Industry News Summary – Global Crossing, Skype, HTML 5 and more

How Skype plans to expand its business
Gigaom wrote an article about how Skype plans to grow its business beside offering premium features, such as group chat;
Skype success with its recent IPO is highly debated as currently the majority of Skype revenue is generated by the Skype-Out feature (86% of Skype net revenue). While the “freemium” model is rather popular and so-far proven in the case of Skype, one must wonder what will happen if major competitors will enter its field. A wide verity of business services might be just the thing Skype needs to remain a fierce competitor in the VoIP world.

France Telecom (under the Orange brand) beings offering Quad-Play deals
Under the name “Open Orange”, France Telecom will offer packages that will start at 39.9 euro per month. The offers will include mobile calls, unlimited SMS, broadband, IPTV and free calls to fixed lines in France. Triple and Quad packages are already popular at around the world, being offered by several us cable companies and in UK by Virgin Media. At IMTC 2025 we’ve talked about Triple-Play from a developer and a provider perspective:

Cable Operators to bring subscription TV to tablet devices
According to IntoMobile.com, at least seven of the ten major cable operators in the US are looking at tablets as a new platform for consuming subscription TV.  The connection between tablets and smart-phones to TV viewing seems inevitable and even too obvious  - will we see tablet offerings from the Cable operators themselves?


Lighsquared LTE swapping spectrum with Inmarsat
The new 4G whole-sale operator we mentioned in our previous post will swap channels with Inmarsat as their current satellite spectrum license isn’t LTE optimized.


Are HTML 5 and H264 a really open alternative for the Web?
Christopher Blizzard, a known open source evangelist wrote an article about H264 and his definition of “open”. Christopher warns us from the likes of GIF, a once prominent graphic format that was widely used over the web – and became less and less compelling after Unisys started to enforce their GIF-related patents.

Global Crossings – Buying or selling?
Lightreading.com wrote an article about Global Crossings latest financial projections for 2010 and future company strategy -
“CEO John Legere and Global Crossing CMO David Carey, say in an interview this week that they believe their company is operating from a position of strength, but expecting to find ways to grow both organically and by acquisition or merger.”

Either by buying or selling consolidation is an expected process in the industry – it only remains to be seen if a competitor to AT&T and Verizon will arise and if Global Crossing will play a major role in forming it.

LTE vs. 3G? An analyst viewpoint

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IMTC Telepresence Activity Group

IMTC Telepresence Activity Group is the activity group who’s goal is to achieve Telepresence interoperability – The Telepresence AG research will help the IETF standardize the field.

We have asked the AG chairs – Allyn Romanow and Stephen Botzko to explain us about their work at the Telepresence activity group:

What is the telepresence activity group?

The purpose of the TP AG is to consider topics that help Telepresence interoperability. Telepresence is a wonderful being-there experience, but alas, systems from different vendors don’t easily interwork, limiting the potential ubiquitous growth of Telepresence. The AG focus on how to solve interoperability issues.

What does your activity group offer to companies in the telepresence field?

The AG offers companies the opportunity to collaborate closely with other vendors in creating a truly easy-to-use and widespread telepresence experience.

What is the role of the group chairmen?

The chairs of the TP AG help to organize the work of the group, including facilitating phone meetings and face-to-face meetings and maintaining a website.

What are the group greatest achievements to date?

The original goal of the group was to tackle the largest outstanding gap in standardization of telepresence – a standard way of describing multiple media streams. To this end, our goal was to introduce this issue into a standards organization. We have achieved this goal in a very timely fashion the IETF is chartering a working group to standardize the treatment of multiple streams in telepresence systems.

In addition, the ITU has started a Telepresence group to work on a wide range of important interoperability issues

The TP AG was extremely effective in describing the work that needs to be done for standardizing multiple streams, and produced a first draft charter for the IETF and a first draft Use Case document for the IETF.

What are the major goals for 2010/2011?

We intend to fully support, participate,and promote the standardization activities in both the ITU-T and the IETF.  This will require the active participation of the AG members in these bodies.  One goal is to ensure that these standards are architected to meet our industry’s present and future need for interoperability in this rapidly growing product area.  Another goal  is that these standards be developed quickly and broadly adopted.

As these standards become more well-defined (late in 2011), the AG will address interoperability testing.

Allyn Romanow, Ph.D:
Allyn is a Technical Leader in the Telepresence group at Cisco Systems, where she currently leads the open standards work for Telepresence products. Allyn has substantial experience in creating new networking technologies, including ATM, RDMA  (Remote Direct Memory Access) over IP, and Ethernet security.  In her previous standards development work, she was the  Area Director for the Transport area in the IETF, which included real time applications, editor in IEEE 802.1 (LAN Architecture), and she helped to found the ATM Forum.

