I am pleased to announce that as of today we have Redwood Telecommunications as a new member of the Timico Technology Group.  London based Redwood is a highly professional  provider of communications solutions with particular expertise in Mitel and Avaya IP telephony systems.

This is is a highly strategic acquisition for both parties. It beefs up Timico’s capabilities in the VoIP systems space and gives us a base in London. Like it or not London is where a lot of the commercial action is in this world. Redwood also has a great list of customers that includes Jimmy Choo – my daughter will be after a discount !:).

Redwood, which will continue to be run by the same management team under MD Charlie Whelpton, will benefit from gaining access to the Timico network, system and data centre assets and skills.

This is a very exciting world to be working in but you have to be one of the players. There is no point in sitting on your hands and watching the world pass by.

It is interesting though that whilst we see a lot of hype surrounding new technologies & platforms aka the current frenzy over the Facebook IPO at the end of the day¹ it is sticking to the basics that makes long term value and sense.

Warren Buffet, for example, invests mostly in areas of businesses that he sees value in rather than those that attract all the media interest. In our business, communications, we need the technology but most important is the investment in relationship with, and the attitude towards the customer. The customer is king. No customers = no business. Lots of happy customers = long term business value. Timico is in the value game.

Redwood’s philosophy fits very well with that of the rest of the group and I look forward to working with the team.

¹ when all’s said and done etc

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You are looking at a disappointed man. Wha!  How can this be?  Surely not you Tref I hear you say? Yes yes disappointed What’s up?  We have had a very light smattering of snow.

I like snow. Snow, for the most part, makes the place look pretty and means I can wrap up cosily in front of a roaring open fire at home and enjoy the real winter. I don’t do the sledging any more – it’s all very well getting a thrill from speeding down that hill but you then have to traipse all the way back to the top dragging a sledge and almost certainly a kid. I still like throwing snowballs mind you. Nothing quite like the satisfaction of catching someone in the back of the neck.

I also quite like the superiority of owning a 4×4 when it snows. Other cars are sliding all over the place or struggling to get up the slightest incline but the Jeep takes it all with total ease.

This snow is not heavy enough for any of any of that. It might well close the golf course tomorrow but that is largely because you can’t see white balls on a white background. That’s the only thing this snow is likely to disrupt this weekend and in all probability I’ll be watching the 6 Nations rugby so not playing golf anyway.

None of the above is why I’m disappointed. Snow is really good stuff for business if you are in the VoIP game. When offices have to shut down because their staff can’t make it in those businesses with the vision to use VoIP and/or SIP trunks have minimal disruption. Workers stay at home and carry on with their job using broadband and VoIP, or calls to an office that is closed are simply diverted to another that has stayed open. It all happens at the flick of switch (actually the tick of an on line box). Snow drives sales:)

Funny innit? One day I’m talking about homeworking at the height of next summer because of the Olympics and the next about the same thing in winter. I can almost see the workplace of the future where people will be talking about building physical offices for people to occasionally come in and meet their colleagues in real life. How weird will that be?

Will people be able to converse in conversations of more than 140 characters  or wthout abbrviatng evry wrd 2 fit sentnce in2 space. T? Gr8 thx. u dont look ne thing like ur avatar. uhuh.

Anyway there you go. That’s why I’m disappointed but don’t worry I’m sure I’ll cheer up soon. It’s Friday after all – yay

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Many of you will perhaps not have heard of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association. It is one of hundreds of industry trade associations serving their stakeholders in the UK. ITSPA was formed about 6 years ago at the “dawn of the hosted VoIP industry in this country”.

In its early days ITSPA was involved in the formation of codes of practice – working with Ofcom to define how an internet telephony provider should behave/operate. Things then went quiet for a while though the organisation has top notch networking events where executives get the opportunities to meet other people in the game to catch up on issues (and gossip).

Over the past 12 months industry affecting issues have started to come out of the woodwork. As the industry is still very much evolving/maturing these issues are often hangovers from the old telephony world that are stifling the growth and innovation prospects of the new world¹.

