Tuesday, October 24, 2006
ENUM Day in Australia
Australia is currently running an ENUM trial until June 2007. An ENUM Day will be held at November 15th, 2006 in Sydney. The agenda can be retrieved from here.
Monday, October 23, 2006
FON overtakes T-Mobile
The ORF Futurezone features an interview with Christine zu Salm, the media managerin of FON in Germany, about the future plans of FON. The reason was of course the new offer from FON to get La Fonera, a preconfigured WiFi Router, for free.
FON is a Spain WLAN company, with participations by Skype, Google and Sequoia, operating currently 100.000 WLAN hotspots worldwide, most of them up to now in Asia, e.g. in South Korea. With the new free offer in Germany (and Austria) they have already overtaken T-Mobiles 24.000 hotspots.
Currently Germany is used as a test market, the plans are to have 1 Million hotspots worldwide by 2010. The basic idea of FON is to open the WLAN hot-spots of residential users in currently 3 different modes:
The question is what FON wants to do with these hotspots in future?
Salm: In November there will be offered dual-mode WiFi-VoIP/GSMs phones for use with the hotspots. This will make our infrastructure also interesting for third parties. The hotspots may also be used for distributing short video-clips (a la YouTube). In addition, the mobile phones may be used for transactions (banking and location dependent services).
Since I am already a Fonero since August (it works perfectly) I am really waiting for the mobile phones ;-)
FON is a Spain WLAN company, with participations by Skype, Google and Sequoia, operating currently 100.000 WLAN hotspots worldwide, most of them up to now in Asia, e.g. in South Korea. With the new free offer in Germany (and Austria) they have already overtaken T-Mobiles 24.000 hotspots.
Currently Germany is used as a test market, the plans are to have 1 Million hotspots worldwide by 2010. The basic idea of FON is to open the WLAN hot-spots of residential users in currently 3 different modes:
- Linus: You give away the access to the hotspot for free to every other Linus user in exchange for free access by them.
- Alien: you pay $3 per day
- Bill: You pay half of an Alien, but you get back some money if somebody uses your hotspot.
The question is what FON wants to do with these hotspots in future?
Salm: In November there will be offered dual-mode WiFi-VoIP/GSMs phones for use with the hotspots. This will make our infrastructure also interesting for third parties. The hotspots may also be used for distributing short video-clips (a la YouTube). In addition, the mobile phones may be used for transactions (banking and location dependent services).
Since I am already a Fonero since August (it works perfectly) I am really waiting for the mobile phones ;-)
Sunday, October 22, 2006
13th CEPT Conference in Berlin
I was invited to speak at the 13th CEPT Conference, which took place in Berlin 11-12 October 2006. The title of the conference was "Regulations und Challange" and the speaker list was quite impressive. A good overview of the state of the art in VoIP from a regulators and incumbents viewpoint was given. The programme and the presentations can be found here, click on programme/presentations to the right.
The motto of day 1 was "Policy Challenges" and featured as speakers Yoshio Utsumi (ITU), Guido Landheer (CEPT), Fabio Colasanti (EC), Michael Bartholomew (ETNO), Kevin Power (ECTA), Tom Lindström (EICTA), Sergio Antocicco (INTUG), Peter Scott (EC), Kip Meek (ERG and OFCOM), Mathias Kurth (RSPG), Rainer Münch (ETSI TISPAN), Kenneth Neil Cukier (The Economist) and Chris Marsden (RAND).
The motto of day 2 was "Regulatory Practices under Challenge" and was split into two tracks. I was speaking in track 2 in "Bulding Blocks of NGN" about "ENUM - Promises or Reality",
together with Alex Mayhofer (enum.at), speaking about VoIP Peering, and Tony Holmes (BT and TISPAN WG4 chair), speaking on "NGN Identifiers".
The conference presentations where very well selected and gave an excellent snapshot of the current developments from the incumbents perspective.
The motto of day 1 was "Policy Challenges" and featured as speakers Yoshio Utsumi (ITU), Guido Landheer (CEPT), Fabio Colasanti (EC), Michael Bartholomew (ETNO), Kevin Power (ECTA), Tom Lindström (EICTA), Sergio Antocicco (INTUG), Peter Scott (EC), Kip Meek (ERG and OFCOM), Mathias Kurth (RSPG), Rainer Münch (ETSI TISPAN), Kenneth Neil Cukier (The Economist) and Chris Marsden (RAND).
The motto of day 2 was "Regulatory Practices under Challenge" and was split into two tracks. I was speaking in track 2 in "Bulding Blocks of NGN" about "ENUM - Promises or Reality",
together with Alex Mayhofer (enum.at), speaking about VoIP Peering, and Tony Holmes (BT and TISPAN WG4 chair), speaking on "NGN Identifiers".
The conference presentations where very well selected and gave an excellent snapshot of the current developments from the incumbents perspective.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
ENUM commercial in Finland +358
Ficora launched .8.5.3.e164.arpa User ENUM into public commercial operation after a succesfull pilot phase that started in 2003.
The database was cleared between the pilot phase and commercial operation and thus there are no delegations at the moment.
Juhani Juselius from Ficora:
Our next aim is to get as much support from telcos and registrars for ENUM as possible. Currently I'm optimistic for their support since we are having good discussions with all major Finnish telcos.
Congratulations!
User ENUM is currently in commercial operation in
Austria
Poland
Romania
Germany
Netherlands
Finland
Ireland is still negotiating
The database was cleared between the pilot phase and commercial operation and thus there are no delegations at the moment.
Juhani Juselius from Ficora:
Our next aim is to get as much support from telcos and registrars for ENUM as possible. Currently I'm optimistic for their support since we are having good discussions with all major Finnish telcos.
Congratulations!
User ENUM is currently in commercial operation in
Austria
Poland
Romania
Germany
Netherlands
Finland
Ireland is still negotiating
