Some of you may have read the news already but for those of you who have not please visit Google’s press center for further information.

It’s kind of scary seeing my mug on John’s post from the 27^th about GIPS mobile offerings.  However, as has been widely published in sources like Engadget, Gizmodo and the New York Times, there has been a crack in Apple’s normally impenetrable veil of secrecy around new product developments with the exposure of a prototype of Apple’s next generation iPhone.  The fact that the device has a front facing camera is the best response to the piece covered in John’s post.

A frequent criticism of Apple is that they don’t do anything that revolutionary.  It is that claim that makes Apple’s success all the more spectacular and game-changing.  Portable .mp3 players existed long before the iPod, but Apple’s entry changed not only the company, but the entire industry.  Similarly, the iPhone and the iPad were neither the first smart phone nor the first tablet PC on the market, but their introduction and resulting success have changed their markets significantly.  With the iPhone, hundreds of thousands of applications have proliferated, creating a whole new market for applications developers (historically a weakness for Apple).  Adding voice and video to some of these applications will enrich the experience for the end user.  To be sure, mobile video conferencing is again not a new category, as AT&T introduced video share about three years ago.  However, the service was not very usable and the device support was not where it needed to be.  However, with the introduction of frame-by-frame access to the camera which is included in iPhone OS 4 and the front facing camera which appears to be part of the 4G design, Apple will be poised once again to change the game with mobile video conferencing.

Now, no discussion of the leak would be complete without mention of the heavy handed response of Apple and the local authorities against Gizmodo and the individual who found the lost device.  However, coverage of that topic should be left to the professionals…or at least the fake professions at The Daily Show: 

We’ve had a busy few weeks here at GIPS. We had our fourth quarter earnings release, we announced our video survey of 1,200 business professionals throughout Asia and North America and we let the Apple application developer community know that our cadre of engineers has enabled the iPhone with video chat and video conferencing capabilities. Additionally GIPS will be exhibiting at Mobile World Congress next week to demonstrate both our HD voice capabilities and importantly video on mobile devices. Video and mobile have been more in demand from our customers in the last year and our business with customers in 2009 reflects this.

Mobile World Congress is the largest show in the industry with upwards of 50,000 people within the mobile communications industry attending. It’s also a place that a lot of business is concluded, new products are launched and where we see what is happening in the market on global and local levels.

While GIPS will be at the conference to learn we’ll also be demonstrating our technological strengths. Innovation comes from many small companies such as GIPS – perhaps technology that will present the industry with the type of innovation that will help drive business during the coming years.

GIPS will be at the show to make a difference and to demonstrate that you can truly see and hear the difference with GIPS. If you’re coming to the show you are more than welcome to stop by our stand in Hall 2. Hope to see you there.

I spent last week up in the Norwegian mountains moose hunting (and yes the hunting was very successful). This is way out in the wilderness, but a couple of years ago a cell tower came to a hilltop. No high speed data though because of limited link capacity out of there.

I brought my new HTC Hero Android phone to test it at this unusual usage scenario. Overall it worked very well. The most impressive thing is that it instantly jumps on a WiFi connection it has seen before. My friend that lives there has WiFi in his house and whenever I was at his house I synched up on email. Data roaming through the cell tower I had turned off. Another nice feature is that it warns for roaming charges.

One complaint I had was that the Microsoft Exchange Synch program was very slow. Don’t know why. The built in Gmail worked much better.

The big thing that happened in our business while I was away (at least for a Norwegian) was Cisco’s bid for Tandberg. In my mind, it further validates video conferencing and our vision at GIPS that anywhere, anytime, high-quality video conferencing is the future.

It’s no secret that GIPS is focused on real-time IP voice and video communications. We are always watching market trends. This morning was no exception. I was going through the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index (CVNI) and noted with interest that, among other things, IP traffic in the Middle East and Africa will reach 1 exabyte per month by 2013.

According to the CVNI, at a CAGR of 51 percent from 2008 to 2013, Africa and the Middle East will exhibit the highest growth of any market in the world. The next highest growth will be in Latin America at 50 percent, Central Eastern Europe at 49 percent, and in fourth place, Asia Pacific at 42%.

I poured a cup of coffee and sat back to consider these market statistics for a moment.

Then it happened. An article on my news feed grabbed my attention. The headline was: “Pigeon transfers data faster than South Africa’s Telkom”.

For those of you who care, Telkom is South Africa’s leading Internet Service Provider (ISP) with annual revenues of almost $1.0 Billion USD and about 1.8 million subscribers. The economy of South Africa is Africa’s largest. Internet speed and connectivity are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also prohibitively expensive.

The test was performed by Unlimited IT, a call center operator that has grown increasingly frustrated with the speed and capacity of the Telkom internet infrastructure.