About Cisco
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, celebrates 25 years of technological innovation, operating excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.

Stephen Botzko:
Stephen is a Director of Standardization and Technology at Polycom, and leads the standardization work for Telepresence.  Stephen has over 20 years of experience developing traditional video conferencing products, and more recently has been focused on telepresence.  He holds several patents on various aspects of videoconferencing technology.  He is the editor of several ITU-T standards, including H.323, H.239, and H.241, and is the rapporteur of the ITU-T work on telepresence (ITU-T Q5/16).

About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) is a global leader in unified communications solutions with industry-leading telepresence, video, voice and infrastructure solutions built on open standards. Polycom powers smarter conversations, transforming lives and businesses worldwide. www.polycom.com

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David Benham from Cisco on “What is TIP?”

What is this Thumb, Index, Pinky (TIP) thing?

Actually, no, TIP stands for the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol.   But the positional relationship of the one’s thumb, index and pinky fingers makes for a useful analogy to describe one of the key design goals of the TIP protocol.

While there are several standards for robust multimedia conferencing, such SIP, RTP, H.264, H.323, none of have yet dealt with the special challenges of preserving the experience in a conference consisting of many multi-screen endpoints as well as a mix of multi-screen and single-screen endpoints.
In other words, without additional mechanisms, receiving endpoints would only know they received three fingers.  They wouldn’t know how to arrange them in a way that you would recognize as a hand, with the thumb, index and pinky fingers in their proper place on the receiving end.
Preserving those “in-person” positional relationships in a multi-point conference, with other video and audio streams (or other fingers in my analogy) switching in and out quickly from multiple single screen and multi-screen endpoints, is an important goal for any immersive Telepresence system.

TIP does this and a whole bunch more to help enable interoperability between today’s Telepresence systems, but I am going to need some different  analogies to continue.   While I am working on those, please see this informative presentation about TIP.

David Benham
Director of Engineering
TelePresence Technology Group
Cisco Systems

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Industry News Summary – LTE 4G, Telepresence, Unified Communications and more


LightSquared LTE to cover all of the USA by 2015.
Harbinger Capital Partner announced it’s plan to build a 7 billion USD, open, wholesale 4G wireless network that will cover most of the USA.
Sue Marek from Fierce Wireless wrote an article about the plan, and remained rather skeptical – Will a private a private-equity firm be able to beat the major industry players such as AT&T? remains to be seen.


A rather optimistic promotional video for LightSquared.

Ericsson is starting to ship LTE equipment in volumes
Demand for 4G LTE grow stronger in USA in particular as Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS are planning to deploy new 4G networks.

Federal help for rural areas phone network development being criticized
As wireless networks become more popular, the government funding for phone networks is being criticized, costing as much as thousand USD for a single resident.

“Chatroulette” founder wants to ditch text chat and focus on video entirely
In an interview for newteevee.com, the founder of the popular video-chat site Chatroulette wants to ditch text entirely – ” Someday we will replace the main page with the new system“.

Global Crossing is entering the telepresence market, based on Teliris Ltd. Products
Global Crossing will also offer the Teliris 6G telepresence system with scalable video coding.

UK broadband test speeds turn “shameful” for many ISPs
In UK, ISPs are “Shamed by UK Broadband Speed Tests” according to lightreading.com.
Actual broadband speeds of packages like the 8-10mbit/s DSL are actually 3.3Mbit/s. The study also shows Virgin Media Inc. supply better results than Oranke UK, BSkyB Ltd. And TalkTalk Telcom.

Polycom and McAfee Alliance to Further Secure Unified Communications and Collaboration
IMTC member, Polycom, announced an alliance with McAfee (Anti-Virus maker and computer security company) in order to develop and market Unified Communication security solutions.

Telepresence Robot from Japan
Osaka University and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) have collaboratively developed a new portable teleoperated android robot – “Telenoid R1”. This robot mimics human appearance in a “minimal” way, thus does not look like a male or female, nor young or old. The Telenoid R1 sync its movement to the movements of the operator, remotely, via a PC with a special software recognition of eye mouth and head movements. Indeed, an unusual and futuristic approach for telepresence.

Telenoid R1 - Innovative, but rather strange.

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Presentation – Tandberg Telepresence Solutions

IMTC Requirements WG Chair Patrick Luthi talked about Tandgerb Telepresence solutions and future requirements for Telepresence systems.
View more presentations from IMTC.
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