Network and Telecom Strategies Blog

Good News for Wideband Voice

posted by: Mark Cortner

The recent announcement by Verizon that it will deliver all of next-generation network multimedia content over its IP-based core network, facilitating the convergence of fixed and wireless networks, is good news for wideband voice technology. The voice market is attempting the ride the wave of hype and interest in high-definition technology with the wideband voice although several practical implementation obstacles currently limit the benefits and value of wideband voice.

The fact that a significant proportion of voice calls sourced from enterprise telephony systems must traverse the PSTN for call completion renders the use of wideband voice to intra-enterprise participants is one obstacle. In addition, the use of mobile phones is increasingly common within the enterprise—many users utilize simultaneous ring, mobile extension, and mobile UC client capabilities provided in conjunction with an enterprise’s IP-PBX system to receive calls on their mobile phones instead of their desktop handsets. The impact of both of these use case scenarios diminishes the effective use and benefits of wideband voice.

The announcement from Verizon indicates that the function of network transport and media transcoding will be separated; if any media transcoding is required the primary responsibility will fall to the participating endpoints—the network will provide a media conversion function only in cases where the endpoints do not share a common codec. If the wideband voice community can convince the fixed network and wireless network endpoint vendors (nimble) to support wideband voice, the networks (not so nimble) most commonly utilized to transport voice traffic to business partners, customers, and in many cases an enterprise’s own employees, will no longer be an impediment to the use of wideband voice.

UC and Catalyst 2009: Closing Thoughts

posted by: Mark Cortner

I had the opportunity to interact with a broad spectrum of enterprises this week at Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference North America held this past week in San Diego, CA. The majority of my conversations with attendees focused on the topic of UC. I found that many of the discussions were in step with the types of conversations that I frequently with clients related to this subject: what are other enterprises planning and currently implementing to support UC and how should a business navigate the evolving competitive landscape fo UC solutions?

I was also interested to hear how a number of enterprises were giving strong consideration to pursuing approaches to UC that challenge the status quo – specifically the use of software or unified clients to replace the use of wired IP handsets and the interest in cloud-based UC services that can be used to augment (or replace) the premises-based systems and platforms positioned by the major vendors. I don’t predict a rapid shift to ether of these approaches but I believe it’s important to recognize that enterprises are wary that UC is “old wine in new bottles” and as a result may be more open to adopting a less traditional view toward endpoint strategies and service delivery models while transforming their communications and collaboration environments.

 

Avaya + Nortel, Not Quite Yet

posted by: Mark Cortner

Last week, Nortel announced that it had entered into a “stalking horse” agreement with Avaya for Nortel’s enterprise solutions business unit for $475M. The stalking horse agreement essentially sets a minimum bid for the auction of the business unit and will be filed with the bankruptcy courts. The auction process allows other qualified bidders to submit higher or otherwise better offers over a 45 day period and then the bankruptcy courts in the United States and Canada will have final approval of the winning bid once the bidding process is complete.

So, at this point, Avaya has not “purchased” Nortel’s enterprise business unit but has rather committed to purchase the business for $475M pending competitive bids. What is the likelihood that Avaya will ultimately “win” Nortel’s enterprise business unit? The same process just recently played out with auction of Nortel’s CDMA and LTE wireless infrastructure businesses. Nokia Siemens Networks entered into a stalking horse agreement with Nortel for these assets in mid-June and today it was announced that Ericsson submitted the winning bid for these assets. The initial stalking horse agreement was for $650M and Ericsson’s winning bid was for $1.13B. The auction process increased the purchase price by roughly 75%.

I’m not sure Nortel’s enterprise business unit will achieve as high a valuation as the wireless infrastructure business. The stalking horse bid for the CDMA and LTE assets was approximately valued at 33% of 2008 revenues and the winning bid was just short of 60% of 2008 revenues. In contrast, Avaya’s stalking horse bid for Nortel’s enterprise business unit is currently valued at roughly 20% of 2008 revenues. Who are other likely potential bidders in the auction? Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens Enterprise Communications could be candidates. Both could benefit from Nortel’s installed base in North America, although I suspect that Nortel’s customers would be uneasy with either. Nortel expects the auction process to be very active; perhaps there are many others that will aggressively bid but I’m not convinced …

QoS Problems With VoIP Over Wireless

Posted by: Eric Siegel

A fascinating article, "Coexistence of VoIP and TCP in Wireless Multihop Networks," was just published in the June 2009 edition of IEEE Communications Magazine (vol 47, issue 6, pp 75-81; the authors are Kyungtae Kim and Dragos Niculescu [NEC Laboratories America] and Sangjin Hong [Stony Brook University - SUNY]).