You’ll be pleased to know that the 11-month-old pigeon, “Winston”, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban. He had a data card strapped to his leg. When he got there, his handlers leisurely downloaded the data and accomplished the entire file transfer in two hours, six minutes, and fifty-seven seconds.

The article goes on to say that Unlimited IT had transferred only four percent (4%) of the data over the Telkom network in the same period of time. Presumably this means that if everything stays linear, “Winston” was 25 times faster than the Telkom network. Let’s give a shout out to “Winston”.

Incidentally, the article also mentions that “Telkom could not immediately be reached for comment.”

I think it’s time for Winston to carry another message. Naturally it will be addressed to Telkom management.

After my last post, in which I mentioned that G.722 is not well suited for usage over unmanaged networks such as the Internet, I received a few comments on that topic and therefore thought it would be helpful to elaborate further in this posting.

Let me start with trying to straighten out a question mark related to G.722. What is really G.722?  When we talk about G.722, do we talk about one codec or the set of codecs that seemingly belong to the same group since they all have names that start with G.722? This set of codecs include, in addition to G.722 itself, G.722.1, G.722.1 Annex C, and G.722.2, which are all very different codecs (one could possibly argue that G.722.1 and G.722.C are not so different since basically G.722.1C is a super wideband version of G.722.1). Since they are distinctly different codecs it is customary to treat them separately and not use the G.722 name for the group of codecs but only for the actual G.722 codec itself. With this cleared out we can focus on the characteristics of G.722.

G.722 was standardized by the ITU-T in 1988 and is a wideband (7 kHz audio bandwidth) speech codec operating at 48, 56 and 64 kb/s. The technology it is based on is called sub-band ADPCM. ADPCM coding is recursive which results in a strong dependency on previously received data when decoding at the current time instant. This obviously has a negative impact on performance when frames of data are lost. Without the proper history of data 100 % correct decoding is not possible and some kind of guesswork has to be included.

Even though G.722 is an old standard it is still being considered for new deployments, such as the New generation DECT (DECT-NG) standard. The main factors making it an attractive choice are that it is a wideband codec with low complexity and no IPR issues. It supports three rates, 48, 56, and 64 kb/s which facilitates some limited adaptation to available bandwidth. However, on the negative side you have to consider that the quality for the bit rate is not very high, and the robustness against packet loss is not the best.

In fact, until recently there was no packet loss concealment (PLC) technique defined for G.722. Implementing PLC was left completely to the device or application manufacturer.  The result is that the PLC and, and therefore G.722 performance, varies significantly between implementations.  Recently, The ITU added Appendix III and IV to the G.722 standard which specifies two PLC algorithms that can be used with G.722. Appendix III delivers better quality but at the price of significantly increased decoder complexity while the complexity increase when using Appendix IV is negligible. Both are significantly better than typical implementations I have seen previously. However, both algorithms are based on IPR that most likely require a license from the patent holders to be used.

For more details, please read this study of several ITU wideband codecs. The following figure, taken from the France Telecom presentation compares the performance of G.722, G.722.2, and G.729.1:

The conclusion is pretty clear. In clean (no packet loss, no background noise) conditions G.722 at 64 kb/s has noticeably lower quality than G.729.1 and G.722.2 at 24 kb/s. It should be noted that the quality of G.722 at 56 kb/s and 48 kb/s drops significantly over the 64 kb/s mode.

Consider the following figure from the same study for comparison of PLC  methods for G.722:

PLC A is Appendix III, PLC C is Appendix IV, and PLC 0 is a brute force method that just sets all missing codewords in the decoder to what corresponds to the minimum value, which give a lower limit on what a PLC method for G.722 can do. If the packet loss concealment methods proposed in the new Appendices to G.722 are used, decent quality can be achieved up to about 5 % packet loss, however less sophisticated methods cannot even handle 1 % of packet loss properly.

In summary, the pros of G.722 are that it is IPR free (PLC not included) and the relatively low complexity. On the negative side you find a high bandwidth utilization, lower quality than other options even at significantly higher bit-rate, and inconsistent packet loss robustness. As has previously been stated, it is clear that the codec in itself is just a small piece of the puzzle and that it is the implementation, more than anything else, that determines the quality.

Links to a few codec comparisons:

http://www.cablelabs.com/specifications/PKT-SP-CODEC-MEDIA-I07-090702.pdf

http://portal.etsi.org/stq/workshop2007presentations/Quinquis_slides.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs

I certainly welcome the recent push for HD Voice, especially as GIPS has been providing HD Voice for almost 10 years now. Many has now used HD Voice in applications such as Skype, and more usage is needed to establish this new quality level in a wider market.

The HD voice discussion has led to surfacing of an old issue, namely the focus on the codec. Tsahi writes in his blog that the codec is the main obstacle to HD voice. However, he points out that HD voice is much more than the codec, which I can’t emphasize enough.

