Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 6

	This Month's Issue:
	The Shifting Market

The major event for Competitive Service Providers - COMPTEL Plus

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frustrating, to note that the countries where the government demands that new services be delivered, all geographies covered, and all access to be shared have raced ahead of the USA. China Telecom USA’s presence in the US market was itself a statement of the evolving CLEC market.

The Futurists

Gary Kim of Dagda Nor Media, Inc. was the most forward looking of the NGN presenters. He noted that “All the future innovation is coming from outside the enterprise” which can be specifically read as outside of traditional telecom companies. He also noted that we are entering the era of person-centered communication where most content in the future will be user-generated. Mr. Kim said that the risk avoidance culture of our telecom companies is the ceding the future to non-traditional competitors. Another sobering thought: these non-traditional companies are less competent (at least for now), but are driving ahead on their vision and energy.

Bill Coyne of TerreStar intends to take this ground by re-inventing satellite-based direct-to-consumer services. TerreStar launches, literally, this fall with a next-generation satellite that will provide SIP IP voice and data.

But for our money, the wildest session was the one on “Voice Mashups.” This session covered the new way voice is expected to be treated by the youthful consumer. It called for a commitment to inventing ever new mixtures of voice, data, and media. Facebook was given as the example of where of our market is headed. They pointed to the growth of Facebook as a business networking tool because of the growing number of free third party applications, including an innovative conferencing application. The social networking community will likely lead the charge that will kill any attempt to use IMS as a walled garden, by sheer proliferation of user invented, user-relevant services. Here again was the argument that services are migrating to the edge and that “IMS has virtually nothing to do with services” and everything to do with keeping control and money in the hands of big telecom.

Trevor Backa of Jaduka summed it up: “ a [Jaxter] software guy today worries about the interface, not the network… he does the [voice] telecom part just like he does the web application parts.” Their message was simple and compelling: Facebook shows “you do not need IMS to get these services.” But behind this optimism was the worry that those who controlled the pipe could control the QoS such that these innovative services could be made… or broken. Charles Studt of IntelePeer held out an olive branch to the

Everyone we spoke to was eagerly awaiting the next COMPTEL Plus show, at another Gaylord venue, this time: Nashville. So are we!

incumbents: “If you control the pipe this [QoS] is a service you can competitively offer.”

The most impressive “dog and pony show” must go to Cisco and its Telepresence video conferencing service. Two rooms organized as ½ a conference table faced each other through three high-def video monitors, creating a live-size panorama of the opposite side of the table. Very similar to an earlier attempt by Teleportec, Cisco seems to have found a commercially viable solution that really does rival being there – airlines watch out! It still has some room for technical advances in the audio component, but the video was spectacular.

New Lives for Phone Numbers!

Wedge and I were delighted to discover two companies dedicated to helping customers make the best possible use out of their favorite phone numbers. RNK made note of the fact that customers are keenly interested in keeping their phone numbers – wherever they go and with their “putting the customer first” philosophy have built a business around letting customers do just that. Building on the extreme number portability pioneered by Vonage, RNK allows customers to permanently “bank” their number and will transfer all calls to your “banked” number, from any service, anywhere in the world. So far the service is only available for numbers in the area codes served by RNK (mostly in the US North East), and is rather pricey. They are however working on solving both of these problems, so stay tuned.

Another phone number innovator is DIDX. CEO Suzanne Brown explains that DIDX brokers phone numbers from around the world, buying up ‘spare’ numbers from one carrier and making them available to another carrier anywhere around the world. Now you too can have that Monte Carlo business number on your card….!

Other Firms of Note

While at COMPTEL, Pipeline sought out OSS vendors on the exhibit floor with the intention of checking in with them on what's new and getting a feel for the companies. Our first bit of serendipity? That these were experienced companies who dared to have very experienced people on the stand at all times. This is a refreshing change when the norm is increasingly to hire models and

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