A group of vendors, spearheaded by Sun Microsystems, introduced last week a draft of Java Business Integration (JBI), a blueprint for facilitating the integration of Java SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) software.  The SOA standard was developed by 22 vendors and is endorsed by players such as Novell, Oracle, Apache, and JBoss.  However, one of the drawbacks of the spec is its lack of support of BEA (Nasdaq:BEAS) and IBM (NYSE:IBM), two of the biggest Java vendors.  One potential scenario that could arise as a result is that these two giants might decide to work on their own SOA implementation, which can lead to an additional fragmentation of the Java platform.

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After attending VON last week, I was unable to go to the CTIA show happening this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, but some of my colleagues attending have given me the latest scoop of some of the major developments and announcements at the event.  Among the major developments at the show were:

Nokia's launch of Preminet, a mobile content and application distribution platform.  The initiative (which has been in beta test for over a year with a number of carriers) sources Java and Symbian software from third party developers around the world to give operators a master catalog of applications.

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Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) announced today at the CTIA show that it will make a "significant" investment with Clearwire, a wireless broadband startup funded by Craig McCaw.  The partnership is geared towards accelerating the development and deployment of WiMax networks.  The agreement stipulates that both companies will be actively engaged working collaboratively to develop WiMax products and deploy WiMax networks as the technology matures.  The Intel VC arm (Intel Capital) did not disclose any specific financial terms of the deal. 

Clearwire already offers WiMax service in Jacksonville, FL and St. Cloud, MN.  The company is planning to offer services based on the emerging 802.16e IEEE standard (an extension of the original 802.16 WiMax standard that addresses the mobility aspect).  The plan is for NextNet Wireless (a Clearwire subsidiary) to use the newly unveiled Rosedale Intel chip in new WiMax gear.  The deal will be a catalyst for the fixed wireless broadband industry, and Intel believes that next-gen products supporting mobility and using its chips should be widely available by 2006.

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Update (26/10/04): Motley Fool claims in a story today that the Intel investment in Clearwire is about $150 million.  Their article is an interesting read.   more »

The Cassini spacecraft is making today a closer approach towards Titan, the moon from Saturn that has not ceased to fascinate astronomers. The probe is expected to be roughly 1,200 km from Titan's surface and will be hopefully able to penetrate the satellite's dense orange haze. Later, in January 2005, the Huygens probe is expected to be released from Cassini and enter Titan's atmosphere, carrying out various science tasks right at the surface - if it can survive the landing.  NASA will be releasing new photos as they become available via the following link. 

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The 2004 edition of the Fall VON Show was certainly a memorable one. It was by far the best attended of all VONs that I have been to, and it gave me a great opportunity to meet some of the movers and shakers of the industry. Om Malik wrote an entry in his blog about media hype, long meetings, not missing too much, etc. - and he might be partially right.  But Andy Abramson got it right on his blog - the reason to go to VON is... CONTACTS!  And it was a great event for that.  It is not everyday that one could meet folks like Chairman Powell, Sir Terry Matthews and his son Owen, Peter Briscoe, Charlie Giancarlo, Joseph Licata, Denzil Samuels, Henry Sinnreich, John Yoakum, et al - all in a single event.  No wonder I hardly had anytime to write blog updates during the event.

And from a personal perspective, going back to Beantown always brings back sweet memories from my undergrad days in this engineering school across the Charles River in Cambridge, where I spent a few great years of my life.  On top of that, the 3-0 come-back-from-behind win of the hometown Red Sox was really exciting (I am a Blue Jays fan, but choosing between the NY Yankees and the Red Sox is no contest - I always love the underdogs; I believe all out-of-town folks pretty much felt the same way and were cheering for the BoSox).

Quite a few interesting developments to note at the show, which will make into a few posts in the following days, but in the meantime, here are a couple of good links:

• The State of VoIP (regulatory outlook)
• Martin Geddes' take on the show

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Tired of seeing people write about VoIP as just a mere replacement for the current PSTN, Jeff Pulver (VoIP evangelist and the CEO of Pulver.com, the organizers of the VON show) took matters into his own hands and launched pulver.Communicator a new SIP client offering functions such as IM, social networking (users can share their buddy lists), and direct VoIP calls to SIP contacts.  The point-and-click interface allows a user to initiate a VoIP call with a SIP contact simply by clicking on that person's name on the buddy list.  Another nice feature is the support of multi-chat across different IM networks (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo!). 

The social network aspect is also interesting, since it can be used not only to share buddy lists, but also to determine who can call any given users (e.g. friends only or friends and friends of friends).  The "click to call" feature is carried over the SIP-based FWD (Free World Dialup) network.  There is an option to allow for inbound linkage from the PSTN via LibréTel, a service also offered by Pulver.com (available for a monthly fee ranging from $6 to $12, depending on the country).  There were some demos at VON for beta versions running on the Palm OS, Pocket PC and RIM's BlackBerry.

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The last few days have kept me quite busy at VON.  It has been the most attended VON event that I have ever been at, and there has been some electricity in the air (perhaps due to the rosier prospects of VoIP or maybe because the Red Sox have come back in dramatic fashion on a couple of occasions to force a deciding game 7 today against the Yankees).

Due to the great attendance at the show, the enterprise panel session in which I participated had a big audience.  This was a bit of a pleasant surprise to yours truly, given the fact that concurrently, Anoop Gupta, the VP of the RTC (Real Time Collaboration) Business Group at Microsoft was delivering his keynote speech (I heard that in Anoop's session, there was standing room only, and that auditorium was much bigger than the room in which the analyst round table discussion was held). 

