Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

Free Burton Group TeleBriefing: Optimizing Enterprise Communication and Collaboration: Blogs, Wikis, and Real-time Advances

Sign up today for either 5/5/2005 or 5/6/2005.

Description:

'Effective enterprise communication and collaboration are now fundamental competitive -- and often regulatory compliance -- requirements. Communication/collaboration optimization is increasingly challenging, however, amid rapidly-changing market dynamics. In this Application Platform Strategies TeleBriefing, Burton Group Senior Analyst Peter O'Kelly expands Burton Group's coverage of communication, collaboration, and content management trends, building on recent reports that address blogs, wikis, and real-time advances.'"

AOL's Next IM System

From Messaging Pipeline: AOL Readies Next-Generation IM Tools: "

NEW YORK (AP) -- America Online Inc. is preparing to ditch its decade-old instant messaging platform, building a replacement from scratch that's designed to integrate text, audio, video and future forms of communication. AOL has released an early, limited-feature preview of its next-generation IM software, called Triton, and hopes to complete it by year's end. AOL plans only one more update to the existing AIM software, now at version 5.9.

Could this be AOL's "Skype Killer"?

Telepocalypse: Perfectly and properly proprietary

Martin Geddes wraps up a discussion on SIP vs. Skype that has been raging among several VoIP-related blogs in the last few days, which at one point led some to question whether or not SIP was dead.

My quick take, if SIP is dead then death is a lot healthier than I ever suspected.

If you are interested in jumping into the discussion check out Martin's blog above, Aswath Rao's Weblog, James Seng's blog, Richard Statsny's "VoIP and ENUM" and Jeff Pulver's Blog.

Five Reasons for no VoIP

Russell Shaw answers Lance Ulanoff's Five reasons why he doesn't have VoIP.

Since I haven't yet made the leap to residential VoIP either, here are mine:

1. VoIP services don't support my home alarm system or my TiVO, so I would need to maintain a POTS line.

2. I have Comcast as my broadband provider, while reliability has been good for the last year, it's been downright awful for the last two weeks. Meanwhile, the last time I lost POTS service was during hurricane Gloria in Long Island in 1985.

3. Those I know who have tried VoIP, generally using Vonage, have complained of spotty reliability and poor customer support.

4. I have this nagging fear of what happens to my home phone number if my VoIP provider goes bankrupt. What happens if it gets lost in cyberspace and can't be transfered (we need a system like Network Solutions/Verisign offers to allow web management of URLs - I should be able to manage my phone number through a web site).

5. Given #1 above, and the fact I make little to no long distance calls from home, the cost benefit just isn't there. Since I still need a POTS line, I'm looking at about $20 a month for a local line, plus $25 per month for a VoIP line, meaning that my current phone bill, which is currently $49 including unlimited local and long distance, would be reduced by about $4.00 (I'm not including taxes & other fees in this equation). Saving $4.00 to me doesn't offset the negatives I noted in the other points above. I should add that I get $5.00 off my wife's Verizon cell plan for bundling my home phone service into the same bill, so the cost savings equation goes away.

6. (Bonus reason) I just don't have a need for anything more than caller ID and call waiting for my home service. I'm not going to set up any custom features via a web site for my home phone.

7. (Bonus reason #2) I'm not willing to trust the safety of my family to VoIP. I'm extremely concerned about the ability for residential services to provide the same kind of 911 support currently provided by POTS. I want to be guaranteed that calls are handled the same way, and aren't sent to different call centers as has been discussed with the Vonage/911 lawsuit in Texas.

8. (Bonus reason #3) I might be wrong about this, but I don't think any of the VoIP services support faxing.

A couple of disclaimers. I've used a public VoIP service in my office for over 3 years now, it works great and I have no complaints, but they deliver it over their own T1, any software update requires us to walk around the office and reboot each phone, and the original service provider has gone bankrupt. We also can't support fax over our VoIP service, we needed a POTS line for that.

I'd also note that I use Skype a lot, I like it but the call quality is nowhere near as good as my home phone or my office VoIP line and the client seems to be somewhat unreliable. We tried a three-way conference call yesterday with two PC users and me being the lone mac user. My client crashed on startup, and one of the other user's clients crashed several minutes into the call.

Now having said all that, if I needed a second home phone line for work, I would select a VoIP provider in a heartbeat. I might also look at a VoIP service if I made a lot of long distance calls. I'm just not convinced that replacing a working, cheap POTS line with a more unreliable VoIP line makes any sense right now.

Networld+Interop: Next Week

Next week is Networld+Interop in Las Vegas.  Even though it has shrunk in the last few years, N+I remains one of the largest, and most important events in the enterprise networking and communications space.

