TORONTO – VOIP, wireless, video, SMS, IMS, GSM – we are on the cusp of major telecom changes – not to mention a riot of acronyms you can’t identify without a program.
It was clear through several sessions at the first day of the three-day Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto that wireless and voice over Internet protocol telephony are leading a revolution in communications, world wide. Here’s a bit of what we saw and heard.
Ericsson Canada’s president Mark Henderson told delegates that video looks to be the next big thing in wireless. Good video too, with interactive television applications and full web browsing on the phone/camera/TV screen.
While wireless penetration in North America has a long way to go (it’s 55% here as compared to 89% in Europe), Korean company KTF is finding that 90% of its 3G wireless revenue is coming from video applications, including video on demand to handhelds (not full movies, mind you, but video clips like movie trailers and sports highlights).
U.K. reality TV show Big Brother is getting 20,000 video connections per day from Brits on their mobiles who just have to watch the contestants all the time. And, not only can customers see video, they can also call up navigation bars on the little screen to patrol the net, find more information or change channels.
British broadcasters have even added extra cameras to soccer games so that mobile users can see multiple replays and highlights from different angles, for a fee, of course.
Robert Odendaal, CEO of Bell Mobility and video services for Bell Canada pointed out that Bell is seeing triple-digit monthly growth in instant messages sent.
AOL Canada will, either this week or next, make official its launch of VOIP service AOL TotalTalk in 33 markets in Canada. The company launched the service in Toronto at the end of 2004 and has been quietly getting ready to offer the service to its 800,000 Canadian users, said Steve Koles, general manager of Netscape and enhanced services for AOL Canada.
The markets AOL is launching are in every province but Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland & Labrador and Saskatchewan and in none of the territories. The price for the service will range from $15 to $40 a month, depending on the services chosen.
All new VOIP comers insisted that price isn’t the only reason people switch to them and that different services such as being able to choose an area code, no matter where you are, are the key selling points. Then again, when Primus dropped its price in the last quarter of 2004, subscriber numbers grew far more rapidly. Subscriber numbers in the second quarter have already passed the first quarter – and there’s still a month left to go,” said Matt Stein, Primus’ v-p new technology and services.
“It’s not only about price,” said Vonage Canada’s vice-president of marketing Joe Parent. “The one thing that’s unique about us is that everything is about VOIP. We’re not worried about eating into other legacy revenues and thinking about ways to keep the company whole.”
One of the remaining problems with VOIP is that while awareness has gone through the roof recently (from 27% awareness in the fourth quarter of 2004 to 66% in Q2 2005, said Koles), understanding is still lacking. “VOIP is becoming well-known,” said Parent, “but it’s not known very well.”
What that means is he’s looking forward for the major cable and telephone companies coming into the market, “spending money to educate the market,” on VOIP, he said.
And while cable and telcos say that the bundle is where it’s at, “I haven’t found anyone who has said they want to give more money to their ILEC,” says Parent.
Since VOIP rides the Internet, the next big security issue is SPIT, or spam over Internet telephony. Spit will be a challenge to stop because while spam filters work based on the content of the incoming e-mails, voice calls don’t have content – it’s just a data stream. Plus, over the Internet, call display becomes untrustworthy (that incoming number could be from anywhere, really), so how does one stop spit? No answer, yet, but the industry is working on it, said Baruch Sterman, CEO of Kayote Networks, in another session on enabling VOIP technologies.
With pervasive IP comes pervasive network availability, where customers making a phone call – using whatever handset they have – won’t know just what network is being used to make the call, but the service provider will be making sure that the call is sent along the most efficient path possible, be that the PSTN, wireless, broadband cable or the Internet, said Mike Lee, Rogers Cable’s vice-president of strategy and development.
Rogers is testing its own wired/wireless phone right now that, when launched, will mean customers can have a single handset that uses the wireless network when they’re away from home and the cable plant when they’re at home. Rogers thinks this will work partly because it found that 20% of wireless phone calls are made from within the home, with the wired phone right there.
For the user, though, it’s all seamless. “We take the complexity of the network away from the customer,” said Lee.
Come back to www.cartt.ca tomorrow for more on the Telecom Summit, including coverage of a session featuring Lawson Hunter, executive vice-president, BCE Inc.; Janet Yale, EVP corporate affairs, Telus; Jean Brazeau, senior v-p regulatory, Sprint Canada; Ken Englehart, v-p regulatory, Rogers Communications; Chris Peirce, senior v-p regulatory, MTS-Allstream; and Michael Hennessy, president, Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association.
– Greg O’Brien