Burton Group has been warning that using VoIP over wireless LAN (VoWLAN) is tricky because "QoS alone cannot completely regulate the bandwidth provided to flows on a wireless network... a single wireless station on a shared wireless channel can degrade performance for all other stations on the channel...." We've been saying that: "A reasonable alternative is to avoid voice over WLAN altogether, substituting cellular voice, possibly with femtocell or in-building repeater technology." (See the Burton Group reports "Quality of Service (QoS) Alternatives Demystifying Radio Management;along with the Technical Position "Quality of Service".)

This new article shows that the problems created by VoIP over wireless LAN are even worse than I'd thought. The authors did some experiments, and they found that TCP and VoIP do not coexist well on a wireless LAN. TCP's large frame sizes, large receive windows (RWIN), bursty traffic, and retransmission when a frame is lost make it interfere with short, evenly-spaced VoIP frames. The TCP frames will dominate radio transmissions because of the frame lengths and frequency during a burst. (Frames can't be interrupted after they start to transmit; therefore, long, frequent TCP frames will dominate over infrequent, short VoIP frames.)

Worse, the self-interference and half-duplex characteristics of a wireless LAN system increase the probability that the long TCP data bursts will need retransmission, further increasing their burstiness and their domination of the channel when compared to short VoIP frames. (Self-interference occurs when a single flow interferes with itself as it travels over the wireless system. When transmission and reception share the same half-duplex radio channel, a stream may compete with its own acknowledgements for radio time, delaying or destroying some data and acknowledgement packets. If transmission hops over a couple of radio links in sequence, then each hop's transmission may interfere with transmissions on other hops that are within reception range; a flow may interfere with itself.)

The authors of the new article show that no standard type of queuing algorithm in routers adjacent to the wireless network, even Priority Queuing (PQ), can handle these problems. And they also show that five standard TCP variants used in end stations (TCP Reno, TCP Vegas, TCP Westwood, TCP CUBIC [used in Linux], and C-TCP [used in Windows Vista and Server 2008]) do not handle these problems. In all cases, the TCP flows dominate and degrade the VoIP flows.

What should be done? Well, Burton Group has recommended that cellular should be considered instead of VoWLAN. The authors of the study make additional suggestions that sound interesting, but they also warn that none of them is a panacea - they all are only partial solutions, at best. The authors warn that "the methods examined here have straight-forward application only when the wireless capacity is fixed. In reality, the capacity is highly variable." They also warn that P2P, uploading traffic, and interactive streaming, such as Skype, that use TCP for voice will complicate the situation even more.

The paper's most interesting recommendations are:

• Use unusually-small TCP receive windows and eliminate TCP bursts on the wireless LAN. This may need to be done by gateways at the wired:wireless interface. The gateway would use smaller TCP packets and a small receive window; it would also use a buffer to ensure that any bursts were smoothed out and that TCP packets were spaced out to reduce self-interference and interference with VoIP frames.
• Use a traffic shaping system. The article says, "After a packet of size pkt_size goes out over the air, the next packet is scheduled no earlier than pkt_size/R. The gateway chooses R based on the network status to determine how much to send as well as when to send."

Other papers have recommended different methods, such as doing priority queuing at all intermediate wireless nodes and combining that with traffic shaping.

At this time, it seems to me that avoiding sharing the same channel between TCP and voice is still the best solution.

UC, Collaboration, and the Cloud

posted by: Mark Cortner

Earlier this week, Cisco unveiled a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture and related enhancements to its cloud-based WebEx Connect collaboration platform. The announcement emphasizes Cisco’s vision of “everything as a service”, providing customers the ability to extend on-demand services into the on-premises network. Cisco’s vision, not surprisingly, is network-centric … where “the network is the platform.”

I have made several posts related to progress of SaaS-based UC services over the last few months. Last year, when Cisco announced the evolution of the WebEx application to a broader SaaS-based collaboration platform, they prefaced announcements from other key UC vendors including IBM and Microsoft. The Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud is a purpose-built network designed to deliver high-quality, highly-secure, and reliable collaboration experiences within and between companies—extending the collaborative experience beyond the enterprise to connect with business partners and customers.

Cisco announced that it is currently delivering on-demand services via the WebEx Collaboration Cloud with service levels of 99.99% availability. The underlying “cloud” consists of a purpose-built network (i.e., the MediaTone content delivery network asset acquired as part of Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx) that utilizes intelligent routing and load balancing across eight global datacenters. Last year, our research predicted that Cisco would leverage this asset to drive new UC service delivery options to augment or substitute for on-premises platforms—and Cisco has done just that and more within the context of its broader cloud-based strategy.

