Doug on IP Comm » HD Communications Summit

May travel – The Cable Show, HD Comms West, Metaswitch Forum

Doug Mohney — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:21:45 +0000

It’s going to be a busy travel month in May, with destinations including Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and Nashville.

On May 10, I fly out to Los Angeles for The Cable Show. I’ll be in-city from Monday afternoon through Tuesday evening, including on the floor of The Cable Show on Tuesday from about 3-6 PM.

May 12 should be at The Computer Museum in Mountain View, California for HD Communications Summit West.

Week after that will be in Nashville on the Gaylord Circuit, more specifically the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville. I expect to arrive late on Monday afternoon, May 17, departing on the afternoon of May 19.

Tweeting today from @HDConnectNow

Doug Mohney — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:17:05 +0000

Live coverage of the HD Comm ’09 event in New York City today will be coming from Twitter on HDConnectNow.

HD Communications – Jeff Pulver's woodside chat

Doug Mohney — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:44:15 +0000

Jeff Pulver goes into his back yard to discuss the promise and potential of HD Communications in a 3 minute, 48 second YouTube video.

The video arrives as Pulver and partner Dan Berninger have finalized plans for the September 15, 2009 HD Communications event in New York City.

A summary of HD Communications Pieces

Doug Mohney — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:17:48 +0000

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

HD Communications – Where do Cox and Global Crossing stand?

Doug Mohney — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:56:18 +0000

As I clean out my in-box of bits and pieces this week, Cox and Global Crossing are two different companies that have indicated they doing to do something with HD Communications and HD Voice. The bigger questions are “When?” and “How?”

A Cox spokesperson said the company was looking into HD Voice, but at this point in time a product will emerge “closer to 2011.” He also said that 2011 is a long way out and “a lot can happen” between now and then.

Based upon some previous conversations I’ve had, Cox’s biggest project these days is rolling out its telephony applications platform to all of its market. Once that is done, then HD is — to grab the phrase from Optimum Lightpath — just another app.

Global Crossing has made no official statements about HD Voice product(s), but one of its network gurus — Adam “voiploser” Uzelac — is certainly making some interesting comments about about HD on his twitter feed and company blog. Speaking from personal experience, you don’t really think about HD that deeply until you start to do HD.

Me thinks Adam is doing HD, and he’s not doing it for the novelty factor.

Since Global Crossing has a strong Enterprise business and offers collaboration solutions (i.e. audio and video conferencing), an HD voice offering build around conferencing isn’t a big stretch of the imagination. Based upon my perspective and experience, Global Crossing tends to buy best-of-breed solutions, deploy them, then allow the vendors supplying the nuts and bolts to talk about the technical details 12-18 months later

If Blair Levin is at the FCC, what might this mean for HD Communications?

Doug Mohney — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:23:16 +0000

Last week, Blair Levin officially returned to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to “help coordinate its development of a national broadband plan,” saith acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps. But let’s be honest, Blair probably already had a reserved parking space over there given his involvement in the Obama transition team on tech policy, working hand-in-hand with FCC Chairman-in-waiting Julius Genachowski. What might this mean — if anything — for HD Communications and Jeff Pulver’s plan to submit a petition this fall for upgrading phone call voice quality in the United States?

Levin is no stranger to the FCC. He was chief of staff for former FCC chairman Reed Hundt between 1993 and 1997 and got the nickname the “the sixth chairman” during the days of rewriting and implementing telecom policy.

More recently, Levin was one of the two strongest names for a potential nominee as FCC Chairman and the favorite of the telecom policy wonk set. My personal opinion is that Genachowski probably is a better basketball player — Levin being partial to baseball — and got the nod to be nominated for chairman.

Even after Genachowski became the leaked/obvious favorite as Obama’s FCC Chairman, Levin kept on popping up in public places talking about national broadband policy.

In January, Levin appeared at the “”State of the Net” Conference event organized by the advisory committee to the Congressional Internet Caucus to spell out how broadband involvement would play out in the economic stimulus package and how broadband stimulus would work moving forward. He explained that what would happen in the an economy recovery package was something that was designed to be timely, targeted and temporary to create jobs, using existing bureaucratic mechanisms to distribute funding. More innovative programs would have to wait.

Since Levin is now point man for the development of a national broadband plan, it is likely we will see some “innovation” on the table as he builds a comprehensive national broadband policy — and I suspect, despite the worrying over at GigaOm, intelligent people have been working on the problem before announcement have been made.

Does innovation mean raising the bar for phone call quality beyond 1937-era technology?

It is an interesting question. Levin is a free market guy at heart, but I suspect he’d also like to raise the bar if it falls into line with delivering faster broadband to more underserved and unserved communities.

