Not Such Great News

Though it isn't yet clear how serious Verizon's patent infringement case against Vonage will turn out to be, it is hard to see how it is positive, overall, for any service provider targeting the VoIP replacement market as an "over the top" basis. We would assume that cable operators have not chosen implementations Verizon thinks infringing. At the very least, the royalty payments now impose a revenue drag of about 5.5 percent of revenues, if the judgment stands. Vonage still has the single largest number of VoIP subscribers, according to TeleGeography, but what that asset will be worth is just slightly more open to question.

Two Ways to Develop Apps...

...and neither is completely right. Mobile operators, no less than their wireline brethren, have to figure out now just what applications are hot, and how to build business models around them, but how to balance the walled garden with the over the top open approach to apps.

It's an old argument spun in new ways. Service providers traditionally have created the apps on behalf of end users, with modest success in some cases. The Internet, of course, changes everything. Now end users and third parties can develop as they like, without carrier permission. Neither the walled garden or the completely open approaches will completely exclude the other sort of approach, though.

Gatekeepers will still have a role in guaranteeing better user experience for some third party apps, as well as developing a few of their own apps. Most apps, though, are simply going to be delivered over the top. The real pinch points are going to come where the app involves real time services with high bandwidth requirements. In those cases, carriers often will emerge as providers of latency control and app context features.

As analysts at The Yankee Group see matters, Internet types will prefer flat rate pricing while service providers lean towards usage-based models. There is room for both, plus ad support. Hybrid models are the future.

Good for Users, Not for Service Providers...

Businesses can use fixed mobile convergence and VoIP to slash more than 30 per cent from their communications spend, according to researchers at Analysys. How? The same way prices have dropped in other areas of communications: bypass of the public networks.

"Companies are spending over 80 per cent of their call bill on mobile services," says Margaret Hopkins Analsys analyst. That's not surprising, if you consider that most people get mobiles sometime in their teens, and keep using them as they get older, as eMarketer suggests.

Google Phone?

This from Engadget. Venture capitalist Simeon Simeonov says Google has a team of about 100 people working on the Google Phone. The photo might be simply a represenation of what the user interface would resemble. That isn't the point. The point is that it looks like a buddy list. And it is possible that the buddy list becomes the hub of communications activity in many, perhaps most situations. All of which illustrates the importance of instant messaging as a metaphor for where a good chunk of communications is going. Which is to say, it works better when the people you want to communicate with can signal that they are available, right now.

Apple's Halo is Glowing

m Pacific Crest Securities says Apple computer unit sales are up 101 percent year over year, with revenue up 108 percent. This is the halo effect from buzz about the iPhone, following the iPod, both of which are raising brand awareness for virtually every product in the Apple family. Apple's PC market share also appears to have nudged up two points over the last six months, says Net Applications. Goldman Sachs predicts that iPod sales could approach 11 to 12 million units in the first calendar quarter of 2007. Morgan Stanley says iPhone interest is actually larger than what the market currently anticipates.

So it appears Apple's brand awareness and buzz is driving iPod and Macintosh sales now, and prepping the market for the iPhone which won't be widely available until later in the year.

In fact, iPod sales will pass 100 million units world-wide in April 2007. Magic.

One Trillion VoIP Minutes

Some 1,079 billion minutes of VoIP traffic were carried by service providers around the world last year, says ILocus. The data suggest over half of calls were for long distance national calls. Separate estimates by TeleGeography suggest global VoIP minutes amounted to just short of 72 billion minutes last year.

There were 37.5 million voice over broadband subscribers, an increase of 16.5 million subscribers over the year. The biggest growth occurred in the U.S., French and German markets.

In the VoIP equipment market, softswitch and media gateways sales generated combined revenues of $2.2 billion - with 36.9 million Class 5 softswitch licences, 34.8 million Class 4 softswitch licences and 48.2 million service provider media gateway ports sold worldwide.

Bandwidth Now Driven by Consumers

"About 85 percent of carriers want Ethernet intelligence embedded into the optical transport network," says Meriton Networks chief network architect Nick Cadwgan. 

In some cases that means the ability to create Ethernet tunnels through an optical network, so that the transmission fabric starts to become a service delivery fabric. 

In some cases, though, it remains important to transport TDM traffic through the optical fabric, as in the case of wireless backhaul, notes Emanuel Nachum, ECI Telecom executive. "You want to integrate TDM, SONET and Ethernet layers as part of the optical infrastructure," he says. And though it has gone unnoticed in some quarters, dramatic changes in transport bandwidth are starting to occur. 

There's a move to 1 gigabit Ethernet at the edge of the network, in part because that's what the cards now support," says Umesh Kukreja, Atrica executive. "Enterprise sites now are pushing 20 Mbps to 40 Mbps while data centers are putting in 10 Gbps links. "We're also seeing N by 1 Gbps paths carried within 10 Gbps wavelengths.

But there's an even bigger change going on. Historically, bandwidth demands were driven by business. 

From this point forward, they will be driven by consumer demand for IPTV and other applicatons. Cadwgan says that over the last 18 months the demand drivers have flip flopped and that telco requirements for consumer video, using IP transport, now are the single greatest bandwidth driver.

Even for service providers who serve small, medium or enterprise customers, there are key implications. Paramount among the changes are new buyer benchmarks for what bandwidth should cost. 

SureWest Communications, for example, offers a symmetrical 50 Mbps Internet access service for customers who take a premium bundle including unlimited wireless, wireline and premium video. On a sum of the parts basis the symmetrical 50 Mbps works out to something like $200 a month. When those consumer users go to their offices, they are going to wonder why their business bandwidth costs so much.

Likewise, even some independent telephone companies serving rural areas on a suburban fringe are planning now for residential access bandwidth in the 40 to 50 Mbps range, with a 10 Gbps "metro core" to support it. You might wonder whether this is "overkill." Not if the telco plans on delivering IPTV services. And executives also acknowledge that if competing cable operators start bonding channels to create 100 Mbps services, then there will have to be a competitive response.

All of which puts telcos and other service providers in an awkward position. Competitors are driving consumer bandwidth expectations and delivery, not the voice and data networks that used to be expected to provide such leadership.