Disruptive Telephony

Fascinating chart out of Silicon Alley Insider today showing the incredible growth Comcast has had in terms of IP phone subscribers versus that of Vonage:

I doubt the chart is a huge surprise for anyone following the industry, but it still does make for an interesting graphic. Despite all the advertising money that Vonage can throw out there, Comcast and the other cable providers have the inherent advantage that they can easily offer powerful "triple-play bundles" of cable TV, Internet access and phone service.

Comcast is no longer my provider (Time-Warner services Keene, NH, where I live.), but when I lived in Burlington, VT, we had Comcast for Internet access and Verizon for phone (and we didn't have anyone for TV, since we don't watch it). The offers that Comcast kept sending us, though, encouraging us to switch, were quite compelling. The amount I paid for Internet access would have been lower if I had either phone or TV with Comcast, and even lower if I had all three.

If we actually watched TV and therefore wanted cable TV, the economics of the "triple-play" would be very hard to beat... so it's no surprise at all to me to see this chart. I would expect we'll continue to see the growth of one and the continued stagnation of the other.

What would be more interesting to me would be to see the subscriber growth of Comcast versus the other MVNOs and the DSL providers. Fascinating times we live in...

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Technorati Tags: comcast, vonage, voip, consumervoip, ip telephony, telephony, telecommunications

Skype today announced Skype 4.1 for Windows. As Raul Liive outlined in a post about the 4.1 beta (see also Jim Courtney's take), this version brings to Windows users the "screen sharing" feature that we've had in the Mac version of Skype for a bit. It also restores several of the features that were in the previous Skype 3.8 for Windows but that got left behind when Skype rushed 4.0 for Windows out the door. And it adds the SILK codec and some other odds and ends.

Per Raul's Skype blog post today, the final 4.1 version fixes a whack-load of bugs as well.

If I were on Windows, I'd definitely head over and download 4.1. The bug fixes alone are probably worth it.

Of course, I'm not on Windows (I'm a Mac user) and so today's announcement is pretty much irrelevant to me. Just as whenever Skype comes out with a new Mac version or beta, it's irrelevant to Windows users. And if by some miracle Skype should actually come out with a new Linux version (no update to their blog in 6 months), that would be irrelevant to both Mac and Windows users.

It's hard to get excited about a new Skype release when regardless of what is new in it, you can generally only use it with people on your platform. Maybe. If they care enough about Skype to download the new version.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge Skype fan. It's open for me all the time and I have something like 40+ group chats (IM) open at any time for various projects and teams.

But Skype's continued belief in a fragmented, fractured, siloed platform-specific product strategy is still a path of monumental stupidity, in my opinion. I've ranted about this before. It's still the same.

In contrast, Mozilla comes out with Firefox 3.5 on the same day across all three operating systems. For any given Firefox release, there is tons of attention and interest because everyone can download, try it out, write about it, tweet about it and generally use it. There's a good buzz that can happen.

I know, I know... Firefox is "just a web browser" and Skype is a much more complicated real-time communication tool... etc., etc. And yes, I know that Windows still has the largest market share so it makes sense to focus there to reach the largest % of customers. (Although I'd wonder if that is true of the "influencer"/word-of-mouth/blogging community that seems to have a higher Mac %.) And sure, maybe there is good sense in both those statements. (or not)

Still, as a Skype fan, I'd love for maybe Skype 5.0 to be a release that came out across all platforms and let me share the excitement with Skype users across all the different platforms.

Probably not. But it would be nice.

Meanwhile, if you are a Windows user, you can get 4.1. And if you are a Mac user, you can safely keep ignoring Skype... no update for you, yet.

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Technorati Tags: skype

This week, I (Dan York) am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today through Thursday at the Westin Boston Waterfront in downtown Boston. The keynote panel I'm on, The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise, doesn't happen until Wednesday morning at 9:15am... but I came down early as a good number of the sessions are of interest.

If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.

You can also follow along with the conference "backchannel" on Twitter by following the hashtag "#e2conf". Here's an easy search URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf

I expect to have a very cool Voxeo announcement out on Wednesday, too... but more on that then... ;-)

P.S. And why do I do the silly "I (Dan York)" construction at the beginning of this post? Because I see my content being scraped and so "I" alone doesn't make sense in other places the content winds up :-)

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Technorati Tags: e2conf, voxeo, danyork, dan york, enterprise 2.0, boston

Upon entering the Southwest Airlines plane this morning on my flight to Orlando to visit Voxeo's headquarters, I immediately noticed a "WiFi zone" sign on a column by the entry door. Naturally, I had to pull out my Macbook Pro and give it a whirl... and, given the issue of Skype-blocking last summer... try out Skype.

