Packet8 Launches IP Key System Service

8x8 has introduced new Packet8 hosted Internet Protocol telephony services designed to replace traditional premise-based telephone "key systems" typically used by companies whose size or structure dictates the sharing of multiple, common phone lines among employees, regardless of where the employees are located.

Note the key phrase "shared line appearance." Since one of the issues hosted IP telephony providers have faced is a bit of confusion about why to adopt, the new Packet 8 service goes about as far as one can to position a feature other than "saving money" as the reason for a particular buyer segment to dive in.

Driven by the new Packet8 675xi series of IP desktop phones and the addition of shared line appearance services to the Packet8 Virtual Office platform, the new hosted key system solution provides businesses an opportunity to migrate to VoIP without altering the features, functionality and user behavior they have traditionally relied upon.Packet8 Virtual Office hosted iPBX solution," said 8x8 Vice President of Sales & Marketing Huw Rees.

The system is said to be ideal for offices where multiple users require the ability to view and answer more than one shared phone line at their desk or anywhere in the business

The SIP busy line appearance function apparently is quite difficult to do, but is essential for customers that require the ability for somebody else to pick up an inbound call without parking, says Rees. "It seems like a small function but it is actually quite complicated to do."

Verizon Launches Wireless, Broadband Wholesale

The Verizon Wholesale Mobility Solutions suite of services is now part of the portfolio of products offered by Verizon Partner Solutions, a leading wholesale provider of networks and network services to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and other telecommunications providers based in the United States.

The move is important because mobility solutions are a more-important part of consumer and business communications spending. And if that is so, competitors will need to bundle wireless solutions.

The introduction of Verizon Wholesale Mobility Solutions means wholesale clients have the opportunity to bundle their full-service Verizon wholesale wireline services with wireless voice, text messaging and mobile broadband services to offer their retail end-users a single source for both fixed and mobile voice and broadband services.

Lightyear Network Solutions LLC is the first VPS client.

The Verizon Wholesale Mobility Solutions suite is comprised of two wireless service offerings: Verizon Wholesale Mobile Voice and Verizon Wholesale Mobile Broadband.

Verizon Wholesale Mobile Voice offers wireless calling plans with a choice of designated minutes of use allowances per month. Each plan includes Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Three-Way Calling, No Answer/Busy Transfer, Caller ID and Basic Voice Mail at no additional monthly fee. Premium features, like Enhanced Voice Mail, monthly mobile-to-mobile minutes and directory assistance, are each available at an additional monthly charge.

In addition to voice plans, wholesale clients can offer text-messaging plans with a choice of designated message allowances per month to end-users that have also purchased wireless voice service. Optional international messaging and premium messaging packages are each available at an additional monthly charge.

Verizon Wholesale Mobile Broadband offers high-speed wireless Internet access via laptop computers with a choice of designated packet data transport MB allowances per month. This product can be sold as either a stand-alone service or as an addition to a voice calling plan. In addition to wireless network services, Verizon Wholesale Mobility Solutions provides wholesale clients with tools that enable them to become one-stop wireline and wireless services providers.

Jajah Adds Hosted PBX Functionality

Jajah has expanded its SMB Solution Suite to incorporate a managed service IP telephony solution, including a fully functional 'soft' PBX. The suite of services gives every small and medium business the ability to IP-enable their existing telephony systems and make VoIP calls to over 200 countries without any additional investment.

The Jajah SMB Solution Suite allows all devices: make or receive calls via mobile, landline and even softphone (PC-based telephone), with specific plug-ins for Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones available. Pre-paid and analog-only phones will also be supported.

Also included:are a suite of productivity tools providing the ability to embed telephony within Google Enterprise Apps and Microsoft Office. Features also include centralized address book, database and directory lookup services.

Presence features allow users to choose which phone to use to answer a call, whether on a mobile, landline or softphone, or even to divert the call to a voice mail, which will be converted to text and delivered as an email into the employee's inbox.

