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By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
Down in Miami last week, all the buzz was around FREETALK Connect, an PBX solution built to leverage Skype.
FREETALK Connect is schedule to roll out in March and will allow SBs (two to 49 users) to enable Skype calls from supported office phones, including the “free” Skype-to-Skype calls, mange Skype contact lists, and get inbound voice calls from Skype users. In addition, they can also participate in the Skype for SIP open beta to make low-cost global calls around the world from a desktop phone.
The box is a partnership between FREETALK and Jazinga, with the latter company providing the software platform for doing thing like callback/dial-around/ access to Skype buddy lists, auto attendant/IVR, paging, cal parking, remote extensions, music on hold, and conferencing. The FREETALK Connect box also includes managed routes to users, phone services, and apps, SIP/Skype service management, and router management.
Supported phones on the network are auto-detected and configured by FREETALK Connect and there’s an on-screen wizard for configuring everything that needs to be configured.
If that’s not enough, FREETALK announced the FREETALK Connect Alliance, an ecosystem of 13 supporting companies for the product to provide apps, products, and services for the box. Alliance members range around the globe from Italy to Taiwan and include Cloudvox, IfByPhone, Iotum, Jazinga, Skype, Tatung, Thomas Howe’s Light and Electric, Voxeo, and Voxbone.
By Doug Mohney, on January 29th, 2010
Shoveling out from under the backlog of CES, I saw two very different pieces of technology that will likely be tied together by next January. And they involve your car and your TV.
GM’s Chevy Volt (www.gm.com), the electric car that will save America (OK, maybe not, but you get it), has some onboard smarts that allow it to “talk” to you, so you can deal with it like a smart appliance.
Using a smartphone client (Android, iPhone, one of the Blackberry family) and remote connectivity through OnStar (and how well it will work the garage is an interesting question) will allow Volt owners to display charge status, the ability to schedule charge timing – including a manual “grid friendly” charge mode for when electricity is cheapest – and get email for charge reminders, interruptions, and full charge, among other things. There’s also a remote-start feature to warm/cool the car and you can review the MPG and odometer remotely if you need to.
So this rolls into part two, where Yahoo! Connected TV (http://connectedtv.yahoo.com) has expanded its footprint and released its TV Widget Developer Kit (WDK) to the public. You’ll be able to get YahooWidgets on VIZIO and Hisense TVs, plus ViewSonic is going to provide a backfit MediaPlayer. Deeper into the stack, MIPS and Sigma Designs are going to support the Yahoo Widget Engine, so Yahoo’s software will start proliferating onto more consumer devices.
(Hello, Google, Hello! I guess the TV isn’t cool enough for you to play with…Skype and Yahoo have already got their fingers on it.)
The WDK has a bunch of APIs to enable developers to write widgets using JavaScript and XML to deliver “dynamic content” to millions of TV sets and other consumer devices in the pipeline, so if you take the OnStar piece and put it with the WDK piece, your car will soon be providing you status updates on your TV!
Needless to say, the concept of car-as-network-device has my professionally paranoid friends more than a little squirmy. Someone hacks your car and it will be a Really Bad Day!
*ahem*
But let’s think about this whole Yahoo! open TV business for a moment. The cool kids on the block, like those using Digium Asterisk, could use Yahoo’s WDK to plug in presence and other features like visual voice mail over your TV.
Sure, you can currently get some TV-esque services from some of your friendly neighborhood cable franchises, but the Yahoo! toolkit means that A) Those cable franchises might get some of those bells and whistles cheaper via open code hacks and/or B) Enterprise and third-parties could go straight to their PBX infrastructure if they wanted.
Is this any better than just having a message coming straight to your cell phone? I don’t know, but it’s another option to think about.
By Doug Mohney, on January 22nd, 2010
Miami – Digium has officially launched AsteriskExchange, an online market for products integrated with the Asterisk IP communications platform (Or “open source communications engine,” if you prefer Digium’s buzz phrase.)
For outside observers of Digium, this is another one of those “Dull but good” announcements as the company continues to build a sustainable and growing ecosystem around its flagship product. On-line marketplaces are in vogue – likely to be a checklist item for VC tomorrow – and work well when there are plenty of developers and platforms/devices. Digium’s Asterisk has a community of 65,000 members (check) and millions of deployments worldwide (check), so this seems to be a no-brainer winner.
AsteriskExchange will offer everything from IP phones and gateways to call center solutions and vertical market applications; categories also exist for speech and text engines, voice prompts, and call center solutions, with new categories being created upon sufficient demand.
Asterisk developers and ecosystem partners (i.e. the phone and software guy) seem to be stoked for the prospects of the marketplace. Free listings are available for those who offer downloadable products at no cost, while pricing and promo packages are available for companies desiring a more commercial solution to be featured on AsteriskExchange.
