Iridiacom Blog - VoIP, GSM and much more

We are still hearing a lot in the Press about Femtocells however it seems several of the large mobile operators are having second thoughts due to unresolved technical issues and unclear business cases.

The concerns were voiced at the recent Femtocell Europe 2008 conference when SFR said it had delayed selecting a Femtocell supplier because of the undefined industry standards, they said they do not now expect to deploy this technology until sometime next year at the earliest.

Vodafone Group owns 44 per cent of SFR and they participated in Vodafone’s group-level request for proposals for Femtocells last year, but it now said “we are assessing another technology in parallel,” said Thierry Berthouloux, network solutions director at SFR. “However, we have decided to extend that assessment period and have put this process on hold to give equipment suppliers time to consolidate roadmaps. There’s no point making a decision today.”

According to those close to the situation, the issue for the major operators in agreeing to a standard is the need for clarity on 3GPP status and the lack of resource being provided by the larger femtocell vendors to achieve this.
For more on this story:

See the full story here

Visit the 3GPP Homepage here

Or at least int Europe he does.

EuroDisney has opted for a VoIP and FMC solution from Orange - this in itself is interesting to see a Mobile Operator offering such a solution but we guess this is a combination of France Telecom who own Orange and Orange itself putting together a solution for such a large and high profile customer.

Euro Disney Associes S.C.A. operates the Disneyland Resort Paris site which includes Disneyland, Walt Disney Studios, seven themed hotels offering a total of around 5,800 rooms and the Disney Village entertainment venue.

The solution will replace the entire existing PABX infastructure and will offer fixed and mobile phone solutions for users. Euro Disney can equip its employees and hotel staff with a mobile phone or softphone for providing tailor made services. Seven Workstation profiles of employee use can be established by taking in different user contexts, company officials say.

New high-tech services can be provided with fixed/mobile convergence based on mobile extension which is more employee friendly and boosts efficiency say company officials. With this Orange service, employees will have access to a unified messaging service and will be more easily reachable thanks to a dual calling function to their fixed line and mobile phone, and they’ll also benefit from having all PABX functions on their mobile phones.

Get more information from Euro Disney here

We like to see a great use of the technology we use and sell everyday and we think Nike have come up with a great idea.

They have launched a new service called Nike PhotoiD that aims to tap into the habits of the digital generation and the “growing expectations of consumers to customise their lives”. Nike PhotoiD employs technology that analyses the dominant colours of pictures taken on mobile phones.

Nike fans across Europe can now take pictures of brightly coloured subjects, such as street graffiti or clothing, and send a multimedia message to the service. In return, they will get a picture of a shoe customised to the main two colours in the shot.

PhotoiD designs will be mapped onto Nike’s classic 1985 Dunk high-top basketball sneakers.

Nike described the service as a “watershed moment in mobile campaign activity”.

“Where past use of MMS in mobile marketing campaigns has typically focused on short-term, one-way interactions between brand and consumers, Nike PhotoiD opens a genuine creative dialogue between the brand and its audience,” said Paolo Tubito, the director of brand connections for Nike Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Overall a very simple idea but one that will have todays generation of mobile users buying in more closely to the Nike brand which for Nike is a great marketing idea.

We saw the origional article over on the Guardian site here

Have a Look at the Nike promotional video

Our readers will know we always have an eye for something a little bit unusual or slightly off the wall as sometimes our industry can be a little bit predictable to say the least. Well during the last few days we have seen some press that there is a new mobile provider in the UK.

Normally an announcement like this is big news - it seems that UK01 has announced itself as the latest operator having been the winner of U.K. regulator Ofcom’s recent spectrum auction where it acquired frequencies in the 1800MHz band. However their licence is limited as only allows it to deploy a low power network with very limited coverage so users of the service will need to be very close to a base station to make a call.

In an attempt to get its service up and running quickly UK01 has signed a deal with WiFi hotspot operator Spectrum Interactive which will enable UK01’s GSM base stations to be installed in the latter’s phone kiosks. Normal dual mode GSM handsets will be able to access the UK01 network but users will have to manually select UK01.

This service reminds us of the good old Rabbit phone that was provided by Hutchison who later went on to become Orange but that service failed as it was an outgoing call only and the base stations were limited.

We hope they can find a niche in the market to exploit.

We are all aware of SIP - actually not everybody is !!! but we assume that those reading our blog will be but I guess most of us think that SIP is a voice only protocol but it is not and we are glad to see some new products emerging to support Video over SIP.

ZyXEL Communications Inc has recently announced the ZyXEL V750W an industry first IP camera that enables video monitoring via Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technology. Recognizing the increased importance for residential and business users to monitor their loved ones, property and assets remotely, the ZyXEL V750W allows users to contact the camera’s phone number from anywhere in the world using their computer activating real-time video and two-way audio services.

Each ZyXEL V750W SIP camera is embedded with its own phone number. Remote users simply dial into the camera and control the viewing angle with the numeric keys installed on their computers. The motorized pan, tilt and digital zoom actions give users the convenience of flexible remote monitoring. The V750W can also be set to call a pre-defined phone number (such as the user’s cell phone or police) when an intrusion is detected at their home or business.

