The VON show was entertaining
as always. Probably a little over a thousand
people attended, but those who did were enthusiastic about it. Clearly not as big as 2 years ago, but
attended by a lot of interesting folks.
The mood was certainly a bit somber because of the market condition,
with again the
folks tied to enterprise and asian markets a bit
brighter. Was it an accident that this
year’s VON logo souvenir was a hooded black sweatshirt that could on a dark
night double as a grim reaper costume?
Some common thoughts:
The Exhibit floor was large
enough to be interesting even though there were a lot of familiar companies not
there. Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel had
large prominent booths. Microsoft was
displaying some partner applications for call center and other enterprise
oriented telephony applications. They
were also showing messenger, with video and handwritten messages on a tablet
PC. The tablet PC looks like a small
laptop with a screen that swivels 180 degrees and folds down so that the screen
is exposed on top. You draw on it with a
special pen that it tracks. Messenger
will send drawings or do handwriting recognition. Recognition rate looked pretty good even with
my sloppy writing (occasional letters wrong but not enough to make it
unreadable). Having spent a lot of the
conference alternating between writing and typing notes, I know for me typing
is MUCH faster, so I asked about that.
The presenter acknowledged that particularly younger folks who grow up
typing may not find this an advantage, though it occurred to me that it may be
a major seller in parts of the world with more complex written languages that
are less easily typed (i.e. china, japan, and the
middle east).
Intel showed a software media
server. 200 ports of conferencing,
speech recognition, and other media intensive services on an 800Mhz
Pentium. It was described as “Dialogics functions without the boards.) Interesting, though I’m not sure it’s really
dense enough yet.
Netrake showed me something interesting – an IP session
controller, built on network processors, which basically maps packet contents
at the upper levels to allow SIP and other protocols to pass through NATs and firewalls.
In effect it provides firewall and NAT traversal without having to
reconfigure the firewall or NAT to be SIP aware.
Several application server and IP centrex vendors were there with small booths (pactolis, net.com, Nuera, Sylantro, SS8) Lucent had a largish booth featuring Softswitch and their converged server. Siemen’s had a good
sized booth displaying enterprise solutions as did Avaya. Nortel, Alcatel,
and Sonus were among regular VON vendors not
there.
As the conference opened,
instead of the usual preview of the featured bands at the party the audio
played a medley of older songs about survival and fighting the good fight. Jeff opened by saying that he was looking for
a theme song for the event. The last 6
months have been about survival. We need
to keep going and know that there is fertile ground out there. Not all the ground is fertile. Jeff repeated his call for services that deliver "Purple
Minutes'" -- high value services people will pay for that are different. He reminded us that there is no doubt about
the fact that the future of communications is in IP. We forget that sometimes and it takes time to
get the rest of the world to believe in it.
He said that there were more
people here from
He talked about lots of quiet
accomplishments –
What gets in the news about
the industry isn't how green OUR industry is but how bad it is for everyone
else (i.e. those still selling circuit telephony. He put in a plug for the Pulver100, his list
of 100 companies leading the VON effort.
The Pulver100 are all private companies, not publicly traded. All have good wins. (Pulver.com/pulver100. there are many
familiar names on the list)
What does the industry need
-- Customers! How do we get Customers? Pursue ways that VoIP
can enhance people’s lives.
Trends: 802.11 will seriously challenge 3G -- it's a
solution that empowers people. People
will be putting VoIP over 802.11 (Comment
-- The professor part of me of course having just written an exam covering the
Shannon and Nyquist limits on communication wonders
how all those bits are going to fit in a couple of fairly narrow public
spectrum bands).
Jeff's Marketing
lessons:
Internet Change agents:
This is where "Purple
minutes" come from -- change agents.
e.g. adding voice to anything.. The personal central office -- you define
your own services (e.g. hosted call centers!)
Purple minutes come from
connectivity, community, applications.
Some thoughts for people:
Jeff's wish list:
·
Royalty free
variable bit rate adaptive codec
·
Low cost low end
IP edge devices.
·
Distributed
service execution -- platforms exist, deploy them.
·
Take advantage of
the great QoS on the internet backbone.
·
IPv6 needs to
happen. Congress won't mandate it but it
has to come because it solves problems.
·
The battle cry
for Purple minutes has yet to be heard.
(The investors and customers don't get it yet)
·
Drop
"IP" from IP Communications -- we are the future of communications.
We are "On the upside of
the downturn". He described the history.
Today's problems:
David doesn't want to give
his wireless network away because of security issues. Because the industry hasn't addressed
security, we break protocols with firewalls.
The opportunities:
·
Integrated
experiences using IM and presence
·
Standard
infrastructure based in SIMPLE and SIP
·
People to people
communication, not device based.
On standards, remember
proprietary email (Comment -- is he talking
about exchange and outlook?)
We solved the NAT problem,
but firewalls are still a pain. (Comment -- did we really solve the NAT
problem? Is this why when I hook to Pulver's wireless network I'm constantly annoyed by windows
alerting me to home gateway (NAT) devices on my network?)
We have multi-modal devices, we
need to interwork them with applications (Comment -- HP had a poster of a road warrior
with a PDA, laptop, cellphone, pager, set up in the
hall. At least a couple of folks I was
talking with who saw it said this is exactly what the communication industry
shouldn't be doing).
David showed a
Cisco/Microsoft video on their integrated service. Basically windows messenger working with
Cisco IP phones on IM. Also I think
there was some SMS in this. Not all that
exciting. It's all stuff we can do
today.
David's predictions for the
future:
·
2003/2004 --
Focus is enterprise IM, moving from proprietary to SIP
·
2005/2006 --
Seamless interworking. Conferencing begins to replace travel
·
2008 -- Seamless
session transfer (never explained, maybe roaming)
·
2010+ -- IPv6
deployment, nobody needs phone numbers, VON is run online
(Comment -- This seems really pessimistic to me but maybe I’m
not realistic about lead times for deployment).
Are we in "the perfect
storm" or do we just have the bends?
His main point was that the real technology disruption we are in is the
result of DWDM and cheap fiber. VoIP is just a side show and not particularly significant
to the telecom crash. (Comment – I never thought about this but I guess this is
probably right.) He portrayed DWDM
as "the Midas touch" -- something that looks like a real blessing but
becomes a curse. The point here is that
DWDM and cheap fiber looked like a real valuable asset when bandwidth was
reasonably expensive, but they made bandwidth virtually worthless, so lots of
people who invested on the basis of recovering money by selling bandwidth got
burned. I can see this.