By Doug Mohney, on January 20th, 2010
Billed as a move that “Changes Face of Cloud Telephony, Ifbyphone has purchased privately-held Cloudvox.
Terms of the deal were (as is typical with these privately held companies) not announced, but Ifbyphone has had a phenomenal growth rate over the past year.
Cloudvox is based in Seattle and enables developers to automate phone calls The company is a big Asterisk shop (hello Mark Spencer) and provides compatibility with existing Asterisk app and software libraries. It is also a scalable hosted service – duh, cloud – and allows developers to place, receive, and control phone calls from their own software, including the usual laundry list of Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C# and simple HTTP/JSON.
From a services perspective, this moves Irv and Ifbyphone into an expanded portfolio of services ranging from turnkey (Ifbyphone’s various offerings) to customization (Cloudvox) of telephony apps. The Phone 2.0 wonks should be going crazy with the possibilities.
By Doug Mohney, on January 20th, 2010
Aculab has announced that it is incorporating a dual redundant SIP service (DRSS) in a core product line. The actual application is expected to be available later this quarter.
Adding DRSS improves IP network reliability “similar to” TDM-based SS7 networks (i.e. like the old PSTN), so Aculab says communication service providers running it in apps like hosted voice, conferencing, chat, and contact centers will be able to provide closer “always on” performance for SIP-based services.
Be interesting to see how this (long overdue in some circles) feature takes off in the months to come.
By Doug Mohney, on January 15th, 2010
ADTRAN (www.adtran.com) entered the unified communications (UC) market last month. Whatsup with that?
More seriously, you have a traditional telecommunications hardware firm jumping into the fuzzy world of software solutions as a complement to the next step up the IP PBX food chain — more applications. Once you add VoIP and PBX functionality, the next thing many businesses want/desire is additional functionality to tie together all the pieces in the data food chain – voice, email, web, fax. And there’s also the win-win for system integrators/VARs to be able to add/offer UC to their customers as Yet-Another value-add.
However, it’s SOFTWARE, so the company will now have to deal with things like providing updates and more features and making sure the resellers offering UC are capable of offering customization skills that end-user clients desire.
From a size standpoint, ADTRAN’s UC solution can go up to 2,000 users — a bit bigger than the average 500-person ceiling in the more typical SMB definition, and opening up larger distributed enterprises.
Features for the UC solution include voice mail, unified messaging, fax server, auto attendant, graphical drag-and-drop for service creation (no programming), response (IVR) for inbound and outbound calling services, integration with databases, text to speech, call redirection services and more.
I think ADTRAN’s approach may have a lot of uptake because it’s relatively simple and straight-forward as compared to the mind-inducing headaches of complexity you see from larger name brands who start talking in code about customer-enabled business processes (yes, ADTRAN also mutters those buzz words) and defining as UC as every color of the rainbow except black and white.
The company’s real challenge is — as ADTRAN executives freely ‘fessed up — is figuring out how selling a software-based product works in its relationships with its resellers and with the company’s culture. Software and adding value to software (i.e. programming/customization by third-party) is a new ballpark.
By Doug Mohney, on January 4th, 2010
Most of my time over the past couple of weeks has been spent on HD Voice issues (www.hdvoicenews.com) and preparing for the HD Voice Summit at 2010 CES.
This week I will be out in Las Vegas and will likely be spending most of my Twitter-Time on HDvoicenews, but there will be some DougonIPComm traffic as well.
For instance, DiTech Networks has a tabletop booth at CES. Yes, DiTech Networks of the IP core/voice processing world. Plus I’ll be talking to Motorola, trying to get face time with Sprint, maybe abusing Belkin over the Gigabit Powerline gizmo, things like that…
By Doug Mohney, on December 23rd, 2009
The walking corpse of Nortel has entered into a “stalking horse” asset sale agreement with GENBAND for most of Nortel’s Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions (CVAS) business. It’s a deal that’s almost as interesting as last year’s “purchase” of Sylantro by BroadSoft. (translation = VERY).
Under the deal — with a big “BUT” – GENBAND would shell out around $282 million in cash with help from One Equity Partners to buy “substantially all” of the assets of Nortel’s North American, Caribbean/Latin America (CALA) and Asian (CVAS) businesses, as well as “substantially all” of the European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) portion of its CVAS businesses — I’m not sure what areas of the world this doesn’t include, since I don’t think there’s a Nortel NP/SP (North Pole/South Pole) division. There’s also about $100 million in balance sheet “and other” adjustments bouncing around in the offer.
Assets GENBAND would get include Nortel’s softswitching, gateways and SIP applications, plus all patents and IP (intellectual property). According to Nortel and reported by ChannelWeb, it has shipped more than 118 million carrier VoIP and multimedia ports including 10 million SIP ports to both wireless and wireline carriers all over the world, and it gained about 40 new carrier VoIP customers this year alone.