For example the porting of telephone numbers uses manual processes reminiscent of the stone age. There is a real reluctance by those responsible to change – you know who you are – get with it – bear skins went out of fashion thousands of years ago. It can take months to port a number. This is not right.

Ditto the fact that you can’t move your phone number to VoIP if the line also carries your broadband. If you try your underlying analogue phone line will get cut off and you then need to reprovision a new phone line which takes time and during which time you won’t have broadband.

NetNeturality also features in the ITSPA world far more so than for ISPs generally. This is because some mobile operators block VoIP. Arguments over capacity don’t wear as far as I’m concerned.

VoIP security is another issue. The same issues affect VoIP systems as used to affect good old fashioned PBXs. Crooks hacking in to your system to make their own phone calls charged to your account for example. ITSPA has a working group that jumps on new VoIP security issues and regularly distributes information/data to members.

These re all issues that affect the development and growth of a new industry. If you are an ITSP and not a member of ITSPA you should think about getting involved. Ditto vendors of VoIP kit. If all you get out of it is the opportunity to meet service providers that in itself makes it all worthwhile.

Right, back to the meeting. You heard it first on trefor.net…

¹ bit flowery I know

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A Ministerial Roundtable on Net Neutrality had been scheduled for 24^th January (ie yesterday) with  Internet Minister Ed Vaizey and the major fixed and mobile operators due to attend. EV is expecting industry to produce a voluntary code of practice in respect of Net Neutrality. In the run up to the meeting and following individual discussions with some of the intended participants the Minister has apparently been unhappy with progress. The Round Table has been postponed until 28^th March to allow time for further industry discussion.

Net Neutrality is a very emotional subject. By and large in my view it is something that has been creating more noise than the issue has perhaps merited but I can understand people’s concerns. The issue of transparency is in particular an important one – if an operator has policies in place that affect its users then the users need to know. Such policies should also not be buried in the fine print of lengthy, seldom read sets of terms and conditions.

The one market sector that the “powers that be” have seemed to take a particularly lenient approach in respect of this in the past has been mobile. My view has been that provided mobile operators aren’t particularly blocking specific services (eg VoIP) then if these services don’t perform well because of congestion caused by capacity constraints then so be it. I also think it is ok to offer premium services that don’t have congestion or capacity constraints.

The work leading up to the Ministerial Round Table has however uncovered some interesting dirt.  The Internet Telephony Service Providers Association has long protested that Mobile Network Operators are blocking VoIP. ITSPA has now published a paper that goes into some detail regarding the MNOs practices in this respect.

In most cases MNOs are not transparent about their policies towards VoIP over mobile data¹. A typical customer of a typical MNO would not be aware, when purchasing a plan via the MNO website, whether VoIP was allowed or blocked (Vodafone are an exception, providing very clear information).

Some information is wrong or misleading. More generally customers would need to be well informed (for example understanding that they should search ‘Traffic Management’) in order to discover the policy of most MNOs towards VoIP. Market forces cannot be assumed to work if the market is not properly informed.

MNOs serving the majority of the market (Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange) either prohibit VoIP in their terms and conditions and / or charge a premium for using it and/or actively block it. This is likely to discourage innovation and investment in services that use VoIP over mobile data. I can’t see that that there is a technical justification for this prohibition – VoIP is not bandwidth hungry like video.

The Ed Vaizey initiative seems timely and industry should be seen to be toeing the line here. I’m not confident that this will be the case, especially when it comes to MNOs. If you are an individual end user it is hard enough to choose a tariff let alone wade through the complexities of the Ts and Cs.

This whole discussion deems doubly important as we now approach the 4G spectrum auctions. This is an opportunity for Ofcom to ensure that Net Neutrality and transparency is built natively into the new services as they are rolled out. I’m not arguing for favouritism for VoIP here but I am saying that legitimate services should not be discriminated against, regardless of the pricing point and level of service.

