Ribbit!

Ribbit has unveiled a new platform for developing telephony services and integrating them with Web apps, as well as what it says is a new business model as well.

The company says it has a 600-plus developer community and already can be integrated with salesforce.com.

"The world doesn't need another phone company," says Ted Griggs, co-founder and CEO at Ribbit. "What it needs is new kind of phone company, one that liberates voice from its current confines -- devices, plans and business models -- and more readily integrates into the workflow of our professional and personal lives."

At the core of Ribbit's technology offering is an open platform that enables developers to bridge the worlds of traditional telephony and the Web. The Ribbit SmartSwitch, evolved from a Lucent-tested CLASS 5 softswitch, and open Flash/Flex-based application programming interface will enable non-telephony developers to quickly build innovative, rich voice applications and integrate them into Web sites, communities and applications, Ribbit says.

By connecting voice from any Flash-enabled browser to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and new VoIP (voice over IP) networks, over 750 million computers become the next generation of phones with developers deciding how they work, the company says.

With an assortment of back-office and service delivery infrastructure, the platform also enables developers to not only build services, but sell them as well.

In the first quarter of 2008, the Ribbit for Salesforce workflow integration will be available for salesforce.com customers via the AppExchange.

In the first quarter of 2008, Ribbit will open its service to consumers. Also in the first quarter, the company will sell commercial and enterprise packages. Both the consumer, small, medium and enterprise markets will be areas of focus for Ribbit.

Ribbit is another example of the growing "voice is a mashup" trend, where communications and voice simply are integrated with applications.

VON Coalition Europe to Provide Input to EC

The Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition Europe has formed to provide policy advocacy for IP communications in Europe. The coalition will work to educate, inform and promote responsible government policies that enable innovation and the many benefits that Internet voice innovations can deliver.

The recent release of formal Proposals by the European Commission to amend the existing regulatory framework for communications marks the start of a wide ranging review by the Council of Ministers and European Parliament.

Founding members of the VON Coalition Europe include iBasis, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Rebtel, Skype, and Voxbone.

328.7 Billion VoIP Minutes in Third Quarter

Service providers worldwide recorded an estimated traffic volume of 328.7 billion VoIP minutes during the third quarter, according to iLocus. Of those minutes 72.3 billion were local, 232 billion were national long distance and 24.4 billion were used for international long distance.

About 69.1 billion of those minutes were retail, 3.2 were wholesale local VoIP (white labeling, for example).

There is about 10 percent double counting in national long distance and about 20 percent double counting in international long distance. Double counted minutes are those minutes where the same call is being relayed by two or more carriers and counted as traffic by each one of them.

The top five service providers ranked by minutes were China Telecom, China Netcom, AT&T, China Mobile and Qwest.

13.6 Percent of U.S. Homes are Wireless Only

Preliminary results from the January–June 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that more than one out of every eight American homes (13.6 percent) had only wireless telephones during the first half of 2007.

In the first six months of 2007, 13.6 percent of households did not have a traditional landline telephone, but did have at least one wireless telephone. Approximately 12.6 percent of all adults—28 million—lived in households with only wireless telephones; 11.9 percent of all children—nearly 9 million children—lived in households with only wireless telephones.

The percentage of adults living in wireless-only households has been steadily increasing since 2003, CDC finds. During the first six months of 2007, one out of every eight adults lived in wireless-only households. One year before, one out of every 10 adults lived in wireless-only households. And two years before that, in 2004, only one out of every 20 adults lived in wireless-only households.

The observed increase in the percentage of adults living in wireless-only households from the last six months of 2006 to the first 6 months of 2007 was not statistically significant.

But other observed increases over time in the percentage of adults living in wireless-only households were statistically significant, CDC finds. These results suggest a possible recent decline in the rate of increase.

The percentage of adults and the percentage of children living without any telephone service have remained relatively unchanged over the past three years. Approximately 1.9 percent of households had no telephone service. Approximately 3.5 million adults (1.6 percent) and more than one million children (1.7 percent) lived in these households.

For the period January through June 2007, the results reveal that more than one-half of all adults living with unrelated roommates (55.3 percent) lived in households with only wireless telephones.

Adults renting their home (28.2 percent) were more likely than adults owning their home (6.7 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

More than one in four adults aged 18-24 years (27.9 percent) lived in households with only wireless telephones. Nearly 31 percent of adults aged 25-29 years lived in households with only wireless telephones. As age increased, the percentage of adults living in households with only wireless telephones decreased. Wireless-only percentages were 12.6 percent for adults aged 30-44 years; 7.1 percent for adults aged 45-64 years; and two percent for adults aged 65 years or over.

