As readers of this blog know, I have been travelling to conferences to attend, speak, and have in-depth discussions. One item I am talking about, and asking about, and interfacing with people about is NFV.  Everyone gets that NFV can reduce CAPEX and OPEX. The telcos get it, and believe me, the vendors get it as it means reduced revenues, and changes in their business models if they have predominantly been hardware infrastructure suppliers.  But the real jewel of NFV is that it can accelerate new services.

Accelerating new services is important on a few fronts.  It has been widely documented that the telcos are experiencing reduced revenue, or at least reduced revenue growth, due to various social media applications (such as WhatsApp, and LINE) that run on their networks.  In other words, their voice and messaging revenues are declining, and being replaced by data revenue because of the applications that run over the data part of the network.  One way to get back to revenue growth would be to “own” the applications that run on the data network. In other words, offer their own OTT apps.  WebRTC, as I’ve written before, is potentially an important aspect to offering exciting new applications. So, getting any new services out there is critical.

Getting them out there as fast as possible is also critical.  Software based VNFs will enable deployment of new, innovative, revenue-generating services faster.  Adding and testing a new software-based service could shave months off the time required to roll it out, and significantly reduce upfront costs compared to traditional methods that involve deploying network functions on purpose-built hardware.  Developers can experiment with, and create new network-based hardware applications because functionality can be provisioned and put online and offline on demand, rather than racking and tacking new hardware for this purpose.  Moving network functionality to software enables SPs to increase the rate and number of targeted services they can roll out, and reduce the cost of “getting it wrong”. 

Asia Pacific had a relatively soft 2015 compared to other regions of the world when it came to new LTE deployments. According to the GSA, there were only 5 LTE commercial networks launched in 2015 in the APAC region. However, it is leading the way in VoLTE implementations. Of the 30 VoLTE networks currently deployed commercially, half are in that region of the world. It shouldn’t be surprising either that most of the VoLTE roaming trials and announcements have involved APAC operators. This fact did not go unnoticed at the recent LTE Asia conference in Singapore where VoLTE was a topic in majority of the presentations. Other topics discussed and presented ranged from Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to the Internet of Things (IoT) to 5G with the likes of speakers from LG Uplus talking about the potential for targeted deployments of 5G based on customer density, usage patterns and service characteristics. In addition to some of these forward looking concepts, ways to monetize the existing 4G investment that operators have made over the past few years was also top of mind.

I gave a presentation at LTE Asia on that very last topic during the Roaming, IPX and Wholesale track. While operators have continued to spend on LTE deployments, according to IHS/Infonetics, they’ve reached their peak most likely here in 2015. However with Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) remaining flat, operators are scratching their heads wondering who is getting the lion’s share of the return when it comes to the investment they’re making in 4G networks. At the same time, operators are their own worst enemy when it comes to encouraging subscribers through high per-minute or per-Megabyte charges to eschew roaming and turn to OTT and alternative means to provide them the connectivity they need when they travel.

A survey done by the European Commission revealed that over 33% of EU travelers will go silent with their mobile data usage when they roam. This is due to the perception or reality of the bill shock associated with data roaming charges. And that estimate of silent roamers is low compared to other published accounts as well as IPX operators and analysts that I have spoken with. As an alternative, subscribers are turning to Over the Top (OTT) applications and Wi-Fi and getting very comfortable using these for voice services and texting.

There’s significant opportunity for operators from roaming, even though roamers only represent on the average a small percentage of their customers – like 5-10%. For example, Juniper Research estimates the retail revenue for roaming will hit $42 billion (US) by 2018, and in addition, Hot Telecom estimates the number of VoLTE subscribers to hit a critical mass of over 1.5 billion by 2019. That’s pretty respectable when compared to the estimated 3 billion OTT subscribers in the same time frame. The point is that operators have an opportunity to implement a framework that can connect billions of subscribers with rich media services anywhere they go across multiple networks.

So wholesalers, IPX, and Group Operators have an opportunity here to help accelerate the roll out of international VoLTE and 4G mobile data services by doing what they do best which is interconnecting and interworking networks. The can provide advanced interconnection services for HD Voice including:

• TDM termination that offloads Media Gateway Functionality to the IPX operator to allow MNOs to go all IP VoLTE/IMS
• Transcoding services
• Contextual voice services that leverage the extensive intelligence from the signaling and data plane traffic.

