AudioCodes is definitely expansion-minded, betting [...]]]>

Perhaps the biggest surprise/trend in LA this week was the move by established IP communications companies to start widening their playing fields, abet for different reasons.  Both AudioCodes (www.audiocodes.com) and snom (www.snom.com) rolled out new products that suggest better and better possibilities for growth in the months to come.

AudioCodes is definitely expansion-minded, betting that its backing of HD voice (HDVoIP, if you prefer) and hardware integration skills will give it a foot into the door of the ever-crowded consumer CPE space.  The company’s move – more fully documented over at HD Voice News (ITEXPO: AudioCodes announces all-in-one multimedia home gateway, bundle with mobile software) – follows a path started last year, when it started making IP phones for the enterprise space to complement its line of media gateways.

At least one service provider has signed up for AudioCodes MediaPack 252 Multimedia Home Gateway, which integrates an ADSL2+ router, WiFi, a DECT/CAT-iq radio, Bluetooth and the kitchen sink into a single box.  If that’s not enough, AudioCodes will also bundle the 252 with its mobile softphone client so you can get the whole wireless-wireline/over-the-top tie-in that seems to be the rage.

Ultimately, it appears AudioCodes wants/will be providing HD voice-enabled gear from edge to core in the consumer and enterprise. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company roll out more consumer and business CPE in 2011, so long as it A) Has a phone of some sort and B) Supports HD voice.

Snom’s move outside of phones and into IP PBX software appears to be more pragmatic.  The company wants to have offering for SMBs so dealers can do a one-stop-shop/integration free sale of phones and a PBX.  The 10 user version of the snom IP PBX is free, 20 phones will cost you, and 30 or more phones (up to around 150) version to cost some more.

Snom tends to run pretty light, so for the company to add a software-based IP PBX solution into the line up most likely means A) Long-time partner Digium and/or the Asterisk-based IP PBX offering just isn’t cutting it like it had in the past and/or B) There’s easy money to be made in the SMB IP PBX space of 20-150 users.

More specifically, you need a Gmail account and calls through your computer to American and Canadian numbers are free through “at least” [...]]]>

Making free phone calls just got easier through Google(www.google.com) (so long we all remember that “free” is not really free, but subsidized through someone else’s money) via “Voice Calls from Gmail.” 

More specifically, you need a Gmail account and calls through your computer to American and Canadian numbers are free through “at least” January 2011.  As is typical in the Great VoIP shell game, calls to other countries start at around 2 cents a minute to landlines, 15 cents a minute to cell phones.

One can get inbound calls through Gmail if you have  (free) Google Voice account.

Timing on this offer is everything, but when you pull up the comparison between Google’s rates and “Leading internet telephony provider,” The Goog’s per minute rates are equal to or better than “Leading.” 

If the folks at Skype haven’t already figured it out, Google is NOT their friend.

Three and four years ago, it was all the rage to A) Give away free phone [...]]]>

There’s been a slew of announcements fluffing a second wave of anonymous-style phone calling via the web. Nobody made money on the first wave, so I’m not sure where the beef, er, green is the second time around.

Three and four years ago, it was all the rage to A) Give away free phone numbers for web usage and B) Provide anonymous phone calling between two parties over the web.   Two and three years ago,  smaller companies went into the tank while larger companies just ditched the idea of “free.”

Digitrad, making a big push at DEMOfall ’09, seems to be the latest of the guys marching down the old trampled path to doom, offering up a free “multimedia” phone number, a .tel domain name and “free call forwarding” and a flat fee to “free” dialing to locations around the globe.

If your business model is JUST providing voice via the browser, I can kinda sorta get it.  C2Call (www.c2call.com) has got a Friendcaller.com app, but then it slips into the “Gee, you can also call phone number for only pennies (well, Euros) per minute” mode… which didn’t end well for very many of the Telecom 2.0/Phone 2.0 wave…

Vivox may have the most interesting play in the space, just having announced its beta launch in Facebook and using a wideband (but not G.722) codec for all of its logged minutes on SecondLife and multi-player games where part of the fun is talking smack in real-time.

