IP Communications and Beyond

Well, I'm not the first to go "live" with news about PulverMedia this time, and frankly I'm perfectly aok with that :)

The other day, I saw a blog post with the title:

"Jeff Pulver Resigns from PulverMedia Board of Directors"

Today, I saw the following notice appear when surfing over to the VON website:

If this is indeed a sign of the demise of the organization, let's hope the many talented people that were responsible for the past success of the whole VON enterprise quickly land on their feet.

I think it's now almost a foregone conclusion that the cable MSOs have the telco's beat -- for the time being at least -- in the residential voice marketplace for most of urban America.

I recently switched over a second voice line at home to my Optimum Voice account -- Cablevision's brand of cable telephony service -- because to be brutally honest, the local telco, Verizon, just doesn't come close to providing the same deal.

From a smooth and incredibly fast turn-on, to an all-you can eat domestic calling plan with every enhanced service you could want for $24.95/mo for the first line, $14.95/mo for the second- including visual incoming caller ID on your television set no less -- it's probably -- in combination with Skype or similar web-based service -- one of the smartest choices in residential telephony.

The Wild Card: Verizon's new fiber-optic FIOS service isn't yet available in our area, or many others yet -- but it could represent a real threat to the cable-co triple-play "monopoly" with it's mix of IPTV, phone/video services and superfast Internet access -- which would ultimately be good for everyone since it will heat up the competitive juices and produce real benefits for the consumer.

Time will tell if the cable operators can maintain their lead.

Partner Jon Arnold was busy at January's Internet Telephony Conference and EXPO East In Miami, conducting a series of video interviews with a bunch of industry folk. The videos are all freshly edited and ready for public viewing, and were produced for both IP Convergence TV, where Jon serves as portal editor, and TMC for distribution on TMCnet.com.

Among those interviewed include Will Stefega of IDC, Matt Lukens of Comverse, Rich Tehrani and Greg Galitzine of TMC, Manuel Vexler of the IMS Forum, and last but not least Eric Burger, Deputy CTO and General Manager of the Communications Division at BEA Systems, and me as sidekick (Eric invited me to join in at the last minute, so how could I refuse...)

For our interview segment, Eric and I are wearing our SIP Forum hats -- he as Chairman of the Board of Directors and I as President and Managing Director (a bit of background and full disclosure all-in-one.)

Eric does most of the talking this time around, and he has some pretty interesting things to say, in my humble and biased opinion ;-) We cover the state of the industry, the interoperability challenge and the growing importance of the SIP for things like pure IP trunking (SIP trunking) to rich media/ communications application deployment. Have a listen here.

I've ranted before about a variety of automotive issues -- from the ridiculous cost of headlight changes to the mind-boggling complexity of today's computer/sensor-laden cars -- and I've got one more to add to the list: the problem with relying on computer-based diagnostic assessments of your car's condition.

First some background: I own a 2002 Audi A4, with about 51K miles on it. About a year into owning the car, an engine check light went on and I smelled burning rubber from the engine compartment. I brought it promptly to the dealer and had it serviced. Turned out a vacuum hose had melted (apparently all too common in VWs and Audi's) and the dealer replaced it, reset the on-board computer, and handed me back my keys saying, "You're all set!"

Problem is, the car never really felt right after that -- the Turbo-lag always seemed a bit too pronounced and the car never really accelerated as it should. Every time I brought it into the dealer for service, I'd complain about the performance and asked them to check it out, and every time I'd get a response saying "We hooked it up to the computer, and everything reads according to specifications."

A few months ago, the engine check light came on again, and this time I brought it to my local mechanic that I've come to regard as a genius. I no longer bring the car into the Audi dealer since my Audi bumper-to-bumper warranty has expired and I'm loathe to pay $160/hour for service -- and as I'll explain shortly, because I simply no longer trust the quality of the service the dealer provides.

The mechanic hooked it up to a diagnostic computer, and the printout stated that there was a vacuum leak somewhere in the system. A number of the vacuum hoses on the engine are sheathed in a nylon mesh that covers the rubber, and a visual inspection of the hoses found no problems, so he went to the next step of pumping a special kind of smoke into the system. Sure enough, he spotted a hose where smoke was puffing out of the nylon mesh -- and once he took it out noticed that the rubber under the nylon was brittle and cracked. He then took the next step of replacing all these hoses he could find in the car.