As suspected, Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) unveiled its unified desktop client, dubbed Istanbul.  I was able to get the details from Ellen Muraskin, who wrote an article in eWeek about that session.  Istanbul, which runs in concert with the new version of the LCS (Live Communications Server), is a client application offering integrated IM, desktop videoconferencing, and IP telephony capabilities.  The product is currently undergoing beta testing and should become generally available in the first semester of 2005.

The key question is: does this mean that Microsoft will finally make a foray into the IP PBX marketplace?  I suspect that the answer to that question is no, at least not in the short term future.  However, in the longer term future, anything is possible, particularly if the traditional PBX/IP PBX model, as we know it today, goes through some changes (particularly for small and medium enterprises - SMEs).  The crown jewel of the PBX is the call processing software: that is the highest margin piece of the product. 

It is conceivable that in the future, some vendors might adopt a software-based model for SME products, and offer platform vendor independence (i.e. standard hardware/servers from vendors such as Dell, IBM, HP, etc.).  In that case, instead of the single, monolithic PBX, we would have call processing functions plus some standards-based hardware.  With this Istanbul move, Microsoft definitely makes a push into trying to control some of these functions.  However, from there to developing a full blown IP PBX, there is a lot of room.  It is more likely that Microsoft will initially want to become a technology enabler for some of these services.  As Gupta said: "We need a sophisticated ecosystem surrounding this. We don't build PBXes".

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Much has been already written about the FCC decision on fiber and the impact it will have on the consumer broadband choices. Since I am in Boston for the Fall VON Show, here is a take on the subject by Hiawatha Bray from the Boston Globe.

But I also enjoyed Om Malik's opinions on the topic and its implications.  In one entry, Om states his disbelief that alternative technologies such as BPL or WiMAX can provide the competition necessary to make the duopolistic equilibrium price (i.e. the current set price of MSOs and RBOCs) lower - au contraire, the consumer bills will sky rocket.  In another story, Om focuses about how RBOCs like SBC will proceed with their plans: FTTH (FTTP) in some situations such as greenfields, and mostly, FTTC with ADSL 2+ or VDSL. 

I will zero in on the technical considerations of going with a FTTC with ADSL2+/VDSL solution. As the figure below shows, there is a tradeoff between the loop range and the throughputs (upstream/downstream): the longer the range, the lower the data speeds.  Distance matters for digital service lines, because they represent a "dedicated line configuration".

The implications can be arrived at from loop length analysis (data is available from several sources including DSL Prime, Telcordia, the NCTA, etc.).  Verizon, for instance, has about 50% of its loops in the 11,000 feet and longer range.  SBC has roughly over 50% of its loops in the 11k feet and higher range.  Bell South has about 45 percent in the 11k feet and more and the same is true for Qwest.  So what can be done with that?  One option is another location, sometimes co-located with the DLC.  This is in the Service Area Interface (SAI) or a cross-connect cabinet.  Hence, the rollouts that are being talked about the RBOCs are either FTTH (in a few cases only, for new greenfields, particularly after the FCC ruling) or bringing fiber to the above "neighborhood nodes" instead of to the curb.  Also, FTTC with ADSL 2+/VDSL will be used for the shorter distance loop lengths.

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I really enjoy reading Paul Kedrosky's articles on The National Post and his blog, Infectious Greed.  The issue is that for the wider Internet audience, some of his great articles get lost behind the NP's "Subscriber Exclusive" policy.  Case in point: Paul's great article on this weekend (the Saturday edition), entitled "Is There a Business Case for Blogging?". 

Unfortunately, I cannot repost it here, because despite enjoying the article, being a subscriber and wanting to share it with you, I have to respect the author's and the newspaper's copyrights.  But perhaps I can just make a few comments on the main points that Paul brings up, while staying within the bounds of copyright laws.

The main inspiration for the story comes from the news headline that Six Apart announced it was going to receive a $10 million VC cash infusion.  So the leit motif is: will other VCs follow August Capital's lead and invest in the blogging industry?  Apart from Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs (the company that runs Blogger) back in February of 2003, this was the first time a VC invested on the idea of there being a business case for blogging.

So besides advertising (since blogs target specific audiences that could be of interest to some advertisers), are there other business uses for blogging?  Well, the article suggests that enterprises might become interested in blogging as a way to share information across several groups. 

My own take is that this sort of application is perhaps a morph between blogs and wikis - a major information depository for a firm, except that with wikis, anyone can collaborate, and in a blog, only a few people with access control the site.  But those lines can easily get blurred (for instance, with Blogware, the software that I use to run this site, the blog author can have a few trusted friends contribute with their own articles and in that fashion it sort of becomes a mini-wiki for those authors; similarly, some wikis can restrict the contributors and control who can post and who cannot).  When does a blog become a wiki or vice versa?  Obviously, wikis are of interest to firms, and this has been previously discussed here at Technology Futurist.

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This past Thursday, Dell (Nasdaq:DELL) unveiled its consumer electronic products, just in time for the holiday shopping season. The lineup includes plasma televisions, new printers and a sleek personal digital music player targeting the same consumer segment as the iPod mini.

Obviously, the recent foray into consumer electronics is definitely indicative of Dell's strategy to continue to leverage its direct-sales model to sell a wider range of products.  But what about the $199 Dell Pocket DJ?  Can it take away some market share from Apple's iPod?  The new Pocket DJ has a nicer design than the older model, weighing 4.4 ounces and having a capacity of about 5 GB (good enough for about 2,500 songs).  Apple owns the digital music player market (using HDs as storage), with about 90 percent of the share.