In addition, they can facilitate the interworking, optimization and heavy lifting involved with interconnecting networks that use the two approved VoLTE roaming architectures: S8HR and RAVEL (You can read more about these two methods in a previous blog; VoLTE Roaming – Are We There Yet?) The value proposition for MNOs extends to other benefits and capabilities like:

• Faster service implementation and time-to-revenue
• Ability to offer inbound VoLTE roaming without having an IMS core
• Outsourcing and hosted options to move from CAPEX to pay-as-grow OPEX
• Regional breakout in addition to local breakout to offload backhaul, improve latency on the more complex call scenarios and perform the heavy lifting associated with transcoding
• Ability to offer advanced contextual voice services on top of roaming hub services

You can go to SlideShare to download the whole presentation. In it, I also covered ways IPX operators and wholesalers can start embracing and emulating OTT services with white label options that leverage WebRTC technology. Did you attend LTE Asia? Let us know by tweeting us at @Dialogic and sharing your thoughts on the current state of LTE.

There was a lot of buzz around the state of NFV at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress held in Dusseldorf last week. Both operators and vendors had a lot to say about NFV, but one thing was certain; going back to old way of deploying network functions using proprietary hardware is not going to happen. And although NFV is nearing its third birthday, according DTAG’s Axel Clauberg, it’s really going through puberty right now, which provided everyone in the audience a pretty good mental picture of where the technology was at this time. Some of the recurring points brought up in the conference included:

• Interoperability – The lack of open interfaces is currently a barrier to NFV deployment and can lead to vendor lock-in and proprietary interfaces dictated by vendors. To some extent, the development of standards and adoption of open source in the MANO layer can curtail this, however, that didn’t necessarily mean all is well in that area. DTAG noted that there is a danger to parallel work going on between the Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), and BT said that they would abandon OpenStack in favor of proprietary approaches if the community did not fix some key issues including scalability, security and backwards compatibility with this technology for NFV.
• Shared risk – The days where service providers would spend large amounts of upfront capital to deploy a service is over – at least that is what service providers hope. Telus envisions that as payments come in for services used by subscribers, compensation to vendors would be derived from that.
• Management and Orchestration benefits - While several vendors were talking up their MANO offerings in the exhibit hall, Telefonica presented its OpenMANO which is an open source reference architecture implementation of the NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) layer. MANO is playing a big role in helping operators realize the long term benefits of NFV.

If social media is any indication of how far along NFV has come, then it seems to be making progress. Prodip Sen, Director-CTO of NFV for HP, cited some Twitter stats on the buzz around NFV for 2015:

• 6,000 people shared #NFV links in September
• 33,840 NFV phrases and hashtags were used between January and October
• 20,037 SDN phrases and hashtags were used in the same time frame

But, even with all the hype around NFV, there were some words of warning to not oversell the technical maturity of the “NFV movement.” Noel Foret, VP at Orange cautioned that overestimated near term NFV savings and having them not materialize could lead to cuts in investment.

And, while the technology continues to improve, what about the human side of the NFV equation? NFV will be extremely disruptive to the existing work flows operators currently employ in creating, managing, charging and delivering services to their customers. This theme is reaffirmed by a recent TM Forum survey that Jim Metzler cited in a Dialogic sponsored white paper, “NFV Applications – Key Considerations for Profitability” which indicated two of the leading business related inhibitors to the broad adoption of NFV are the need to reskill the employee base, and the need to make organizational changes.

TM Forum Study on inhibitors to NFV deployment

So, what do service providers say vendors should be doing when it comes to NFV? From the presentations I attended and the one-on-one discussions with service providers the message is to continue to “cloudify” your offerings because NFV will continue to gain momentum over the next few months. After all, how long does puberty last? Tell us what you think - tweet us your comments at @Dialogic.

NFV is an important topic for Dialogic.  Dialogic has had software infrastructure products for some time in the media processing area, even before I ever heard of the term NFV.  Software-based media servers are in our DNA.  We’ve been doing it for a long time.  We know the issues, we know how to overcome them, and we know the benefits of using software based infrastructure products.  And we are currently moving many of our hardware platforms to be software based.  It’s just the right thing to do. 

With that as background, SDx Central recently did an interview with me that was published today. First of all, yes, pretty much all of our customers are asking us about NFV.  It’s a really important topic.  It will change the way they do business, and basically determine even if they are still in business in 10 years.  It will have much the same impact on the industry as VoIP did in that there will be a new landscape.  There will be new players that emerge, and some of large players of today may not be so large anymore in the future.  It’s really important to get this right. 

Dialogic’s focus is on providing Virtual Network Functions for an NFV deployment.  We understand that we can’t provide an end to end solution but that we can provide certain best elements within the NFV.  That is, we want to be leaders in providing media processing, transcoding, signaling interworking and call control/routing/interconnect VNFs.  The overall NFV deployment then will utilize these Dialogic elements as a part of a best of breed approach to the solution, with the MANO layer providing the glue for all the components. 

We are ready.