The telephone network has
been all about managing scarcity. Trunks
are expensive, switches are expensive, manage them frugally. The new reality is completely different. In an era of abundance, the result is
inevitable -- bankrupcy for anyone investing in
managing scarcity (Comment -- I see where
he's coming from but on the other hand it's only abundant if you control it. Many companies out there are managing
scarcity because the abundant resource is under someone else’s control.)
He gave an example of the
gold rush and the fact that the merchants made more money than the miners
selling aluminum pans and camp gear.
Why? Aluminum was very expensive
then. In the 1850's, people made jewelry
out of it. In the 1880s they figured out
how to make it from ores and the price dropped sharply. All the people who were making jewelry and
other expensive things went bust. It
took another 40-50 years for the market to really recover in volume (2 world
wars and finally the aluminum can provided enough volume to recover the same
amount of money being made earlier).
Really interesting and a bit scary -- the timing of the recovery is
independent of the crash. He claimed big
dislocations like this are very rare.
He showed some views of Cisco’s
VoIP market.
It's been flat to declining in the last year. Cisco's PSTN stuff is still selling well, 30 softswitches/quarter, but not selling
at a growing rate. He talked about some
customers.
He talked about the spending
freeze.
All of this will go away in
time, but it's painful now. One thing that might unlock things is a
competitive threat -- if VoIP becomes a viable differentiated
service that everyone has to have, they will spend on it.
How should companies survive?
The freeze isn't global.
When the freeze unlocks there
are 3 levels of vendors.
There is a lot of
"Stealth VoIP" around. RBOC's are testing
it, just not being very public about it.
WiFI(802.11) is going to be a huge disruption. VoIP on WiFi is going to be next. WiFI fills a niche
that is compatible with 2.5G data. Use Wifi when you can, and 2.5G to extend range at lower
speeds. VoIP
will drive WIFI into the enterprise -- wireless PBX is a big win for managing
enterprises. Have to solve security
problems (Comment -- and again watch out
for the radio bandwidth)
Conclusions: Freeze and turmoil will continue for a
while. It's not the end of telecom. It will result in a more level playing field
when things thaw.
Fiber is great, but it
doesn't go to my house, and it doesn't go into most buildings. Until it does, that abundance doesn't get to
me. He started with the characteristics
of smart networks. They were okay, but
you can only be so impressed with call waiting (i.e. only so much you can
do). Attempts to smarten networks have
broken services (interesting example he gave was that AT&T's TrueVoice service, which boosted the bass frequencies to
compensate for lousy microphones in phones, broke some modems).
So, networks are best a bit dumb,
but how dumb? The internet is real
dumb. Do people really want to have to
roll their own voice services from UDP and TCP?
Not likely. Even the internet
though provides some services inside (domain names, mail, etc.) Some services are best provided by the
network but not necessarily by the provider of the bandwidth (Comment -- yes, this is a distinction few
people make but it's a critical one.)
Don't try to reproduce the
PSTN. We know how to do that, it's not
interesting. What should we do
different? Address the user, not just the
network. Users come in multiple
flavors. Turnkey users who just want
basic phone service, some who want to customize.
Security is the hardest
unsolved problem.
He went through a ton of
applications, mostly presence based, that demonstrate the power of IP
telephony. Nothing
really new here.
Wideband voice -- make IP
voice better than the PSTN (Comment --
yes, I think this is a real possibility, but it's a need people don't know they
have right now. Cell phones have trained
everyone to accept really terrible voice).
Combine the corporate
directory and presence (comment -- yes,
lots of interesting services. At some
point though people will get worry about being watched).
One model of access based on URI's is take your phone with
you. Plug your office phone in at home
and have all the same services. (Comment -- sure, but why do I need to haul
yet another technology toy around with me?
Why not build the phone dumb and the intelligence somewhere else, not in
the connectivity provider, so I can use a cheap generic phone on both locations
and not have to lug it around?)
Video isn't for consumers for
the most part. Consumers don't really seem
want it for much. It is for enterprise
-- avoid travel. (Comment, but it has to be very good to replace travel. My experience with video has always been
poor. The problem is that you don’t
control what you are looking at. It’s
that ability – to control what you look at, that makes face to face meetings
much more valuable).
User interface is the
key. He gave some interesting
examples. Mitel
makes a plug for your PDA that lets you use a PDA as a big screen interface to
a dumb little phone. OnRelay
makes a PDA app that displays your office phone. He made lots of points about how adding a
better user interface opens up new services.
(Comment -- sure, but I think part
of the problem is we just aren't being creative enough about what we can do
with a voice interface. If Bill Gates
wants you to talk to your PC, why is the phone industry moving towards typing
at your phone? Wildfire and similar
services prove you can build intuitive interfaces with built in help without a
screen and with only a 12 button phone, but it takes some thought and DSPs to do it. Expensive
DSPs and connectivity to DSP service nodes priced
this out of the range most people would buy, but that's no longer going to be a
limit. Wildfire is still out there and
someone from Wildfire attended the conference.)
VON needs to be just as good
as PSTN (reliable, easy to use, high quality, etc.), plus a lot more.
What’s the Path to VON
(Comment, this is a very incremental view, not surprising)
Platform requirements - they
are in the midst of working these out.
When it happens, that unlocks $3-4Billion in capital from BellSouth This will
happen when the technology reaches “carrier grade”. To do that it can’t just be cheap to buy but
must be scalable and be cheap to operate.
Must have service creation
and evolution - not just a one off, but uses service creation to extend to
whatever they want.
Summary - VON deployment
driven by features and operations. Must be carrier grade.
He gave a very realistic and
pessimistic view of the situation in which an ILEC is stuck – declining minutes
and declining subscribers.
He started with a view of the
world in 1995 -- no real internet, legally protected monopoly carriers, little
use of wireless, a stable business. What’s happened since:
Competitive market now has no
natural monopoly:
Question (Carl Ford) -- what
about your capital budget – Answer going down.
What's the priority? -- whatever makes
money!
Vingt Cerf is one of the
architects of the early internet, and has been involved in a lot of the
evolution of the network over a period of 30 years. He
received the William McGowan award for communications, presented by Jeff at the
conference.
He had no slides, saying "Power
corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely".
