Ruminations on Russia

It was cold, cold, cold in Moscow this weekend and dropped 22mm of rain on Saturday alone. The good news was that it allowed me to sit in a corner of my study and re-read a number of core think pieces including David Isenberg�s The Rise of the Stupid Network and his subsequent piece with David Weinberger, The Paradox of the Best Network. The end of the telecom company as we know them, as David Isenberg correctly identifies in this article for IEEE�s Spectrum Magazine The End of the Middle, is nigh. What comes next, and why, is significantly harder to fathom. Once you get beyond the �one sentence will cover it� CNN simplistic answers there remains substantial complexity. The good news is that in an industry undergoing significant tectonic shifts is the opportunity to invest in start ups that can become household names.

VoIP for early adopters has been viewed overly simplistically. It works pretty much all the time, it�s free as long as you don�t need to talk via a telephony network. So if it�s not working no great hassle, and pretty much all of us have a back up of some kind, even if we have junked our PSTN line. However, Vonage has had a couple of outages in the last two weeks that have caused some angst. Om Malik�s suggestion that this is The End of the Honeymoon seems to me right on the money. Someone, somewhere commented that he could remember the number of times that his (switched) phone system went down. On the flip side; whilst his telecom network never went down, his video conferencing never went up. Mercer Management Consulting forecasts (via The Register) that consumers will be happy to move to VoIP � provided that the quality is as good as their telephone line. It would be a good assumption that enterprise requirements are more demanding than those of consumers.

We backed a start-up in 2002 jNETx who built a next generation intelligent networking platform, or Open Convergent Feature Server based around a JAIN SLEE and OSA/Parlay that bridges the evolution from 2G to 3G mobile, and of course fixed platforms. Ensuring that the OCFS is a carrier grade product has required all the brilliance that a large room full of maths and science PhD�s can offer. Douglas Tait from Sun and the founder of the JAIN initiative posts here on the complexity of writing SS7/Voice signaling-to-IP gateways. (For more on the Service Delivery Platforms, JAIN SLEE�s etc I encourage you to read this 512 page, 16MB report from the Moriana Group. This link takes you to the download.)

Niklas Zennstrom CEO of Skype, a DFJ investment, has recently blazed a trail for the freeness of VoIP. Emphasizing the fact that Telephony is Just Software, which I blogged here. Rohan Mahy�s response covered here in The Register, has a go at the proprietary solutions such as Skype and begins to explain why SIP is a better solution � in the long term. Albeit that SIP has some issues that IAX may handle better.

In my immediate pipeline at the moment are two companies in the border session controller space and one in CPE / soft phone space. Both of them sit in so much of the pie covered by soft switches that definitions becomes difficult, if not meaningless. So this is not just an issue of connecting legacy networks to IP networks. To my mind the issue is ensuring that the mission critical data application otherwise known as voice is always available. One of the BSC companies spent considerable time educating me as to the very considerable issues running enterprise-quality voice over the Internet. I�m not there yet � let�s just say the problem won�t be solved tomorrow.

So what was the point of this link fest? I think that the point was to say;

• The end of fixed line switched copper-based telephony is upon us � that much is clear.
• It�s not a given that you can jump from there to free calls/sessions. Let me be specific; voice may be free but that does not mean that you won�t be paying for it somewhere, especially if you require quality of service. Video conferencing will not be a bundled all you can consume package for [10] years.
• There will never be a global utility called The Internet.
• Building networks and intelligence to provide enterprise quality mission critical applications requires significant tinkering with the Internet � it won�t come for free.
• What the meaningful difference between soft switches, border session controllers, feature servers will be is unclear. It should mean the death of stovepipe applications but we are not there yet.
• IBM GS is a more likely winner than Ericsson Services (or whatever they call themselves) because of their enterprise knowledge.
• And don�t even begin to bring mobility in to this until we have clear answers to all of the above.

That�ll do for now.