Hmm, I’d love to leave short voice messages to certain people in “Mafia Wars”…

The “Vonage World” plan provides unlimited calling around the world to more than 60 countries, including India, Mexico and [...]]]>

Running around last week, I didn’t have a chance to post anything about Vonage’s unlimited flat-rate calling plan and the throw-in of unlimited “readable” voice mail.  So I’m playing catchup and Vonage is playing catch-up.

The “Vonage World” plan provides unlimited calling around the world to more than 60 countries, including India, Mexico and China under the current flat monthly rate of $24.99.  It is interesting that this is happening at the same time where GigaOm is reporting that Skype is going to hike its connection fees for its “non-global” countries from 3.9 cents per call to 7.9 cents — but not the per minute calls. (PS: Om, if 6 cents per call is going to discomfort you from calling your mom on the weekends, you are one cheap bastard…it is SIX CENTS P-E-R call. How many times are you calling mom, dude? Let’s see, at 10 times per month, that’s 60 cents.) *ahem*

The Visual Voicemail service will provide unlimited readable voicemail delivered via either email or SMS text message. It’s cool, if I was starting from scratch I might be tempted, especially if/when (third quarter, where is it) the mobile client for smart phones comes out.

Vonage is rolling out new products; yes this is Good for the company.  But are all these new products too late to stop the bleeding of its customer base?  Third quarter and fourth quarter numbers are going to be very interesting.

Competitors for vanilla voice are numerous. You figure all the cheapskates (see above), have migrated to Skype and other soft-client alternatives.  Impulse buyers and “What do I get <fill-in-loved-one>?” and tech geeks will be tempted by ooma’s telo product at Best Buy and Radio Shack.    Cable has been pounding away with triple play bundles and phone companies are matching them.

I’ll give the current executive management at Vonage credit — they have got the company moving, and they’re prepared to go down swinging.  But the squeeze in churn is on, bunkies…

The half-empty argument is pretty straightforward and buried at the end of the company’s rah-rah “We’re in the black” verbiage. Vonage lost a net 89,000 subscribers [...]]]>

I’ve been spending the last day staring at the ocean and pondering what the latest financials for Vonage really mean.  Is the glass half empty or half full?

The half-empty argument is pretty straightforward and buried at the end of the company’s rah-rah “We’re in the black” verbiage. Vonage lost a net 89,000 subscribers last quarter, which is chump change with around 2.5 million subscribers on the books, but the company’s run rate in adding subs has slowed for a while, then went red last quarter with a  net loss of 6,000 subs.

For a while, Vonage was parroting the “When the economy is bad, we’ll gain because we’re a cheaper alternative to domestic phone service” babble, but the trend line for new subs is downward trending. Time to face facts: The very cheap are going to MagicJack and the thrifty-minded are taking advantage of triple-play bundling by telcos and cable companies.

Add onto this problem #2: Vonage’s monthly churn rate has risen from 3.1 percent per month to 3.2 percent.  No matter how you slice it, Vonage has been around the 3 percent range for churn, so this is an ongoing problem that they haven’t managed to manage yet.

Finally, we come to chronic problem #2: cost of customer acquisition.  This quarter, Vonage spent a whopping $363 per signed customer, a number that has gone UP  both from the last quarter and on a year-to-year basis. This time last year, Vonage spent $283 per customer, while last quarter the company “only” spent $290.

Double-wammie here is that market expense was down $14 million from the first quarter as Vonage “eliminated redundant spending, offset costs for prior period promotions and transitioned to a new marketing campaign.”  Sooo, they cut their marketing expenditures and raked in fewer customers per dollar spent — it ain’t pretty.