He talked a bit about McGowan
(founder and CEO of MCI), and how when he first met him at MCI. McGowan told
him that MCI didn't need R&D, they would just
dangle a big check in front of a vendor and get the vendor to do the R&D.
Cerf came back to them to help them build MCIs first email system.
The way they got people to use it was that McGowan directed his people
that they would get all their instructions via email. Getting things done takes
leadership. That's why we were here.
Worldcom today announced their Worldcom
connection service, a SIP based VoIP service. One thing he noted is that it's a fixed price
all you can eat service. This is
fundamentally the way the internet has always worked. VoIP is
transforming the voice market like this.
(Comment -- didn't AT&T
announce a fixed price long distance model recently?)
He sees this as the leading
edge of a transformation in the industry.
(Comment -- fixed pricing sounds
like a great idea if you are a heavy use or if the thing being priced is cheap
enough I don’t think many people go for those fixed price – all you can fly
airline tickets)
He talked about how MCI/Worldcom moves terabytes of call detail records now. If it's fixed price,
that goes away. (Comment -- really? Can they
avoid detail recording for use by law enforcement.)
The phone network solved the
equal access problem several years ago.
Today, if you are a dialup user you get equal access, but broadband
doesn't -- you are stuck with the ISP who provides the DSP/Cable modem. (He also made a comment that what we call
broadband now will not see so in 10 years, I agree).
He wants to see equal access
for broadband, feels it's technically possible, but we need regulatory
framework and a business model. (Comment
-- the consumer impact here is of course yet another monthly bill. Let's be careful).
He gave credit to Henry Sinnriech for SIP.
SIP isn't merely a protocol for voice calls,
it's a general framework for end-to-end negotiations of services. SIP not only supports peer-to-peer, but also
client-server. (Comment -- not quite sure about this one, MGCP is more adaptable for
this one). His example was
negotiating whether or not to send large files to an end device.
Enum is very important element in defining interaction
with the public net. It has value even
if you stay on the internet. One of the
problems with enum is political – The US and 17 other
countries share country code 1, and nobody has resolved who owns it and
populates it. Another problem is that
there have been advocates for letting anyone register enum
nmbers. That
won't work. People can hijack phone
numbers if there are multiple registrars.
He closed by reminding people
that we are pioneers and need to stay the course.
Question: What kind of turmoil happened in the history
of the internet.
Answer -- lots. The early
internet didn't come from connecting LANs, but from people connecting 3 wide
area networks (one satellite, Arpanet, one other). This was 1973. Bob Metcalfe was still working on
commercializing ethernet. Getting people to switch over wasn't
easy. Computer science organizations
didn't want to spend money on networking that they could spend on more graduate
students. Arpa forced them to connect. In about 1982-1983, the internet had started
to grow, and it was still hard to get people to switch. Cerf and Postel had to shut down the arpanet
for a day to force people to convert.
Had to issue a second warning (two day outage). Finally at the end of 1982 they shut it down
for good.
That was only the
beginning. Now he had to fight with X.25
networks and the
Question: What's up with IPv6. He is of course a strong supporter. Billions of devices will be on the
network. Have to maintain the end-to-end
notion about the internet. End-to-end
digital authentication was the one thing they didn't build into the original
design of IP that he wishes otherwise.
They couldn't enforce it because IP had to run over wires, with no
device in between computers. It would
have been timely because public key cryptography came in only a few years later. Nat/Firewall solutions won't support
end-to-end encryptions (they don't really work either). The big problem with IPv6 is lack of
momentum. It’s good that Windows XP
implements it and routers implement it, but it hasn’t had a lot of
testing. In particular there hasn’t been
a lot of testing with the higher level protocols. Pressure for IPv6 will come from devices that
will only talk V6. Talking between V4
and V6 requires proxy solutions (no way to manage the 128 bit addresses in the
32 bit fields in V4). Oddly enough,
while the internet hates NATs, they may be the
stepping stones to making it work. (Comment -> a freind
of mine fought a long battle with the IETF for a solution he calls IPV8, which
looks a bit like NAT boxes around a core of IPV4. One thing IETF didn't like was the NAT
function). Note that secure IP
connections doesn't make you secure. A
secure connection can deliver a virus just as easily as an insecure one. Security means securing the operating system
as well.
She put out an incredible
amount of information in a short period of time. I can’t capture it all here.
SBC has been testing VoIP since 1996. (She
had lots of information on various trials of softswitches,
IP PBX, and other technologies.
The industry has to walk
before you run.
There will be multiple
phases.
Two approaches:
·
IP Enable your
circuit switches (She had lucent AGCS all over the example viewgraphs.).
·
Second is redo in IP (softswitch implementation).
She went through iMerge in some detail.
One thing that she praised AGCS (lucent) for was publishing the spec for
the phones, which gives them broad interoperability. She said that many IP PBX solutions stick you
with the phones from the IP PBX vendor (she said SIP is a little better on this
but not there yet).
She went through the softswitch solution -- 3 layers. Reality is that people bundle these in all
different kinds of ways.
TRI has been trialing VoIP for years. First trials were not toll quality. Deployed some small scale
trials of VoIP. One thing that limited them was that it was
basically long distance, and they didn't have regulatory relief for it.
They have softswitches
from 7 different vendors in their labs.
She described a 1999 trial in
3 locations. Lots of problems with echo
control (too much delay). Also the echo surpression fix didn't work very well (People didn’t like the “push to talk”
quality of the voice).
They had trials in 2001 of IP
Centrex (Lucent and Nortel)
(Comment – the lucent trial
is the one in the Lucent facility in Lisle). She had some big concerns with security.
She also mentioned the Lucent
deployment -- 1500 people in iMerge (Comment -- I never had the service on my
phone, but it got mixed reviews from those I know who had it early on. Biggest problems were with things like
conferencing and echo.)
Next Gen softswitch
deployments -- one problem is that offices need to have some number of phones
that work without power (emergency).
Another issue is what to do about e911 when the phones move. (Comment
-- when lucent deployed, they forbid people from moving their own phone because
of concern over losing track of location for 911s. This wasn't a good solution).
New services: Web administration,
integration with outlook, call logs, click to call.
There are lots of issues in
getting ready for VoIP. You have to understand your LAN, moving to
Switched layer 2 will improve things, but lots of engineering issues. There are also lots of issues with your usage
pattern to understand how to engineer it and how much it will save you.
