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Business UC video voip

Debate – Low Cost versus Productivity Features – what will get the ITSP industry through the recession?

I attended the ITSPA council meeting in London today. One of the topics of discussion was the content of the forthcoming ITSPA workshop in Town on  12th March (ask me for details if you don’t already have them).

We had it down as “opportunities and threats in the recession” or words to that effect. Not much detail. The debate then covered a range of subjects that might be suitable for the workshop ranging from whiz bang new video phones to just lower cost services.

What we came up with, and I think this is going to make for a highly interesting afternoon, was a debate on whether it was lower costs or new features that was going to make people buy our services and get the industry through the year or two ahead.

Personally I think it is both but I am looking forward to the debate. If anyone wants to come let me know. There is a dinner afterwards and these are normally great evenings.

Categories
Business events

Party Time

I don’t know about the rest of you but by the time Christmas Day comes along I’m going to be partied out. It all started with the ITSPA Awards at the House of Commons on Thursday last week followed by lunch with customer Foxtons on the Friday.

Monday I had dinner with KeConnect MD Robert Kemp in Ipswich, lunch with NTL on Tuesday at Cafe Bleu in Newark. Last night it was the Timico management bash at the Olive Branch in Clipsham. Tomorrow night it is the Twang.net party at Monty’s in Newbury.

Then Monday it is the Timico staff party at Belton Woods near Grantham. Tuesday night it’s The Wig And Mitre in Lincoln. I’m assuming that Santa has already sorted out what presents to bring the kids because I certainly haven’t had time to do it.

I have to say that I am looking forward to the period of austerity that this time of credit crunch and financial uncertainty merits and will be joining the queue for discounted lettuce at the reduced section in Tesco’s on the 2nd January.

Categories
Business voip

BT's Policy Regarding Number Porting – Cease And Reprovide

When, as is increasingly the case, a customer wants to move his telephone number to a VoIP service the underlying analogue line is ceased. ie it stops working.

If that customer wants to use the (VoIP) number over his broadband connection then he has a problem because the broadband connection stops working because the line has been ceased. He has to wait for a new underlying number to be provided which ain’t a quick process. This is a very anticompetitive scenario because it makes it hard for an end user to reuse a number if it is their only line.

A year ago the industry asked BT to change their process so that the line could immediately have a new number to keep the broadband working. Nothing seems to have happened here so the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association is taking up the cause and will be lobbying BT.

I’ll keep readers posted here because this does seem to me to be an issue that is preventing a free market from working.

Categories
Business voip

BT’s Policy Regarding Number Porting – Cease And Reprovide

When, as is increasingly the case, a customer wants to move his telephone number to a VoIP service the underlying analogue line is ceased. ie it stops working.

If that customer wants to use the (VoIP) number over his broadband connection then he has a problem because the broadband connection stops working because the line has been ceased. He has to wait for a new underlying number to be provided which ain’t a quick process. This is a very anticompetitive scenario because it makes it hard for an end user to reuse a number if it is their only line.

A year ago the industry asked BT to change their process so that the line could immediately have a new number to keep the broadband working. Nothing seems to have happened here so the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association is taking up the cause and will be lobbying BT.

I’ll keep readers posted here because this does seem to me to be an issue that is preventing a free market from working.

Categories
Business internet ofcom voip

999 Call Traceability

Had a very interesting discussion with Chris Rowsell, Ofcom Project Director, who clarified what obligations the ISP community were likely to have regarding the traceability of calls to the Emergency Services.

Location information requirements for Internet Telephony Service Providers have been covered in a previous post. Ofcom, together with the emergency services establishment, and for obvious reasons, is trying to understand how real time information regarding the location of a caller might be provided.

The only information available that might help pinpoint a location is the IP address from which the call is being made. There are, however, many problems to be over come, and I’m sorry about the technical nature of some of these points for those who just read this blog for the occasional light entertainment. 

  • The IP address might be behind a NAT
  • There might be multiple Internet Service Providers involved
  • The call might be made from a wifi mesh network
  • Many ITSPs are not ISPs  and cannot easily relate IP addresses to locations.

It is physically possible to imaging the process by which this tracing could be done. Timico, for example, has records of where calls are made to and from. These are kept for billing purposes and contain IP address information. Timico can also link the address of a broadband customer to the IP address of that connection.

The act of hooking up both sets of data is far from being real time and  the cost of developing a system to do so would be huge and disproportional to the value. Certainly it would be unlikely to get past a cost benefit analysis. Interestingly the establishment values a human life at £1.4 million for the purposes of these CBAs.

CR accepted that there was currently no practical way of quickly linking the two sets of data. He did intimate that Ofcom would be initiating a project sometime next year to discuss a way ahead. I suspect that this will be a long and arduous process.

Categories
End User internet

Theatre Royal Update

I mentioned that I would chart the progress of the “Save Lincoln Theatre Royal” Facebook Group. The diagram below shows the membership growth over the past 12 days.

