If two recent reports are any indication, video is quickly becoming crucial to enterprise communications. According to a report by Dell’Oro Group, annual revenues for the Unified Communications market will outpace the enterprise voice market through 2014. While there are many important features included in a UC solution (including voice), video is a prominent component that helps differentiate a UC product from one that only includes voice.

In addition, GIPS released a survey last week of 1,200 business professionals in the US and Asia regarding their use of video conferencing, and discovered some surprising results. Among the findings:

-          In three of the four countries surveyed, a majority of respondents had participated in a video conference or video chat.

-          79% of those who use video conferencing technology rely on consumer applications.

-          The most common reason that participants gave for using video conferencing was to communicate and understand others more clearly and effectively.

-          Video delay and freezing continue to be technical concerns for many users.

If you are interested in reading the entire report, you can find it here.

Browsing around the papers presented at the latest NOSSDAV workshop, I found “An Empirical Evaluation of VoIP Playout Buffer Dimensioning in Skype, Google Talk, and MSN Messenger”. Having worked extensively with GIPS’ jitter buffer algorithms, and having some knowledge of Google Talk, I was intrigued by the title. The paper had some interesting experiments, but also a few giant leaps to conclusions.

The paper’s authors have created a laboratory test bench for PC soft phones where they emulate different network conditions (delay, jitter and packet losses), and measure objective speech quality (PESQ) and the end-to-end delay. Then they apply a previously proposed hybrid between PESQ and the E-Model to arrive at a score which takes both measured speech quality and delay into account. The idea is that both audio quality and end-to-end delay contribute to the total conversation experience, which is an easily supportable proposition. Finally, they derive an optimal playout buffer delay for each network condition based on this hybrid measure. I will come back to this approach later.

The experimental part of the paper, setting up the lab and examining the three clients, seems all fine to me, even though I’m not sure that their delay estimation algorithm really can cope with the rapid delay changes that modern jitter buffers apply. They also make rather wild assumptions on coding, packetization, and soundcard delays. But those are minor issues. My problem is their use of the objective hybrid model as a guide to optimality. It is widely know that PESQ is rubbish when it comes to assessing agile jitter buffers, simply because it cannot follow the swift delay adaptation. Tagging on a delay impairment factor to obtain a total user experience number frankly doesn’t improve the situation.

The authors wrap up their work by comparing the measured delays of the three clients, with the delay that renders the highest score in their hybrid measure under the same network conditions. The three clients all exhibit different behavior – not very surprising since they have different jitter buffers – but none of them follow what the authors claim to be optimal. Hence, the user experience of all three VoIP clients could be vastly improved, if only the “optimal” delay would be applied, is their conclusion. Allow me to disagree.

Surely these VoIP clients can be improved, but to distrust the man-years of design and implementation, and endless hours of in-house and customer tuning and testing, I need something more than the broken compass that is PESQ.

Earlier this week I listened to a webinar from CommuniGate on HD voice. (In fair disclosure they are a customer.) It was interesting because you had three companies in the chain of HD voice – GIPS, CommuniGate and Deutsche Telekom.

The benefits of HD Voice were discussed and the subject also addressed why network operators should view it as an excellent value added service particularly for the SMB market. While the main focus of VoIP services to date has been cost reduction over quality, HD voice heralds a new generation of high-fidelity voice communication services, which allows business and consumer users to have a more natural and reliable voice communication experience than ever before.

Mobile operators are missing significant revenue opportunities in the SMB market where workers on the “move” need increasingly reliable high-fidelity voice quality to interact freely with other users and automated systems. It is estimated that the worldwide SMB market for VoIP services will reach $10.4 billion by 2014. Most of this revenue potential, however, will be directly dependent on how well integrated and easy to use various media will be, and to what extent it will deliver quality features not previously available to SMBs at accessible price points.

CommuniGate is beating the HD voice drum to get carriers to listen. Their MobileOffice, a Unified Communications hosting platform, enables network operators to deliver high-value, HD Voice enabled communication solutions to Small Businesses. To explain CommuniGate’s offering in more detail they have released a whitepaper that looks at FMC as the bridge of two “HD capable” networks; the mobile and the Broadband IP Network (Internet).