What are the experts saying?  Om Malik had an interesting insight on his blog post, from Steve Milunovich (the Merrill Lynch strategy czar, whose opinion is definitely one of the most respected in Wall Street):

We believe the Dell's music devices will continue to have limited success.  Dell announced an iPod Mini competitor with the same user interface as the previous Dell Jukebox, which has not done that well.  Dell management said last spring that it intends to be patient in the MP3 market. The 5 GB Pocket DJ will sell for $199 versus Apple's 4 GB iPod Mini at $249.  The larger 20 GB DJ will go for $249 for versus the Apple's 4th generation 20 GB iPod at $299. The two biggest issues Dell customers have are viruses and integration.  Both play to the advantage of Apple.

Here are a couple of more interesting reviews at Gizmodo, my favorite gizmo review site:

• DigitalLife: Dell DJ 20GB and Dell Pocket DJ 5
• Two New Dell Music Players

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In a ruling issued on Thursday, the FCC has given carte blanche for operators to provide broadband over power lines in order to "increase competition and promote broadband service to all Americans".  The major goal of this initiative is to increase the availability of broadband to wider areas of the country because power lines reach virtually every home and community.  Moreover, in areas where broadband access is already available, BPL can greatly enhance competition by providing consumers with another broadband alternative.  The FCC also mentions the following BPL intangibles:

• “self-healing” network capabilities
• improved security from physical and cyber threats
• facilitating use of distributed generation
• customer and utility control of appliances and equipment energy use
• improved load management and electric grid utilization
• applications, including automated meter reading, extension of supervisory control and data acquisition functions to the end user level, outage detection, and equipment performance monitoring

As discussed in a previous post here, it is certainly conceivable to see in the not so distant future a few utilities acting as landlords, and leasing their feeder networks as a backhaul access to wireless broadband service providers.

But in the meantime, ISPs are already signing up deals with electric utility companies.  For instance, EarthLink will start offering Internet connections over Consolidated Edison's power lines in Manhattan.  Con Ed is teaming up with Ambient Corporation on that particular deal, and already began signing apartment building landlords.  Eventually, the range of service offerings can be quite ample, including not only Internet access, but also VoIP and other value added services, including: diagnostics, managing residential power load, monitoring electricity consumption, etc.

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Since Avaya, Proxim and Motorola announced the initial results of their research on seamless roaming between 802.11 (WLAN) and 2.5/3G cellular networks earlier this summer, there have been a flurry of announcements of plans to converge cellular and Wi-Fi networks. Case in point: yesterday, Chris Rice, the CTO of SBC (NYSE:SBC), claimed that the carrier's public Wi-Fi hotspots will be used to carry calls from Cingular users by 2006.  The new modus operandi will be for phones to become aware when a WLAN Access Point (AP) is nearby and automatically handoff the call to the Wi-Fi network (what I call the ABC - Always Best Connected - model) 

Rice said that SBC can improve Cingular's cellular coverage by filling in the gaps, relying on Wi-Fi hotspots in places like restaurants, hotel lobbies, coffee houses, etc. to mitigate some of the spectrum demands on the wireless operator.  Achieving this goal might be a challenge from a timeline perspective, as there are quite a few details that still need to be worked out.  For instance the systems that can support the 3G/WLAN seamless roaming entail special client equipment, only working with APs supporting newer technology (e.g. 802.11e, which is the QoS standard that also enables longer battery life, due to the "deep sleep feature").  What about all the older APs that have already been deployed?  Nevertheless, it was interesting to see SBC give a sneak preview about its future Wi-Fi/wireless strategy.

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The idea of giving music fans more power to create their own compilations of CD music is a natural progression in a world in which the consumer is king and personalized service is the ultimate goal. This trend has been manifesting itself in cable TV service (TiVo, "time shifting", VOD - Video On Demand, etc.), the electronics industry (PVR - Personal Video Recorder) and why not think also in the audio/music industry?

In fact, the notion of giving consumers the choice to choose their own song compilations (paying a license fee per song) and then burn their CDs at a music store (including the engraving of the blank shiny CD surface) was discussed in this forum before.  Now, add coffee to it - and presto! - it's a pretty powerful combination.  So kudos to Starbucks (Nasdaq:SBUX) for coming up with the idea of "music bars", a nice setting where customers can listen to digital recordings and burn their own CDs.  The famous chain is enjoying success in its firs music bar opened as a pilot project in Santa Clara, CA (I will be sure to pop in next time I am in town).  The plan is to open 15 of these "Hear Music" coffee houses in Seattle, WA and roughly 30 in Austin, TX.  Music fans will be able to select their music with the aid of a stylus pen and self-service screens placed throughout each location.  The pricing of a customized CD has been set to $8.99 for the first seven songs and 99 cents for each additional song.

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Motorola (NYSE:MOT) has teamed up with Master Card to develop mobile handsets that are able to perform secure financial transactions.  The phones are being equipped with PayPass, a contactless payment service developed by Master Card and VivoTech.  Master Card is seeking for customers having many low-value transactions that are mainly cash based.  McDonald's, for instance, is one of the restaurants that announced it will accept the transaction system by the end of the year (i.e. in Dallas and NYC, with more cities to be added in 2005).  Master Card is also teaming up with other cellular phone manufacturers such as Nokia (NYSE:NOK) on tests of Pay Pass capable phones in Dallas, TX.

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Ellen Muraskin has a pretty thought-provoking article in her latest eWeek column.  The key question is: will Microsoft be making an entry in the enterprise IP Telephony space with SIP and the newest release of its Live Communication Server (LCS 2005, code-named Vienna)? 

Ellen mentions a piece by Mary Jo Foley in Microsoft Watch (interesting to see more on Istanbul, a client that will be able to empower users to change content between text and voice).  So we have a client able to dynamically switch content, a SIP-based server, presence information... all the elements required to build a comprehensive enterprise SIP-based IP PBX.  Can this become a reality?  Maybe so this time around, although it may not be announced at the upcoming VON show.

