Voice on the Net, Spring 97

Reported by Eui-Suk Chung
(Courtesy of Ericsson)

When : April 1-2, 1997 (Conference), April 3, 1997 (Workshop)
[Eui-Suk attended the conference only, not the workshop.]

Where : Ritz-Carlton Hotel, San Francisco, CA

Organized by : pulver.com

Participants : Over 500. The conference was sold out.

URL : http://www.pulver.com/von97/

Summary/Comments

This conference is not an academic conference with results from latest research. It is an industry conference with a lot of presentations of company strategies, products, visions etc. [including a lot of marketing touch in the presentations.]

The conference was soldout, and attracted more than 500 participants. There were more participants from telecom industry than from computer industry.

The conference encompassed not only Internet Telephony but also Web broadcasting and regulatory issues. A quick hand-counting by the organizer, Jeff Pulver, showed that about 60 % of audience was interested in Web broadcasting and about 30 % in regulatory issues. Of course, a big majority was interested in Internet Telephony.

A trend in 1997 is that Internet telephony will be moving from being a hobbyist phenomenon to business-to-business domain. In the last conference (Dec 96) there were a lot of presentations by small niche companies. This time, many big players such as Microsoft, Lucent, Pacific Bell, MCI etc. are taking over the show.

[Eui-Suk: I am not sure who's making money on Internet Telephony today. But one thing is sure; Jeff Pulver is making money!]

Table of Contents

Day 1 : Day 2 :

Voice over the Net

by Elon Ganor, CEO and chairman, VocalTec

Key message: Internet telephony is here!

Voice over the Net (VON) started in 1995, and according to IDC survey, the portion of the Internet telephony in business market is growing faster than the portion contributed by consumer market (end-users).

Current industry status:

Market drivers for IP telephony are: Justifying the values: The IP telephony puzzle has the following pieces:

IP telephony brings low cost and advanced services via media-rich call management. So when will it happen? It took 20 years for fax to really take off, 10 years for cellular business. According to the speaker, IP telephony will take 3-4 years (starting 95).

Why so quickly?

The evolution (when these things will happen?) : In summary : Advice: Move quickly!

Voice over the Net

by Charles Giancarlo from VP Business Development, Cisco System

Key Message: Cisco is committed to make VON a reality.

Today, voice market is much bigger than data market which is bigger than VON market. The speaker showed a diagram over increasing Internet traffic/market. [Eui-Suk: You can see almost everywhere this kind of diagram showing ever increasing growth. What it measures does not matter; it's all the same diagram. This conference was no exception.]

New markets :

Summary:

Everything on the Net

Vint Cerf, Sr. VP, Internet Architecture and Engineering from MCI

[Eui-Suk: This guy looks and talks like their W3C AC representative John Clensin.]

He also showed recent Internet statistics which is growing, growing and growing. For example, gaming and gambling domain names increased tremendously lately. (Now, we even have diarrhea.com!) Extrapolation of diagrams implies "Internet = world population" by 2001, but this won't happen though.

MCI is constantly expanding its Mbone to meet with traffic increase -- 300 % per year.

MCI goal = Life lesson #126 aboout leadership: finding out where everyone is going and running like hell to get out in front.

MCI announced some time ago Vault Architecture, a call processing view. It is about use of Internet technology inside voice network!

Potential V-Class (?) services :

Some MCI products : VON challenges : Conclusion: Internet is today's Holodeck, everything is possible!

??? Title ???

Michael Malaga from Worldcom

The speaker talked about Quality of Service, and what we can expect. He talked about traditional telco views vs. new Internet views; merge/synergy will bring good news.

What is Worldcom's role? Build the most robust cost effective global network, etc. etc. [Eui-Suk: marketing...]

Extra Link QoS products :

In the middle of dialup/ISDN and T1 : In summary :

Growth of PC Client Telephony on the Internet

by Michael Glancy, General Manager OEM Communications Products Operation, Intel

First 5 minutes of all talks are all the same, i.e. it is about the tremendous growth of Internet, Internet phone market etc etc. This one was no exception.

What Intel is doing: smaller and faster processors [which enables Internet Telephony!].

Intel is working hard to ensure interoperability :

Intel is working on : Today's Internet telephony model is "meet and greet". The new Internet call model should be "direct", just like POTS phones; you enter the phone number or email address, and it connects you to your friend directly. [we need an automatic resolution of IP addresses.]

Conclusions: Substancial industry-wide progress has been made; even more is required...

Creating a New First-Choice Communications Network

by John Ludwig, Vice President Internet client and collaboration ??? from Microsoft

Today's first choices :

Requirements for first choice network : interoperability, cost, ease of use, quality.