Key issues: QoS,
interoperability, standards (4 out there, none will go
away). end-to-end
reliability, "Need a packet buttset to test
connections). E911 and
CALEA. Maintenance
(how do you reach beyond firewalls).
Some key VoIP
data issues:
They are starting to see a
4th layer on top of the softswitch, like IN, that
does things like understand how to get through NATs
and firewalls.
She showed some Sylantro slides for IP centrex (softswitch based) for administration. Administered a followme/findme service. Some do time of day (not Sylantro).
She showed a Lucent solution for enhanced
business services, it works with iMerge
(conferencing, contacts, click to dial)l (comment
-- this is like something I worked on at Lucent a while back, or more probably
the descendant of the thing we were trying to productize).
She presented new and old
market projections for next generation networks. (Basically bad news -- way
down.) One factor is the expected move to all IP never happened. Instead we now accept that you have multiple
networks and interfaces just a fact of life.
NGN isn't replacing the PSTN,
it's different. There are some success
stories:
One interesting
question: Is the switch market saturated? Answer -- definitely not. There will be worldwide growth of 500M lines
over next 6 years. That’s just as big as
the last 6. It's not in the
I sat through just a bit of
his presentation, his big theme was that broadband deployment can and must
happen through communities, not necessarily through carriers. Communities in many areas have developed and
deployed their own broadband solutions without support from carriers. It's a civic good and a vehicle for development.
Netrake is a manufacturer of something they call an IP
session controller – designed to help SIP sessions cross network
boundaries. He described the challenge as
interconnecting islands of VoIP in a
He went through lots of
information on different interconnection scenarios and pulled out some common
needs like address translation, firewall transition, mediation of signaling,
etc.
The proposed solution is of
course their product -- an IP Session Controller. This is based on network processor
technology, not general purpose processing since it manipulates all the
packets, including the bearer channel flows.
You need to be able to manipulate the RTP packets and monitor them,
measuring QoS and translating addressing and other
issues. This is not a call control
platform -- it's complementary. This is
an autonomous system -- not controlled by something else.
The Session controller
intercepts all of the signaling traffic in order to determine how to prepare
the network for the RTP traffic. I
visited the company’s booth and learned more.
What they do is have a client behind the firewall that enables the to open all the connections they need outgoing (thus
allowing them to poke through the firewall).
The IP session controller coordinates with the client and maps the RTP
and other information in the packets to allow them through the firewall.
Convedia builds a hardware media server (like Snowshore). I
remember meeting Peter at an earlier conference when the company was still in
“stealth” mode. Their media server is
under control of an application server or softswitch
(they implement VoiceXML and work with any. They have two models, a 1U minimal server and
a rack mounted high capacity unit.
They are actively selling the
platform in 150 countries.
It's ugly out there – The core
network is overbuilt, even in
His view was the media server
market is doing okay. Enhanced services
are one of the bright spots in the industry.
RFPs, trials ,and
deployments are everywhere (IP Centrex, Cable MOS's, ASPs,
IXCs, wireless, NGN -- mainly in
Bright spots in the
market:
BUT -- things are going to
get worse before they get better. There
will be more consolidation (asset sales).
Growth in services and new services are required to fill up the
pipes.
Getting business is about
$$$, business cases -- new revenue or reducing cost, not philosophy. There is still $50 Billion/year being spent
out there (In the
The state of the industry: really bad.
Intel's sales have fallen more in this recession than in any other (as a
% and in real $). The semiconductor
company stock index is now 1/6 of what it was at its high. He went through lots of depressing data about
job losses in high tech and telecom. The
telecom loss rate is higher in 2002 than in 2001. With that as preview though he reminded us that
technology really does make a difference in everyone's life, and they are the
ones doing it.
He talked about a couple of
Intel technologies. The first was
Hyper-threading. Micro processors today are only 35% busy internally. Rather than deploy two processors for
boosting processing power, figure out how to make one microprocessor run two
instruction threads. Lower power, and lower cost for double the performance. Expect to see this on desktops and
workstations next year.
He talked about wireless LAN
as a bright spot in PCs. Intel is
building a new mobility oriented microprocessor (Banias). This includes 802.11b built in. Also lots of features for increasing battery
time, such as batching of micro instructions (uses less power per instruction),
and a power optimized bus (the bus is only powered when it's active). It also introduces a stack manager that
increments and decrements the stack with it's own
function units. (Comment -- the old PDP-11 minicomputers had instructions that
automatically incremented and decremented for the same reason -- that's why the
C language has those odd ++ and -- operations.
The idea was kind of dismissed when stack pointers moved out of memory
and into registers, but now with internal speeds so high it is attractive
again.)
Finally he talked about
integrated analog/digital processing. The
latest technology is 90 nanometer feature size.
Integrating analog and digital design modules lets them build things
like software radios, integrated codecs with software
defined coding, and more efficient processing than
traditional DSP implementations.
He's the author of a paper on
the Stupid
Network, which claims that networks should be dumb. (Comment
– the paper was written when he was with AT&T, and he left shortly
thereafter). The talk was basically
familiar stuff. For people who haven't
heard it, the argument is that intelligence in the network just gets in the way
of innovation at the edges, and we need to move to an internet model. That doesn't mean you can't do client/server
with servers hosting services for end users, just that you don't want to build
intelligence into the transport network.
(Comment -- I think actually all
the problems with firewall traversal, QoS, and
internetworking are pretty good support.
The only problem is that security and QoS are
real problems and it's not clear how you solve them without making the network
just a little bit smart).
He talked about how the
architecture of IP, in particular the lack of link-by-link error checking is
what enables VoIP.
(Comment -- this was one of the
big innovations in an earlier piece of work I did called Fast Packet
Network. I think the idea was also in Datakit, though both of these were virtual circuit oriented
networks. It was very controversial at
the time but we could prove it was better for both voice and data to leave
error checks and retransmission at the edges).
He said that none of the
recent killer applications were invented by Telcos
(he had a familiar list of internet applications) (Comment
-- gee, what about wireless?)
Stupid networks can fail
cheaply -- services at the edge that don't work don't hurt anything, can be
introduced cheaply, and then dismissed.
He mentioned AT&T had a big failure with an intelligent service in
the network (Comment, I'm not sure which one he is
talking about since there have been many things that could be considered here).
He said that Gateway based VoIP with phones or PSTN at the edges is not a stupid
network. It's limiting, telephony focused
and basically a sustaining technology response to what is fundamentally
disruptive (VoIP over stupid networks). He said that VoIP
gateways are actually a temporary business, as VoIP
endpoints multiply the need disappears.