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Note: Just to throw some wood on the fire: Anoop Gupta, Corporate VP of the Real-Time Collaboration Business Unit at Microsoft is delivering a keynote on Tuesday at 11:15 AM.  Since I am participating at an analyst roundtable happening at the same time, I will not be able to attend Anoop's speech, but look forward to hearing feedback later on during the show. 

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Mobile Tracker, a widely read blog about mobile communications, had a piece on MobiTV's newest partnership with AT&T Wireless (NYSE:AWE) to allow the latter to offer a $7.99 per month service that enables cellular subscribers to access TV content on their mobile handsets.  The Berkeley, CA based-company (financed by VCs such as Menlo, Redpoint, Gefinor and Sorrento) had previously signed a deal with Sprint PCS (NYSE:FON).  The channel lineup includes quite a few stations.  The AT&T Wireless service is available for either the Nokia 6620 or the Motorola V600.  The article also links to a critique from Russell Beattie, who described his experience on a Nokia 6620.

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This past week, WiMAX proponents were bolstered by a couple of announcements: one from AT&T (NYSE:T) and another one from Covad (OTC BB: COVD.OB).  Both companies made their announcements at Web 2.0 Conference that took place in San Francisco last week (Ed. note: Om Malik had a few interesting postings in his blog about the conference).

Ben Charny had an interesting article on the WiMAX announcements on CNET news.  It was not surprising to hear that IXCs such as AT&T or xSPs such as Covad exploring WiMAX as a potential alternative to FTTH/FTTC in offering VoIP and broadband access bundles to consumers.  The end of UNE rules in June has forced IXCs, CLECs and xSPs to make sweeping changes in their strategies and focus on wholesale, enterprise and perhaps some innovation, as weapons to stay competitive against the RBOCs.  Not only that, WiMAX has the promise of cheaper costs ($75 versus $1,500 or more per dwelling).  As mentioned in a few posts here, there are quite a few issues left to be solved for WiMAX, but there is potential for a broadband wireless solution to still emerge as a viable alternative. 

Not only that, but the RBOCs' FTTH exercise will take quite sometime, and within a much shorter time window (i.e. 2-4 years), the prospects of  WiMAX (or even a proprietary broadband wireless scheme) will look a lot brighter.  It might require a bit of creativity, but it is something that could be done.  It will be for instance, interesting to see some electric utility act as a landlord and lease some of its feeder network to act as a backhaul access to a WiMAX network operated by a player such as Covad.  The future will tell whether such partnerships could eventually become a reality.

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Note: Mark Goldberg (who authors Occam's Razor, my favorite Euro VC/strategy blog) had a good compilation of WiMAX articles in a previous post in his blog.

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David Isen posted in his blog the the VON Magazine article he wrote about Japan, which I highly recommend.  I will not rehash his themes and closer examination of what Japan is doing right to lead the way in the delivering broadband services to the consumer market. 

Instead, I will talk about how some of Japan's neighbors are tackling the best way to deliver FTTP (Fiber To The Premise) to their countries.  Without a doubt, Japan is the leader in broadband in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, with over 1.5 million FTTH customers currently getting the service.  After getting burned with ISDN, NTT made a slower foray into FTTH, but seems to be picking up speed in delivering the service (competing with the pioneer Usen Broad Networks) and establishing a goal of 2 million FTTH subs by 2005.

But what about the other countries?  Australia also seems to be getting quite serious about FTTH.  One of the first companies to deliver optic fiber in Australia was Bright Telecommunications, offering service to about 200k homes in Perth.  The company has several packages, including video, high speed Internet and voice services bundles.  Telstra is working on an FTTH trial at Brookwater Estate, Greater Springfield, a new housing estate on the outskirts of Brisbane.  Bundling will also be centered on voice, video and broadband access, with a caveat: Telstra will be tuning down the throughput to match that of existing cable and ADSL services.  In Canberra, TransACT Communications will be offering broadband at 36 Mbit/s downstream and 1.6 Mbit/s upstream, relying on FTTC (Fiber To The Curb) and ADSL 2+.

In China, China Telecom (the country's largest broadband Internet provider) plans to try out FTTH services in the future, but for now will primarily rely on DSL to provide broadband access to its customers. Despite that, with the 2008 Olympic Games looming on the horizon, many telecom service providers in Beijing have prepared study plans to further develop the region's infrastructure.  Beijing's metro fiber optical network is projected to connect to other cities and connect contest and non-contest venues.  China Telecom has been quite active, and recently bought some optical infrastructure from Nortel (NYSE:NT).  As well, China Netcom is rolling out a wireless broadband solution using the 3.5 GHz spectrum, relying on Alvarion's WalkAir 1000 platform.

Finally, Korea has already deployed more than 50,000 km of fiber.  Korea Telecom (KT) is rolling out a FTTH pilot service in Kwangju, a southwestern city in Korea, for 100 subscribers.  The aggressive target set was to deliver between 50 to 100 Mbps of bandwidth to about three quarters of the total households by the end of 2010.

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Another VC blog that I am a big fan of is Jeff Nolan's (I also happen to like his sense of humor - on the title Jeff has "In the tradition of Dan Rather... Fake, but Accurate!").   