Employees can specify their location and availability, while the network will also make intelligent routing decisions based on last-call and office hours.

The system fully supports number portability. The Jajah SMB Suite also offers sophisticated dial-plans, call monitoring and limit-setting amongst other budget management tools.

The service also supports visual Voicemail (where voicemail is converted to text), universal messaging, SMS, conference calls, scheduled calls, call logging, and address book synchronization.

The SMB Solution Suite will be available directly at www.jajahSMB.com, with a global indirect channel partner to be announced in the third quarter of 2008.

Not Good Enough, Netherlands Regulators Say

The largest Dutch cable operator Ziggo has said it now reaches one million digital homes and is claiming to be the number one digital provider in the country. The figures means around 30% of all 3.3 million homes served is now digital.

Not good enough, Netherlands regulators believe. Coming: new rules giving alternate video providers access rights to cable plant. One wonders: will anybody want to do so?

Consumer Satellite Broadband to Overtake Commercial Revenue

Northern Sky Research Now Projects that HughesNet and WildBlue each will have about 50 percent share of the consumer satellite broadband market by the end of 2008.

In fact, aggregate industry revenue from consumer broadband will surpass commercial revenues by about 2013.

YouTube: Complete Dominance of UGC

TubeMogul allows content creators to post video clips to multiple sites at once and track aggregate views for the clip across sites.

So in a recent survey of over 200,000 clips and traffic over a 90 day period, YouTube blew every body else away.

The average clip got more views on YouTube in three months (3,092) than on the next eight video sites combined (2,092).

In principle such dominance should translate into meaningful positioning as an ad medium at some point, with one important caveat. Most user generated content is hard, if not impossible, to monetize in that way. Google executives themselves seem to think something on the order of four percent of YouTube's inventory is the primary inventory against which to sell advertising.

Good content is hard to create on a sustained basis.

Wireless Milestone in 2009

Some mile markers are more important than others. One big change in 2009 is that, for the first time, U.S. customers will spend more money on wireless services than on wired services, according to forecasts from the Telecommunications Industry Association.

What's in an 8 Gbyte iPhone?

Not many iPhone owners will dissect it with the specific intent of determining all the components and estimating the manufacturing cost. But that's what iSuppli Corp. does, and did.

iSuppli estimates the 8 Gbyte version's component and manufacturing costs are $174.33, exclusive of other costs such as software development, shipping and distribution, packaging and miscellaneous accessories included with each phone.

At $174.33, the cost of the new iPhone is markedly less than the $227 that iSuppli estimated for the first-generation, 8Gbyte 2G iPhone in June 2007.

“iSuppli believes Apple aimed for a more cost-effective design for the 3G iPhone compared to the 2G, in order to lower the retail price—which will allow the company to seed adoption and to capture maximum market share now—while the company still has buzz and a perceived differentiation relative to its competitors," says Andrew Rassweiler, principal analyst at iSuppli.

Beyond the $174.33 bill of materials and manufacturing cost of the iPhone 3G, Apple is spending an estimated $50 on intellectual property royalties for each unit shipped. With the 8Gbyte version retail-priced at $199, and the estimated $300 subsidy paid by AT&T to Apple for each unit, Apple is selling the product at a price of $499, and spending $224.33 to produce each one. This gives Apple a BOM, manufacturing and royalty margin of 55 percent for each 8Gbyte iPhone 3G unit sold.

Netherlands to Mandate Cable Network Access

At some point, as cable operators become more substantial providers of voice and data services, they will find they start to come under the regulatory frameworks long established for other telecom providers. Cable operators in The Netherlands appear to be at the front of that trend.

The Netherlands regulatory authority OPTA is proposing mandatory access rules for cable operators very similar to rules governing wholesale access that apply to KPN, for example, but in the video services area.

OPTA says the emergence of terrestrial digital TV, satellite and IPTV platforms have failed to bring about a greater choice for buyers of multichannel video. OPTA says the option of imposing a freeze on prices is not a sustainable solution that would lead to greater competition.

