Skype - You don't get what you pay for

This is great: Telepocalypse by Martin Geddes: You don't get what you pay for

Just KISS and it'll happen

It’s a maxim we try and keep at the forefront of our minds when developing our services, it’s core to the XP methodology we live by. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is something that is often overlooked in the technology industry.

In the presentation I saw from Avaya at IP07, they were demonstrating how to get your employees to make their mobile calls through the corporate PBX. The overwhelming message was make it simple, that’s what will make users adopt it.

Their two recommendations were

• Avoid dual mode like the plague, it’s too difficult and therefore people work around it
• Do a deal with you network operator whereby all calls to and from your company’s PBX are at flat rate

Taking point 1 initially, this is signals to me that the traditional FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) approach of WiFi or Bluetooth while in the home zone and then traditional GSM/3G when out of range is being accepted as not viable.

While there may be some cost benefit, it’s not significant to overcome the user experience hurdles that the current dual-mode handsets put in front of users. People just want to make calls, and in actual fact are prepared to pay more to make them more conveniently.

In the business context the question of cost is even less of an issue to the end-user. Generally their company’s paying, which leads nicely onto point 2.

If a company can negotiate a fixed cost deal for any calls made from employee mobile phones back to the PBX it becomes economic to route all calls through it. Suddenly full routing, tracking and recording is under the control of the company. Calls outside the company can take advantage of fixed line pricing instead of costly mobile agreements, especially when calls are made internationally.

However there is a problem. In order for this to work, the user has to download, and use an application on their phone. The application then accepts the number dialled, calls the company’s PBX and requests that it establishes the call to the destination.

Suddenly it’s no longer simple.

This does get round the call quality and coverage issues presented by offerings from companies like Truphone. Using the existing mobile network, with 99+% population coverage means people should be able to make the calls pretty much where they want.

The problem is, users don’t want to use applications; they want to use their phone. They are Normobs, why would they want to navigate the applications menu on their phone to make a call when they can just key in the numbers.

A company may be able to convince/incentivise some hardened road-warriors to use an application like this, but the whole workforce, IMHO not a chance.

The mobile operators could technically provide this service to their corporate customers but I don’t see the economics stacking up for them. Fixed rate deals are just something else that’s turning them into a dumb pipe, not something they’ve spent billions of pounds over the last decade or so to achieve.

I do find the many approaches to try and circumvent the mobile network operators intriguing, many are very innovative but I don’t believe any yet will be adopted by the Normob (Normal Mobile User).

Therein lies the strength of the mobile network operators position. Unless you KISS people are not prepared to change.

IP07 - Please call someone

Popped into IP07 this week, the annual exhibition covering the convergence of voice data and video over IP networks. This produced a pretty eclectic mix of exhibitors. To give you a flavour:

• BT and Thus with their managed network services,
• Dialogic with their telephony cards,
• Microsoft of course (what it must be like to have a marketing budget for attending every show almost irrespective of relevance).
• Symantec and IPSwitch offering network monitoring management tools (we use WhatsUp)
• Nokia with all sorts of device management offerings as well their obligatory sexy handsets in glass case
• eFax with the internet faxing service
• Coms, a hosted VoIP provider
• Nortel, Mitel and Avaya offering their particular take on the next generation PBX.

It is to this last group I turn for an interesting insight.

I attended presentations by both Mitel (about Presence) and Avaya (about connecting mobile devices with the corporate PBX) and both had a recurring theme:

Please make voice calls.

People are increasingly using email and text messaging to communicate rather than picking up the phone. If you sell voice systems, this is bad news.

There was talk of the scourge of email trails and how organisations are becoming paralysed as people covered their backsides and cc’d the world. People are using email to hide but are being increasingly overwhelmed by more and more messages. If everyone just picked up the phone, they claimed, life would be better and things would get done.

Picking up the point about hiding, the man from Avaya did have the decency to mention voice mail, the original communication avoidance tool.