So? Well, Internet has the edge! It enables rich interactive multimedia experience, and we will overcome our shortfalls.

The Microsoft vision :

Microsoft Plans : Demo of NetMeeting 2.0 beta : Summary : see Microsoft's vision and plans above.

Elemedia, a Software Venture of Lucent Technologies

By Joe Mele, President, Elemedia

[Eui-Suk: There is a huge huge Lucent delegation at the conference! They seem to be quite serious about Internet Telephony.]

Current products:

Summary : Check their web site www.lucent.com/elemedia.

Demo of Constellation

by Product manager for Constellation, Netscape

These Netscape guys showed up too late, and had to jump directly onto the demo of a system called Constellation without any introduction; they claimed it to be built entirely on Web technology, which implies instant cross-platform availability. So what is this Web technology? It turned out to be HTML, Java and JavaScript.

What is really this product? A new desktop UI, OS, browser??? You will see when it becomes available. Anyway, a click on the icon in the bottom right corner of your PC desktop starts Constellation, and then, you don't see your MS Windows desktop any more until you log out from Constellation -- you can basically do almost everything within Constellation; web browsing, file access, etc.

Their handout talks about shift to Netcasting Paradigm. Current Internet paradigm is browse, bookmark and revisit. The new paradigm is "always on-line".

[Eui-Suk: it looks great, but I am not sure whether I want to use it. It looks too heavy for me. The screen (UI) is all covered by buttons/hyperlinks...]

??? Title ???

George Favaloro, Internet Solutions Division, Compaq

Compaq provides hardware, software, services to infrastructure players.

Today: provides basic access services, content-related services

Tomorrow: will provide value-added services (data, audio/video) e-commerce, encryption, fax, VON, telephony, video streaming etc etc

Value-added services will be built in a layered fashion:

Compaq will also collaborate with other partners! (Partnership to provide value-added services on top of Compaq competence)

He also talks about Compaq servers, and ICE/Compaq multimedia engine; [Eui-Suk: Gee, what an advertisement!]

Multimedia Convergence for the Enterprise

by Denis Aull, vice president, Internet communications, Lucent Technologies

Lucent makes things that make Internet communications work; gateways, communication servers etc.

IP is the new, multimedia Dialtone on the Internet!

See http://www.lucent.com/internet_telephony for more information.

Telephony on the Internet, Implications for Telco industry

by Mark Fisher, general manager for Internet Services, Pacific Bell

Pacific Bell is both an ISP and telecom operator.

Thanks for the repetition! Usual [good] stuff about Internet vs. phone network economics, expected evolution etc. Nothing new here...

Voice on the Net and the Telecommunications Industry

by Colin Harrison, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Bay area generates about 30 % of total US Internet Backbone traffic.

The future is the Internet! But let it be, at least for 1 human generation, i.e. 1 web century; It will grow up.

Cost advantage of VON is big, but it is not the biggest driver. VON attacks only a portion of the total (telco) cost. It doesn't reduce for example marketing costs.

IBM's activities: RSVP, metering & monitoring, codecs and echo cancellation, H323, gateways, BAMBA, voice mail streaming, JTAPI & CallPath, voice on the web collaborative services...

Telco advantage :

Telco will survive (year 2007) :

Breakout session: Broadcasting Technology

There were three breakout sessions; Telephony, Broadcasting and Regulatory. I attended the Broadcasting session. About 1/3 of the audience attended this session.
  1. Streaming Technology
  2. Content Pull/Push
[Eui-Suk: These two topics are very "hot" right now, and there is a lot of interest. Unfortunately I don't get much technical details though. Most presentations are about their products, and many of them have only proprietary solutions; so, not much standards here...]

1. Streaming Technologies

Chair: Oliver from Battery.com, a venture capitalist

Panel: (10 min each)

Issues :

Microsoft Panelist

MS believes that there is a paradigm shift, one driving force is netoworked multimedia.

Compelling application :

Key attributes of NetShow v2.0 : The NetShow client : Version 2 in beta now.

Clients are available on Unix, PC, and Mac, but no server is available on Unix.

Chris Waldon(?), Netscape Panelist

From Intranet/Internet perspective, we have an application paradigm shift: moving from desktop to networked environment. We are building new breed of applications Content is not just a content, it is an application Communicating information is hard, not creating it.

Solution: Netscape believes that we must deliver multimedia solution, base it on open protocols, and provide cross-platfrom capability -- use Java.

Products: NS media server 1.0 (it is an audio-streaming server)

Philip Rosedale, Panelist from Progressive Network

General Manager, Applications Group

Building the next mass medium => make video ubiquitous.