So now it wants to create a wholesale access regime for video services. The actual text is not yet available, so it is difficult to assess the extent of the rules. It does seem reasonable that what OPTA is after is something more than the ability to resell the existing cable services. More likely, the rules will allow competing video packagers access through the local cable network for alternate providers offering differentiated fare.

Why Open is Good for Mobile Service Providers

Recent efforts by Apple and Google to reshape the wireless industry ultimately will help mobile operators and handset vendors, In-Stat argues. The reason is simple: in a business environment where partners and third-party developers now are essential for rapid development of new applications, the more-open and standardized frameworks will allow for faster rates of innovation, even if carriers find the change a bit unsettling.

The current telco-centered approach to developing Internet mobile applications has created an ecosystem for application developers that is complex, fragmented, difficult to enter, and offers a high risk of failure, the high-tech market research firm says.

Look for early examples in the location-aware advertising area, especially as revenue sharing models come into play.

Jajah, eMobile Launch IP Mobile Voice Service

Jajah and Japan-based eMobile have launched an IP-only mobile device, the EM-ONE, allowing users to make and receive voice-over-mobile-broadband calls without a traditional mobile phone connection.

The Jajah Mobile software uses the data channel, a HSDPA connection, to deliver voice services. In 2007 Jajah and eMobile released an outbound-only IP-mobile service, which attracted thousands of Japanses users. Now eMobile customers can not only use their device to make calls to more than 200 global destinations, but for the first time also to receive calls.

For about $5 a month, eMobile customers can purchase a Direct Inward Dialing number, for their Sharp EM·ONE Ultra Mobile Device running Windows Mobile 6, which turns their device into a fully functioning mobile phone, without a cellular connection, beginning August 1, 2008.

Analysts at Ovum predict that, by 2010, 77 percent of the voice connections in the Asia-Pacific region will be mobile and that the region will host over two billion fixed and mobile voice connections, 42 percent of the global total. Ovum’s annual voice service forecasts mobility to be the key growth technology in the voice market for the foreseeable future.

In addition to low cost long-distance and international calls, calls between eMobile customers are free and transmited over a pure SIP connection.

Digital Living Room Market Still a Bit of a Niche

While data-centric home networking is mainstream, the market for Internet-connected TV devices is still nascent. Early adopters of networked digital home services today are found, as you might expect, in higher-income homes.

The target connected digital living room consumer household has household income between $100,000 and $150,000, says MultiMedia Intelligence. These households typically have children and are located in a metropolitan area on the East or West Coast.

So Much for UGC Advertising

Would-be film makers hoping to make a little money creating content and posting that content on video sites will do exactly that" generate a little money.

Though user-generated video will continue to account for close to half of total online video streams between 2008 and 2013, UGC content will produce no more than four percent of ad-related online video revenue at any time during this period, according to The Diffusion Group.

In fact, UGV mostly will be an indirect way of drawing more viewers to professional online video sites capable of generating sustainable ad-related revenue, TDG says.

According to Mugs Buckley, UGV currently accounts for 42 percent of online video streams, yet generates less than four percent of video ad-related revenue. Conversely, professional online video (including both short-clip and long-form content) accounts for 58 percent of streams and 96 percent of ad-related revenue, a reality unlikely to change over the next five years.

So much for the unrealistic hope that amateurs are going to reshape the content business.

Why I Won't Be Defecting from the Windows Ecosystem

Windows Vista operating system has been a challenge for many of us. It is not a secret that lots of us prefer using XP, and will continue to do so for a while. That doesn't mean we aren't planning to switch.

To be sure, some Microsoft users will find they can switch to another operating system without losing much. But many of us will not find that appealing.

As somebody who gets asked to beta test new applications and services, I just find that running XP or Vista is a business requirement. If beta versions of new applications routinely are made available on some other operating system, that is a different story. If that does not happen, as the saying goes, "resistance is futile." One sticks with the operating system the rest of the ecosystem uses, and so far, in my case that means a Microsoft platform.