HD voice is all about high quality which puts even tougher requirements on everything else like noise suppression, echo cancellation, gain control, etc.  In fact, once you have solved all those problems the codec becomes important and will be the limiting factor for the quality given everything else is taken care of perfectly. The important thing to understand is that the codec is just one small piece of the quality experience.

Of course, there are nuances also since the robustness of the codec to things like packet loss is important.

INTEROPERABILITY is one very important factor with the codec that probably is why it is so prominent in all discussions. I do think we will have to live with a multitude of codecs though. A few years ago, I thought we had more than enough codecs, but apparently not since they keep coming …

This past Friday was SUPPOSED to be a vacation day camping at the best urban campsite that I know of at Kirby Cove.  However, with a major integration of our video technology underway at a top tier Internet Service Provider (stay tuned for news), duty called.  And to reach out to our Swedish Engineering team, I needed only to use my Samsung Omnia from Verizon to help coordinate some last minute details.  Late Thursday evening, my first stop down the information superhighway on my Smartphone was an application called Nimbuzz (see John’s mobile HD voice post from last week).  With Nimbuzz, I was able to see all of my IM contacts’ presence and use HD voice to talk to Magnus at the start of his Friday morning workday (all from the convenience of my handset over the data network!).  I was also able to send off a few quick messages to other team members regarding a few other ongoing projects and stay on top of my email for any urgent issues.  Then, I participated in an hour and a half long conference call using the dial-in portion of GoToMeeting from Citrix Online (See Larry’s personal breakthrough post from March).  All of this technology allowed me to be very productive and completely untethered from my office.  It is possible that my post does not surprise you, and if so, I am glad.  The promise of these technologies is beginning to receive wide-spread recognition and use.  However, this was my view of the full moon rising over The City, the Golden Gate Bridge and the beach at Kirby Cove:

This was my office furniture:

And my office equipment:

Two pieces of recent news seem to indicate that VoIP and Unified Communications are benefiting from efforts to tighten belts. This is a topic that has received quite a bit of attention already, but it is noteworthy that the phenomenon appears to be taking place in both the home and the workplace.

Over the weekend, the Boston Globe ran an article comparing various residential VoIP services. It surveyed the gamut of options, from PC applications like Skype and pure-play VoIP services like Vonage, to offerings from cable/telco companies such as Verizon. While the article could have been written about 3 years ago, what seems to be pushing the topic to national consciousness is the need to save money on home phone service. The piece clearly recognizes VoIP as a solution (perhaps the solution), and helps everyday folks not familiar with the industry navigate a crowded landscape.

Perhaps even more intriguing was the release of a report from Frost and Sullivan on web conferencing and collaboration.  The report claims the market for services from such companies as Citrix GoToMeeting, WebEX and On24 is expected to double by 2014 and reach revenues of $400 million. Among the driving factors, economic uncertainty seems to loom large.  Companies are looking to reduce travel expenses, and UC solutions can deliver the kind of interaction that would otherwise require face to face meetings. Furthermore, the SaaS model has proven stable enough that companies are comfortable going with more cost-effective hosted solutions to meet their collaboration needs. Finally, technical hurdles have been overcome to deliver reliable, high quality voice and video applications.

Today GIPS announced that CommuniGate Systems will utilize our VoiceEngine PC solution to enable their Flash-based rich media application called Pronto!. While this is obviously great news for GIPS, I think the real story here is about the evolution of VoIP and the maturation of the Unified Communications market.

About 10 years ago, it seemed like the VoIP market was very equipment and enterprise focused. Companies could cut costs by migrating to IP PBXs for their phone systems, and carriers could similarly reduce costs by routing their backhaul traffic over IP. Then about 5 years ago we saw an explosion of PC-based IM/softphone applications, like Skype and Google Talk, that delivered high quality calling to consumers for free or very low costs.  The last couple years have been about the convergence of those paradigms in the form of Unified Communications applications. CommuniGate and Pronto! offer a perfect example of technology that is on the cutting edge of the UC trend.

While cost reduction was the main driver behind the early VoIP trends, features, functionality and ease of use are all crucial for the UC market. By combining email, IM, calendar, presence and VoIP functionality, Pronto! incorporates pretty much every form of communication in one application. In addition, the Flash-based UI is the ideal solution for hosted services looking for a lightweight, easy-to-use client. The result is a really cool application that gives users everything they want at their finger tips.

One implication of the UC boom is that “VoIP” as a term is becoming less relevant, and is simply the method for delivering voice to these next generation applications. This should be viewed as a positive development, as it signals the market has matured to the point where users have come to expect high quality voice to be included in a variety of applications, and that voice is still a primary mode of communication for most people.