Euro VoIP Up 400 Percent Since 2005

Consumer VoIP subscribership in Europe was up more than 10 million lines in 2007, compared to 2006, say researchers at Telegeography. At year-end 2007, 25.3 million consumer VoIP lines were in service in Western Europe, up from 15 million in 2006, and nearly four times the 6.5 million VoIP subscribers in 2005.

The key driver of growth has been aggressively priced bundles of voice, broadband, and video service. While prices vary widely across Europe, many operators charge as little as €30 (U.S. $43) for all three services, including unlimited calling.

This strategy has been spectacularly successful: TeleGeography projects that western European VoIP subscribers will top 37 million and will account for 29 percent of western European fixed lines by year-end 2008.

The success of upstart service providers has forced legacy telcos to respond. Most European incumbent phone companies have introduced dual-play or triple-play bundles, which frequently include flat-rate IP telephone service. While their success has varied widely, France Telecom has emerged as the largest VoIP service provider in Europe, and incumbents now account for five of the 10 largest European VoIP service providers.

Cloud Computing: The Next Disruption

There's something stirring out there in the computing world that will have large implications for communications service providers. Cloud computing is going to rip away the boundaries that have separated formerly-distinct business segments, realign value chains and bring massively large new players into fragmented, highly distributed businesses that are unaccumstomed to this level of competition. Consider recent moves by VMware, for example. 

VMware has unveiled infrastructure software that pools hardware resources, such as servers, storage and network, into an on-premise cloud-computing environment. At one level, this helps enterprises better manage data center resources. At another level it helps enterprises support remote or traveling users with all the applications they would expect to be able to use at their office desktops. The federation capability might be used in several ways, such as extending business partner access to enterprise resources for inventory tracking or supply chain management.

Okay, you say. It's a more efficient way to use computing resources, but so what? The "so what" is that cloud computing now means small Web hosting outfits are going to compete with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others. That's a big deal

The Virtual Datacenter Operating System allocates resources to applications based on the workloads they're handling at a particular time. The VDC-OS also delivers a set of application services, such as security and scalability. These services are independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which the applications were built to run.

Cloud computing has become one of the dominant drivers in the IT sector over the last year or so. It generally it refers to hosting applications remotely and allowing local access using a browser.

The new platform will enable mid-market and low-end enterprise IT shops to build their own enterprise-grade external hosted clouds, and connect them with other clouds, if they so choose. 

VDC-OS shifts the center of server computing from individual operating systems to infrastructure software that spans many distributed servers, VMware said. In essence, the new technology serves as the operating system for the entire data center.

 

The VDC-OS expands virtual infrastructure along three dimensions. First, it seamlessly aggregates servers, storage and network as a pool of on-premise cloud resources and allocate them to applications that need them most. Second, it 

delivers a set of application services to guarantee the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which they were built to run. 

Third, the VDC-OS federates compute capacity between the on-premise and off-premise clouds.  Unlike a traditional OS, which is optimized for a single server and supports only those applications written to its interfaces, the VDC-OS serves as the OS for the entire datacenter and supports the full diversity of any application written to any OS, from legacy Windows applications to modern distributed applications that run in mixed operating system environments. 

Tesco Cuts the Cord

UK supermarket chain Tesco is building its own GSM network, an unusual step for any enteprise to take. The retailer will construct a private GSM network to replace its existing fixed-line phones at about 1,500 locations, CommsDay reports. Cable & Wireless will provide the backhaul and Ericsson will design, build and manage the network for five years.

Inside buildings and on Tesco campuses, mobile handsets will act essentially as cordless phones. But those handsets also will roam to the public GSM network off campus or outside buildings.

In many ways, the Tesco network is one of the more significant enterprise fixed-mobile converged networks so far. Tesco will use its existing IP network for voice trunking, while replacing tethered phones with mobile handsets that double as traditional mobile phones when outside the office.

By doing so, Tesco eliminates desk phones and all the maintenance,moves, adds and changes associated with use of those phones. To the extent that unified communications and FMC are at least in part about reducing the number of devices or phone numbers or mail boxes any single user must interact with, Tesco's network eliminates all support requirements for one of the two voice services it used to support.

Cisco Buys Jabber

Cisco Systems is acquiring open-source instant messaging software maker Jabber. Cisco will embed Jabber in its on-premise unified communications suite and and its WebEx Connect application.

Jabber provides integration of presence data across different devices, users and applications, allowing multiple instant messaging to communicate with each other, an obvious advantage for any unified communications service or application. 

More than 10 million users, including workers in AT&T, Bank of Ireland, BT, Department of Homeland Security, Earthlink, FedEx and JP Morgan, license software from Jabber.

300% Jump in Bandwidth Use by 3G iPhone Users

AT&T had expected about 500 percent growth in data consumption by 3G iPhone users, but has found bandwidth consumption jumped only 300 percent, according to AT&T CTO John Donovan.

It isn't clear whether this is because of end user behavior or some other element of the experience, such as users not being able to use their devices as much as they might have wanted to. Battery life issues, coverage issues or other impediments might have contributed. Nobody really knows, yet. 

What Convinces Cord Cutters to Buy Landline Voice?

Nielsen Mobile has found that about 17 percent of U.S. households say they have no landline voice service and rely on wireless services instead. But the Nielsen study also found that 10 percent of U.S. households are former wireless-only users who now have returned to wired voice service for one reason or another. 

About 17 percent they are required to have a landline voice connection in order to use some other important service, such as an alarm service, digital video recorder service, Internet or fax. 

About 12 percent say it was too expensive to make all their calls using a mobile.  

About 11 percent say the value and price of a bundle convinced them a landline voice account was worth having. Another 10 percent cited the convenience of a bundle as the reason to move back to buying landline voice. Basically, 22 percent said a bundle including voice was what got them to move back. 

Vodafone to Offer Dell Ultra-Mobile PC

Vodafone and Dell have announced that Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 ultra-mobile device will be sold with built-in mobile broadband, exclusively through Vodafone stores and online, and directly from Dell, in key European markets.

Available from late September, the Inspiron Mini 9, featuring built-in mobile broadband from Vodafone. There is no word yet whether Vodafone plans to take the plan a step further and directly bundle the mobile PC with service in the same way that mobile phones are bundled with mobile service.

But that is a logical step, if EU regulators will allow it.