September 29, 2005

Perspectives from VON Fall 2005

Last week I was invited to participate in the VoIP Bloggers Roundtable in VON Fall 2005 in Boston. It was a great 90 minutes of discussion. This also afforded me an opportunity to attend other sessions. The Conference had multiple parallel sessions and so I had to pick and choose the sessions that I will attend. Each of the sessions provided me some insight into what is happening in the market place and how others are viewing the industry. In this post, I will summarize my perspectives on what I saw and heard during the three days I was at VON.

Naturally, the most important aspect was meeting face-to-face fellow VoIP travelers and exchanging thoughts and ideas with them. I met for the first time many fellow bloggers of whom I read regularly. Some of us also spent an evening over steak and wine (I feasted on potato and cola). But the price of admission was worth the conversation. David Isenberg also joined us and all of us paid due homage to the “Stupid network” paper. I was expecting that there will be some lamenting of the fact that the whole industry is talking exclusively about the service provider model and there was talk of IMS everywhere in the VON. But alas, there was no time for it. Many people encouraged me to post more often. I take this as a compliment. I will try, but I failed this time, as I am posting it more than a week later.

The bloggers panel was an interesting discussion lasting about 90 minutes. The topics were varied touching on regulation in different countries; use of technology during national emergencies and the influence bloggers have over the industry. Pulver was visibly frustrated with the current regulatory direction in US. It is rather unfortunate. In my opinion, he was alone when he was educating the lawmakers and regulators about how voice in an IP network is different from voice in PSTN. And he largely succeeded in that phase. But for whatever reason, as VoIP is becoming more mainstream, some of his points are not being recognized. It would be easy to attribute all this to the change in the leadership at FCC. I have a differing opinion. I will elaborate it in a subsequent post.

I attended many general and breakout sessions. I will list some of the noteworthy comments (with my editorial interpretations):

  • Brad Glaringhouse of Yahoo indicated that Yahoo is big on working with the incumbents (of course with all the partnerships, it has to be). Some of the future things they are looking at is convergence, intelligent call handling (same as Simply relevant?) and voice triggered applications. He suggested that one never knows which will develop a huge market, based on the fact that nobody anticipated the way ring tone service caught on. I am puzzled with that specific example. Both ring tone and ring-back tone can be realized by the end-points in the IP domain. But the industry is expecting an equivalent payoff for VoIP providers as well. Where have netheads gone?
  • You must have heard of the misstep before Zennstrom came on. There were some technical difficulties – nobody will own up the exact failure. But suffice it to say that the session was an audio only session with video missing. I feel this is minor compared to what he said. Nothing. It was a rehash of what was already said – synergy between eBay, Paypal and Skype. The revolutionary aura was missing. Many got up and left during the presentation. It could be as simple as they rushed for the delayed lunch appointment. But the imagery was that of the home team fans leaving the stadium at thend of a losing game, just so they can avoid the traffic rush. Oh well. Some questions were not asked: Now that serious commercial transactions are involved (after all it will be used for autos and houses), will the “partner” eBay require the use of internal supernodes and not public ones? Does Pay per call model violate the claim that Skype-to-Skype calls will be free forever?
  • I learnt that VCs may not be interested in end-points. They are more focused on services. But I am sure they have heard of “Stupid network”; but I suppose the lure of ARPU is not easy to forego. The catch phrase was: “VoIP is free; but it is going to be more free.” I guess users will be rewarded for listening to some form of ad. Why it hasn’t happened in the regular web is not clear.
  • Patrick Fitzgerald of Siemens thinks that the next generation ATA will bring the third screen to the home – the first screen being the TV and the second being the PC. I fully resonate with his thinking. With this screen, one can think of many neat features that can be offerd by the terminal (not the service provider). By the way nothing prevents one to develop such a terminal for PSTN as well. This is how the Empire can strike back. (Details for a later post.) He also suggested that the industry should focus on better design elements like user interface and displays. Amen!
  • During a discussion on developing products for the mainstream, Jeff Bonforte of Yahoo was asked why new features are not being added in a speedy manner. He replied that big companies like his have competing priorities and need to allocate resources judiciously. Sometime long-term goals need to give way to short-term objectives. It is interesting for me to hear a complaint usually aimed at PSTN being replied in a similar fashion. What happened to the legion of software developers who can roll out features from their “garage” (why not their bedroom, I do not know).
  • Posted by aswath at September 29, 2005 11:35 AM
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