The big “BUT” is that this is a stalking-horse arrangement, so other companies can choose to place their own (higher) bids when the assets go up for auction in early January.
If you’re looking for the palace intrigue/things-that-make-you-go-hmm here, GENBAND was on a roll of rollups up until the credit markets got cold in the fall of 2008, with its last acquisition being a (rumored) all-stock deal for NextPoint back in September 2008. NextPoint, the product of a merger engineered by One Equity Partners, had the number #2 share of the SBC (Session Border Controller) market back then with 14 percent — Acme Packet.
The major player in that deal was One Equity Partners, who backed the “parents” of NextTone and and ReefPoint into the merger of NextPoint. Exactly how much GENBAND stock was shelled out for NextPoint is unclear, but “substantial dilution” seems to be a phrase bandied about by some observers.
Now One Equity is backing GENBAND’s “Stalking Horse” bid for Nortel’s assets. Be interesting to see what happens when real money and other players jump into the bidding process.
By Doug Mohney, on December 17th, 2009
Yes Virginia, this is the last of the ADTRAN photos. This set covers the network and software testing labs; up “stack” beyond the physical layer if you prefer… The poster below does a good job illustrating the different types of testing that network products go through.
You’ll notice there’s a lot of different testing that all flows through Design Engineering. One day, ADTRAN will get around to working up this whole thing in a bunch of cool web pages if they’re smart…
Gee, doesn’t this look like the inside of a CO (Central Office), complete with the overhead racks. ADTRAN’s carrier products get carrier-sized testing.
This is the DSLAM area as you can figure out by the pretty signs, a new touch. Last year, ADTRAN didn’t have the pretty signs or the testing flow posters.
 Looking at all these VDSL modems gives me DIGEX ISP flashbacks where you’d cram in tons of stuff on racks and racks. I didn’t bother to count. Can we just use the metric “boatload” as in “ADTRAN hooks up a boatload of VDSL modems to test its network gear.”
And if you haven’t figured it out by now, this is the IPTV test suite, another new edition/display added on for this year. Gotta love the large screen TVs. I wonder if they sneak in here with popcorn and wings during football season.
This is a peek into the FTTN (Fiber to the Node) room; it’s pretty small, yet they’ve managed to cram in a whole bunch of fiber deployment gear into the different bays, with each bay configured to the preferences of a specific carrier; Qwest is at the far left end, where the ladder is.
Moving onto one of my favorites, if you look down the center of the picture, you can see the “Wall of Phones” ADTRAN engineers built to do load and function testing for software/firmware updates. The walls have phones on both sides and has wheels so they can be moved around to where they are needed in the lab.
The flowchart documents the series of tests AOS (ADTRAN operating system) goes through for voice testing before it is certified for release. The jokers at Zynga and other social media sites might learn a few things about software testing and upgrades from this picture if they didn’t do their resource planning on the backs of napkins as an afterthought to “Hey, we need to do a software upgrade, d00d!”
This is ADTRAN’s “Wall of OTNs,” optical terminal devices, similar to the “Wall of Phones,” except it has fiber node devices on it.
By Doug Mohney, on December 14th, 2009
ADTRAN does an insane amount of in-house testing on the devices it builds. The physical testing that prototype devices undergo is, frankly, mind boggling. 
A peek into the high-voltage (lightening) test lab. Equipment has to take a couple of good hits from a lightening strike without catching on fire; note the extinguisher at the center of the picture and the nice thick protective glass enclosing the test area.
There’s also a lower-voltage test lab to make sure devices keep on running after taking a couple of minor electrical hits.
It looks pretty boring, but these are vibrational shaker tables. Apparently there’s a setting that goes up to “earthquake” to make sure devices continue to function after being rattled around.
This two story shiny metal box is the Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) test area — yes, you can ride the sign on the side as well. ESD runs 16 hours a day and I suspect they probably test drones and missiles for Redstone on the side.
Inside, the lab is one big EM shielded box, with Styrofoam cones laced with iron oxide to absorb radio waves coming from a device under test. The antenna sucks up RF from the device and can identify potential sources of interference.
A close-up of the radar, er radio absorbing cones.
The door to the chamber even has an all-plastic handle — no excess metal allowed. A device undergoing tests sits on an all-wood table — no nails allowed.
If you can’t stand the heat, you don’t want to be in this room. High-power lamps effectively cook devices up to 120 degrees — should you happen to leave your telecom gear out in the desert by accident.
Yes, Virginia, they do melt things here. Note the sagging top.
There are other big boxes scattered throughout the labs that submit test articles to over 90 percent humidity, sustained heat, sustained cold, and various other tortures.
Data collected is used to refine designs and ensure that the products going out the door will live up to the hardware warranty the company provides.
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