Jeff has a couple of great posts on the Vortex 2004 Conference that he attended.  It was an event that provided great insights into the future of the enterprise and the IT industry.  He posted some very interesting Q&A sessions, including one with Mike Volpi, SVP, Routing Technology for Cisco and previously Cisco's M&A czar.  Read it all here in Jeff's post.  On the exchange, I found the following replies quite interesting:

Q: Who are other gorillas that Cisco wants to align with? A: Platforms do exist but they are tectonic in that they move in their own direction irrespective of what their partners want. Some of the gorillas are technology providers while others are services. [Ed. note - he answered this without answering it] Q: Is Microsoft a competitor? A: Not in routers, but they do want to keep the network as a commodity with little value add. It's like having a car with all kinds of fancy technology but still on crummy roads.

Keep in mind the disclaimer that Jeff had in his blog (comments were paraphrased and not made "ad literem").  But there are a lot more interesting speeches - Geoffrey Moore, Jonathan Schwartz, Shane Robison, among others.

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CNET author Ben Charny had a story on how Cox is rolling out VoIP services across several locations in the U.S., including Oklahoma (Tulsa), Louisiana (Lafayette and Baton Rouge) and Texas (Midland).  The U.S. MSOs are much further ahead than their Canadian counterparts in deploying these services (there are other examples, such as Comcast, which is relying on Cisco gear and Time Warner and Charter, which bought into Sprint's Wholesale VoIP solution, which uses the Nortel gear).

What is the price of Cox's bundle?  $100 a month for voice, video and data.  In the meantime, over here in Canada, Rogers is planning to introduce VoIP services in the first half of next year (there are some indications that the company will use Cisco's gear).  Perhaps the slower deployment of IP by the Canadian MSOs can be partly attributed to the still uncertain regulatory picture.  Despite that, some Canadian MSOs like Rogers have a trump card they can play, namely wireless as a the fourth component of the bundle.

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IP World Canada is a Canadian telecom show focused on IP that is going full steam ahead this week in Toronto.  Regretfully, due to a last-minute contingency, I was unable to be there this morning to attend a great tutorial about SIP by Henry Sinnreich (the father of SIP and Distinguished Member of Engineering from MCI), but I will be there tomorrow to catch Mr. Sinnreich and others present various interesting sessions.

Jake Gordon, the conference organizer, has assembled a great lineup of telecom executives (truly a who's-who list of the telecom world in Canada), including the likes of Michael Sabia (President and CEO of Bell Canada), Joe Natale (EVP and President, Client Solutions at Telus), John MacDonald (Allstream President), Don Smith (CEO of Mitel), Isabelle Courville (President, Enterprise Market for Bell Canada), Frank Panza (Director, IP-One Marketing), Phil Edholm (CTO and VP of Network Architecture for Enterprise Networks at Nortel), and Ibrahim Gedeon (CTO Telus Communications), among others.  These and many other speakers will be able to give a good pulse of the true adoption of VoIP thus far in Canada.

The agenda includes several tracks, including technology solutions, enterprise/SMB solutions and customer case studies.  The show definitely looks promising and is generating a lot of attention.  I am therefore pleased to have been invited to speak in a couple of sessions (one is an analyst roundtable discussion on the current state of the industry, and the second one is a longer session on the evolution from TDM to IP PBXs).

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It's official - SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize today, breaking through the Earth's atmosphere to the edge of space for the second time in five days.  The US-built craft is the world's first privately built manned spacecraft to have completed its third round-trip journey to space (besides the two over the past week, it had previously achieved the feat earlier in the summer).  Hopefully, the Ansari contest will further bolster dreams of private space exploration and open the final frontier to tourists at large.

Note: The da Vinci Project, one of the Canadian entries in the contest, is planning to still go ahead with the launch of its rocket from Kindersley, Saskatchewan later this month.  It is nice to see the Canadians involved in this venture persevere, and I hope they achieve their goal to soar past the Earth's atmosphere.

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NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu Laboratories have teamed up to develop a prototype micro fuel cell for 3G FOMA phones.  [Ed. note: FOMA is the name of DoCoMo's proprietary 3G network in Japan]  The logic behind the move is to cater to the power demand by heavy-duty 3G cell phone users.  But even normal users will also benefit, given the increasing power consumption of cell phones (which can be also used to play games, store information such as photos, play different music ring tones depending on the caller ID, etc.). 

The greater power capacity is due to the micro fuel cell, which is able to store 10 times as much power per unit weight as a conventional lithium-ion battery.  The fuel cell generates electric power through a chemical reaction by mixing hydrogen and methanol.  CNET reported that Fujitsu was able to increase the methanol concentration in the fuel cell by developing a better membrane.  The prototype unit measures 152mm x 57mm x 16mm and weighs 190g. 

The charging device is shaped like a normal cradle used to recharge handsets, and it meets all the specs of other FOMA mobile phone rechargers besides being compatible with all FOMA handsets as well.  Both companies anticipate that the prototype will be further refined, with development being completed by the end of 2005.  The key question is when the prototype will become commercially available - thus far, the jury is still out on some of these fuel cell initiatives in terms of products actually launched in the marketplace.

Note: TechTree (an interesting Technology Daily from India, which I enjoy reading) also mentions that Fujitsu apparently has another prototype power unit that incorporates the technology.  Perhaps this work can be extended to other devices, such as PDAs and laptops.  A 300 ml. methanol solution can hypothetically charge a notebook for close to 10 hours.

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Last week, SpaceShipOne (the entry funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen) made the headlines by successfully completing one of the required two flights to win the coveted Ansari X Prize, a $10 million award conferred to the first privately developed manned rocket to reach space twice within a two week time window.  The spaceship can win it all if its scheduled launch tomorrow is successful and it reaches an altitude of at least 98km for the second time since September 29th.  Tomorrow's mission timeline is as follows:

* Takeoff at 7am PT

* Ignition at 8am PT

* Landing at 8:30am PT

* Press Conference to announce official Altitude at 10:30am PT

The flight and press conference an be viewed live at: http://www.xprize.org

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Argumente, my favorite Romanian blog, reports on the first sale ever of a blog.  Could this be a breakthrough in the history of blogging?  How much could a blog be worth?  Is there such a thing as a blog business model?  All intriguing questions, but the reality is that the vast majority of us bloggers only do this for fun.  But it is interesting nonetheless to read Jeremy Wright's insight into the sale of his blog, Ensight.