There will always be people who want to avoid direct communication but this can be for a number of reasons, not necessarily just because their work-shy.

I use a mix voice calls, email and text to better manage my communications. The choice is a function of the information to be exchanged, my availability and location as well as that of the other party.

Voice calls are if I want to discuss something now or just want to make the communication more personal

Emails are if it’s something that I don’t need an answer to straight away or I’m expecting the other person to consider or research a response

Text is when I’m mobile or I know the other person is, or I don’t know where they are. If it get’s complex or drawn out I’ll generally move over to a voice call or email from my BlackBerry

Receiving and answering a voice call is incredibly interrupting. It stops you dead in your tracks, preventing you from completing what you are doing. Interrupting someone while they’re mind is elsewhere forces them to readjust their thinking and as the caller, you have to negotiate the preamble while this happens before you can have an efficient conversation with the other party.

Email and text on the other hand allow the recipient to complete the task they are currently undertaking. This is far more efficient for both parties.

Send them an email or text and you give them a chance to respond coherently. I’m not saying they will, I’ve fired off far too many reactive emails and texts in my time, but they can.

Whether they do or not is a function of them not the communication method. Impromptu voice calls promote this kind of behaviour.

Has the age of spin really ended?

I came across VoIP Watch recently and this post, Grand Central Numbers Post about Grand Central's post Number Changes caught my attention. He's made a number of posts about the 'Great Skype Out' as he described it.

Andy waxes lyrical about the founders of Grand Central and their open and honest approach to the issues they were facing with certain numbers they were providing to customers. He compares this unfavourably to the Skype's recent announcements concerning the sign-in issue they experienced. As he makes quite clear in his post, the principals of Grand Central are friends and clients, but was their post really that open an honest? Is it part of a new wave in customer communication?

GrandCentral basically seem to have passed the blame quite conveniently onto a supplier. In my book that's not necessarily open and honest about internal issues but more passing the buck. How do we know this wasn't spin, stretching the truth, or otherwise dressing up the situation?

Skype on the other hand, did it would seem, have an internal issue. The like of which, as a developer and service provider myself, do indeed materialise from time to time. Sometimes they're irritating, othertimes they can be terminal. That's the nature of complex systems.

I suspect that Skype's honesty issue was more around protecting their IP. I can imagine the technology that running a telephony service supporting millions of users on top of a network infrastructure you don't control requires some pretty intelligent programming. Something worth fiercely protecting.

Grand Central are also guilty of slapping a BETA tag on their service. This seems to be not only very fashionable of late but has the added benefit of allowing companies to absolve all responsibility for reliability. Should Grand Central come out of BETA, I wonder if the tone and delivery would be the same.

When it comes down to it, customers just want systems and services that work. Whether you adopt an honest John approach or spin the issues to the hilt, the customer will only remember whether the service was there when they wanted to use it.

Interconnecting for minnows

News today from Truphone : Truphone wins court injunction against T-Mobile blocking tactics. In short, T-Mobile UK were blocking calls to Truphone phone numbers, Truphone have successfully proven that they have a sufficient case to argue in court, the judge has required that T-Mobile UK started connecting calls from next Monday.

Great news for the developing internet telephony providers? Well it's certainly a start.

This reminded me about Mark Hay of HSL's campaign to try and compel T-Mobile to interconnect with them over SS7, see Dispute between Hay Systems Limited and T-Mobile UK Limited about SMS termination via Signalling System 7.

Now this case was different in that in centered on a dispute on the technology of interconnect but yet again it was T-Mobile UK blocking the way (incidentally I understand HSL have successfully interconnected with other UK operators). All consistent I hear you say, big company protecting the status quo what's to talk about?

You'd be right if it wasn't for the investment T-Ventures (investment arm of Deutsche Telekom) made in Jajah an internet telephony provider : T-Online Venture Fund Makes Strategic Investment in JAJAH. Left hand not talking to right hand or a more strategic vision of blocking or owning.