What I especially like about CommuniGate is they don’t just talk HD voice, they act on their beliefs. To make sure everyone “gets” the HD voice message – they’re offering a free trial. So rather than read about HD voice, why don’t you try it out for yourself.

For the last 2 hours, I have been asking people to sell me on the iPad, the tablet computer Apple launched this morning a couple blocks away from the GIPS office. No one has succeeded. I had to ask people to do this because Steve Jobs sure as heck didn’t. When I first heard about the iPad, I didn’t really know what it did, and I am still not entirely sure why someone would want it. According to Jobs, the iPad “is so much more intimate than a laptop, and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen”. More “intimate”? What does that even mean? The only thing that quote tells me is that Jobs wants to make out with the iPad. I know what it isn’t (a smartphone or laptop) but don’t know what it is. Put simply, what problem that I currently have does the iPad solve? I asked my dad what he thought, and he put it very nicely; “My sense is it’s a solution looking for a problem.”  

Let’s back up and try to figure this out. I asked my coworker, Larry, to sell me. He started with the same approach as Jobs. “It’s more than a smartphone,” he said.  “All right,” I said, “so you can make calls from it? Is it supposed to replace my phone?” “No, it’s too big. It would be silly to make calls with it. It wouldn’t replace your phone” he said.

Ok, stop right there. If the iPad will not replace my smartphone, and the only features it shares with a phone are ones a smartphone also shares with a PC, stop comparing it to a smartphone. I am sure the iPad is also more capable than a USB memory stick, but since the iPad does not compete directly, or even indirectly, with a USB stick, a comparison between the two is irrelevant. Comparing the iPad to a smartphone confuses things.

So, now that we know we can ignore any comparison to a smartphone, and I still don’t know what unique need it fills, let’s focus on why the iPad is a better alternative to a laptop. This is the only approach that will convince me the iPad is worth its $500-$800 price tag. Since no one else has done this yet, let me try to convince myself. Here we go.

The iPad makes a great alternative to a laptop. First, it is smaller and more portable than a laptop. Yes, that is nice. Second, has a larger screen than a netbook, which means it is great for watching movies and browsing the web. Good, I like that. Third, just like your laptop, it runs word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs with Apple’s iWork suite. Excellent! I need those. Wow, I am really selling myself on this. So, since the iPad is great for multimedia entertainment, it must have a pretty large hard drive to hold all those movies I will watch, and all the music I want to listen to. Well, kind of. The cheapest model has 16GB of Flash memory, but the $699 model has 64GB. Ok. That’s a little pricey, but I am sure I can store all those files on an external drive and just take what I need with me. Maybe, but you would probably need a PC to do that, since the iPad doesn’t have a USB port. Oh. I thought I was trying to replace my PC. All right. I guess I can figure out how to get by with that much storage. Well, I bet the iPad is great at all the basic productivity tasks if I need to take work home or on the road with me. I can easily work on all those spreadsheets and presentations when I am on the go. Maybe. But the touch screen and lack of a keyboard and mouse might make that difficult. Oh, yeah. It might be hard to get work done without those things. You can get a separate keyboard and mouse. Right, though that kind of kills the idea of portability. Ok, well I bet it will be great for sharing photos. Yeah, except you need a PC for that. Oh, right. No USB port. Or memory card reader. Oh. Hmmm. So, what would I use this for? It is great for surfing the web! Right. Tell me again how it is better than a smartphone.

I spent a good 4 hours yesterday watching my favorite football team, the Minnesota Vikings, self destruct as only they can. During the frequent commercial breaks, I noticed the over abundance of ads for mobile carriers. There were the usual pudgy Owen Wilson AT&T ads dueling with the Verizon map commercials, along with a few Sprint and Metro PCS spots mixed in. This flurry of activity sparked me to wonder aloud, “How competitive is this market?”