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Israeli WiMAX vendor Alvarion (Nasdaq:ALVR)announced earlier this week that it had signed a deal with French operator Altitude Telecom to deploy an advanced wireless broadband network across France.  Altitude will rely on Alvarion's BreezeMAX solution to roll out broadband wireless VoIP services to SMEs in addition to large businesses.  The French service provider is deploying Alvarion's solution to build a nationwide network using their 3.5GHz spectrum, to complement and upgrade its existing 26 GHz wireless telecommunications infrastructure.

This is certainly good news for folks in the WiMAX camp, although the spectrum is still an issue to be considered for a wider uptake.  Case in point: Altitude is the only current operator with a license to operate in the 3.5GHz throughout France.  Globes (an Israeli business e-daily) reports that the BreezeMAX network will be rolled out in four counties (initially in the Loire Valley, with plans for additional counties within a year).

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Here is another Wiki - this one is a Wiki with a twist, or a TWiki.  It is a particular implementation of a Wiki, having quite a nice feature set.  More interestingly, there are quite a few examples of companies that are taking advantage of the the software, including the likes of British Telecom, Disney, SAP, Motorola, Wind River and Yahoo!, among others.

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Here is another story from the Korea file.  Telecoms Korea had a piece on new phones and services to be introduced in Korea.  The latest model to be offered by KTF (a Korean mobile operator) features a mobile caption service which displays lyrics of the song played on MP3 phones in real time.  This is the first time I hear a mobile operator providing such a service.  Given the success that the ringtone download service had in regions such as Europe, I expect other Euro wireless carriers to follow suit.  This particular phone also comes with a 3-megapixel camera and TV receiver.  There are plans to add caption to all the MP3 phones or PDAs released through KTF in the future. 

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Natasha Netschay Davies had an interesting article about Wiki software about a week ago in The Globe and Mail.  In case you do not know what a wiki is, then nothing like checking out the definition on wikipedia, one of the most popular wikis in the web.  Wikis represent the latest innovation in the collaboration space - think of them as sandboxes where multiple users can jointly develop web content, without the need of programming skills.

Wikis can really cut down a lot of time on the development of product specifications, market requirement documents, and other projects that normally end up getting bogged down by multiple revisions by various people across an enterprise.  Moreover, wikis create a good environment for "group think" and instills a sense of community: the willingness to contribute to a collaborative effort increases substantially.

The article also talks about Socialtext, a Palo Alto (CA) start-up that successfully commercialized the wiki concept.  Hopefully we will see a lot more - this technology is one to watch in the upcoming years and will dramatically impact the collaboration space.

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Curitel, the South Korean handset maker that made the news in late August when it announced a deal to ship a new camera phone to Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) also grabbed some headlines last week, with the launch of the P1, a slick-looking camera phone with a twist: speech synthesis.  Yes, the phone has text-to-speech as a built-in feature.

Given that the speech engine being used is in shrink-wrap mode, it might not have a large vocabulary.  The speech synthesis is done to output via voice the contents of the text data such as alarms, scheduling and SMS.

The cam-phone, which comes in different color models, is held sideways.  P1 is also equipped with a 2-megapixel digital camera and a 1.9 inch wide TFT LCD screen. (hat tip: Telecoms Korea)

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On the hunt for the coveted Ansari X Prize, one of the Canadian entries (the da Vinci project) announced last Friday that it was postponing its October 2nd launch.  The delay was caused by an inability to obtain a special material necessary to make two key parts.  This temporary halt means that Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne, due to launch from California's Mojave Desert on Wednesday.  If the spaceship can repeat the same feat (i.e. reach an altitude of 62 miles or 100 kilometers) twice in a two-week time frame, it will capture the $10 million prize purse.

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Note: Canada also has another entry running in the contest: the Canadian Arrow, which was discussed here in a previous entry.   more »

There was an interesting InfoWorld article posted earlier this week about how Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) is skeptical about the prospects for a wider adoption of WiMAX.  The TI executive (Joseph Crupi, VP of TI's Broadband Communications Group, and the ex-CEO of Telogy, which was bought by TI) argues that the WiMAX could be an unfulfilled promise, just as the initiatives previously put forth by the Broadband Wireless Internet Forum (BWIF), an industry group that advocated for the adoption of proprietary specs for wireless broadband access a few years ago.  Crupi also mentions that operators for the most part still have not embraced WiMAX as a viable alternative to DSL and delivering broadband to the home.  The article mentions how China Telecom (the largest Chinese ISP) plans to rely on DSL to deliver broadband access to its subscribers, with WiMAX not being mentioned as part of the strategy.

But just because some service providers are slow in picking up new technology or the previous BWIF initiatives failed, is it fair to say that WiMAX is doomed to failure?  One has to wonder if underneath all of this skepticism, perhaps there could also be an effort to slow down Intel's (Nasdaq:INTC) quest to prominently figure in another segment of the wireless market.

That sentiment was echoed by Nancy Gohring in an article in her blog, WiFi Networking News.  She correctly notes that in the US only a few spectrum holders own the licenses suitable for WiMAX, and their interest in the technology has not yet been ascertained.  For instance, Nextel Communications (Nasdaq:NXTL) owns the spectrum, but hinted at using other proprietary schemes in that frequency range.  However, other major operators remained sidelined due to concerns of deploying in unlicensed frequencies. 