Let’s hope Ed Vaizey gets what he is after on 28^th March. If I can track down any drafts of the code of practice I will.

¹ a legitimate question would be why you would want to make a call VoIP over what is quite an expensive mobile data transport medium. That is really neither here nor there as far as this debate goes and costs will in any case plummet over the next few years.

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I love it when our engineers come up to me and say “want to see something interesting?”. Today one of our top VoIP engineers showed me the ProTalk IP (SIP) antivandal door entry unit.  This is a rock solid door entry system controlled by SIP video phone.

Pressing the button initiates a sip call to the number / call group of your choice, sets up a video call upon being answered and allows the operator to open the door remotely by keying in a prearranged number.  The system will in theory work with any SIP video phone – we have tested it with the SNOM 8xx series and a number of soft clients.

It should even work on mobile SIP clients – any SIP phone that can generate a DTMF tone. At Timico it is being tested as part of the security for the new data centre but it is easy to imagine it being used in many application areas.

I could even envisage using it at home – kids forget their key and you not in the house? They push the button and you answer on your smart phone and let them in.

ProTalk is a product of ProVu communications in Huddersfield.  They are good lads and worth taking a look at.

Isn’t technology marvelous!

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I went to my first VoIP meeting in (as far as I can remember) the summer of 1999. It was a pulver.com “Executive Retreat” located at the ETSI HQ in Sophia-Antipolis near Cannes in the South of France. It’s a tough life but someone has to live it.

Since then we have been through a couple of recessions and a long hard climb for VoIP technology to become accepted. I knew the day would come but VoIP is now so mainstream that businesses think nothing of installing “VoIP only” voice solutions with no legacy ISDN or analogue lines as backup.

They are doing this because of two things:

Firstly the cost of IP connectivity has plummeted and at the same time IT departments have realised that VoIP does = reliability, especially when it comes to DR scenarios.

Secondly the cost of implementing VoIP solutions versus TDM based trunks has come down so much that a business can see step functions in cost reductions that have been absent from the communications market for some years now.

For example one of our customers, the car manufacturer Honda, has been able to save 45% of the cost of its voice communications by moving over to SIP trunking instead of ISDN. Honda have resilient internet connectivity to support the VoIP network but still see the huge cost benefit.

It is also quite normal to see people installing PBX systems that dispense with any form of ISDN backup and that rely purely on broadband for their IP connection. I guess time has told us that these solutions “just work” and concerns over quality and reliability have been unfounded.

We still have a long way to go on the VoIP journey with technological developments such as High Definition (HD) voice and Fixed Mobile Convergence beginning to gain traction and whilst the future is exciting there is certainly a sense of satisfaction in seeing VoIP finally becoming the mainstream solution for voice communications.

For anyone interested I’ve penned a short Guide_to_migrating_to_sip . So much has been written on this subject that I’ve kept it short and hopefully to the point.

Also for anyone interested the header photo is by Nevit Dilmen taken from Wikipedia. You will easily guess the relevance – it adds a bit of colour (grey) to a subject that isn’t the sexiest going.

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Rumours abound this morning on the Twittersphere that Microsoft is about to announce the acquisition of Skype for $8.5Bn. That’s 10x 2010 revenues, a year in which Skype reported a loss of $7m! That loss itself was a dramatic reduction on the previous year but Microsoft is still betting on big growth ahead.

This is all very good news for entrepreneurs who invested in private communications companies way back in 2003/2004 and whose businesses are actually profitable .

I’m not sure however how the Skype brand fits with Microsoft. Skype is associated with free or very cheap. Microsoft is expensive although not as expensive as Apple. Microsoft is desperate to improve its web offering which Skype does for it.

Skype has a big overlap with MSN. Is this a problem? Do people still use MSN? Skype also overlaps with Lync. How will that fit? Lync for medium and large enterprise, Skype for small? Or will they just run Skype as a separate entity in which case where will the leverage come from? Note that only 2% of search engine traffic to this blog is from Bing!

