Author Archives: Stuart Zipper

About Stuart Zipper

Stuart Zipper is currently a contributing editor to Communications Technology, a high tech business journalism consultant and freelancer, and the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break.

Can VoIP Save Blackberry?

by Stuart Zipper

Leave a reply

Word emanating from Waterloo, Onatario, Canada is that the new BlackBerry 10 platform will support VoIP. Over the past couple of days, a flood of both formal statements and leaks indicate that a slew of developers have jumped at the opportunity to build BlackBerry 10 versions of their VoIP applications, either for their own VoIP services or to provide to VoIP carriers who prefer not to devote their resources to basic applications development.

For the tekkies among us, myself included, the development is indeed exciting. But for the business analysts amongst us, myself included, the jury is still out.

It’s no secret that the former Research In Motion (RIM), which has just taken on the name of its premiere product line as its corporate name and renamed itself BlackBerry, is in trouble, its survival hardly assured. Once the absolute leader in smartphones, these days it’s been totally eclipsed by both Apple and Android-based offerings, with Microsoft’s Windows nipping at BlackBerry’s heels. Some really good analysts I’ve been reading are even suggesting that Android will soon displace Apple, with Windows Phone to also pass both BlackBery and Apple, with BlackBerry relegated to last place.

Given that scenario, BlackBerry’s best chance at survival is to take a gamble, and part of that gamble is on VoIP. To that end, BlackBerry has now validated PJSIP, which is an open source embedded SIP protocol stack written in C. In short, PJSIP is a way to port a VoIP application to various platforms, and a couple of weeks ago the developer community behind PJSIP (see www.pjsip.org) released instructions on how to port to BlackBerry 10. The task can be done in a phenomenally short 10 minutes. After that, it’s up to the developer to tinker with his application to make it work properly on PJSIP running on the BlackBerry 10 platform. From what I’ve been reading, the task is not difficult.

The result may be that the new BlackBerry 10-based phones, which to no surprise support Long Term Evolution (LTE), are the first that will soon work as VoIP phones over just about anybody’s VoIP service. Will that be enough to save BlackBerry? Or will the leader get another arrow in its back? Only time, and the marketplace, will tell.

So what does that mean to users of a VoIP provider such as Phone.com?

That’s an obvious answer. It means that in the near future the BlackBerry 10 phones will be, as I’ve been predicting for a long time, usable as VoIP extensions on a company’s virtual PBX. In other words, the conversations will flow over wireless data channels, rather than over current cellular voice channels, and the VoIP calls will be both incoming and outgoing. Indeed a very small business might even use a cell phone as its main business phone.

Meanwhile, as we wait for this to happen, I should note that Phone.com users can easily set up any wireless or landline phone, or a PC, anywhere in the world, as an incoming extension to their virtual switchboard. (The PC can also be an outgoing VoIP extension, using Phone.com’s Communicator software http://www.phone.com/features/communicator.php.)

Finally, while BlackBerry may be the first to open up its platform to VoIP developers, the way industry works there’s little doubt that others will play follow the leader. While there are some VoIP kluges for Android, I think it’s inevitable that Google won’t let BlackBerry get ahead on this one. And the folks at Microsoft and Apple aren’t dumb or the companies wouldn’t be where they are … they’re sure to follow suit once they realize they’re losing business by not supporting VoIP.

Rural Businesses May Finally Get A Shot At VoIP

by Stuart Zipper

Leave a reply

Yet another clear indication that VoIP will soon be carried over 4G wireless, i.e.  LTE (Long Term Evolution) emerged a couple of weeks ago at the Citi Global Internet, Media & Telecommunications Conference.

At that conference AT&T’s senior EVP of AT&T technology and network operations, John Donovan, made it crystal clear that part of AT&T’s broadband delivery plans include LTE, mostly in rural areas, rather than wired broadband service.