Besides spectrum, another obstacle for WiMAX is the development of the IEEE 802.16e specification for mobile wireless broadband.  This spec (part of the larger WiMAX 802.16 standard) is not expected to be ratified until the end of 2005.  Other restraints include base station interoperability and higher costs until that issue is solved and economies of scale can be achieved.

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Note: Thus far, the few operators that are rolling out broadband wireless services are mostly relying on other technologies using licensed spectrum (e.g. the JV between Allstream, Microcell and NR Communications, which operates in the 2.5 GHz band, providing services in Canadian locations such as Cumberland, Ont. and Richmond, B.C.). That said, in June, Intel announced a WiMax trial to provide Internet services in two Chinese cities, Dalian and Chengdu.

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Yesterday, I had posted a story on LG Electronics' strong performance in 3G wireless handsets.  At the end of the piece, I mentioned an article that I came across Telecoms Korea talking about a potential deal involving LGE selling its communications unit to either Nortel or Cisco (I discovered the original article on Tuesday this week, but could not find any official news item on Google News or any other source).

Well, today, someone e-mailed me a Dow Jones Newswires story claiming that that rumor is now official: LGE will spin-off its telecommunications unit and establish a JV with Nortel:

S Korea LG Elec To Set Up Telecom JV With Nortel - Report SEOUL -(Dow Jones)- South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. (066570.SE) plans to spin off its telecommunications equipment operations and set up a joint venture with Nortel Networks Corp. (NT.T) of Canada, reports online news provider edaily. The two companies plan to sign a memorandum of understanding and finalize details by the end of this year, edaily reports, quoting an LG Electronics official. LG Electronics' telecommunications equipment business posted a loss of more than 70 billion won ($1=KRW1,148) in 2002, but last year the business turned profitable to post a net profit of more than KRW50 billion, edaily says. A spokeswoman at LG Electronics said she couldn't immediately confirm the report. At 0517 GMT, shares of LG Electronics were 1.5%, or KRW900, higher at KRW62,000, outperforming the broader market's 0.4% drop. LG Electronics also makes mobile handsets, home appliances and plasma display panel televisions. -By Seoul Bureau, Dow Jones Newswires; 822-732-2165; djnews.seoul@dowjones.com

Interesting news item - but it is still early to jump to any conclusions until more details are announced.  For instance, I wonder if the JV will or will not include the 3G handset part of the LGE communications organization (the original report mentioned specifically that the 3G operation would not be a part of the JV exercise).  If so, then the deal makes sense for Nortel, since the company is actively competing in the 3G space, and this can create some synergies (e.g. Hutchison 3, a leading W-CDMA operator). 

However, speculatively speaking, there will be some duplication in the enterprise division (in terms of the LGE KTS and PBX, as well as the interest in KTS vendor Vodavi).  I would imagine LGE would keep its enterprise product lines and sell them in Korea and APAC (except possibly for Australia and other areas where Nortel is strong).  Nortel would still use its enterprise product lines in the remaining regions around the world.  Again, the information is still very fluid, so it is early to make too many conclusions.

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Note: The story originally appeared on Edaily, a respected Korean publication.  Since I don't speak Korean, I tried searching for LG in the text and found the article.  Then, finding an online Korean to English translation tool was difficult (Google's language tools currently do not include support for Korean-to-English translation).  Altavista does have such an engine, albeit the translation is not the best (I guess the engine is still a work in progress).  But here it is, in any event.  The URL is:

http://www.edaily.co.kr/news/exclusive/read.asp?newsid=02102486573423072&strPage=1&curtype=read

(scroll down to "Traduci una pagina web" and copy and paste the above URL).  Then, choose "da Coreano a Inglese" on the combo box and click on the button that says "Traduci".

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The CRTC VoIP hearings continued today, the final day of the three-day public consultation period that will determine the regulator's stance of VoIP.  Yesterday, Jeff Pulver posted his own submission to the CRTC in his blog.  Not surprisingly, Jeff pitched an FCC-like stance, much like the same position that I have been advocating here at TF.  But I liked the way he so candidly said:

"The default presumption should be that regulation need not apply. If a potential monopolist demonstrates that it cannot play fair, then it should be slapped silly."

Time will tell whether or not the CRTC will take a page out of the FCC book and adopt a minimum-regulation position.  Actually, it is not just the FCC that took that route; in fact, there are other countries such as the UK, Austria and Singapore that have also reached the same conclusion.  As Richard Stastny points out in his blog, it seems that regulators that have already dealt for some time with issues such as ENUM are apparently more forward-thinking towards VoIP (Ed. note: Richard has been one of the key players in Austria's ENUM initiative and has spread the ENUM gospel in a few VON conferences).

Once the hearings are completed, the commission will have to ponder upon a lot of issues, before making its final decision, which is expected to happen in the first half of next year.

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Update: Transcripts should be available sometime soon (now that the hearings are over) - check the main CRTC VoIP hearings page.

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According to Italian business news daily Il Sole 24 Ore, rival telecom equipment makers Alcatel (NYSE:ALA) and Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) are both interested in acquiring a majority stake in Italian softswitch vendor Italtel SpA.  Italtel reported a 2003 net loss of €24.2 million on sales of €691.2 million. 

As reported on that daily on Tuesday, US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier and Rice, which has owned the stake (48.8 percent) for more than four years, now wants to sell it after the company put plans for an initial public offering (IPO) on hold due to market conditions.  Alcatel has made an offer for the stake and Cisco, which already owns 18.4 percent of Italtel, has indicated it wants to increase its shareholding.

