Thought pieces on HD Communications

HD Communications: The Third Wave

HD Communications [...]]]>

Over the past week, I’ve been pulling together information to pump up the HDConnectNow website, www.hdconnectnow.org.    Here’s a summary of the different thought pieces and the coverage of the first HD Communications Summit back in May (May! How time flies…)

Thought pieces on HD Communications

HD Communications: The Third Wave

HD Communications – HD voice as the most cost-effective upgrade
What can the Obama Administration do for HD Communications?
If Blair Levin is at the FCC, what might this mean for HD Communications?
One missing of the HD Communications puzzle – A standards framework
HD Communications Summit: Analysis – Will international needs bootstrap HD voice?
Working through the communications continuum

Coverage of the First HD Communications Summit

Summary: 29 things I learned at the HD Communications Summit

Presentations at the HD Communications Summit – pictures
HD Communications Summit: Analysis – Will international needs …
HD Communications Summit: HD Cellular is happening
HD Communications Summit: Islands of HD, trending upward
HD Communications Summit: Cable bides its time.
HD Communications Summit: Codec convergence, “HD” logo take center …
HD Communications Summit: Pulver announces HD marketing association, FCC petition, fall event

Don’t get me wrong; TANDBERG and Polycom and all the other visual-solutions have their place in the scheme of things, but they are A) expensive B) [...]]]>

Videoconferencing and telepresence rigs provide more information for communications options, but HD voice may prove to be the quickest and most cost-effective upgrade for businesses of all sizes.

Don’t get me wrong; TANDBERG and Polycom and all the other visual-solutions have their place in the scheme of things, but they are A) expensive B) need more bandwidth and C) Need more care, feeding, and prep, due to A & B.

Real world example:  When I was hanging out with Jeff Pulver yesterday, one of his meetings was at the Embassy of Ireland. We were ushered into an elegant and beautiful conference room with a nice TANDBERG video conferencing rig in one corner, video camera adjusted at table height.

As Jeff started his dervish windup on the goodness of HD over vanilla voice, I looked over at the TANDBERG and started calculating how many tens of thousands of dollars it cost to buy it — then multiplied by 2,  for the end point sitting back on the Emerald Isle.   Let’s say, it’s around $30,000 for the single end point.

Compare that $30,000 to a $300 or so HD business phone and you’ve got two orders of magnitude of expense for the baseline videoconferencing setup.  Put another way with the simplified math – you can stick 100 HD phones on desktops and/or conference rooms for the price of one video end point.

Those HD phones will get a lot more day-to-day use than the videoconferencing rig as well.  People will just “pick up the phone” and if they don’t get who they need, they can leave a message, while the videoconferencing rig needs to have an arranged time of use so someone is on the other end — it’s not a spontaneous “Gotta call bob” type of thing.  In addition, people will tend to primp themselves and the video area to look good on camera and running around to prep for that conference.

HD voice is likely to have a lower peak impact upon bandwidth and the network, but more sustained.  Assuming a ratio of use of 1 phone per 10 deployed in E-whats-his-name’s equation, you’d have 10 phones x 64 kbps, so 640 Kbps of bandwidth distributed across the network using G.722.  Compare that to a single point “surge” of 2-3 Mbps for a typical videoconferencing rig.   You could spin out various scenarios to skew numbers either way, but you get my point.

Installation also is a lot easier than a videoconferencing end point; enter the videoconferencing system integrator to adjust for lighting, positioning, and plenty of other factors.

HD voice: Plug in phone to network. Phone number or SIP URI to dial another HD phone (OK, that’s simplified, but you get my point…)

With HD voice now a “baked in” option with Avaya and Polycom phones, upgrading to HD voice is almost a no-brainer for improving corporate productivity, unless you installed non-G.722/non-upgradable VoIP phones last year.

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.

“[High quality voice] would just simply be a firmware [...]]]>

Business VoIP provider 8×8 is getting ready for the introduction of high-quality voice services sometime in the near future. The company anticipates deploying the G.722 codec in a firmware push to its over 16,000 customers, with the exact timing and business model to be determined.

“[High quality voice] would just simply be a firmware upgrade we would push to the phones, ” said Huw Rees, VP Business Development, 8×8. “We’re deploying Aastra 67 series phones… the acoustic cavity provides better than the standard 3 KHz frequency response and has much better audio characteristics. So we’ve got a nice high-quality full-duplex speaker phone and we want to deploy a codec better than G.711 or G.729.”

8×8 is currently testing the G.722 wideband codec internally for IP-to-IP calls and is also reviewing a few other codecs to “see if something sounds even better,” said Rees. “The nice thing is G.722 doesn’t use a lot of bandwidth, but it sounds very good.

Implementation for testing has so far gone smoothly. “It took about 3 days to get it up and running and working,” Rees said. “We were quite surprised.”  Since 8×8′s call handling software already handles different media types for audio and video, it is a matter of making sure both sides of the call use the “highest common denominator.”

