VoIP and ENUM

I upgraded my blog to the new version of Blogger. They said that this will leave the layout unharmed. As anybody can see, it scambled up my Google Ads.

Until I can have a look at this, I apologize for the inconvenience.

In the meantime I found out that this is only happing if you use Firefox

Skype asks FCC to open up mobile networks

Now this will be interesting.

Comment by Erik Cecil:

Bells: Carterphone doesn't apply. In that case, it was a rancher who wanted to use is walkie talkie to talk to the vet from out on his ranch. But Carterphone proves our case. That's because these days there's competition. That rancher has the choice of any number of wireless providers. So he doesn't need to use his walkie talkie. He can use his cell phone.

Martin: Petition Denied. Next.

Or?

Two weeks ago I had a post about Deloitte & Touche predicting that global traffic will exceed the Internet's capacity end of this year, mainly caused by video traffic.

Now Network World is stating: Don't expect video to exhaust the fiber glut.

“In long haul, there is still plenty of fiber,” says Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota. “If you look at the total Internet traffic in the U.S., it could be squeezed down one or at most two fiber strands. And on most routes you have hundreds of strands.”

...

Insight Research did a study back in 2001 of fiber utilization among 13 major long-haul carriers. Data was culled from fiber pairs in 24 major cities.Only 7% to 8% of the total capacity was used, and of that only 3% to 4% was actually lit, says Robert Rosenberg, president of Insight Research. Historically, utilization has been more like 30% to 40%, he says.

Couple with that the slowing growth of Internet traffic. Even though the rate of video growth has been increasing – Level 3 says 50% to 60% of the traffic across its IP backbone is video, compared with 5% to 10% five years ago – the overall growth of traffic on the Internet has slowed to 50% per year from 100% or more in the heady days of the bubble.

“Back in those days, everybody was putting in as much as they could and it made sense,” says Clif Holliday, an analyst with Information Gatekeepers Inc. (IGI). “There’s probably an awful lot of excess fiber in the ground.”

So the bottleneck is still in the access, but also this is improving with fiber-to-the-home.

Last week Siemens transmitted 10 Gigabit/second over a passive optical network. And the last mile was 100 kilometers.

This should be sufficent for HDTV.

The interview Eelco Blok gave to the "Wirtschaftswoche" (in German) has been translated already in English by D.H van der Woude (see below).

What is interesting here is that KPN goes a different path here then Deutsche Telecom:

Mr Blok further implies that KPN has reached an understanding with OPTA that the network
will be open from day one. And he says in quite clear terms that KPN does not agree with
DTAG that there should be a regulatory holiday.

However, last week OPTA published a study by Analysys that concludes that the result of
KPN's All-IP net quill be that even its largest competitors will end up with no business case.

Which would mean that KPN's open network only will used by... KPN.

The translated interview:

„Complete switch off "

Eelco Blok, board member at the Dutch market leader KPN, in an interview over radical fixed net reconstruction and new Internet competitors.

WirtschaftsWoche: Mr. Blok, have you already cried today?

Eelco Blok: Why should I?

The day moves closer, when KPN will shut down the old telephone network, their implicit basis of contracts in the past 100 years.

(laughs) much more I mourn the customers we lose to the competition. In order to stop the customer decrease, we not only must completely change our net, but also the enterprise with all its coworkers.

Is the old telephone network is no longer good enough, in order to develop new products for the customers?

In the future we can exist in the competition only if we offer with greatest possible bandwidth offer the entire product spectrum from VOIP up to IPTV to our private and business customers. This functions only in an ultramodern fixed net, which only uses IP to transmit. In the year 2010 we want to switch off the traditional telephone network completely. In order to guarantee data transmission rates from 30 to 50 megabit per second, we must everywhere in the Netherlands roll out glass fiber to the street corner. For the coming three to five years this suffices to be competitive.

Is such a megaproject worthwhile?

We made additional means available to a level of 1,0 to 1.5 billion euro until 2010. Perhaps we will supplement these investments. A large part of these means originates from the sales of buildings, in which we house our today's switching centers and that we will not need any longer. At the same time our costs can be lowered significantly. The new net needs less technicians. Until 2010 we want to ax 8,000 jobs. Those are 50 per cent of our fixed net workers.

