOS service, best for reliability and performance for its Internet, television, and telephone services.

Better cable companies include Cox, Bright House and Wow, the survey indicates.

For Internet service offered through a cable company, Wow, Cincinnati Bell and Bright House also did well in the survey. Verizon's DSL Internet service was rated "average" for value, reliability and support, but scores for performance were lagging, according to Consumer Reports.