To my great surprise and pleasure, it worked great. (For a little while - see below.) Here's Bruce Lowekamp:

As you may or may not be able to see in the graphic, our call had been up for 3 minutes and 33 seconds when I snapped the picture.

Unfortunately, I didn't have easy access to my headset, so I couldn't really have a great conversation. The ambient background noise in the plane was really too much for my voice to be heard unless I bent down toward the microphone... and likewise even with the MacBook Pro volume up all the way it was a bit hard to hear Bruce unless I bent down toward the laptop.

And, of course, I didn't really want to annoy my fellow passengers. :-)

You can see on the right the technical stats for the call. Packet loss was surprisingly low. At the time I captured this window, I had a 3% receiving packet loss... but through much of our call that was hovering down around 0%. A roundtrip of 789ms is, of course, rather entertaining.

Sadly, though, the connectivity didn't last forever. After about maybe 30 minutes of trying this out and making video calls to different people, my Skype account went offline.

COMPLETELY offline.

No instant messaging/chat, either. Which is exceedingly annoying.

Out in Twitter-land, Fred Posner asked Southwest if they were blocking VoIP, to which Southwest replied:

@fredposner yep...we do.

Bummer.

Actually, what annoys me more is Southwest blocking Skype IM. Other than the novelty today, I don't know that I really want to be making calls from the plane... although I could see the usefulness from time to time.

What I do want is the Skype IM... since I use Skype IM heavily for communication with people including my team. It seems, though, that my Skype connection is completely blocked. Which is unfortunate, given that all my other IM services seem to be working fine.

Southwest, can you please figure out how to block the Skype voice and video, but still leave us the chat?

Despite the VoIP-blocking, though, it was seriously great to be able to use my laptop and work online during the flight. Even better, on this flight the Southwest WiFi was free while they are apparently testing it out. I did a couple of speed tests from DSL Reports, naturally, and seemed to be getting around 3Mbps down and around 200-250 Kbps up. Here's one of the results:

What a crazy world we're now in... 3 Mbps downlink... on a plane!

P.S. And of course I had to snap a picture like this:

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Technorati Tags: internet, connectivity, southwest, wifi, travel, voip, skype, airtravel, airplane

By way of a tweet from Matt Roberts, a friend from my Mitel days, I learned of this video interview with Sir Terry Matthews on Canada's Business News Network:

Sir Terry Matthews speaks to BNN about the state of the industry in Canada, why he loves home-grown startups and what he sees as the next big thing in technology.

If you've not heard him before, the interview is a good view into the passion, enthusiasm and charisma that keeps him starting up companies all over the place. The report says he's now up to 80 companies or so that he's started up... and I'm not surprised.

His overall message, though, is what he has been consistent saying for many years now... we are in an age where incredible broadband capacity is coming online - as that happens, what will we do to make use of all that bandwidth?

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Technorati Tags: terry matthews, canada

As you have no doubt noticed, my last post here was April 20th... what happened? Well, our second child was born April 24th, and as any parent of a newborn can tell you, you enter this wonderful yet challenging vortex where your time is entirely in the service of the wee one... ;-)

I'm slowly getting back up to speed now, though, and so you'll see more posts appearing here and across all the other blogs where I write...

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If you are free tomorrow at 11am US Eastern / 8am US Pacific / 5pm CET, and want a glimpse into what we all are doing over at Voxeo, we are offering a free webinar about what is new in the upcoming Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects 9 product releases. I am speaking in the first part about Prophecy 9 and then will be followed by Stefan Besling from our VoiceObjects team to talk about what is new in VO9.

As I put together the slide deck, I realized that the engineering team has filled this release with some great features:

• our voice application platform now works across all three major operating systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS X
• the new management console has some graphical features to aid in managing large premise installations that simply have to be seen to be believed (think... three dimensional walls...)
• the new "virtual platforms" feature makes adding new capacity as drop-dead simple as installing a new server and adding it in
• the new log analyzer tool lets you dive deep into logs to find what's going on - and to generate pretty pictures out of the activity as well

I'm definitely looking forward to talking about it tomorrow... and the more I use it on my home system (the beta is available at www.voxeo.com/prophecy), the cooler I think it is. (And I'm not saying that simply because it's my job now! :-)

Anyway, please do join us if you can - and if you can't, an archive will be available on the VoiceObjects Developer Portal soon.