The perception given by all the commercials is that the market is very competitive. Each firm is making its case for why it is the best choice- largest 3G network, fastest downloads, widest selection of phones, least restrictive calling plans, etc- and furiously trying to attract as many customers away from the other providers. Yet, I couldn’t help but think that, while they have offered more services, each successive cell phone plan I have purchased over the last 8 years has only been more expensive than the previous. If this market is that competitive, shouldn’t prices be falling?

If you believe the commercials, it appears as if they are. Verizon and AT&T announced reduced rates for their voice plans. Interestingly enough, they both settled at $69.99 a month, behavior which seems remarkably coordinated. However, as Marguerite Reardon pointed out for CNET, these new plans may actually be more expensive for many users, as they impose higher fees for web and data usage for owners of mid-range phones. 

This is an incredibly complex topic, which we have touched on in the past, but it seems like, at least until now, most carriers have tried to use subsidized phones as their main differentiator. By signing exclusive deals with manufacturers, and then offering phones for reduced upfront fees, operators are able to lure customers based on those phones’ features.  What many consumers may not realize, however, is that they are probably paying more in the long run than users of the same phones in other countries. Telecommunications tends to be a naturally oligopolistic market, and the U.S. mobile market is no exception. The high barrier to entry associated with owning large networks leads to only a small number of firms owning virtually the whole market. But what is most important (and what the FCC will probably be looking into) is if this arrangement is beneficial to consumers. I don’t have an answer to this question, but I do have a nagging feeling that I should be getting more for less.

SK Telecom announced last week that they plan to sell 2 million smartphones  in 2010. By 2013 they will offer up to 25 models of smartphone and round 40% of those will be running Android OS.

Also at the same time LG Electronics is betting on Android – they plan to rollout 20 smartphones this year with over 50% of these models are based on Android.

Apparently Korean mobile phone manufacturers are still optimistic about Android despite of Google’s launch of Nexus One.  In Hong Kong we notice the price of HTC Android phones like Hero or Magic dropped after Google start selling Nexus One directly.

From Gartner’s projection last Oct Android will be the 2^nd largest smartphone platform by 2012 – around 76 million units a year.  Looks like Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry has a very strong competitor moving forward.

I believe that this week’s news about Google’s threat to pull out of the Chinese market has far reaching implications for the ultimate opportunity to provide more openness.  David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer was interviewed earlier this week on CNBC (my apologies in advance for the really lame graphics, sound effects and screaming reporter):

Although Gmail was not yet a service available on google.cn, it was a service that many Chinese used on gmail.com.  And email is only one of the beneficial services available on Gmail.  Gmail (and its tightly associated Gtalk) is one of the leading providers of HD Voice.  Local Chinese Internet service providers Baidu and TenCent also offer HD Voice, but their ability to interconnect Chinese with international callers may not ultimately be as powerful as Google’s capability to do so.

During graduate school at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, I participated in a two week seminar in China on the ins and outs of doing business there.  Besides being very impressed with what I saw and the companies that I visited, it was very clear that there were a multitude of challenges to succeeding and that the effort was not for the faint of heart.  In many of the articles that I have read in the last week, I was surprised to read the speculation that Google’s true motivation for its actions was the second place ranking of its search engine.  Considering the challenges involved, I think that Google has accomplished a lot in the short time that it has been engaged in China.

Ultimately, voice and video over IP has the power to connect people in ways that aren’t fully possible via email or other more static information technologies.  This ability to connect and exchange ideas is an opportunity that all nations benefit from.  Hopefully, the Chinese government and Google can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement to provide the Chinese with the ability to reach out and connect with the rest of the world.  They have a lot to learn from us, and we have a lot to learn from them.

There are many things in our daily lives that we come to accept and have given up questioning as to why we tolerate it. From shoddy call centre service from credit card companies (“please press 1”, “please press # to listen to all your options again”, “sorry I didn’t understand that command, please call back goodbye”), short-changed at the below-average lunch place, (yes I still go!), no phone signal in the centre of the City to the daily bus driver who waits to see me running before he takes off for the next stop.