I don’t have the answers. Also I’m sure there are many more questions than this. What I can say is that life is far from boring when it comes to the internet and the world wide web. More, I’m sure, in due course.

PS I don’t normally indulge in rumour mongering but this seems likely to break today and I will be out and about and not in a position to post to the blog. So I’m getting in early!

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Consultants Analysys Mason are conducting a study on behals of Ofcom into determining the location of Voice over IP callers making calls to emergency services. It is is easy to determine the location of a caller is in the old fixed line world because a phone number is recorded based on the location of a piece of copper “plugged” into the local telephone exchange.

This is not the case with VoIP.  A VoIP number could be anywhere on the planet. Anywhere there is a connection to the IP network/internet that is.  Ofcom recognises this and wants to understand whether there is a practical solution.

UK technical standards organisation NICC has published (Jan 2010) a potential solution to the problem though this is complex and also limited to VoIP users using UK ADSL connectivity.

This solution stems really from network architectures familiar to large telcos and my first reaction is that it is very expensive. One might ask what price a life? This is a reasonable question. We all have grannies and nobody wants ours to be the one in the burning building dialing 999 only to find that the fire engine has gone to the other end of the country.

The counter is the same as is used for website blocking. Not only is it expensive but it is going to be fraught with problems. The expense is also going to stifle innovation and prevent new entrants into the market.  Most Internet Telephony Service Providers are still very small companies.

There is more. The system relies on UK IP addresses being used. In calling round some industry contacts to discuss this problem I discovered that the use of non UK IP addresses is quite common. One large telco often uses blocks of IPs that originate in France.   USA based IPs appear in the EU and vice versa.  Bring on IPv6 do I hear you say?.

IPv6 may help. I can see the day when everyone has their own personal IPv6 address/block just like they have their own mobile phone number today. It probably still won’t do enough to provide location data though.

I realise that none of this helps Ofcom. I will be responding to the survey but don’t believe that here is realistically even a medium term solution to this problem.

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I am pleased nay thrilled to report back from last night’s ITSPA Awards that Timico received the Highly Commended Award for Best ITSP (Large Enterprise).

The ITSPA Awards were held at the top of the BT Tower (Post office Tower to those over a certain age) which is a wonderful venue and all thanks to BT for hosting.

A couple of years back Timico won the best Unified Communications Award. Last night was a particular milestone for us as we have been expanding our horizons to work with larger businesses and this Award really reflects a lot of hard work that has gone into developing our proposition for that market.

Most ITSPs in the UK plant themselves firmly in the SMB space. Timico is able to play in a bigger market because unlike many ITSPs we are a fairly substantial ISP in our own right and an established MPLS networking business brings with it many opportunities to service the voice requirements of larger customers using our Genband A2 VoIP platform. The Genband platform coincidentally also won an award last night for best VoIP infrastructure.

The winners of the Large Enterprise Category were Virgin Media Business. We’ll beat them next year

Details of other ITSPA Awards cateorgy winners can be found here.

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It doesn’t seem unreasonable to blow your own trumpet on occasion and I am please to say that this time I can use the full register of that particular instrument.  Timico has been shortlisted for best Internet Telephony Service Provider in both SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprise) and Large Enterprise categories at the annual ITSPA Awards.

This is very pleasing as it fairly reflects the evolving nature of our business. A large percentage of our customers, as business demographics might suggest, are indeed SMBs. SMBs have represented the heartland of the hosted VoIP industry during its formative years.

Large Enterprises have traditionally opted for big PABX solutions, quite possible hosted. As Timico has grown we have won more and more business from the Enterprise sector and have found that this is an area of the market very willing to embrace hosted VoIP but also to mix and match premises based PBX and hosted using SIP trunks as the unifying factor. 

The biggest influencing factors here have been a combination of the maturing technology and the reduced cost of bandwidth across Wide Area Networks.

The Awards are at the BT Tower next Monday evening and are usually a great opportunity to network. Good luck to all the other finalists

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