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I can't stand fax. I can't. It's a technology that I just wish would go away. It kills me that fax is one of the main reasons I didn't drop my landline in my move. Yet the reality is that fax usage is everywhere... and probably will be for quite some time if for no other reason than the complete and utter simplicity of fax usage. Print out your message, or write your message (you know... that thing we all used to do... take a writing tool (pen, pencil, crayon, charcoal, etc.), grasp it in your hand and make marks on some writing surface...), just stick that message in your fax machine, punch in the number and press Send. It's hard to get much simpler than that.

But the lack of fax has been a barrier to many a premise-based IP-PBX deployment. Everything's going great... people are looking at all the great things they can do with VoIP and Unified Communications, etc. They are figuring out distributed architectures that are all IP-based. It's all looking really cool technically and will save money, too. All is going well and then someone asks "What about the fax machines?" And so people wind up with kludge solutions using analog breakouts or local lines or attempting Fax-over-IP or keeping some TDM around or... or... or...

We as an "IP communications industry" have to figure out a way to address the "fax issue" if we really do want to build our big interconnect and move beyond the PSTN into a richer communication experience. (And the SIP Forum, by the way, has formed a FoIP Task Group to look at this issue.)

In this context, I was intrigued to see that this week the folks at Digium announced a new service called (Duh!) "Fax For Asterisk". Here's the standard blurb:

Digium's Fax For Asterisk is a commercial facsimile (Fax) termination and origination solution designed to enhance the capabilities of Open Source and commercial Asterisk as well as Switchvox. Fax For Asterisk bundles a suite of user-friendly Asterisk applications and a licensed version of the industry's leading fax modem software from Commetrex. Fax For Asterisk provides low speed (14400bps) PSTN faxing via DAHDI-compatible telephony boards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP endpoints and service providers. Licensed on a per-channel basis, Digium's Fax For Asterisk provides a complete, cost-effective, commercial fax solution for Asterisk users.

Translation: You can send and receive faxes through Asterisk using either TDM or Fax-over-IP (T.38), licensed on a per-channel basis.

In a rather smart move on Digium's part, they've also rolled out "Free Fax For Asterisk" where you can get a free 1-channel license for Fax For Asterisk for an Asterisk installation. This will let people at least play with FFA and may be all that some small offices need.

I'm naturally intrigued by the FoIP side of the offering, which the FAQ dives into in a bit more detail. Unfortunately I've been doing some work on my home network and my Asterisk installation isn't operational right now, but I expect I'll be bringing that back online soon and expect I'll then be experimenting with this a bit more as well. So if I could get termination with a SIP service provider who offered T.38.... could I at least solve the receiving side of the picture? (And yes, I can also solve that through eFax and a zillion other providers.) The sending side still requires some hardware changes on my end to scan it in...

Now if we can just make it ultimately as simple as sticking the papers to send in the document feeder and pressing Send...

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Technorati Tags: asterisk, digium, fax, voip, foip, sip

Unless you remained under a rock last week, you know that Skype was released for the iPhone, somewhat predictably rocketed to the #1 downloaded iPhone app, shot past 1 million downloads in two days and then just today went past two million downloads. As Skype's Peter Parkes' writes:

I’m back with an update – and it’s no surprise that we’ve stormed past the 2 million download milestone. This means an average rate of 2-3 downloads per second since the app first appeared on the 31st March.

2-3 downloads per second! You have to think Skype's got to be rather happy about those numbers. Jim Courtney had a good post rounding up some of the Skype for iPhone coverage.

The good news, for me, was that Skype for the iPhone did include support for persistent group chats, which I noted was my one big desire for the iPhone client.

I've been using the client now off and on for the past week, and thought I'd write down a few initial impressions:

• Audio quality - I've not actually used it for too many calls, but when I have the audio quality (over WiFi) has been great. I'm looking forward to trying it out more whenever I next travel. Interestingly it seems to use the G.729 codec versus any of the ones that Skype developed themselves.
  
  
• Group chats are supported, but are buggy - As I said above, the good news is that group chats, both public chats and also non-public group chats, are supported by the iPhone client. The bad news is that the groupchat support is still a bit buggy (and yes, I realize that it's a 1.0 release). I found a wacky behavior (which I reported) where the iPhone client would only show you the 10 last updates in a group chat, which made it kind of useless.

  I've also noticed that when I go into some group chats in the iPhone client, they don't have the most recent updates in them, which you could expect... but they don't ever seem to update. Now, this could be part of the known issue Skype has with multiple Skype clients simultaneously using the same Skype ID. The updating of groupchats between multiple Skype clients sharing the same ID is a bit funky with regular PC/Mac clients, so it's probably no surprise that it could be strange with the iPhone client in the mix. I'll have to try it sometimes without being signed into Skype anywhere else.

  Still, the great thing is that I can update group chats while I am mobile and, if things work right, also catch up on what's been written in those chats.