Italtel's main client is Telecom Italia (NYSE:IT), which accounts for 65 percent of its revenues and holds 19.37 percent of its capital.  According to the article, the Italian telco has no preference between Alcatel and Cisco and only wants Italtel to be "effective and competitive".

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Two great sources on this story are a Light Reading (The Daily Payload) article and a piece written by Om Malik on his blog, Om Malik on Broadband.  The Daily Payload entry examines the various pros and cons for Cisco and Alcatel to make the acquisition.  Om, as usual, is a step ahead of the curve and looks at the final outcome, believing that the loser of the Italtel sweepstakes might go after another softswitch vendor (his guess is Veraz Networks).    more »

The results for the quarter ending June 30 are in and LG Electronics posted a strong performance, with net income increasing from roughly 494.4 billion won (about $427 million) versus 267.3 billion a year ago.

More remarkably, handset unit sales grew 89 percent from a year ago, to 9.94 million sets.  The strength continued in August, when LGE (LGEAF: Other OTC) registered a significant increase in 3G and US GSM phones.  Quarter-to-August handset shipment rose to 24.9% QoQ (or about 7.8 million units).  LGE has been one of the few global handset makers that have achieved sequential shipment growth and market share gains.  Apparently LGE and a few other Japanese players have been outpacing the large handset manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola and Samsung) in the 3G arena.  Smith Barney pegs LGE's global market share in the 3G segment at 26 percent, which is quite impressive.  Perhaps some observers did under-estimate LGE's strong 3G performance.  In Europe, for instance, LGE has a good presence (e.g. Hutchison 3, a leading W-CDMA operator).

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Note: Telecoms Korea recently had a post about rumors that LG will reportedly sell its communication unit (except the handset division) to either Nortel or Cisco.  Since I do not own a subscription to the site, I could not dig deeper into the story, but all my Google news searches have turned up empty thus far - any info will be much appreciated.   more »

The CRTC (Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission) begins today three days of hearings on VoIP regulation.  A total of 33 industry participants are scheduled to make presentations as part of the public consultation hearings.  The list is a who's who in the Canadian telecom and VoIP arenas, including the likes of the incumbents (e.g. Bell Canada, Telus), CLECs (e.g. MTS/Allstream), new VoIP entrants (e.g. Primus, Vonage, Yak), MSOs (e.g. Rogers, Cogeco), telecom vendors (e.g. Nortel, Alcatel), municipalities (e.g. Calgary, Vancouver), E-911 organizations (Ontario 9-1-1 Advisory Board) and well-known VoIP evangelist Jeff Pulver (from Pulver.com). [Ed. note: Actually, Jeff has several entries in his blog on the subject, including this one, which links to a National Post story from Kevin Restivo.] 

These discussions are attracting a lot of attention south of the border as well.  Besides the Pulver.com team, the American media is following the story with interest, as it provides the FCC with some interesting insights into policy making.  Ellen Muraskin interviewed me yesterday for a piece she wrote for eWeek, and I anticipate that there will be more Canadian analysts providing their views to various US editors, reporters and key media people. 

Earlier this year, the CRTC issued a preliminary opinion which signaled that it was considering adopting a regulatory model for VoIP.  More specifically, the CRTC initial stance was that VoIP should be regulated as a "telecom service" for the incumbents (Bell Canada and Telus), whereas it should be treated as an "information service" by the rest of the competitors. The rationale behind this position was that there were a few folks concerned with a "no regulation" scenario in which Bell and Telus would adopt a strategy to drive other small players out of the market, by setting their prices for services artificially low or by providing Internet access and VoIP service bundles.

Bell and Telus obviously were not thrilled, as they would not only risk losing market share, but also would face an uneven playing field versus the competition (a cable player such as Rogers, for instance, would initially have an advantage over the incumbents).  From a strict fairness perspective, they have a valid point: rules should be ideally applied evenly across the board. 

So what is the alternative?  Reiterating what I wrote in a previous post here at TF, my opinion is that the CRTC cause would be better served by "light regulation" that is premised upon public service goals such as emergency service (E-911), law enforcement (CALEA) and universal service funding. The rationale of this focus on light regulation is to allow this nascent industry an opportunity to flourish. VoIP is still in its blossoming stages and innovation in this area should not be choked before the industry has a chance to grow.

So what should the CRTC do?  It is a tradeoff between allowing the industry to fully reach its potential (i.e. very "light regulation" evenly applied across the board) or regulating the incumbents while allowing the competitors some freedom (in order to prevent the incumbents from completely killing the competition).  It is not an easy choice, since each option has its merits. 

The ultimate goal of any regulator is to create a market as perfectly competitive as possible.  From a competitive perspective it is necessary to have at least a couple of strong players in the marketplace, without giving a clear advantage to either one of them.  The ILEC / MSO duopoly, while not the best "perfectly competitive" scenario, at least works because the two players fight for the same customer, offering a bundle versus bundle deal for triple play services (voice, data and video).  This is already happening in the U.S.  If the CRTC adopts its initial stance, MSOs would get an initial advantage in Canada (granted they are a bit behind their U.S. counterparts, but still, the CRTC would have to watch them very closely).

I would also make the case that Canada would benefit more from regulation only after the need for that regulation is proven to be necessary.  In other words, my suggestion is to keep regulation to a minimum and provide an even level playing field for all competitors.  Why not take a page out of the FCC book, since their initial VoIP stance seems to be working well?  The benefits of "light regulation" (i.e. just concerning public service goals such as E-911 and CALEA) far outweigh the risks of anti-competitive behavior from the incumbents.  And, even should the incumbents engage in such practices, the CRTC can always have the option of stepping in to avoid a large-scale industry consolidation.

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