My car now runs like new -- no lag and no acceleration problems. I then related the issues I had been having -- for years -- with my car and the inability of the dealer to find any problems. The problem was the dealer's over-reliance on computer diagnostics, and that many problems aren't significant enough to trigger a fault in the system (since the computer is set to certain tolerances) but are serious enough to seriously impact performance. For four years I had been driving a car with damaged vacuum hoses (the melted one should have alerted the dealer to check them all), and my pleas to check the car out fell on deaf ears and eye's only interested in the computer printout.

So, the moral of this tale is when you are having performance issues with your car, and your service person tells you "everything checks out on the computer", don't accept this as "case closed". Find a mechanic who will think out of the circuit board, who will perform tests to get to the bottom of the problem and who knows the limitations of computer-based diagnostics.

I recently had a great conversation with Tom Cross, CEO of the TECHionary web site -- billed as the largest animated library on technology -- and a producer of online tutorials and a teacher for on-site corporate training courses on a variety of IP communications technology topics. Tom called to interview me for a piece on the SIP Forum (of which I am the managing director) that he's planning on publishing to his blog, Cross Talk, and once he got what he needed for his post, we started talking about a number of issues that are close and dear to our hearts.

One thing we shared was our astonishment over the enormous confusion surrounding the proper installation and set-up of high-def flat panel televisions, and the fact that a full 3/4 of the people who buy these sets aren't watching high-def images because they either didn't hook up their sets properly or didn't order the necessary high-def cable or satellite boxes from their service providers -- talk about the need for technology training here!...but I digress, since what I want to focus on here is what I'm calling the Convergence Dilemma.

Tom related to me his experience teaching a recent training course on SIP for a global hospitality company -- and how the only staff in the room were from the company's telecom department. When Tom asked why there were no data guys attending from the IT department, he was told "they do their thing and we do ours" or something to that effect. Apparently, this is a common occurrence during Tom's training gigs, and it apparently signals that even after several years of network convergence and the IP-ing of corporate communications technologies, a wide gulf still exists between the telecom and IT departments of many if not most large, Fortune 1000 corporations.

Today, we might have achieved voice and data convergence from a technology standpoint, but convergence from a human resources perspective is still a figment of our imagination (if that). If this situation is as bad as it seems from Tom's observations, it's certainly clear that it represents a major stumbling block in achieving the promised benefits of IP communications technology, and that such corporations with departmental "iron curtains" that are deploying these solutions risk wreaking havoc instead of reaping cost savings and workforce productivity/efficiency improvements.

I'm curious to see if you share Tom's observations, and if you have anecdotes you can share about companies who haven't yet closed the Telcom/IT Gap. Conversely, I'd love to hear about companies who get "it" -- how they've managed to meld their IT and Telecom teams, and what the outcomes were in terms of deployment successes and overall return on their technology investments.

Sarah Reedy, Associate News Editor of Telephony Magazine, recently invited me to do a podcast with her for Telephony Online.

I spoke while mainly wearing my Managing Director hat of the SIP Forum, and we covered such topics as the recent health of the latest industry conferences (apparently a hot area these days ;-) as well as the role of SIP in the marketplace and the role of the SIP Forum in advancing the state of interoperability among products and services, an ongoing effort highlighted by the SIP trunking-related SIPconnect Technical Recommendation.

If you're interested, have a listen!

I debated whether to have you guessing whether this was real or not all the way to the end of the post, but after much deliberation decided to come clean right away.

The IETF has continued its hallowed tradition of issuing phony (and very funny) April Fools RFC's. Man About the Industry Dan York kindly forwarded me the email that was sent out by the IETF, and tells me that this important "New Internet Draft" follows on the heels of such past favorites as:

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

Title : Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Version 4.0: P2P2PSIP

Author(s) : H. Kaplan, B. Penfield

Filename : draft-kaplan-sip-four-oh-00.txt

Pages : 42

Date : 2008-04-01

This document defines a new and improved version of SIP, which

tastes great and is less filling than the previous SIP. This

draft updates all previous and future RFCs related to SIP in

SIPPING, SIMPLE, MMUSIC, BEHAVE, and so on.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kaplan-sip-four-oh-00.txt