Deutsche Telekom makes the billion-investment dependent on a Regulatory Holiday and wants to force that the competition does not get an entrance to the new high-speed net.

We pursue a completely different strategy. It is clearly in the interest of all to open the new net immediately for the competition. We have aready reached an understanding with the Dutch Regulatory authority. Alternative fixed net companies can share the new net immediately. Thus we are on a line with the European Union commission.The real profiteers are nevertheless Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo, which use your infrastructure almost free of charge in the future for the spreading of videos and television.

We are convinced of the fact that Google, Yahoo and Apple in the private customer business, and in addition, IT-services from the like of IBM, EDS and Microsoft in the business customer market, form a very important part of the competition landscape. We fight no longer only against other telecom companies and cable system operators. Nevertheless we will defend our position in the communication market.

How do you want to achieve that? The competition will be even harder in the new net. Research concludes that Google, Yahoo & co can offer their services in the same quality as infrastructure operators. Which right of existence will you than have?

It can well be that there will no longer be recognizable quality differences and the customers will use these web services exactly like what we offer. But for us there is no alternative. Already now the turnover in the fixed net business decreases each year. We hope that with our television offer this trend can be stopped. That can only work when we renew the entire infrastructure and lower the costs

[03.02.2007] juergen.berke@wiwo.de

Deutsche Telecom said it will shut down the PSTN in 2019, British Telecom said it will have the 21CN fully in place 2015, and now KPN is already at 2010.

I currently have only German references from heise.de and futurezone.orf.at (in German):

KPN will shut down completely its traditional phone network in 2010. Calls will then be provided only via VoIP, says Eelco Blok, responsible for the fixed network part of KPN to the "Wirtschaftswoche".
...

This changes the telecom-infrastructure completely, a lot of workplace will not be required anymore.

This will be done in some cases without the users really noticing it, e.g. with customers from Arcor and Alice in Germany. Also Deutsche Telecom is moving in this direction.

Phil Kerpen has an article on Forbes.com yesterday starting with the following paragraph:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A new assessment from Deloitte & Touche predicts that global traffic will exceed the Internet's capacity as soon as this year. Why? The rapid growth in the number of global Internet users, combined with the rise of online video services and the lack of investment in new infrastructure. If Deloitte's predictions are accurate, the traffic on many Internet backbones could slow to a crawl this year absent substantial new infrastructure investments and deployment. . .

Huh? I cannot believe this.

Who is predicting this? Deloitte & Touche? or Phil Kerpen?

As Kevin Werbach points out:

So, if you actually read the Deloitte & Touche "study", which is here, you discover that it's **one page** of pretty summary conclusions.

Not one page of executive summary; the entire relevant discussion on "reaching the limits of cyberspace" is a single page in one volume of their 2007 tech trends report.

And if you read that one page, you find that the only source for the claim that backbones are reaching capacity is a piece from CNET News.com in March.

That's a relatively unremarkable article talking about the demand that growing video traffic places on the network. It talks about ISP traffic shaping and distributed caching being promoted in response.

There's nothing in there about network neutrality. In fact, the very next page of the Deloitte and Touche report is about "The net neutrality debate needs resolution," but it's a completely separate article. And the conclusion is: "Both arguments [for and against net neutrality] have merit; both have their flaws." Not exactly the conclusion that the Forbes column drew from the report.

Or as Vint Cerf said: this article must have been commissioned by the RBOCs.

Ah yes, and Tuvalu is going under because of Global Warming.

Just for completeness:

The UK ENUM Consortium has finally launched the RFP/ITT for the UK Tier 1 Registry.

The ITT and related documents can be downloaded from here.

Presentations and other details from the workshop that was held on Jan 17th can be found there too.

Organisations planning to respond to the ITT need to inform UKEC of that intent by Feb 7th. Responses to the ITT must be submitted before noon on Feb 28th.

So the UK may also go commercial with ENUM sometimes this year (or 2008).