For the price of of what Vonage spent to acquire new customers, ooma would have given each customer new phone hardware, five years of phone service — and still have around $113 or so left over at list price (plus $20 more for the sale this week as ooma unloads generation 1 hardware).

Balance that against the half-full argument – record earnings of $31 million, making the seventh consecutive quarter of positive and increasing adjusted EBITDA.  There’s a bunch of new (for Vonage) products in the pipeline to leverage its existing customer bases, with plays in the mobile and international markets. Vonage also believes that its new marketing campaign will drive more customers…. we’ll see. It also has lowered its total cost in delivering phone service, but the costs per line are up about 9 cents. (Multiply by 2.5 million to figure out the real money).

Vonage has a long way to go before it breaks out the champagne.

On the first call, I logged into the weekly VoIP User’s conference session using ZipDX and G.722.  Featured speaker was Anthony Stankus, Gigaset Communications product manager for North America — needless to say, he was drinking his own champaigne by using [...]]]>

I had two separate calls today, each with its own unique high-touch component.

On the first call, I logged into the weekly VoIP User’s conference session using ZipDX and G.722.  Featured speaker was Anthony Stankus, Gigaset Communications product manager for North America — needless to say, he was drinking his own champaigne by using a Gigaset phone.   There were somewhere between 20 to 30 people on the call listening and asking questions — and you could tell who was using G.722 and who was using G.711 (John Todd).

Maybe the contrast between the two codecs on a conference call is what people need to get that “Ah ha” moment and realize life is indeed better with HD voice and wideband codecs.

Anthony has an uphill battle getting Gigaset phones proliferated through the big box stores and the SOHO community, but he’s got a great product at an attractive price relative to the rest of the market.

My second call of the day was with author Austin Bay — well, he describes himself as “Author and syndicated columnist. Soldier, developmental aid advocate, war game designer, lecturer, and radio commentator.” The two of us have never met face-to-face, but we’ve been long-time sparring partners on a mailing list or two.

To borrow a phrase from In Living Color, “Him got 27 jobs, Mon!”

Austin and I did an experimental/experiential video call with ooVoo video software.  Bay has used the software to have interactive video chats with his buds at Pajamas TV, with the net results reprocessed into news clips.  Austin wants to get some of the video artifacts out of his rig and I wanted to see it in action.

Austin was using a MacBook and I was on my Acer Aspire One using its embedded webcam and mic. We seemed to get about the same results, but I was “bad” and didn’t use a headset as recommended by ooVoo; didn’t seem to bother Austin any.   I had some white-wash in the background, but I’ve got a skylight behind me, so there’s a lot of natural sunlight that I’d have to adjust for if I was trying do this on a regular basis for publication.

From a working perspective, the only annoyance was Austin and I sometimes talking over each other due to a slight network time lag. He would start and I would start up at the same time with our yadda-yadda.

Without going into details, Austin is getting back into the saddle after a couple of surgeries.  I’m kinda frightened to think what he’s like at 100 percent and medication free, because he was full of enthusiasm and pep from his den in Austin, Texas.

Getting chopped are pay-per-view movies downloaded from the Internet and mobile data service. Customers [...]]]>

Over at TMCNet, Gary Kim has unearthed survey data generated by Alcatel-Lucent on global consumer telecommunications spending in these tight times.  People are cutting, but they’re going to keep VoIP and multi-channel video services (i.e. TV) pretty much the same.

Getting chopped are pay-per-view movies downloaded from the Internet and mobile data service. Customers plan to reduce spending on network based services if the economy – i.e. their pocketbooks – doesn’t get better, moving from fee-based services to free alternatives.  People will also shift from wireless voice to using email and text messaging to save pennies and dollars. Pre-paid voice and bundled service packs offering discounts get a thumbs up over post-paid plans.

Mixed results when the economy improves: 29 percent of consumers will increase their spending on network-based services while 13 percent will tighten their belts regardless.