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.