SME Hosted PBX: Smaller is Better

The smaller the business, the more likely it is to prefer a hosted IP PBX solution over a premises-based solution, says Yankee Group VP Steve Hilton. The pay-as-you-go
approach coupled with minimal on-site IT support makes hosted solutions desirable for
small businesses.

Based on Yankee Group survey data, businesses with fewer than 20 employees are three times more likely to want hosted IP solutions, compared to organizations with 99 employees.

Buying preferences are about evenly split in the 20-to-99 employee range.

Demand for hosted solutions also seems to be quite a bit higher in the retail segment, as you might expect, as these are deployment situations where most people will not need voice or text communications most of the time.

Small businesses in retail segments (a segment with more branch or franchise locations per firm) are almost three times more likely to want hosted IP solutions, whereas firms in professional services and manufacturing sectors are more evenly split between hosted and premises-based IP solutions, says Hilton.

There are some obvious conclusions. Service providers able to deliver hosted voice soltuions over a wide geographic area are positioned to sell hosted PBX services to retail enterprises with lots of franchises to support.

Service providers without wide geographic reach will largely have to content themselves with a focus on professional and manufacturing prospects that more often operate out of one or just a few sites.

The paradox is that there is no simple answer to the question of whether hosted PBX service makes more sense for small or enterprise-sized organizations. Large retail entities often operate thousands of essentially small sites, even though a sale will be made at an enterprise level. Geographic scale then matters, even when the actual use case is a gas station, convenience store or fast food outlet.

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.