HD Communications – Optimum LightPath talks about its business HD Voice offering

Doug Mohney — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:34:07 +0000

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].”

ooma goes RadioShack – Over the counter HD communications

Doug Mohney — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:04:52 +0000

Edited/Corrected on 6/2 @ 3:05 PM ET – ooma’s new product will support G.722, added comment about new codecs

Ooma announced today that its products/service will be available through 3,000 RadioShack stories nationwide. The company bundles free lifetime PSTN local and long-distance US. phone service in with its VoIP broadband phone device. IP communications geeks will love it because it has Digium’s Asterisk under the hood and the new Telo product supports the G.722 wideband codec.

Currently, the ooma system is a $250 hardware bundle that includes a Hub connecting to a broadbna device and an existing phone plus a Scout device to extend the ooma system to additonal phone jacks in the home. Basic dial tone and long distance services are included while users can pay for an advanced features bundle starting at around $13 a month or $100 a year. Ooma has the math worked out such that buying the bundle will cover both the hardware and around five years of local and long distance phone calls for a typical user.

The second generation of ooma, Telo, will be available in the third quarter of this year and include the aforementioned G.722 codec, a faster processor — a dual core ARM from MindSpeed, if memory serves – plus optional DECT 6.0 wireless handsets. Software upgrades to Telo may include support for iSAC and Skype’s SILK. Additional hardware refreshes are part and parcel of the company’s roadmap.

Ooma’s “secret sauce” is to push most of the routing intelligence down to the device, leveraging Asterisk to handle where calls are directed (i.e. to the lowest-cost network if it is not making a “free” peer-to-peer call). The company also touts its better call quality through the use of higher quality codeces for calls between devices.

Ultimately, ooma wants to flood the market with its devices, so adding RadioShack illustrates a steady expansion of its footprint beyond its relationship with Best Buy. Once the production lines are cranking, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ooma make an appearance at either Target or WalMart. Ooma CMO Rich Buchanan is an old hand at the consumer electronics game and thinks in terms of millions of units as his benchmark of success from his previous stints at Sling Media and Creative Labs.

Two other cards ooma may play down the road are SMB and white labeling. The basic ooma hardware/service could be bundled and shaped for a small office SMB-style environment while the use of Digium Asterisk could enable various code-loads tailored to cable operators and vertical markets.

Pulver plans four for fall (HD Communications events)

Doug Mohney — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:18:05 +0000

Jeff Pulver is not planning just one follow-on HD Communications event this fall, but four of them, adding stops in Europe, Israel and potentially Australia.

A two day event in New York city is currently penciled in for September 15 and 16, but Pulver feels that he needs to be where “HD is happening” and is looking at a UK event in October as well as an Asia-Pacific event later in September. Europe is already deploying wideband HD in wireless and wireline environments with France Telecom leading the way. Telstra is reportedly deploying HD-quality services for its Down Under customers.

For Israel, an early September event will be the “reboot” of the communications industry for that nation.

One missing of the HD Communications puzzle – A standards framework

Doug Mohney — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:38:52 +0000

One of the missing pieces out of the HD Communications puzzle is standards — yes, plural. There are plenty of codec standards, mind you, but what defines an HD phone call, really? The telecommunications industry may have to borrow from a page from the TV world at some point down the road.

The lowest common denominator (LCD) for wideband codecs seems to be the almost archaic G.722 — but longevity and a little tweaking over the past couple of years isn’t a bad thing, mind you. Manufacturers have embraced and incorporated the codec into their hardware and it has become a part of the DECT CAT-iq cordless home phone effort — and DECT CAT-iq is the HD/cordless standard for the cable industry.

Companies onboard with G.722 in handsets include VTECH, Siemens Gigaset, ooma in the consumer world and Avaya, Cisco, Polycom, and snom in the business arena.

Going into the wireless world, the standard with the most traction is AMR-WB, also known as G.722.2. Spectral efficiency is the name of the game, so there’s a different manipulation of the media stream to conserve bandwidth and this segways into transcoding.

Can you do better than the two existing LCDs? A number of parties believe they can for various reasons, including bandwidth efficiency, CPU optimization/trade-offs, and the like. Skype’s SILK codec is probably the best/most publicized effort for Yet-A-Better (YAB) wideband codec for speech applications.

What if you want to go beyond the LCD and get the very best experience, period? There’s no definition yet for that in the HD phone call world which puts us slipping towards the Digital TV world to borrow some concepts. Under this to-be-defined-framework (Hello? HD Connect? Hello?), a PSTN call would be “standard definition” and the baseline service when HD wasn’t available. The next step up would be in the G.722 and AMR-WB frameworks — the equal of the 720p in the wireless and wireline worlds.

Finally, at the top of the heap would be a 1080i/1080p standard, for the very very very best in sound quality. Is this something akin to CD quality? Or do you go higher and provoke a fight with audiophiles and embrace DVD Audio or something equally challenging?

Be interesting to see what Jeff Pulver thinks about this framework.