The exact timing of the roll out has yet to be determined. “I don’t have a schedule yet,” stated Rees. “My gut feel is sometime this year, that’s a guess… We’re cautious in terms of doing firmware upgrades and doing as few as possible on an annual basis, but we have the mechanisms in place to have hundreds of thousands of endpoints upgraded in providing services. We’ve got the process down, but there’s always little ‘gotchas’, so you don’t want to do [firmware upgrades] too often.  We may be ready to do it next month but hold off until we have something else we need to push to the phone as the same time.”

G.722 will likely be introduced in a more “controlled” release to make sure customers and the network are not adversely affected; the codec will require some additional bandwidth.

Another area 8×8 is examining is the justification/business model for deploying HD. “Where the pricing thing comes in, is this something you charge for or is this something you provide to make the service ‘sticky’ ?” Rees said. “It’s potentially a churn reducer. When someone gets used to this type of service, is that something they would every want to give up? Probably not.”

HD interoperability with other carriers is something 8×8 is “philosophically on board” for, but past efforts with vanilla VoIP exchange have been difficult. “The issue in the past has been is the effort worth the final reward?” Rees commented. “Just the number of [VoIP] providers, the probability of talking to another compatible service provider, having a compatible codec, the percentages start to multiple… there’s been a lot of initiatives with ENUM data bases… Someone … needs to pull it all together. We’d be very happy to participate if there’s any real benefit.”

Leading the round was Worldwide Technology Partners. and the deal reportedly wipes out (probably dilutes out) the other investors. TCrunch says that ooma was “really on the roaps and [...]]]>

TechCrunch says ooma has raised another $14 million, for a total of $56 million in VC money raised over the course of the company’s history.

Leading the round was Worldwide Technology Partners. and the deal reportedly wipes out (probably dilutes out) the other investors. TCrunch says that ooma was “really on the roaps and down to its last few dollars,” but sales at Best Buy are rockin’ and the company should reach profitablity with the newest round of financing.

No doubt ooma was really screwed up at first launch. The gear was too expensive ($399), the consumer message was confusing, and there was way too much Ashton Kutcher in the picture.

New management was brought on about a year ago and earlier this year CMO Rich Buchanan told me the company can’t ship product fast enough.  Buchanan is a big thinker and ultimately envisions selling millions of the units per year through outlets like RadioShack.  It’s a different mindset from the business VoIP community, for sure.

At first glance, I thought the ooma concept was a bit nuts, but when you walk through the business model — pay for the gear up front, around 5 years of phone service are baked into the price, make money off the value-added services and hardware upgrades — it starts to make a whole lot of sense.  There is a lot of processing firepower built into the ooma device (Linux-based OS with Asterisk on top) and the second generation Telo will support HD through G.722.

Consumer retail is the first distribution path for ooma, but there are some interesting plays to be made with white label (cable companies offering HD voice, anyone?) and the always-looming SMB market.

The comapny currently has the largest documented HD deployment in the world having sold over 400,000 HD handsets to a VoIP customer base of around [...]]]>

Going over my notes from the HD Communications Summit last month, it is instructive to look at the European carrier most bullish on HD voice — France Telecom (FT).

The comapny currently has the largest documented HD deployment in the world having sold over 400,000 HD handsets to a VoIP customer base of around 6 million users in France — that’s about a 7 percent penetration rate at last report, but the numbers will continue to grow moving forward for a number of reasons. For one thing, HD calls are charged/billed the same as regular phone calls.  Any FT VoIP customer who buys an HD handset automatically gets HD service, with no activation required.

And HD support is being “baked in” to handsets of all shapes and sizes.  Last month Cisco reportedly was adding G.722 support to the firmware on its flagship small business handset.  Ooma is putting G.722 in its handsets for the home (OK, so ooma isn’t in France yet, but give them time) and other manufacturers are joining the HD voice club.

FT turned up HD over VoIP in its home territory (i.e. France) in 2006, and has continued to expand its HD footprint across its territories.  Spain began getting HD handsets for VoIP in the first quarter of 2009 while the UK and Belgium are getting mobile HD service.  As the third largest mobile operator in Europe, FT serves 123 million customers — there are a lot of customers to upgrade to HD out there.

According to FT’s research, voice quality is a key criteria when choosing a VoIP or mobile service.  Half of VoIP users would change providers (Vonage: Take note here) to get better voice quality.  In addition, 30 percent of non-VoIP users would siwtch to VoIP if it had voice quality akin to face-to-face communication.  Finally, customers want “mobile with the quality of a fixed line.”

FT says HD voice has had a positive impact upon retention; in other words, they are keeping customers, rather than watching them leave to cheaper alternatives.

While VP of Marketing Adam Boone didn’t have specific numbers, Sipera’s sales force has lot of “anecdotal” evidence of customers and channels asking about G.722 support.  G.722 provides an advantage over other codecs as it provides higher voice [...]]]>

Security vendor Sipera Systems says it is seeing evidence of G.722 uptake among its enterprise customers.

While VP of Marketing Adam Boone didn’t have specific numbers, Sipera’s sales force has lot of “anecdotal” evidence of customers and channels asking about G.722 support.  G.722 provides an advantage over other codecs as it provides higher voice quality with the same amount of bandwidth used.   The company incorporated G.722 support into its free UCSniff security tool in the fall of 2008 and Sipera’s (paid) network tools can enforce policies on what codecs are used within the enterprise.