Men (13.8 percent) were more likely than women (11.5 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones. Adults living in poverty (21.6 percent) were more likely than higher income adults to be living in households with only wireless telephones. Adults living in the South (14.9 percent) and Midwest (14 percent) were more likely than adults living in the Northeast (8.8 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

Non-Hispanic white adults (11.3 percent) and non-Hispanic black adults (14.3 percent) were less likely than Hispanic adults (18 percent) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

CopperCom SoftSwitch Sales Halted

CopperCom is getting out of the softswitch business, says Light Reading.

Light Reading says CopperCom CEO Julian Thomson says CopperCom "will no longer market the CSX, CopperCommander, and Switchmaxx/VoiceMaxx product lines."

The decision was "primarily due to a lack of demand for our products," Thomson says. "We looked at our forecasting, our market sizing, and so forth going forward, and the demand simply wasn't there."

While competitors stand to benefit from one less softswitch vendor in the market, Light Reading says the effect of CopperCom's demise will be minimal because the company hasn't been actively competing in the market for some time.

One might note that the softswitch market is a bit smallish for the number of suppliers. Infonetics data shown above.

Vonage Outage

Users of Vonage's internet telephone service have been reporting a major service failure, ongoing since Friday. In some cases, it appears that incoming calls are not connecting. Vonage is forwarding the attempted calls to subscriber landlines and cellphones, but repeatedly, and late, some customers report.

An anonymous administrator of Vonage Forum, the independent discussion board where gripes were aired, reports that Vonage claims to have resolved the issue this morning, but users continue to report problems.

Vonage can ill afford such lapses, to say the least. Not when its advertising emphasizes how reliable the service is. Not when it faces yet another patent infringement fracas, this time with Nortel. Unfortunately, nobody in the VoIP space benefits much (competitors might enjoy Vonage's travails to an extent) when VoIP has these sorts of issues. Sooner or later, everybody is going to do VoIP, and the residue is going to cling to all the other providers when that happens.

Qwest Plans No Major Acquisitions or IPTV

After completing a months-long stratgic review, Qwest Communications essentially has decided to "stay the course." There will be "no major shifts" in Qwest's basic approach to the market.

People shouldn't expect major acquisitions or a massive move into IPTV, for example. Instead, Qwest seems to be focusing on a balance between capital investment and shareholder return issues, such as reducing debt load, buying back shares and supporting the payment of dividends.

Partnerships are the way Qwest will provide new services in areas such as video and wireless. That's good news for Sprint, who provides Qwest mobility services, and DirecTV for video entertainment. It also means Qwest will be receptive to other partnerships as well.

"We are looking at partnerships to help us with offerings in the home," Mueller says. "Partners will be a huge part of our success, going forward."

But Qwest will not be looking to make major acquisitions, or dramatically change the rate at which it invests in broadband access, undertaking a major fiber-to-home initiative, for example, though it is increasing its "fiber-to-node" efforts in a relatively controlled way.

Qwest expects by 2011 to increase its broadband penetration to increase from 23 percent to 40 percent, with higher access speeds and a nominal increase in operating costs.

The fiber-to-node deployments are not, Mueller emphasized, related to IPTV, but rather to data services. "Qwest doesn't have the scale" for that, Mueller says.

But fixed-mobile products will be launched in late 2008, to leverage the broadband access investments.

Overall, Qwest will attempt to balance capital investment with returns to shareholders, as one would conclude given Qwest's resumption of dividend payments.

Capital run rates now set at about $1.8 billion are a "good run rate for us," Edward Mueller, Qwest CEO says. "We are trying to minimize capex where it doesn't drive growth," he says. "We will try, in the network operation, be picky and minimize capital expenditures in the outside plant where it doesn't make a reasonable return for us." There also will be a bigger emphasis on "success-based" capital investment, in the enterprise space, for example.

Qwest will focus in 20 markets, including its 10-largest markets, for the FTTN upgrades. Those upgrades might include support for gaming services rather than entertainment video, with the 20 Mbps downstream access capabilities the FTTN upgrade will support. Qwest earlier had said it would spend an incremental $175 per home passed to put the FTTN network in place for 1.5 million homes.

Qwest says it will focus its wholesale efforts on "profitable expansion," suggesting a "success-based" approach to out-of-region enterprise services. The hosting part of our business has promise, Mueller says.