In an earlier blog, I was going over some of the questions that came up during a webinar that I recently did with Hot Telecom analysts Isabelle Paradis and Steve Heap on IPX Services and the Pathways to Innovation. In the first blog (which can read by clicking here), we answered the question on the current state of VoLTE roaming where we described the two architectural approaches being deployed by service providers. One approach is known as S8HR or Home Routing where a roamer’s voice call is tunneled back to the home network’s IMS core over the S8 interface that connects the visited network’s and home network’s respective Evolved Packet Cores (EPCs). A question that came up from a very astute listener was whether that architecture was going to affect how calls are ultimately charged.

Why would Home Routing impact the way calls are charged by the operators and in what manner? In S8HR, both the SIP signaling traffic and RTP-based media is tunneled between the visited network and the home network using GTP protocol. The IMS infrastructure of the roamer’s home network is used to process the call. Home routing is very comparable to mobile data roaming scenarios and it’s advantageous from the standpoint that roamers can use VoLTE even if the visited network has not implemented an IMS.

From the visited network operator’s perspective, with a VoLTE call, the subscriber is using mobile data and at a level of quality better than “best effort” used by OTT applications riding over mobile data. The operator knows that the payload is IMS traffic because of the Access Point Name or APN selected and the way the dedicated bearers for the voice (QCI=1) and the video (QCI=2) sessions were established.

Figure 1 - S8HR - A Home Routing approach leveraging the EPC of the home network is becoming popular due to its simplicity to deploy.

Regardless, when a roaming subscriber makes a VoLTE call in a visited network that connects to the home network using S8HR, the subscriber is using mobile data. The data stream that carries the voice and video traffic is a guaranteed bit rate – better than what is used for OTT services. The home network has the responsibility of processing and terminating the call to the appropriate destination network; the cost of which would be on top of any data roaming component charged by the visited operator. We already know that operators are not going to be able to charge more for VoLTE calls, but what about this ability for operators to differentiate the bearer type and provide very granular charging based on the associated quality supported? Will this enable them to charge differently for providing a higher level of guaranteed bit rate for a given service?

What you may start to see is a move from per minute charges for voice calls to QoS-based megabyte charging. Although, I think these QoS charging scenarios will leave subscribers scratching their collective heads, and if voice is charged by the megabyte, will subscribers know how much bandwidth a VoLTE call will take up, let alone what a real-time video session would consume. My back-of-the-envelope calculation for the bandwidth usage for a 2 minute voice conversation comes to about 2 megabytes notwithstanding any overhead due to the bearer protocol. Right now, I’m getting charged $0.25 per minute by my operator Verizon for a circuit switched roaming call when I go beyond my roaming bundle. Oddly enough, I’m getting charged $0.25 per megabyte of data!

Most users, however, probably don’t want to bother with trying to figure out the impact of voice on their giga/megabyte-based mobile data plan. They will look to other ways to communicate such as OTT applications and will further economize on their mobile broadband usage through Wi-Fi networks. This will especially be the case if operators don’t make roaming available or continue to make mobile data roaming so expensive that subscribers go silent when traveling abroad.

So why not make the service smart? Is there an opportunity to give subscribers free “on-net” VoLTE calls with charges occurring only when the call “breaks out” like OTT players do today? Why not add prompts or messages that alerts subscribers of the charges incurred using an OTT app on their mobile data versus VoLTE. Alternatively with the capability to do granular billing by QCI and service, why not implement sponsored roaming opportunities to provide VoLTE roaming to targeted subscribers for free and allow those sponsors to indicate this to the roamer in the dialer.

So what do you think operators should start doing? Is the time now to start changing the way voice services are billed? Is this an opportunity for operators to take a disruptive approach in how they charge for multimedia services? Let us know what you think by tweeting us at @Dialogic #VoLTERoaming. You can also watch the entire archived IPX webinar by clicking here.

On October 10^th, a warm and sunny Saturday in Denville, NJ, 110 high school students were in the cafeteria of Morris County School Technology (MSCT) at 8:30 in the morning. Instead of enjoying the beautiful weather, the students were hard at work huddled in front of their laptops. However, these students were far from sad to be at school on a weekend because they were spending the day doing what they were passionate about; building cool applications, complex robots, and other projects with their peers.  

This day marked the first Local Hack Day at Morris County School of Technology—a day where high school students in the area (and even a few middle school students) spent the day developing innovative projects. There weren’t any limitations to the types of hacks students could do, but most focused on app development, WebRTC, and website creation. The creativity and talent of these students could be clearly seen from the start. One team even brought in a black garbage bag filled with Lego pieces, and built a Lego car that would follow the stream of a laser.