I’m not saying this is a stellar recruitment campaign nor making any point other than an observation on how this particular effort is going. The Group has however been publicised on BBC Radio Lincolnshire and its exposure is increasing.

What seems clear from the Group membership is that the demographics of Facebook are still squarely set with the younger generation.

What is also interesting is the difficulty I have had in recruiting Facebook friends from the UK ITSP community for the ITSPA Group – currently standing at 16 members after a few weeks of trying.

ITSPA is a closed group with membership by invitation only. However this is still slow progress. Most company representatives in the ITSPA world are in their thirties or forties I would guess and likely not comfortable in the Web2.0 space.

Business still has a long way to go with Web2.0.

Categories
Business UC voip

ITSPA Autumn Dinner

A very enjoyable evening was spent at a restaurant in Westminster last night as ITSPA held its Autumn dinner. Yours truly was asked to chair the after dinner debate of which, unfortunately, I can tell you nothing because it was held under Chatham House rules – what goes on tour stays on tour 🙂 .

What I can tell you is that the Sponsor of the evening, Telecoms Consultancy Illume now quotes the market for business hosted VoIP seats to be around 300,000 subscribers. Illume conducts a quarterly survey of the ITSP community to come up with their figures.

Interestingly VoIP players have seen the need to move away from selling VoIP as cheap telephony and are now looking at different added value angles such as Disaster Recovery and also the productivity benefits brought about by Unified Communications.

The ITSPA dinners are open to both members and non members and are not only a great networking opportunity but a wonderful source of information. If you want to know more about forthcoming events visit the ITSPA website or its Facebook Group or just drop me a line.

Categories
Business ofcom voip

Number porting

Number porting has always been a hot topic in the telecoms world. Why does it take so long? Why can I move a number from “service provider A” to “service provider B” but not from “service provider C”.

In the “old” world porting was (is) an expensive process involving one provider actually forwarding calls to another. The number is never actually ported, just diverted. Whilst the consumer doesn’t see the costs the network operator certainly does.

Way back in November 2007 Ofcom decided to make it easier for everyone, consumers and networks alike and mandated that the UK telecommunications provider industry sort itself out. What’s more Ofcom gave everyone until 31st December 2008 to get a database populated with numbers so that porting would be made easy – within 2 hours for a mobile number, for example.

This would make switching service providers really easy and provide for a more competitive marketplace etc etc.

A working party was set up that includes all major telcos in the UK together with representation of smaller businesses via ITSPA (Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association) and others. 

This activity seems to be making progress. Portco,  new company funded by industry to manage the porting process, is on the verge of being set up and a supplier/partner to build the database is near to being selected.

The initial requirement is for mobile numbers to be easily ported. Once the database is available the industry is being given until September 2009 to get it populated after which time mobile number porting should be a cinch.

Fixed numbers don’t have to be portable in the same way until the end of 2012 but I imagine that in reality it will happen a lot sooner because it is in the interest of everyone to make it happen.

Categories
Business events UC voip

The ITSPA AGM and Summer Reception

The annual ITSPA bash went ahead yesterday. Numbers were down a little, I suspect because of the encroachment of the holiday period. However once the formal proceedings were over we had a great set of panel debates and a talk from VoIPWatch blogger Andy Abramson.

 

I was down to moderate the Unified Communications panel. However due to illness I was stitched up with moderating the SME panel as well. This worked out ok because I was in two minds in the first place which one to go for. Timico’s sweet spot is SME but the sexy market leading stuff is Unified Comms (for the SME market in Timico’s caseJ ).

 

Interestingly of the fifty or so attendees the four panellists (Steve Mackenzie of ICU Global, Andy Abramson, Andrew Penn of Siemens Enterprise, Tony Cocks of Microsoft) and myself represented 5/6 of the organisations in the room involved with UC. I therefore invited Mark Owen of Nortel up to the stage to fill a spare chair and take part in the debate.

 

The fact that there were no other ITSPA members claiming to offer UC services is interesting. They are either offering straight dial tone products as is the case with the likes of Tesco and Orange Home (they may disagree with me) or are in the PBX replacement business.

 

There is an argument that says that the business market doesn’t want UC. However my take on this is that demand for UC is just about to take off as environmental and financial pressures come to the fore.

 

Key takes from the day?

 

Some big SIP trunk deals happening –  one company was spending £50k a month on call traffic with one ITSP.

 

Microsoft is launching a hosted version of OCS and is looking to locate one of its servers in Ireland. This is a direct service being launched by Microsoft. Not a partner play. Obviously the concern is that Microsoft’s marketing dollars can heavily influence their market share here. However after some debate the team came to the conclusion that this is an opportunity. Microsoft will make the market but a substantial number of customers will not want to deal with the big behemoth.

 

Also when it comes to selling communications to the SME market, which is a substantial chunk of the opportunity in the hosted space, customers like the direct touch. They need the confidence of knowing that they can trust their supplier and know who to call when they have a problem. Accessing support via an anonymous call centre won’t work for everyone.