It’s not often I see public telephone boxes anymore – they are out there but who uses them? A recent article in the New York Times got me thinking about this archaic piece of equipment. Here in the US, we live in a society where 277 million people subscribe to a mobile phone service.

The ubiquitous home phone is also seeing a decline too. “The decline in the cordless phone market is indicative of a larger story,” says ABI Research practice director Jason Blackwell, “which is that of wireless substitution worldwide. In developed nations a growing number of people are dropping their fixed phone lines altogether in favor of mobile-only services.”

There are a multitude of reasons for this decline: mobile phone usage, cultural, cheaper long-distance calling services, the economy and perhaps relevance. Much like cable television losing out to the Internet, the landline telephone is losing relevance with the introduction of its younger sibling – the sleeker, smarter mobile phone.

However, the television may be set to regain its position in the household and push out its little cousin the telephone.

Only recently at CES did both LG Electronics and Panasonic announce Internet-enabled TV’s and a partnership with Skype. The Television is growing into new and expanded places and could function as both the PC and telephone. The possibilities for content, cable and Telco providers to monetize additional communication services in this way are vast.

Next week – GIPS will be presenting a webinar on the subject, so if you would like to sign up click here.

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.

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.

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.

2010 hadn’t even arrived before two carriers announced plans that made the last decade seem like it happened 20 years ago. AT&T asked the FCC to drop the requirement that the provider maintain a legacy landline infrastructure, signaling a move to an all VoIP system. A day later, France Telecom’s mobile unit, Orange, launched its HD voice service for UK subscribers. All you have to do to realize how quickly technology is changing is imagine reading that sentence in the year 2000 (or even 2008).

The AT&T request has all kinds of interesting angles that I am sure we will touch on as the week progresses (is AT&T trying to skirt FCC regulation? what happens to the 20% of consumers who rely exclusively on the PSTN? what does this mean for other service providers?) but what I am most interested in is the supposed death of the landline. I am not sure how others define the term, but a VoIP line is still a “landline” in my book. AT&T is still interested in providing home phone service; it will just be over IP instead of PSTN. I have written before that I think home phone service is going to eventually fall by the wayside unless service providers can actually offer innovative features or services (e.g. video calling) instead of treating it like an ugly stepchild and bundling it with Internet and TV. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about an all IP infrastructure. I think there are definite benefits (HD voice) to home VoIP service. It is just up to the provider to offer these benefits to justify the home phone’s existence.

Speaking of HD voice, Orange’s service should be a huge step forward for voice quality and consumer satisfaction. I read one blog post that claimed, “For most of the European languages, current scenario call quality is good enough”. I have to disagree. Maybe it’s because I have been to too many loud concerts, but most of the time I find cell phone conversations unbearable and have a difficult time understanding the other party. In ideal situations, cell phone technology typically yields a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of about 3.8, with most users hanging up when the quality drops below 3.5. When you factor in the background noise and echo that come with mobile conversations, I can’t be alone in my disdain for mobile quality. By expanding the audio frequency to 7 kHz, mobile users in the UK should be able to hear each other a lot more clearly.

As long as I have been involved with VoIP the debate whether QoS methods are the solution to providing good voice quality has been ongoing. With QoS methods I refer to protocols that allows for prioritization of packets that have low latency requirements such as VoIP packets. Of course, if from the VoIP applications point of view, the network is perfect you should also expect perfect quality. As a a side point, that is a very reasonable expectation but unfortunately something that is very often not the case. The reasons can be endpoint hardware or software related or a combination of both. I discuss some of the potential issues in a previous blog post.

The reason why QoS methods are not heralded as the savior of VoIP quality (and video for that matter) is that they are often impractical to implement and not as efficient as one might assume. For example, if the amount of data on the network that needs to be prioritized represents a significant portion of the total traffic the scheme will fail completely. Another issue is the impact on the so called background traffic that doesn’t get prioritized and may result in unacceptable behavior of the less prioritized data streams.

QoS methods are successfully used in well managed and controlled networks but because the VoIP traffic often traverses many networks, including the largely unmanaged Internet, rarely can end-to-end prioritization be guaranteed.

because of these limitations of QoS methods it is crucial that any voice or video offering over packet networks deploy endpoints that can compensate for network issues.

So, you may ask, what can I do on my own network? In this article in  ComputerWorld you can learn how to tweak your WiFi router settings to implement QoS on your home network. As I mentioned previously, this will unfortunately only help the performance of the WiFi network and it requires changing the router configuration in a manner most consumers are not aware of or not able to do because of the complexity involved. So, even though I think it is a good idea to make such adjustments they only solve problems on a small portion of the data path for a call (the actual broadband connection is much more often the real culprit) and are unlikely to be done made by most end users. Therefore, as a developer of a VoIP or video over IP product you can never assume that QoS will save you, you have to make sure that your product has been properly designed to mitigate network issues.