In the last year, Cisco has advanced the integration between the WebEx application and its other on-premises products including Unified Communication Manager, Unified MeetingPlace, and its expanding product line of video offerings, aka TelePresence. The WebEx application has simply become one application within a broader SaaS-based collaboration platform (WebEx Connect) that supports conferencing, instant messaging, and team spaces but ultimately will also deliver other core UC services including SaaS-based e-mail and presence services … how far behind is hosted, SIP-based telephony services?

VoiceCon 2009: Key Announcements

posted by: Mark Cortner

The focus and themes presented this week at VoiceCon Orlando continue to expand beyond enterprise telephony to include its accelerated intersection with unified communications and collaborative applications. The event was filled with new product announcements but several vendor announcements stood out as significant industry developments. The event has been dominated in the recent past by news from Cisco and Microsoft, but this year the key announcements came from Avaya, IBM, and Siemens.

Avaya launched a new system architecture, Avaya Aura, that integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-modal, and multi-location businesses. The foundation of the new architecture is the SIP-based Aura Session Manager which serves to centralize communications control and application integration. Avaya Aura also includes Communications Manager and Presence Services. The new system architecture signals Avaya’s shift from a voice-centric approach to UC to a broader, more encompassing approach to voice, video, messaging, presence, and web applications.

IBM officially launched Sametime Unified Telephony, a software solution that brings “voice collaboration” to legacy and IP-based enterprise telephony systems. IBM also announced a validation program, with widespread industry support, to verify interoperability with third-party voice systems. With Sametime Unified Telephony, an enterprise can integrate a multi-vendor telephony environment with IBM’s unified communications and collaboration platform, Sametime, and provide users with a common, consistent, integrated user experience regardless of the current underlying telephony environment.

And lastly, Siemens showed off its OpenScape unified communications software running on Amazon.com’s cloud computing platform. The demonstration served as a proof-of-concept of the intersection between cloud computing and UC. Siemens noted that there are no firm plans at this time to offer any particular products as web-based services but will use the proof-of-concept with customers to gauge interest in a cloud-based service delivery model as an alternative to the capital investment for premised-based UC solutions.

Microsoft OCS and Telephony

posted by: Mark Cortner

Microsoft recently executed an impressive virtual event to launch Office Communication Server (OCS) Release 2 (R2). The launch event included an overview of the new product capabilities included in OCS R2, “break-out” sessions that provided technical deep dives into the product, and customer case studies. OCS R2 includes expanded telephony functionality, simplified multimedia conferencing and collaboration, and the extensibility of OCS to line of business applications and workflows through communications enabled business processes (CEBP). However, taken in its entirety, the marquis additions to OCS are the voice-related enhancements.

The new telephony capabilities include single number reach, advanced call management delegation for administrative assistant applications, and a new Office Communicator soft client interface. In addition, Microsoft has significantly expanded the handset and headset endpoint ecosystem from vendors such as LG Nortel and Polycom. The devices in the ecosystem have been optimized for Office Communicator—translation: these devices support some non-open standard protocols and voice compression techniques that are included in OCS. Microsoft has also added mobile client support for the Java and Symbian operating systems and the ability to connect directly from OCS to the PSTN through SIP trunking.

The enhancements included in OCS R2 address many of OCS’s previous gaps related to telephony functionality, although several key capabilities must be addressed before most enterprises will give serious thought to leveraging OCS as a “phone system”. For example, remote site survivability and support for analog devices will be requirements for many business customers.  By aggressively pursuing the remaining gaps in OCS’s telephony functionality, Microsoft will continue to make progress in converting those that either dismiss or are skeptical of Microsoft’s future role in telephony to believers and OCS’s role will expand from a collaborative-centric to a complete enterprise-class UC platform.

The battle for dominance in the UC market will be intriguing as the major platforms mature, cloud-based services enter the market, mobility continues its explosive growth, and the industry continues its shift to software-based products. The telephony-focused enhancements contained in OCS R2 will place further pressure on the telephony-centric vendors, as silo-based applications are integrated into multi-application UC platforms and enterprises seek the most cost-effective path to address the forces impacting its communications and collaboration strategies. And with a goal of establishing a dominant position in the UC market, Microsoft has signaled the critical importance of telephony in OCS R2 and its intent to not only complement, but ultimately replace what we know today as the phone system.

Nortel’s Bankruptcy: More Thoughts

posted by: Mark Cortner

The high wire balancing act required by Nortel following its bankruptcy filing will crucial to the viability of its enterprise voice business. In a post earlier this month, I predicted that Nortel would not shed these assets while in bankruptcy and would retain these assets unless business conditions significantly deteriorate.