He went through who should
build and own the stupid network and what the business model should be, but it
was more questions than answers. He gave
an example of why it shouldn't be the Telco's.
Steam power killed all the sailing companies in the 1870's. Steam power was really very little different
except that it allowed ships to operate on schedules, and it required fuel at
ports. Apparently the steam companies
couldn't operate it. VoIP
is much more different so from circuit switching, so why should we expect
telephone companies to manage it? Here
were some of his candidates for running a stupid network:
Nothing really on the
economics except to point out that it's much cheaper to fiber the world today
than it was before.
They are a hosted services IP
PBX company. He gave an analysis of
service provider spending leading to the crash.
Historically it rose at 3%. Then
from 1994 it rose at 13%. 13% might be
sustainable but by 1998 it was rising 42% a year, clearly unsustainable. We overbuilt $50B and are digesting that bubble
now.
Overbuilding has a
benefit. T1's are cheap -- $75 point to
point in the SF Bay area
All the traditional revenue
sources for carriers, including services, are really commodities. That means declining prices and margins. What will work is bundling and
personalization. By bundling services
and personalizing to the customer you add value people pay for (the analogy was
a custom PC from Dell). (Comment -- maybe for enterprise, I'm not so
sure in general. I thought most PC’s
purchased were pretty generic.).
Hosted service provider model
is emerging as a new way to deliver services -- You host services for virtual
network operators, who customize services on your platform and deliver to end
customers. ) (Comment -- I did some work on this at Lucent in 2001. We had a hard time figuring out how to
develop the channels to the virtual network operators. The business is typically worth
$15-$20/user/month to the application service provider and $80/month (including
usage) to the VNO.
He invited someone from Telia to complete his presentation. (Comment
-- Lucent work with Telia on stuff like this
too. They are quite innovative). Telia is the Swedish PTT.
They are merging with Sonera (Finnish
PTT). Why are they interested in hosted
IP PBX?
Question -- what's the
compatibility with CPE, is that a problem) Answer-- it hasn't been an issue for
them. CPE based PBX's don't really
coexist with their hosted deployments in the same customer.
(Comment
-- Wow, practically an empty room. With
all the vendors here I can't believe it. It would seem prudent for any vendor to show
up when your customers offer feedback if only to show you are interested. A few more people showed up over time but
still less than I’d have expected)
iBases speaker
Ibasis is an international carrier. The have had lots of issues with vendor
interoperability.
(Comment
-- is it any simpler in the SIP world? I doubt it.)
They have done interoperability
with a lot of vendors on H.323.
TheybBelieve that interoperability won't necessarily stop VoIP, but we will have more proxies and workarounds to
interoperate in the mean time.
Interoperability is more than
just getting Voice through it. Addressing,
signaling, services, and AIN on the PSTN also need to interoperate on the softswitch.
VoIP Table stakes include popular PSTN features, including
business functions. You have to provide
interoperability of these features with PSTN implementation. Have to support
things like calling name (this requires accessing the name database using SS7
or some other interface they give you).
Value added services (web
provisioning and real-time provisioning, rich signaling and user interface)
come next. These have to be usable.
Potential evolution: Web based control center, personalization,
PAM, device adaptation.
Lots of new interoperability
issues raised by the new stuff –
Carrier interoperability in
the IP domain including services becomes an issue. IP to PSTN, IP to ATM, IP
to premesis networks, etc.
Some service interoperability
issues:
Consider how bad it can get
when you have voice mail involved -- leave a message through one coded
connection, code/decode in the voice mail system, then retrieve through another
encoding (comment -- ouch! I thought two
incompatible cell phone technologies interconnected with a low bit rate VoIP link was about as bad as it could get. This is worse).
Ultimate test is the user --
universal service, feature compatibility, high quality.
A real
argument for open standards since carriers have to interwork with
others.
Bob Weinski (Verisign (AKA Iluminet)).
They run a nation wide
signaling infrastructure as well as providing billing and other services. 1000 carriers use their infrastructure. His talk was about IP Enabling their
signaling infrastructure.
Steps in evolution to VoIP:
It's happening at all levels
now. Not a major part of the
infrastructure yet, but we aren't waiting until everything is done to move up
to the next step.
He gave a long tutorial on
call setup and interworking. Piles of protocols and
structure. Bottom line is that
they have:
Convergence is a myth, we are
diverging. The pictures are much more
complicated now than they were back on the good old days. (Comment
– he’s right. The fundamental rule of
evolution is that the old stuff takes forever to go away and clutters up
viewgraphs and requirements documents for years after it becomes irrelevant to
revenue and profits.)
Question -- which protocol
gave the panel members the most interoperability troubles, SIP or H.323. (Someone
immediately said "MGCP") iBasis said
H.323. Chet McQuade said things were more complex with H.323
thoughH.323 is more mature.
Question -- how does Bell South
see the importance of operations. Very important Don't make your operations for VoIP fit the PSTN mold though, start by doing competent
support for new technology while they transform their legacy support systems,
then hook up.
This one had a bunch of
people in it. That probably fits the interests of the audience in finding ways
to define the value we can provide and sell products.
Packet has won, but the key is value added
services. This session is about how to
do that.
Went through the basic
motivation for softswitch, and what the applications
are. Why is the softswitch
consortium important? -- carriers can't do one stop
shopping any more so they need interoperability, can't rely on the vendor.
Service providers are not
completely frozen, they have plans for network
modernization. Major problem is that
Marketing people control the expenditures and the VON community hasn't educated
the marketing teams in RBOC/ILEC companies on the value for deploying packet
technologies. (Comment – I’ve seen examples of this one too)
They are an IP service
provider they provide wholesale services to alternative access providers for
enterprise customers. Market opportunity
-- $9 Billion hosted services market.
60% of it up for grabs in next 3 years.
Big growth in IP Centrex and IP Voice services (web voice
services). Softswitch
market is growing (140%/year).
Some
examples. Small multi-site business. For $50K investment, you get $40K savings in
telecom costs in the first year, and $250K in operations cost over 3
years. Pays for itself
in 9 months or less. Very good.
Cost to the end user is
$370/endpoint capital
on average (phones, routers) plus about $73/month in usage and
service charges. (Comment -- again, this isn't cheap telephony, but business telephony
isn't cheap now).