Boone believes increased adoption of high-quality voice will probably take place within the call center,  with a “more efficient call center” translating to better interaction with the customer.  Savings from better call quality translates to less time spent on the phone per customer.

Back in 1994, Al was the point many for “Reinventing Government” As a part of his mission, he put a “date certain” marker down for all [...]]]>

What can the Obama Administration do for HD Communications?  A look back at what Vice President Al Gore did before he won his Nobel Prize provides some clues.

Back in 1994, Al was the point many for “Reinventing Government” As a part of his mission, he put a “date certain” marker down for all of the executive agencies of the government to establish an internet presence by the fall of 1994.  Needless to say, this action lit a fire under a lot of organizations who went out and put up websites, ranging to the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Central Intelligence Agency.  Nobody wanted to make Al or his acolytes unhappy.

When October 1, 2004 rolled around, government agencies were bragging about their shiny new websites and Internet connectivity.  As a net result, the (U.S.) open standards-based Internet suddenly had a lot more intrinsic value for private industry, academia, and individual citizens. Subsequent administrations and Congresses, have continued to build upon that base, trying to out do the previous generation as to who has the coolest toys.

Back to the question of the day: What can the Obama Administration do for HD Communications?

With all due respect to the current Amtrak-loving Vice President, Joe Biden is no Al Gore when it comes to carrying the torch of technological advancement.  Fortunately, President Obama has nominated both a national CTO and a well-admired Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  Both have roles to play.

Aneesh Chopra, the nation’s CTO, will be responsible for promoting technology innovation including “national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, reducing administrative costs and medical errors using health IT, and using technology to change the way teachers teach and students learn.”

HD voice = advanced technology to transform the way we communicate. Perfect fit.

Chopra could state the obvious:Existing technology for voice phone calls is in need of an upgrade, so the federal government and the organizations that work with it should all adopt G.722 as the standard way it conducts broadband voice communications by some date certain, starting with conference calls and working all the way down to individual departments and offices.  Simply switching to VoIP provides a base for other apps, but HD Communications provides an uplift in quality that should improve communications between government agencies, and ultimately between other nations; after all, the French, British, Germans, and Italians are all implementing HD voice in the form of G.722.

The White House should be the first organization to go “All G,” providing a suitable example and incentive for other agencies to make the move up to HD Voice.  It’ll make a good complement to go with the secure BlackBerry.

The FCC is the point agency for a creating and implementing a national broadband policy, so Julius Genachowski and the FCC’s broadband’s main man, Blair Levin, can incorporate and trumpet the use of HD voice and G.722 in the creation of said policy.  The FCC may have to provide some suggestion/clue/encouragement by service providers to interoperate, but hopefully such mechanisms/suggestions will be relatively loose and not require a Big Club or a complex settlements formula.

“One of the great promises of hosted voice is as the feature server is upgraded, [customers] don’t have to pay for an upgrade, said John Macario, Optimum Senior Vice [...]]]>

Optimum Lightpath’s HD voice offering is as much about being just another hosted application as it is about better quality voice calls, said company officials.

“One of the great promises of hosted voice is as the feature server is upgraded, [customers] don’t have to pay for an upgrade, said John Macario, Optimum Senior Vice President, Product Strategy and Management. “They’re getting it as a part of an ongoing relationship with us… we believe as new features are available, they should be made available, that is really what this is about.”

Last week, Optimum announced the first business HD voice service in North America.  The service is being delivered using BroadSoft’s (formerly GENBAND) M6 Communications Application Server and is designed to be an end-to-end, turn-key solution with a flat rate fee for bandwidth, minutes,  support, and customer phones and service.   Customers will get Cisco’s 7945 and 7965 IP phones and everything is designed for the G.722 codec from end-to-end.  For a typical-sized medium to large-sized business,  an all-inclusive service including phone and CPE, bandwidth, 24×7 monitoring and maintenance can work out to be $35 per seat per month.

Macario doesn’t expect HD voice to be for everyone. “Voice is not one size fits all, different companies have different needs,” he said. “We want to be able to offer them whatever solution is most appropriate.”  Optimum provides everything from TDM to SIP trunks and Cisco Call Manager in addition to hosted VoIP and a premise-based solution.

However, potential customers for Optimum’s HD voice are expected to mirror the company’s core market of medium to large businesses, including hospitals, educational institutions, municipal and county governments and financial service clients. “HD voice is applicable where there needs to be crisp, clear, well understood communications, a doctor talking to a nurse in the middle of a noisy conference room, two guys on talks to each other on the trading floor,” said Macario. “It’s not our view that HD voice is a killer app, but it is of benefit in those situations where crisp, clear, well understood communication is necessary.”

By taking an intra-company approach to the offering at this time, Optimum doesn’t have to worry about a critical mass of end-points, codecs, or other interoperability issues. That’s not to say that the company isn’t thinking about HD Communications calls between its own customers and ultimately the rest of the world. “We’ve thought about it, and we still have a little run time,” said Macario.  “We will wait and see where the demand is [for interconnecting and interoperability].”