“We anticipate that LTE will be our broadband coverage solution for a portion of the country, we just haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve got enough experience under our belt to know what the portion will be,” Donovan said. “There’s no question that as we extend ourselves from 75 percent of the footprint to 99 percent of the footprint in our region that we’re going to be using LTE for some of that broadband.” (For those who would like to hear Donovan’s entire presentation, it’s at: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=113088&p=irol-EventDetails&EventId=4887032

What the means, of course, is that businesses in America’s rural areas who opt for VoIP services such as Phone.com will be getting another broadband option for delivery of Internet phone service. Indeed for some it may be their first high speed broadband option, which means a fertile new market for both business and residential VoIP carriers.

 I’ve blogged about what I see as the relation between VoIP and LTE often, so it is gratifying to see my predictions come a step closer to reality. One thing I should mention on the technical side is that VoIP over LTE (or VoLTE) used to deliver broadband to a fixed location is significantly easier than VoIP over an LTE-capable cell phone. That’s because VoLTE for a phone needs to accommodate hand-off as the user moves from one place to another, an issue that doesn’t arise with a fixed location.

Crash Course in Mobile Telephony

by Stuart Zipper

Leave a reply

I’ve been writing about digital wireless phones ever since, well, ever since Qualcomm had its very first half dozen prototypes to show folk. I even got to play with one of those phones, at a trade show.

But a little more than a week ago, I got my first real “crash course” in mobile telephony. Or perhaps I should say “crush course.”

What happened was that I was sitting in a hospital parking lot, filling out a pile of forms. I got so immersed that I totally forgot that my cell phone was sitting on my lap, and when I got out of the car it apparently slipped out with me, but I didn’t notice until a couple of hours later.

Desolate that I couldn’t find it, I went home and jumped on my PC, using the GPS-based “find me” feature built into the phone to determine that it was still somewhere around the hospital. Charging back to the parking lot I looked some more, to no avail. Perhaps, the security folk said helpfully, it had been found and turned in to the hospital Lost and Found – which of course to my continuing bad luck was closed by then.

A quick call the next morning revealed that indeed it had been sitting in the Lost and Found overnight, so of course I rushed right over. But my joy turned to sadness when I retrieved my little phone – for it had been run over by a car before being found. Just about crushed to death, with a crinkly screen and a cover over the battery compartment that wouldn’t close any more; the only thing still usable was the find me function.

And thus I now find myself the owner of a brand new, shiny blue, HTC 8X Windows Phone 8. An LTE model, no less. In other words, the newest kid on the block. And I can even get LTE data around where I live, in fact data service that’s even more reliable than voice.

So as I write this, I’m wondering when the obvious next step will happen, with that LTE network enabled for VoIP over LTE (VoLTE). Yes, there are some kluge apps that can do this now, but the network really isn’t yet set up to handle key issues such as reliable hand-off, as one moves from one cell to the next.

But I’m confident, having written about technology for decades, that it’s only a matter of time now before my LTE phone starts functioning as a two-way digital extension off the virtual switchboard of my Phone.com account.

Meanwhile, by the time you’ve read this, I expect to have ordered a phone case that has a decent chance of surviving a parking lot accident.

Do Not Forget the Fax

by Stuart Zipper

Leave a reply

In ancient times – I don’t mean B.C., I mean B.E. or ‘before e-Mail” – I used to have a fax machine sitting by my desk. In fact (or should I say in fax), I was using fax transmission way back in the early 1970s, via a clever contraption with what I think was a one pixel sensor on a rapidly twirling arm, scanning bit by bit as the document being faxed was very, very slowly pulled through a tube. Some 20 years later I of course had far more modern equipment, with higher data transmission rates and capable of scanning or spewing out several pages per minute.

But these days fax has become a rarity in the United States. I haven’t needed to send or receive a fax in well over a year. I got rid of my last dedicated fax machine something like a decade ago.

So I was somewhat shocked when I was suddenly required to fax a document this week. It seems that customer service at the Hospital Corp of America (HCA), which bought our local hospital some years back, can’t get e-Mail. They demand fax or snail mail.  Having put my life on the line at that hospital, I can say that their medical expertise is top notch, even if their customer service is in the telecommunications stone age. Indeed I bet they’re even still using traditional phone service, rather than far less expensive business VoIP.