Based on the large number of meeting requests I've received from vendors this year, it seems as if there is much more activity than year's past.  The move from the over-sized LV Convention Center to the  Mandalay Bay convention center should go a long way to restoring the show's attractiveness.

For those of you attending, I will be teaching an all-day workshop entitled "Building SIP-based Networks" on May 4th.  I am also speaking at a session on WAN futures entitled "Services Update: What Does the Carrier Landscape Look Like for MAN and WAN Services?" along with Marvin Chartoff of Unisys on the morning of May 5th.

I look forward to the opportunity to meet some of you in person.

VoIP Watch: Do The Math

Andy Abramson discusses the cost of GPRS for data (see:VoIP Watch: Do The Math) on his blog.  His conclusion, the high cost of GPRS for data will lead to a greater push for GSM/WiFi phones, which can use VoIP over WiFi to save money.

I'm not sure I see Andy's point here.  I pay $24.95 a month for unlimited data transfer from Cingular on their GPRS/Edge network.  Any time I've been in a Starbucks, the t-Mobile rate for WiFi has been $9.95 a day, or something like $3.00 an hour.

Given that I'm already paying for GPRS/Edge so I can get mobile e-mail & web access via my Treo, what would I need with a Hotspot?  If anything, the growing availability of GPRS, Edge, and EVDO are making public hotspot services far less attractive.

We've been talkiing a lot among our analysts about the future of mobile access.  Given all the variability of coverage of public hotspots (multiple carriers requiring multiple accounts, service not available everywhere), the idea of simply equipping employees with a GPRS/Edge or EVDO card is getting increasingly difficult to beat.  The key benefit from a network management standpoint is that you can provide easy access for your employees, rather than needing to support multiple accounts on the various wireless services (though it should be stated that services such as iPass and Fiberlink do offer greater ability to use a single account for multiple services). 

However, you still have the issue of lack of coverage.  I was in the Miami airport a few weeks ago, which didn't have WiFi outside of Laptop Lane ($10.00 an hour or so if I recall correctly).  Now that I've got my Treo with Bluetooth DUN, the days of searching for a WiFi hot spot are over.

Comcast: Another day, another outage

My comcast cable modem service is out for the third time in about two weeks.  Whereas the last two outages were only DNS-related and I was able to get back on the net by changing DNS settings, this one is a complete "hard" outage, I'm unable to connect to the Internet at all.  I called Comcast and got the standard pre-recorded message stating that there was an outage in my area and that technicians were working on it, so I don't believe this is a network wide issue.

And these folks are going to try to convince me to get rid of my POTS line so that they can become my phone company?  They must be crazy.

(Posted via Bluetooth DUN using my Treo 650 w/ Cingular GPRS and an Apple PowerBook)

SkypedOut - Revisited

I contacted a SkypeOut staffer via their message board system about the credit expiration issue, here is their response:

Thank you for your input. We are aware that this might upset some users and are reviewing the policy. The reason policies like this exist is not to grab money but if we do not expire ununsed credit at some point we will have an ever increasing amount of liability on our balance sheets. It's a serious accounting issue to have constantly increasing ununsed credits like this.
 
But like I said, we are reviewing the policy.

Lingo Outage?

One of my Seattle-based co-workers who uses Lingo for his home VoIP service reported that his service was out for most of yesterday, with frequent reloading of code to his ATA.  He tried calling their tech support linee and received a recorded message stating that they were having "minor" problems, and to power cycle his ATA.  The waiting time to speak to a live person was estimated at 30 minutes.

Of course, there was (and is) nothing on their web site about the outage.

Folks in the residential VoIP business need to realize that their customers will expect that at a minimum, the current (and accurate) status of the service will be available on the provider's web site.  Don't leave your customers in the dark when you are having service issues.

SkypedOut

Andy Abramson points out a little detail in the SkypeOut user policy that is sure to inflame many SkypeOut users:  SkypeOut credits expire if they aren't used for a period of 180 days. 

I purchased 10 euros worth of credits for use the last time I was in Europe.  While over there last fall I used at most 1.75 euros.  I'd always assumed I could use the rest during my next trip later this year, but now thanks to Andy I see that my unused credits were 90 days or so away from expiring.  My only saving grace being an accidental SkypeOut call I made when clicking on the wrong user about 3 months ago, had I not done that, my credits would have expired already.

Skype is going to generate a lot of badwill over this policy.  It ought to be changed, if one purchases credits they ought to be available for a lot longer than 180 days, and should never expire as long as the Skype accunt is actively used.