However, it looks like there’s a chance I can get my voice back when I read about Orange announcing it will be the first to offer mobile High Definition (HD) Voice for its customers in the UK – well a trial anyway with full nationwide roll-out due later in 2010

HD Voice offers sound quality that my concert-damaged ears can understand. As a company with offices across the globe and people I have to talk with people across different continents with varying accents, which can often be difficult to understand over the telephone. I accepted it for too long but now that issue is resolved when I’m able to use Nimbuzz, Yahoo or CommuniGate to speak with HD Voice clarity. However, often I’m stuck talking on a mobile with terrible-I’ve always put up with this – sound quality.

News that Orange is stepping ahead with HD Voice should send shudders down their competitor’s spines. There’s very little to differentiate one mobile service to another – they might tell us there is but really? However, HD voice on a mobile telephone that’s a huge differentiator for a device that is designed principally to talk.

As the baby boom generation go gently into retirement and their hearing deteriorates the offer of HD voice will be attractive. As too, will all the younger generation who have endured countless noise exploding concerts, nightclubs and iPod blasting music…HD voice must be and will be heard.

I’m a firm believer that HD Voice will herald a new era for mobile communications and a new standard for the telecoms industry – however, it’s that domino effect  that companies such as Nimbuzz, Yahoo, Google, Skype and CommuniGate that herald change – let’s hope there are some other mobile carriers that will brave an HD world.

So if you want your voice heard come and meet with GIPS next month in Paris at the upcoming HD summit and hear the difference.

Magic Jack has announced  a new version of its USB phone/computer connector that allows customers to make cheap phone calls with their cell phones. But hold on. For those who are saying “Yes, another mobile VoIP application”, this one is different. Instead of an application that uses a phone’s WiFi connection to make VoIP calls, the Magic Jack device is a femtocell that will connect a mobile phone to a user’s home broadband connection using the phone’s cellular radio.

Two questions instantly came to mind when I read this news. 1) Why is this better than a smartphone app that uses WiFi, and 2) why is this a cool “mobile” product if users are tied to their home networks?

The answer to both probably has something to do with Magic Jack’s target audience- your grandmother. Magic Jack is going after the substantial portion of American consumers who don’t know a lot about technology. Despite the popularity of the iPhone, Blackberry and Android devices, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t even know what a smartphone is. They don’t care about the latest apps, and they certainly don’t want to figure out how to make VoIP calls over random WiFi networks. They are just looking for a way to cut their phone bills, and maybe even replace their landline, but want something more reliable than just a mobile phone. And they probably buy products off TV infomercials.

In anticipation of the FCC unveiling a national broadband plan at its February 17 meeting, both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Obama administration have recently made public recommendations that could signal a meaningful change in the wireless broadband market.

First, in a report filed on January 4 that analyzed the state of competition for broadband Internet access, the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice said that the best way to promote wireless broadband competition was to free up more radio spectrum.

 “The scarcity of spectrum is a fundamental obstacle that the commission should address,” the Justice Department said. “Reallocating spectrum that is being underutilized would encourage the deployment of wireless services and could help to make such services more competitive with wireline offerings.”

The potential increase in wireless spectrum is significant. The FCC could feasibly auction a sizable slice of the available spectrum; increasing the current 500 MHz to 1300 MHz over the next few years.

The DoJ went on to recommend that the FCC should organize any spectrum auctions so big wireless providers in any given geographical area cannot easily win these auctions. In other words, the FCC should foster a competitive wireless broadband market.

The Obama administration then released its recommendations the following day (January 5).  In a letter to the Chairman of the FCC, NTIA chief Lawrence Strickling said the administration also felt that additional measures were needed to ensure competition in markets where customers have little to no choice of broadband providers.

Let’s see: Both the Justice Department and the Department of Commerce are tasking the FCC with a national broadband plan that will dramatically expand the available wireless spectrum and insure that a competitive market is preserved.  Excellent.

As a consumer of both wireless and wireline broadband services, I am anxious to see what the FCC delivers on February 17.