We always love the way a business can use a particular hot topic to help promote sales, and right now saving the planet is a real leading news item so a lot of companies have latched onto this to help promote sales.

The part we particularly like is the different angle companies are taking on this depending on their products - lets look at a few different examples on this.

Mitel are promoting their green credentials based on the fact that VoIP and Unified Comms means less travel and more home working and of course less travel is good for reduced carbon emmissions. Mitel states ‘Consider that a roundtrip from New York to Chicago produces 0.35 tons of carbon and flying the U.S. coast to coast accounts for one ton of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases per person. In this regard, teleworking helps spare the environment 3.6 tons of pollutants per teleworker per year.’

OnRelay states that the 25 million IP desktop handsets projected to be purchased in 2008 will consume 1.6 billion Watts of power. They say replacing the majority of those IP desk phones with mobile phones should result in a 74 percent savings in power costs. On Relay also state it is also important to note, that the business transition to mobile phones does not increase the total amount of energy used by mobile phones, because most business people already carry at least one mobile device. Indeed, OnRelay MBX’s ability to separate personal and business in the same mobile device can serve to reduce the number of mobiles carried and charged.

Finally we have Citel who manufacture a legacy desk phone to IP PBX gateway and they say this is a more eco-friendly solution than ripping out old handsets and cabling to install new Cat 5 and more expensive IP phones.

For us here at Iridiacom anything that reduces emissions and waste has got to be a good thing but we leave it for you to decide who is making the best arguements.

Well an interesting twist for the PBX market - you can now go to costco.com for your IP PBX. The warehouse wholesaler who is better known for its discount prices and free food samples will now be selling Quanta Computer’s Syspine Digital Operator Phone System which is based on Microsoft’s Response Point phone system software.

It is interesting to see such a system sold on line without direct technical backup, but Microsoft seems confident enough that the product is easy to setup. If a small business does need help, Microsoft is more than happy to point out their list of Response Point specialists is available on line.

The Syspine includes a base unit appliance with a four analogue trunk lines, four desktop phones and Response Point software that provides features such as Auto Attendant and Voice Mail. The system supports up to 50 Syspine IP310 business phones to create a complete small business phone solution without additional license fees (these are bought on line in packs of 2)

This announcement will grab headlines but in reality it is just an on line reseller who sells many hi-tech products adding to their range an IP PBX which these days is not so new, earlier in the year we saw that Fonality partnered with Dell to make Fonality’s Small Office software available in an IP PBX bundle on Dell hardware.

We like to try and keep an eye on what happens in the Asterisk community and we have always liked the Trixbox CE product, well it seems there is a real spat going on with Trixbox.

Trixbox began life as Asterisk@Home, and was later rebranded as Trixbox. Asterisk in it’s early life did not have a configuration GUI and configuration was always time consuming so this lead to the design of configuration tools, one such tool was called AMP (Asterisk Management Portal), and that became known as FreePBX. Trixbox was distributed with FreePBX as the GUI tool.

Well it seems Trixbox is now distancing themselves from FreePBX, and has moved to create their own forked configuration tool, which is more tightly integrated with Trixbox. Trixbox also mentioned security concerns, faster bug fixes and improved features as additional reasons for this change. Trixbox has released CE v2.6.2, which includes the GPL patch for their integrated version of FreePBX, and this is currently a BETA release.

The formal announcement on the Trixbox Forum here has lead to some very lively debate.

It is our guess Trixbox users will be happy but that fans of FreePBX will not - it seems the Asterisk community would prefer to see FreePBX survive in its own right espescially as it helped Fonality get a foothold in the PBX market along the way. You will see from the comments on the forum that feelings certainly run high when this sort of things happens

We have been working with the SIP protocol for a few years now and we are big fans of it and how it has moved the VoIP industry forward together as one without the need for larger manufacturers or developers using their size to ‘force’ standards forward.

So what do we mean when we say SIP is SIP, well the point we are making is how SIP devices, servers, end points etc work together - many people in the industry assume if you buy device x then it will work with server y or provider z, well this is not the story in the majority of cases.

When we connect two SIP devices together in most cases they will work and you can make or receive a call but the problems arrive in the details and the services you need, items such as Caller ID, message lamps, call transfer, busy lamp field can often cause problems and in most cases take a long time to slve usually required one of the developers to make a small change or update.

So the moral of our story is that you should always test a device before saying it will be compatible and once you have some devices working together then stick to them.

We are starting to see reports now that Fixed Mobile Convergence is dead and the new King in town is Mobile Unified Communications (MUC ???)

So what does that mean ? - there has been a lot written about FMC and what it can or cannot do, essentially FMC brings the mobile user into the business enterprise by offering single-number access, dual mode phone (GSM/WiFi), VoIP calls on WiFi within the enterprise to reduce the cost of calls. We can compare this with UC that relies on Femtocell technology that extends the reach of the mobile cellular network within the home by using a special mini base station plugged into a home broadband connection, this has the advantage that a regular GSM handset is used.

It will be interesting to see which flavour emerges as the strongest - many FMC applications and handsets are starting to be implemented but we see this is heavily driven by businesses in the enterprise sector on the other side of the coin the Femtocell technology is now being trialled heavily and we see this being driven more by the cellular providers as a method to protect future revenues.