Many of the problems some of us encountered early on were incompatibilities with other devices and applications that worked fine using XP, and stopped working when Vista first launched. That doesn't mean we think those problems will not be fixed. They are being fixed. And the time will come when any application or device that worked with XP will work with Vista. Problem fixed. But it will take some time before that happens. How much time might be an issuse for some applications. But Microsoft's ecosystem will get all that fixed.

So everybody who remains on XP, sooner or later, will migrate to Vista. XP support will be discontinued, Vista support will be ubiquitous. It's a little like the reason end users are migrating to IP-based phone systems. All considerations of new features and lower costs aside, support for legacy TDM systems will some day end. So, going forward, everybody will move to IP-based systems.

Refreshingly, Microsoft owns up to the early issues. "We had an ambitious plan," says Brad Brooks, corporate vice president, Windows Consumer Product Marketing. "We made some significant investments around security in this product."

"And you know what, those investments, they broke some things," he says. "They broke a lot of things. We know that. "

Speaking to application partners, Brooks was honest and direct. "We know it caused you a lot of pain in front of your customers, in front of our customers."

"And it got a lot of customers thinking, and even yourselves and our partners thinking, “Hey, is Windows Vista a generation that I want to make an investment in?” he adds. So forget about the flash. Vista was designed around Internet security, and Brooks says it succeeded in that effort.

"There's been 20 percent fewer security problems on Windows Vista than XP in 2007," he says. "Windows Vista is the safest OS in terms of security vulnerabilities in its first year of operation, safer than any other commercial or Open Source OS in its launch."

"When you run Windows Vista you're 60 percent less likely to get malware on your machine than if you use Windows XP SP 2," he says.

"It is only getting better as we move forward, because Windows Vista, it's an investment in the long term," he says.

"The same architectural changes that we put in that caused the heartaches moving to Windows Vista are things that we are going to carry forward into Windows 7," he says. "And we are going to target roughly the same hardware specifications that we did when Windows Vista launched."

That means developers can invest in Windows Vista applications knowing they will run the same way in Windows 7.

That was the right thing to say, and I expect it is what Microsoft will do. Looking back on the specific incompatibility issues I encountered with Vista, it was those incompatibilities--now being fixed--that were the issue, not the particularities of Vista.

So despite the fact that I have chosen to run XP on my latest machines, not Vista, that does not mean I will not upgrade to Vista, or Windows 7. I might hope not to be in the first wave of adopters of Windows 7, but that's just a practice many of us have adopted over the years when a new OS is rolled out.

Microsoft does not have to worry about me defecting from the ecosystem. It does have to worry about its ecosystem defecting, though. So far, I detect no movement of that sort. For that reason, I am sure I'll be moving to Vista. The ecosystem is hard to ignore.

3G Smart Phone Battery Life: iPhone Leads

The battery life on Apple's new 3G iPhone isn't great, but it beats that of other 3G smartphones we've seen, say testers at PC World's Test Center. In the study's standard talk-time battery life test, an iPhone, on average, ran 5 hours and 38 minutes, a performance PC World deems "fair."

The original iPhone, which ran on AT&T's slower EDGE networ, lasted 10 hours of our test. But the 3G iPhone beat out the rest of the current 3G smartphone pack, most of which fell shy of the five-hour mark that's the cutoff between a word score of fair and poor in PC World's performance ratings.

The HTC Touch Dual had an average talk time of 5 hours, 18 minutes. The AT&T Tilt lasted 4 hours, 47 minutes, trailed by the Pantech Duo at 4:46; the Motorola Q9 Global at 4:43; and the Palm Treo 750 at an abysmal 3:53.

The iPhone 3G also beat out competitors on Sprint and Verizon's EVDO mobile broadband networks, including the Palm Centro (4:19) and the Samsung Instinct (5:33), PC World says.