What with Orange and Vodafone disabling the VoIP functionality on their Nokia N95's it all seems to me that the operators plugging the mobile VoIP dyke but are rapidly running out of fingers.

Fixed rate data plans and an acceptance among users that if it's free, poor quality voice is fine (I use Skype but boy is it hard work at times) is opening the door up for more and more VoIP providers. These providers are lightweight, nimble and completely without a PSTN legacy. Couple that with Mobile Broadband being rolled out and the mobile operators have put out a Welcome mat.

For me this raises the question of what these 'minnows' of the telecoms world will do when it comes to interconnecting with each other.

Will they perpetuate the closed shop, 'interconnect where I have to' approach or, create an open system where each provider interconnects with each other provider.

Traditional marketing and competitive strategies would drive people to keep their communities to themselves and only interconnect where the have to, ie to the incumbents. But I think this time has passed.

The opportunity exists for multiple niche players to exist, each serving very specific markets providing just the hooks and add-ons to a traditional telecoms service that their target market needs.

Chris Anderson demonstrates in The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand that companies like Amazon, Rhapsody and iTunes are already serving these niches in their respective markets. I believe VoIP technology can remove the supply constraints on the telecoms markets to allow the same to happen.

The danger for the new players is that a large player comes in and does it before they've had a chance to get to critical mass, eg T-Mobile with Jahjah.

The answer, in my view, is for all these players to interconnect with each other. Enable your customers to talk to as many of their friends and colleagues as possible and they'll love you for it. Couple that with a range of services that are made for their market and they'll have no reason to move and eulogise about your service to their colleagues and friends.

It's also a defensive option, as the VoIP community grows, the collective strength grows, critical mass arrives more quickly and the incumbents won't be able to ignore you. Rather like a shoal of smaller, nimbler fish staying out of the way of the lumbering predators, it's easier and more effective in a group.

I'll be watching the space with interest and welcome any comment from the existing players, this could get interesting.

Open Source Components

I ended up on the Truphone web site today after a bit of browsing. I do like their approach and positioning, I reckon they've got it bang-on for their target market.

Another shrewd partof their approach has been to concentrate on one mobile phone platform, Nokia. So many mobile application vendors try and work across multiple devices and end up underwhelming everyone. I've no doubt they have plans for other platforms, almost certainly Sony Ericsson after their stellar rise to prominence in the last year or so, but they've given themselves the best chance of success by carefully choosing the battleground.

While there, I discovered their How Truphone Works page. They eulogise about the wonders of using open source software components plugged together to make their service work.

We do make use of open source software at Esendex but more in a supporting role than in our core system. This isn't through any fundamental opposition to using open source software, more a indication of the maturity of the open source industry in our chosen development environment.

Our systems are 100% Microsoft.Net, coded in C#, hosted on Windows servers. The open source systems with the most active development and mature feature sets are predominantly designed for Linux systems, coded in C.

So we've had to develop everything ourselves. Good news is that the system works just the way we want it to without any unnecessary functionality. Bad news is that it's taken us a longer to get there.

We have found a place for open source software, we use NUnit for unit testing; NAnt for build automation; Log4Net for application logging; Ethereal for network communication diagnosis; along with a variety of supporting libraries in our SMS SDKs for the open source environments.

The open source movement has been phenomenally successful and has provided a fast track for many companies. For us it's helped us make better systems.

Businesses Look to Mobile VoIP

Interesting item on Cellular News today: Businesses Look to Mobile VoIP

Seventy percent of businesses plan to be using VoIP regularly on their mobile devices over the next two years, according to research by Coleman Parkes; this is up from 27 percent who are currently using it.

It's a stellar prediction and a potential nightmare for mobile operators' voice revenues if it's accurate. I do feel that there is an increasing assumption among companies that you can continue doing business while mobile. Mobile VoIP is part of a mix of service that are required to make that a reality.

Reading down I discovered that

The research questioned 200 CIOs of enterprise companies across the UK, Europe and the USA.

So not necessarily a representative sample, but possibly where they lead others will follow.