This is managed IP
networking, not public internet
He presented a very complete
and complex case based on work with a large ILEC in the
Residential
(high end users) -- Voice over IP using IADs. Video, voice
access to internet services (voice web?)
They use an IAD to address POTS
and ISDN phones. Also support SIP
phones. They analyzed it with 2 softswitches in 2 cities plus one to act as a SIP
proxy. The solution interworks
with IN.
He went into a lot of
analysis on the economics. Basically the
business case for going IP is positive if you are first to market with or
without significant competition. It's
neutral to negative if you are last to market.
He went into lots of sensitivities, I'm not
sure whether he really covered all of them.
One message -- Voice is the
big driver. Without putting voice on
your IP network you don't get a return.
-- how
do customers take advantage of VoIP replace the PSTN
or something else.
For him most are combining
new and old objectives for it. VoIP gives them the chance to look at it as an opportunity
to extend their solutions (remote workers, new solutions to CRM, etc.
Service providers are used to
one stop shopping, lucent and nortel did it all. Nobody does that now. Vendors and Service providers are pointing
fingers at eachother looking at who does
integration/interoperability testing.
The service providers don't want to do this because they don't yet have
the competncies.
Question -- what's the driver
to move from arbitrage to services. The impediment is complexity. Arbitrage was easy, minimal interworking. Doing
services is hard. Really
tough to do something hard with a customer who is just trying to save money.
Where is the money spent in
networks -- endpoints! Getting VoIP deployed means spending at the endpoints. The PBX replacement cycle is 6-10 years. it's 3 years till
you get to 50% penetration, 10 years until you replace them all. The good news is there's 10 times the revenue
in edges and endpoints as their is in core carrier
networks (Comment -- a very interesting view, and a correct one. edges and endpoints
are huge opportunities).
He was very upbeat. Siemen's enterprise
business is up 300%. This was his focus
(Comment -- Siemen's
had booth in the show and it was large, prominent, and enterprise focused).
More risk in staying TDM than
going VoIP now.
VoIP will be the way to go for enterprise and
the risk of not going is missing services and getting stuck with old
technology. The benefits of this go to
the IT department and the customers who have small locations. FedEx was a cited example. (something like 200
regional centers using VoIP)
Enterprise market will turn
in 2003, maybe later if uncertainty over Iraq continues. The critical problem is lack of benefits to
the end user. A PBX on a packet network
is not exciting. If that’s all we do
businesses will replace circuit with IP when it breaks which isn't happening fast. He cited
another customer example, Volvo, with a huge network. They are using a wireless phone as the
primary phone and implement roaming calls using the company VPN (if I use my
phone in another Volvo site I suppose this means the call goes over the company
net).
PC/Internet was driven by applications, we need them to drive VoIP
deployment.
What's the impact of the CLEC
collapse? less
than you would think from the press. 5
years ago the RBOCs wanted ATM. There were early adopters of VoIP (QWest, Global Xing, and others).
Early adopters suffered some pain.
The good news is nobody wants ATM any more. The early adopters of IP have functional
networks. 3 Billion minutes/month go
over Sonus gateways and softswitches. millions of ports,
100's of softswitches. BellSouth, QWest,
Deutsch Telekom are all customers.
Moderator -- how can everyone
here be so optimistic?
Basic answer -- everyone
needs a phone. Equipment needs to be
replaced. right
now we are living on borrowed time.
Spending must resume soon. All
the panel participants plan to be there when it does.
This was really a coordinated
show of the partners in Equant's hosted services
network. Pretty well attended, probably
about 25 people, which is good considering it was the first session of the day.
Equant is the largest global IP and data service provider
for multinational companies. (huge business, 250 people staffing help desks). Talked about the needs for
business hosted services in 1999-2000.
Service differentiation for service providers (Comment -- he had one of the most annoying presentations I've ever
seen/heard, a LOUD doorbell every time he changed slides. Don't do this!)
Cisco's offerings (in
partnership with call control, billing, network
management partners) include:
Multiple companies can share
the same network. He talked about the
network built for Equant that was built by HP, Equant and NetCentrex. They emulated the real world environment with
a mock up network in
Cisco supported Equant's marketing of this service with tools and
presentations.
Netcentrex provides a centrex (hosted PBX)
function in both IP and SS7 networks.
50% of their business is circuit.
They began to build a solution based on H.323, and then wound up making
it independent (SIP/H.323). They
provided a centralized call control center for Equant
that drives H.323, SIP, and mixed networks.
There is a front end that addresses the individual domains (proxy/gatekeeper
and even a controller for MGCP endpoints).
Equant manages their whole worldwide network with 2 softswitches (1
HP did the global integration
for this. The VoIP
VPN Application and interfaces where done by Atos on
HP open call.
Cisco was selling 3,000 VoIP phones a day 3 months ago. (Comment
-- that's a million a year, believable, though at something like $500 each
that's a lot of money, more than many people gave as the market size). Problem is nobody provides a VoIP network for them so companies buy gateways and interwork in circuit.
That's the opportunity for Equant -- provide a
hosted network solution for all those endpoints.
Equant began by offering a VPN core connecting to PBX's
through VoIP gateway.
Then they deployed large IP PBX's connecting to it, then on to small
systems, and finally net centrex (no local call
control). (His slide mentioned
"support of the IETF call processing language here. SIP CPL? I guess so).
She described the
architecture. Cisco provided the
infrastructure, NetCentrex provided call control, HP Opencall provided the VPN
service platform and provisioning platform.
This was a redundant fail over solution.
He came on again to address
what the situation was now in 2002 after this deployment. They are offering this service to their
worldwide enterprise customers.
·
Much more
attention now is being given to managed IP versus
public internet.
·
Security is a big concern.
·
Adoption speed is
slower than expected.
·
Opportunities are
mostly migration. A few are willing to
do radical replacement (radical may be complete within 2 years.) Only a few
·
The migration
case is hard because customers want to keep current features and interwork during the migration (Comment -- yes, this is the hybrid network case I believe is going to
be very important).
What are equant's
needs in 2002 -- IP telephony integration (better integrated products
The vision hasn't changed
from 1999. What changed:
·
A shift towards
private networks
·
Still looking for
the killer app.
·
Irrational
pessimism has replaced irrational exuberance.
·
Not everything
wants to be outsourced -- you want to keep people working.