• Battery life - Somewhat predictably, I've found that keeping the Skype For iPhone app running does eat up the battery a good bit. At one point when I left it sitting on my desk for a while purposely, I did see that the battery went down considerably - and my iPhone got a bit warm, too. Now perhaps this is because I do have so many chats open. I did, however, expect this to be the case. I can see myself using the Skype For iPhone client primarily for dipping into the Skype flow to send messages or catch up on what's going on. I don't see myself using it for an extended period of time while mobile... although of course I can always plug it in.

All in all I've been quite pleased with how the Skype For iPhone client works in my initial usage. I need to use it while traveling to really get a sense of how well it performs. It does, of course, suffer from the two inherent issues in the Apple iPhone platform: 1) you can only use the voice portion over WiFi; and 2) there is no background processing - any app has to run in the foreground. Of these, #2 is really the larger annoyance because you can't be doing something else on the iPhone and still receive Skype IM messages or calls. Still, it's great to have a Skype client on the iPhone.

What do you think? Have you installed it and tried it out? What have you found works well? Or doesn't work well?

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Technorati Tags: skype, iphone, apple

In case you've been under a rock, or are just tuning in from a long weekend, Skype is releasing "Skype for the iPhone" tomorrow and will apparently follow that with a Skype for the Blackberry application in May. GigaOm ran with the story last week, CNET came out with an "it's official" story last night and then seemingly everyone and their brother and sister came out with stories today about it. (Phil had nice pictures over at Skype Journal.) It's been a big day for Skype - and the formal launch isn't even until tomorrow. Expect that we'll see a large number of stories tomorrow when people actually are able to install the Skype for iPhone app and start playing with it. (And yes, I'll probably write one, too.)

What's fascinating and perhaps incredibly predictable is that almost all of these articles talk about how this brings Skype's free calling to the iPhone... about how this will make it easier for people to make cheaper calls... how it is integrated in with the iPhone Address Book for easy calling... about how this disrupts voice and calls... about how this will make cheap calls available... about how nice the GUI is... about how calls will be cheaper...... (Do you detect a theme?)

MY ONE BIG WISH

While all this is true, I personally don't really care. Sure, it will be great to be able to receive a Skype call and sure, it be great to be able to make a Skype call (all on WiFi of course). Sure, all that's great.

But there is one single thing that I am looking for in this Skype for iPhone application that has been missing from Fring, IM+, TruPhone and every other iPhone app that has offered some type of Skype integration. In a word, it is simply this:

groupchats

Over the past several years I have become a huge user of Skype multi-user groupchats. Both for internal groupchats within organizations or companies and also for public groupchats where people have joined together to discuss common topics. They are an incredible communication tool - and no other iPhone app has delivered those for Skype.

THE POWER OF PERSISTENT CHATS

The strength of Skype's multi-user chat facility is in its persistence. Once you join a groupchat, you will receive all messages to that groupchat until you actually go up to the Chat menu in the Skype client and choose "Leave Chat". Closing the window doesn't get you out of the chat - you must actually leave the chat.

The power here is that "all messages" means even those messages sent in the groupchat while you were offline. When your Skype client reconnects to the Skype P2P cloud, your client downloads all the messages sent to the chat while you were away. Within typically a few seconds you wind up getting a complete history of everything said over the past while.

Think of it as a conversation that never ends.

When you are traveling, you can be typing in the groupchat up until the time you have to board your plane. Land at your destination, pop open Skype, wait a few seconds or so, and... ta da... you have the full conversation of what happened while you were in the air. Or if you are being environmentally-concerned and put your computer to sleep at night (or power it off), when you wake it in the morning, after the sync, you get all the messages sent during the night - which, when you start working with global teams, becomes increasingly important.

Persistent groupchats are powerful organizing and community-building tools.

And we've not had this yet in an app that works with Skype on the iPhone. We've had person-to-person chats in apps like Fring and IM+, but not group chats.

So tomorrow, when everyone is trying out the Skype For iPhone app and testing the voice quality, whining about how it only works on WiFi and not 3G (Duh! Apple has forbid VoIP over 3G.), looking at presence, whining about how video isn't yet supported, looking at address book integration... none of those will be my concern...

I'll be looking at the groupchat support and pushing it's limits as best I can. I hope to be pleasantly surprised. We'll see.

UPDATE: I should have noted, of course, that multi-user groupchats are possible with both Jabber and of course IRC. However, while you might be able to configure certain clients and servers to supply some level of persistence, it is not on by default (that I have seen) nor as simple as it is with Skype.

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Technorati Tags: skype, apple, iphone