The next several months will be critical as Nortel reaches out to its customer base and attempts to reassure nervous customers of the company’s ability and intention to continue its investments in the enterprise telephony offerings; that channel partners will continue to support customers and maintain expertise in Nortel products; and that its partnership with Microsoft (the Innovative Communications Alliance or ICA) remains fully intact and healthy.

The message that Nortel shares with its customers surrounding the bankruptcy will be the first step to reestablishing credibility. I don’t believe many businesses will accept that the bankruptcy does not affect Nortel’s ability to execute and that why many may want to believe that past product commitments will continue to be met. The pragmatic view may be that even with the best intentions, Nortel may be forced to extend delivery dates and shrink legacy product lifecycle timelines.

In addition to its own product commitments, Nortel must protect its channel partner relationships as the channel partners themselves frequently represent the customer’s indirect relationship with Nortel. The channel partners are undoubtedly also nervous about Nortel’s future, as many may rely disproportionally on product/service revenues dependent upon Nortel products and may therefore be at a business risk as well.  I noticed this week that one of Nortel’s largest non-carrier and highest certified channel partners, Shared Technologies, signed on to Avaya’s business partner program.

The establishment of a unique relationship between Nortel and Microsoft, within the ICA, was positioned as an important strategic milestone for both companies as well as for the UC market.  The reality is that, over the past several years, I suspect neither party has experienced the windfall of joint business opportunities related to UC that they may have anticipated when the ICA was formed in 2006. I expect the ICA to quietly dissolve in the next year and that while Nortel will continue to “partner” with Microsoft; it will work even closer with IBM and its less predatory platform, Lotus Sametime.

The approach that Nortel takes to each of these key areas of concern over the next few months will be pivotal to the future of their enterprise voice business as they navigate the bankruptcy process. I anticipate Nortel’s execution will determine the direction and pace at which the dominos fall …

Nortel’s Bankruptcy Filing

posted by: Mark Cortner

The recent filing by Nortel for bankruptcy protection is the latest in a steady stream of financial challenges the company has faced over the last several years.  Nortel has a proud and rich history in enterprise voice solutions and is among the global leaders in the market. But given the company’s recent filing, many enterprise IT organizations are raising the question as to how the bankruptcy filing should impact their plans and strategies to continue to use or make new investments in Nortel telephony products.

The first step to answering this question is to assess whether or not Nortel will elect to continue to compete in the telephony market. Nortel will undoubtedly shed several product lines/businesses as a result of the filing although I’m not sure the enterprise telephony business will initially, if ever, be one of the lines of business that is divested.
The enterprise voice customer base would be attractive from an acquisition perspective, but the support liability associated with Nortel’s legacy platforms and the duplication of next-generation VoIP/IPT/UC products from those of a likely acquirer would diminish this value. I expect these assets to remain a component of the “new” Nortel and the line of business to be continued unless business conditions significantly deteriorate.

The second step is to look at customer deployment scenarios. If the enterprise is currently using legacy, circuit-switched technology then the issue of immediate concern should be product end-of-life/support. The vast majority of enterprises who have not started the migration to VoIP/IPT have life cycle commitments for the products they currently own, either from their third-party system integrators or directly with Nortel.
The bankruptcy filing enables Nortel to break any existing contractual commitments, so Nortel could potentially eliminate any warranties or support. The prior support commitments an enterprise has received from Nortel are likely a key component to the timing of its migration strategy to VoIP/IPT. Although it is unlikely that Nortel would completely eliminate its existing support commitments (unless it completed exited the enterprise voice business), the risk is rather if and by how much will the end-of-life/support timeline shrink. For example, those enterprises that are starting now with a 7-10 year migration plan may want consider accelerating this to minimally a 5-7 year migration.

Lastly, for many businesses that have chosen to use Nortel products for VoIP/IPT, they likely have an installed base of Nortel legacy voice products and may have a significant economic advantage to continuing to use Nortel solutions. If possible, these enterprises should consider slowing or delaying any continued migration to VoIP/IPT until Nortel has sufficiently restructured its business and is executing on a new operational plan. The enterprise IT organization should take this time to execute due diligence and revisit the rationale for selecting Nortel as a key partner. The process should be aimed at validating that the product selection has been made on the basis of key competitive advantages that Nortel is perceived to maintain over other competitive offerings. The next several months will be challenging. Nortel’s future position and success in the voice market will be determined by the actions they take, more than the words they say, in the coming months.