There were various workshops that would help the hackers with their hacks, or just learn different skills. Some sessions were taught by other students who were well-versed in specific subjects. Our very own Dan Wolanski did a workshop on WebRTC, where students learned how to design and develop an API for peer-to-peer video web conferencing. The students then were able to utilize the API natively within their browser to make a WebRTC video conference in class!

Prior to the hackathon, Dialogic had an in-class intro session at the high school for juniors and seniors on Voice over IP services.  From the first session, it was obvious that these students knew technology. For example, one junior asked “I know that my cell is running AMR (an audio codec optimized for speech coding). How can that talk with my computer that is compressing with something else?” Being the technology enthusiasts they are, they also asked Dan about his opinion on Google Glass, or whether the iPhone is better than the Android or vice versa. With questions like these, it is obvious that the level of complexity of the local hack day projects shouldn’t come as a surprise.  

After a nice hot meal, the three judges went around to the different teams to assess their projects based on credentials like business applicability, polish, and functionality. The first prize of Fitbits and $25 Amazon gift cards went to team SnapTrav2 for their app, which notified app users of any delays in Manhattan subway lines in real-time. The second prize of Fitbits and portable phone chargers went to team 3D Alpha, who created a virtual 3D environment that could be used as a backend development tool to build a video game. The 3^rd prize of Fitbits went to team Physics-Calculator, who developed a website that allowed you to enter physics formulas, and would output an answer based on the values given. The website also provided you a physics explanation explaining how that answer came to be, which would surely be useful to many physics students.  All of the projects were impressive, and it was hard for the judges to decide the top 3.

The day ended with a cup stacking competition to solidify the friendships they made that day.  We’d like to give special thanks Yashwee and Aashka, the organizers of the event, who are also juniors at MSCT. We would also like to thank Mr.Hendricks, the current computer science teacher at MCST and former Dialogic Engineer, and Ms.Eberhardt, supervisor of the STEM program at the school for their dedicated support in making this event a reality. Let’s make next year’s MCST Local Hack Day even better!

Alan Percy at the panel discussion Open Source in the Service Provider Network at ITEXPO

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) got plenty of attention this last week at ITExpo in Anaheim, CA.  With a dedicated track of sessions and presentations, NFV was covered by a long list of “who’s who” in the industry.  The goal of the track was to cover many of the basic concepts of NFV, showing how the architectural benefits of moving network functions into virtualized software yields a more efficient and flexible platform for communications services, while providing guidance to service providers on deployment options. 

Open source software in CSP networks was explored during a session moderated by Peter Radizeski, Principle Consultant at RAD-INFO and joined by a panel that included Matt Bateman, Network Architect with XO Communications; Anand Buch, CEO at NetSapiens and myself.  Inspiration for the discussion came from a recent independent survey of 22 global service providers, facilitated by a third party consultant group and funded by Dialogic.  The goal of the survey was to measure the “mindset” of key decision-makers on the role of open source software in networks.

Some key observations uncovered by the survey were presented and discussed by the panel relative to where Open Source fits in a CSP network:

• Service Providers are more willing to use Open Source in building new Internet services rather than Core Carrier Functions. 
• Much more likely to find Open Source in IT Infrastructure (O/S, database, virtualization, storage) as opposed to Telecom-specific software
• Open Source is more common in the lab or in proof-of-concept trials

Both Matt and Anand commented that in their experience, the core of a SP network is “not the place to be experimenting” and that expectations of reliability are vastly different between new Internet-based services and core call completion/success.

When the topic of discussion shifted to the cost of open source software, some interesting comments surfaced in the surveys:

• The total cost of ownership (TCO) of Open Source software is not necessarily lower than commercial software – costs shift to OPEX
• Open Source requires a commitment to staffing (internal or external) for ongoing maintenance and support
• Big benefit of Open Source is not cost reduction, but flexibility and customization

Again, general agreement by the panel, that over the long-haul, the cost of maintaining open source software can be the same or greater than commercial software, requiring specialized skill either on-staff or on-retainer to make required maintenance and enhancements.  However, it was noted that the lower upfront costs, but higher operational expenses associated with open source does align with the business model of smaller service providers.

Other points raised in the survey results and discussion by the panel brought into question whether some of the popular open source software was originally developed with service provider applications in mind and whether open source software was the same/higher/lower quality vs. commercial software 

• Many Open Source applications are enterprise-centric, making them hard to use in service provider deployments
• There is no reason to believe that open source has consistently lower (or better) performance than commercial alternatives. You still get poorly written code from proprietary vendors

In summary, it seemed that open source software is making its way into telecom applications, but not across all parts of the network and not every service provider is as eager to adopt open source software in their networks.

While the final survey results used during the session have not been finalized, Dialogic will be making a copy available in a few weeks – register here to receive a copy of the Open Source in CSP Survey Report when it becomes available.