LOTS of speakers in thissession Moderated by a consultant (Lee Quintanar) He gave a
very complicated hybrid network picture on what's in carrier networks and a set
of requirements for it. This was an
overflow crowd, probably over 100 people
Dialpad was one of the first IP telephony companies to have
to restructure, but survived.
They have done over 1.8
Billion VoIP minutes.
700K call setups a day with 4.5 Million
minutes/day. They are consumer focused
(PC to Phone and Phone to Phone, calling card focused. International (Korea/Japan)
and US.
They have a server (Vega)
that controls call setup and does authentication. (looks softswitch like). Dialpad doesn't own the network. Their data center is 250 square feet (a
medium sized office!) They use
relationships with ITSPs to deliver. They are basically a retailer for Internet
Telephony.
Their server will do H.323
and SIP, and they do dynamic call routing (least cost, Qos,
time driven, etc.) Not a lot of demand
yet for SIP (no SIP endpoints?)
Service is basically toll
bypass. Some plans to expand (voice
mail, presence, etc.)
They started as a free model,
65K customers signed up a day! They
needed a call center. Lots of users are
international inbound to the
Good news: broadband lets them go G.711 and even if they
use G.729 they get better and better QoS. Price is down to 1.5 cents/minute. Broadband glut is making their value proposition
better and better (because QoS is now much closer to
the PSTN, but that glut has also driven down the price for circuit)
Support via Live chat and
call center (they have email, but it's not a good fit with customers paying for
service).
They are an all packet IP Clec aiming at small business. Denver and Washington based. Still VC funded (since 1999).
Features –
He gave an example customer
being charged $1575/month for 16 lines of circuit voice, local, and long
distance, plus a 384Kb/s DSL for data. Talking
nets charges 1K for the same stuff run over a T1 with VoIP,
which gives faster
(up to T1) internet access, and more features.
(Comment -- good
value, but again not cheap).
They have a reverse gateway
to connect to the local switch to do 911, a Broadsoft
feature server, A
sonus/TTI softswitch, Cisco
IADs. They usually
use a Cisco architecture on premesis
with Cisco IP phones if they use IP phones instead of IADs
Challenges –
·
nobody has it all, they must integrate best of breed.
·
Interoperability
is the big challenge. 3-5 months to get
message waiting light to work. Vendors
were helpful, but it takes time.
·
They need to know
the vendor roadmap -- don't surprise them with upgrades. They can give vendors good feedback as the
conduit to the real end customer.
·
Vendor sales
force turnover is a big problem -- they have to retrain the vendor SE's on what
they do.
·
The cost of IP
endpoints (including IADs) is still a big problem in
making the economics work.
Deploying on customer
premises is a big deal. You have to know
how to do it.
Their system changes the way
businesses work. They typically replace
some creative jury rigged system to save money on telephony. Some businesses want to change their
behavior, some don't. Don't assume your
customers are going to want to adopt change, and don't assume they are dumb!
Talkd a lot about BT Ignite -- They inherited much of the
Concert Assets (variously partnered with MCI/Worldcom
and AT&T). They have an
international VPN product. Their big
product is inbound services (tying together call centers for global
customers). Their core is a standard
MPLS network. Lots of
different applications (VoIP and standard IP. The talk had lots of detail on the
architecture. They support a lot of
different endpoints including their own endpoints.
Main VoIP
issues:
Why should they deploy VoIP?
Sure, IP transport is
cheaper, but why should I trash a fully depreciated 40% utilized network for 3
cents a minute. Look at the economics:
They are launching an IP
Based multi-media ACD (partnering with Cosmocom). Features include Click to talk, web
interaction (chat, co-browse, video, email).
This gives them the ability to marry a fully functional circuit based
call center implementation with a IP technology (not
exactly clear what they really did).
What the big benefit is for
this is that when a customer needs to set up in a new country, they don't need
to set equipment up there. The equipment
can be centralized (just like equant).
Summary –
This was basically the same message as the
earlier session on Equant. They are a part of France Telecom. They have 3700 business customers, 2/3 of the
top 100 companies, $3B revenue)
What's working:
What isn't working:
This is AT&T's service
that interconnects VoIP carriers as a
wholesaler. Provides routing/rating that
lets them interwork, track minutes, resell minutes,
and do routing.
They are a true
clearinghouse. Their members who
terminate traffic offer it at a price, AT&T adds their margin, and sourcing
carriers decide who to used based on the price.
Their network is based on an
OSP (Open Settlements) server on each end and a settlement back end
system. These systems produce the CDRs from which they produce the bills. Their scorecard:
Between vendor
inter-domain connectivity is a problem.
Gateway implementations don't scale, gatekeeper inteworking
has compatibility issues, border proxies look like a
good solution, not mature.
They don't yet see SIP in the
wholesale market. Everything they do is
H.323. SIP might happen, but not there
yet.
Question -- what's the
traffic mix? (by
revenue most interesting)
Question: everyone is on H.323, interoperability is a
big issue. There is now an H.323 forum
working on a certification process. Need
participation from service providers.
I was there for presentations from David Gurle and Henry Sinnriech. Nothing new here. Both preaching SIP as the answer, walled
gardens as bad, and the current state of the industry lacking standards as
impeding development. David made a
particular plea that Presence and availability is more than just IM or click to
call. It's your on line identity. It's fundamental and key to get right. There are serious issues with privacy and
identity theft that people aren't getting right now. (Comment
– All of this is somewhat ironic coming from a Microsoft person, since I've
heard many complaints about privacy and security in Passport, but he doesn't
necessarily represent Microsoft in all his views).
Party. Jeff's 40th
birthday party/concert was as all the parties, good food and good music, even
if I thought it got a bit loud. I
continue to be amazed by the Herding Cats, a band he had for an earlier party
that he brought back for this one. I'm
not sure any of the songs they played repeated the last show, and all were well
done. The second band (The calling) was
good, but the sound system was just too loud for the hall in my view. Almost painfully so at
times. Really
too bad because I enjoyed the music, from a safe distance. I have no idea how long the party went on,
but suspect we wont see some folks today.
This session was fairly sparsely attended, maybe 10-15 people, with
several leaving during the session and few questions.
They are an application
server company. The motivation for carriers
to look for new services is obvious, everyone is looking at service revenue to
offset comoditization of their business and retain
customers.
He had some slides comparing
past and current requirements and characteristics of telecom services. In the past, requirements were precise,
multi-year payback was acceptable, product offerings were generic packages, and
services needed lots of up front investment.