But back to the fax.

Yes, I do have a business-class multifunction printer that can be used as a fax. All I have to do is plug it into my Phone.com VoIP line, and be sure to remember to set to machine not to answer incoming calls. Or alternately, if I really needed fax, I could buy another phone number and use that exclusively for fax. Indeed Phone.com’s basic Virtual Office business plan includes two phone numbers even for its entry price of $14.88 a month, and a small business could use one of those for voice and the other for fax. Alternately, for $4.88 a month a business could add another line, just for fax.

But even though I do have such a multifunction printer, I have a better solution: Phone.com’s Internet Fax, a feature I think many have forgotten about. But it is right there to use, both on the dashboard in the upper right hand corner once you log in to either your extension or to the main account, and on the list of functions on the left of the screen when you’re logged into your extension.

In this case I simply scanned the document into a PDF file, and sent it by logging onto my Phone.com account. And the fact is, had I been using my printer as a fax machine, it would have been the exact same electronic scan, so the refusal to accept a file via e-Mail is even more puzzling. After all, my scan scan was a PDF file, which would be identical whether e-mailed and printed, or whether printed locally via fax. An added bonus – the scan is now stored on my computer, just in case I ever need to send the document again.

And indeed I did need it again … thankfully Phone.com’s Internet Fax service sends you a confirmation e-mail that your fax was received, or if not why. In my case, it seems I had set the fax to high quality, thinking that I was being nice in making it easier to read. Bad choice – it seems HCA’s fax machines can’t receive high quality transmission, so I had to resend it at a lower quality, easily done when using Internet Fax.

And … there’s no outrageous fee involved in sending a Phone.com Internet Fax. Just check out what a hotel charges for a fax on your next business trip ($1 per page is not uncommon), or what the local supermarket or office store might similarly charge per page.

Crystal Ball Gazing Into 2013

by Stuart Zipper

Leave a reply

At the end of the year it’s somewhat of a tradition for every commentator, columnist, blogger, would-be guru and crystal ball glazer to either write about “that was the year that was” or bravely make their predictions for the coming year.

Two such predictions that have been bouncing around, from respected research houses, particularly interest me.

The first comes from In-Stat and it’s a prediction for 2013 that was made back in 2010. At that time In-Stat predicted that by the end of 2013 some 79% of all businesses will have converted to VoIP. When the prediction was made, business VoIP penetration was only at about 33%, with an estimated 42% of U.S. businesses having VoIP in at least one location.

Interestingly, over the past 24 months, few soothsayers have updated that In-Stat prediction, and dozens have repeated it. Personally, I’d buy 79% of all U.S. businesses having VoIP in at least one location. But I’m not quite ready to expect to see that percentage applying to ALL business telephony.

Still, it’s easy to see a majority of all business telephony having migrated to VoIP by the end of the year, as realization of the benefits of business VoIP, virtual switchboards and the cloud computing paradigm that makes VoIP work penetrate ever more deeply into the business world.

As for the second prediction, that’s one made by Juniper Research a couple of weeks ago, in which it said 2013 would be “The Year of Microsoft” in the mobile industry. That’s based on the release of Windows 8 mobile, the mobile OS with which Microsoft hopes to finally make up a lot of lost ground in the mobile industry.

Indeed I’ve already seen several predictions over the past year or so that Windows mobile will become the number two operating system for mobile phones by the end of 2013 or 2014, trailing only Android. That of course means that Apple will fall from its leadership position in smartphones, just as BlackBerry did before it.

As to whether Windows 8 really is good enough to live up to that prediction, I should be able to pontificate in a short while. I’ve just obtained a shiny new HTC Windows 8 phone (I guess AT&T owns my mobile soul for another two years). And it is an LTE phone, so I may soon get to play with Voice over LTE (VoLTE), the upcoming “killer” version of wireless VoIP.

This wasn’t, by the way, done for the sake of this blog. It’s the result of my clumsily dropping my phone in a hospital parking lot. Some kind soul found it and turned it in to the hospital lost and found but, alas, the device had already been fatally injured by an errant vehicle.