It seems that the slow holiday news cycle in the US has lead to media speculation. No, I am not talking about the Tiger Woods accident. I am referring to the industry publications that are abuzz over a rumored VoIP phone from Google.

While it seems plausible that we will see a Google branded phone in the next year, I have yet to hear a convincing business argument for why this would be a good idea, let alone why a VoIP phone would work in the current carrier-handset paradigm. As I wrote last week, I think Google is pursuing a very intelligent strategy by having an open OS that is available on a number of devices and networks. That strategy would seem to be jeopardized if Google followed an Apple-esque model of bundling hardware and software. In addition, carriers have shown absolutely no willingness to allow VoIP traffic on their networks, and I would imagine would be unlikely to subsidize a VoIP device from Google. The only way I could see this working is if Google sells the phone on its own, and users could go to a carrier to get a data plan, while using the phone for voice calls over WiFi. I am not sure how many people would line up for such a device, as anyone enticed by the proposition of cheap monthly phone bills would likely be turned off by the high upfront cost of an unsubsidized phone.

The rumors may in fact be true, but until someone presents a compelling reason why Google would launch a VoIP phone (or better yet, a reliable source willing to confirm said rumors!), I will continue to treat them as such.

GIPS is a company that never sits around. It’s a company that is constantly innovating, developing and leading the market. That’s why the Company announced the availability of VoiceEngine Mobile for Android today. GIPS VoiceEngine allows Android application developers to build solid performing HD voice (VoIP) enabled applications quickly, expertly without reinventing the wheel.

The first company to offer HD voice on Android-based mobile phones is Nimbuzz, the social mobile application company. Nimbuzz is rapidly gaining interest with over one million people signing up to use their service each month and with the addition of Nimbuzz on Android phones – it is only set to grow even faster.

It was only last week that Nimbuzz launched their new offering NimbuzzOut, which allows calls from the Nimbuzz application to any mobile or landline phone at affordable prices whether it’s 3G or Wi-Fi. As GIPS CTO, Roar Hagen said: “Nimbuzz continues to offer their users a distinctive unified social messaging application that connects popular social and instant messenger networks into one simple, user-friendly offering.”

In an earlier post I mentioned that Gartner has predicted that Android will become the second most popular smartphone by 2012 with 14.5 percent market share and iPhone with 13.7 percent market share. Now all I have to decide is whether to leave my iPhone for the new Droid!

A lot of what is written about mobile VoIP centers on carrier resistance to the technology, for fear of revenue cannibalization.  Today, GIPS and Israeli company Outsmart announced a partnership which could redefine the way carriers view VoIP. Outsmart has integrated GIPS technology in their Plug N’ Talk softphone to deliver high-quality VoIP to mobile customers. By offering a softphone that is tied to a user’s mobile account and loaded on a USB memory stick, mobile operators can use VoIP to retain customers and realize revenue from VoIP calls.

Plug N’ Talk is already successfully deployed with Filipino carrier SMART, and is targeted at Filipinos living abroad. With Plug N’ Talk, Filipinos can maintain their mobile numbers and accounts, while enjoying local rates for international calls from softphones to other Smart customers. But don’t take my word for it, check out the commercial. I have no idea what she is saying, but it sure looks fun!

Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of activity on the HD Voice front. I have myself participated in not less than three HD voice events since the beginning of the month. It started with the ITEXPO conference in L.A. in the beginning of September. A whole track was dedicated to HD Voice with several interesting panels. The room was full most of the time indicating a growing interest in this topic. I think people have started getting the benefits of HD Voice because now the discussion was much more focused on how it can get deployed quickly rather than what it is. In particular, the notion that just because you have a HD codec you don’t necessarily offer true HD Voice quality garnered a lot of interest. This was also the focus of my talk at the HD Communications Summit in New York a couple of weeks after ITEXPO. The codec is of course a crucial part of any VoIP solution and it sets the upper limit of the quality that can be achieved. So, a good HD Voice codec is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for offering HD Voice quality. Many other parts of the solution are equally important in order to achieve the best quality. The most important factors to consider are:

• HD capable microphone
  • At least 16 kHz sampling frequency
• HD Voice Quality Enhancement
  • Echo cancellation, noise suppression, gain control,…
• High quality HD Voice codec
  • Suitable for usage scenario
• End-to-end network HD Voice support
  • Preferably no transcoding
• Network clean-up
  • Quickly adapting jitter buffer and smooth packet loss concealment
• HD capable loudspeaker
• Low latency

Only if all these factors are properly addressed will the users experience true HD Voice. My colleague John Hermansen found a very good way of illustrating this message with this picture:

An HD solution with just a codec is like a clunker with really nice rims...

The most recent event covering HD Voice was The VON CTO Summit which was organized by VON in conjunction with the VON conference in Miami this week. The event was advertised as ”…a high-level dinner roundtable at which leading competitive service providers will develop a road map for creating a nationwide IP-based peering fabric that will bypass the legacy PSTN and support advanced services such as HD voice.” The results from this meeting will be announced in the near future.