Today, payback has to be in months, requirements are never concrete,
services are tailored, and nobody wants to make up front investments.
This demands a service
creation platform approach that can allow a new service to be added
easily. (Comment – yes, but if nobody is making up front investments, how do you
sell investment in a platform?) The
platform has to be easy to implement and integrate (shared application
platform). Large vendors are not doing
nearly as much system integration now so it can’t require effort.
Doing IP and SS7 services is
important. Carriers are buying services
now, in advance of the decision to go VoIP, but don't
want to strand investment.
Net.com is another
application server provider. I first
encountered them as supporters of a new forum on service creation that was
really focused on integration of all the components needed for new services. I haven’t seen any recent news on this.
He went through a lot of the
same background as the IP Unity speaker.
His service creation architecture is tools creating scripts. Scripts run on an execution platform, which in
turn drives some kind of network interface.
He talked about being able to drive H.323, SIP, or SS7 off the same
platform.
Their platform (Shout) -- has
a built in media gateway, as well as SIP to H.323 interworking. (The platform seems to have all the usual
APIs)
He gave an example service (
He gave an example of a
legacy case, a US LEC asked a vendor for calling line ID enhancement on its
class 5 switches. The project cost $4.5
million in development, took 14 months, and cost $25M to deploy. Not exactly what you want to have for service
creation. (Comment – from the questions
after the session I believe this was a Nortel switch modification, but it is a
credible story for any switch based development)
Pactolus started building their solution in 1999. They have an application server based on SIP
and MGCP. It can use an integrated or
separate media server. Their Prepaid
solution does 150 Million Minutes a month.
They also have a big (96 port) conferencing solution.
Their competition is
basically TDM platforms. They have an
integrated media server (software), and can run several thousand call sessions
of prepaid on one 1U Netra.
Requirements for SCE --
Standards based, pure IP software architecture, etensible
SLEE, efficient and reliable. (Nothing seemed
really new).
He talked about their SLEE as
being XML based. Not clear what that
means. He highlighted the ability to
customize units in the SLEE: Examples
being multiple languages, different signaling, etc.
Their service creation is
based on a palate of building blocks, with the ability to call java
scripts. Building blocks for call
control, media control, and some with raw SIP in them.
They delivered prepaid to a
carrier that delivers 80M minutes of prepaid a month. It was a 6 week job to integrate their
solution with the carrier's customer databases.
Reliability – Their platform
is designed for 5 9's. Scalable to 1
Billion minutes of prepaid a month.
I asked the only question
-> Is there any service portability between your
platforms. The answer was basically only
with support and work between the vendors.
I think the industry will score a milestone when we can achieve service
portability.
We had 8 people, which was 6
more than the attendance in the session before us (Operations support), and all
seemed engaged and stayed to the end, which I thought was positive.
I gave an overview of what
hybrid networks are, where the arise. Basically hybrid networks include multiple
protocols and multiple architectures for service delivery. They arise from carrier migration, mergers,
and new service offerings. They are a
fact of life for many years to come.
The issues include
duplicating effort in developing services, duplicating equipment in delivering,
and hairpinning or tromboning. The need for continuing investment in old
technologies can also be an issue.
I overviewed several
approaches:
Everyone seemed engaged with
this.
Doug gave a Jain overview focusing on Jain
SLEE. He was very supportive of me and Personeta, and gave a lot of good arguments for JAIN and
for JAIN SLEE. I was glad to see him highlight
service portability, particularly after the earlier session.
Lou is a former MCI/Worldcom employee and architect of their IN system. Net Direct is an integrator. He was there to give real world experience,
of which he has plenty. He described two
projects.
One was a voice portal with
both IP and PSTN endpoints. Several vendors, several 3rd parties delivering content, and lots
of integration. One interesting
thing was that they had a major problem with speech recognition in SIP. This happened even with G.711 (64Kb/s) coding
and good networking. During the
questions the reason became clearer. The
trouble is that the sampling rate of voice generated in the SIP endpoints isn't
synchronized to the network (your SIP client in your PC uses its own
clock. This isn't a problem with normal
voice, but the recognizer was quite sensitive.
Even after a lot of tuning it's much less good than PSTN. Even tone recognition is an issue. DTMF recognition rates were 92%, which means
in each credit card number one digit is wrong.
not good.
They had lots of interoperability issues too. Perhaps the biggest experience is that the
project was a success, but the business, hosted VoiceXML
portals, hasn't been. The customer
signed up far fewer enterprise customers to host portals than they had planned.
The second project was a huge
call center: 1200 agents growing to 5400
agents. Here the customer had specified a what may be worst case test for the open systems approach: Multiple vendors for component, a total of a
dozen. The network brought calls in
using a softswitch and Sigtran
based signaling to an SCP that directed calls to VoiceXML
based IVR and eventually to agents using SIP terminals. The main issue here was integration headaches
with incompatible protocols. Even after
getting it all right, everything broke with each major release. The project presents an object lesson in not
betting too heavily on open, standard interfaces to insure interoperability.
He had a lot of questions
from someone who turned out to be with Wildfire about the speech. It's getting better, and SIP
signaling for tones (RFC2833?) will help the DTMF problem but it will take a
long time in deploying.
The SIP-IT event was going on
next to VON, as was an ETSI TIPhon meeting, a JAIN
meeting, and Pulver’s Presence, IM, and Location
events. (Comment – in better times these all were separate events, but actually
co-locating them was I think a real benefit in bringing together a lot of
people) I visited the SIP-IT event
to see some old friends. SIP-IT is
actually the 11th SIP interworking
event. (The early ones were called
“bakeoffs” before Pillsbury objected to the use of the term). One interesting thing was just how different
this looks. A room full of programmers
hunched over laptops. The SIP-IT folks
had separate meals and rarely mixed with the other groups. My contacts (Lucent and ex-lucent people
primarily) told me that this event was about half the size of the largest
ones. Very few companies had integrated
the latest SIP RFC (3261). That struck
those who had as odd since the draft has been out a while. There were several participants who had been
at most of the events, though there were established companies missing and new
entrants. Much of the effort is still
going into basic interworking – getting a basic call
to work. Not advanced scenarios like 3rd
party call control, refer, record route, re-invite, and others. The events do, however, no doubt have a
positive impact on the industry, allowing the developers to work together one
on one in a non-competitive environment to get the implementations right.