RealVideo was introduced on Feb 10, 1997, and is a major breakthrough; over 1.5 realvideo downloads after 4 weeks!

Over 80 Realvideo partners today.

[Eui-Suk: This has been a really loooong day; the presentations continued from 8:00 AM to 7:30 PM! Unfortunately, my both laptop batteries died here [4:30 PM], and I had to go back to paper and pencil, meaning limited notes taking.]

Panelist from Narrative Communications

There are 400 Internet radio stations using RealAudio.

Advertisement banners deliver interactive multimedia, but no video. Besides, when you click on them, they take you to somewhere else. The ads should be "played" right there in the banner without taking you away from the page you were browsing. Check out www.enliven.com/.

Panelist from VDOnet

VDOnet does video over TCP/IP. Has also video phones. Their video products adapt to different bandwidth available at the time.

Panelist from Xing

Xing is a video streaming vendor, and they do MPEG, both encoders and players. And others.

Audience

A question from the audience: how can we get it (audio/video streams) through the firewalls? [They are often based on UDP, and gets blocked by firewalls.]

Progressive Network: Use HTTP as a carrier!

Netscape : Give the user option to choose how to deliver (TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP etc.)

Microsoft: But it is a short term solution. For long term solution, find a right standard for passing firewalls securely.

2. Content Push/Pull

Chair: ???

Panel: (10 min each)

Panelist from PointCast

I missed this session. Sorry. I arrived too late.
Maybe there also were other sessions before I arrived. I don't know.
[See the following BackWeb section though. It has an interesting comparison.]

Panelist from BackWeb

PointCast has a "content model", but BackWeb has a "technology model". That is, the source of revenue for PointCast is the selling of the contents while BackWeb sells the servers.

BackWeb has a "polite agent" which downloads info in the background when the computer is idle. There are about 60 channels today, and the number will increase to 1000 by the end of 1997.

Panelist from Intermind

Intermind allows personalized information delivery. You can create your own web channels. See www.intermind.com.

Panelist from Creative Labs

[Eui-Suk: This is the guys who make "Soundblaster" sound cards.]

They built an Internet Communications Lab 8 months ago. Their products include VideoBlaster, PhoneBlaster, 3D Blaster, WebPhone etc. See www.creativelabs.com.

BackWeb channels are not really "push" channels; they have a "poll-and-pull" model. I.e. whenever the user is on the web, the BackWeb client polls channels servers for new packets of information.

A demo was given, and of course, a lot of BackWeb propaganda was also given. www.backweb.com.

Summary: Consumers don't necessarily want newproducts. They want tools that are familiar to them. What they want is "enriched entertainments".

WavePhore Inc

WavePhore provides point-to-multipoint data broadcasting services. The WavePhore System integrates all of the necessary content, hardware, software, and network infrastructure to provide the most complete end-to-end Multimedia Datacasting solution.

Most of current push technology is "poll and pull", i.e. the client polls the website (the channel), and if there is any news, it downloads (pulls) it. WavePhore targets home PC users, and uses true push model (point-to-multipoint distribution, just like TV).

See www.wavo.com for more information.

Standards and Multimedia Communications on the Net

by Neil Starkey, president, IMTC

IMTC = International Multimedia Teleconferencing Consortium. For more information, see www.imtc.org.

The speaker gave first an introduction about why we need standards, who sets standards, and so on; the usual stuff.

Then, he talked about ITU's work on Multimedia Communications Standards. ITU is focusing on real-time conversational services, and the Group 16 is the lead study group for multimedia. This group is working on H.-series, T.120-series, G.720-series, V-series and F-series of standards. More information is available at www.itu.ch.

IETF is another forum that provides a foundation for IP communication. Their work encompasses :

IMTC is an open forum of over 125 members, and provides a vendor neutral forum for interoperability testing for H.320, H.323, H324 and T.120.

Voice over IP (VoIP) Forum was formed to provide interoperability among the Internet telephony products, and became an Activity Group within IMTC in November 1996. He also gave an overview of existing standards and standards in progress:

Speaker's message: VoIP is the one who's working on Internet Telephony Standardization. We combine, clarify and complement existing standards, and H.323 is the foundation.

Breakout session: Telephony

There were three breakout sessions again; Telephony, Broadcasting and Regulatory. I attended the Telephony session.
  1. Review of Current Technology Issues
  2. Effect of Internet Telephony on Business

1. Review of Current Technology Issues

Chairman of this session made an analogy to "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy"; in Internet Telephony world, we have 2 answers : Internet and H.323. Now, what is the question? What are we trying to solve?

Panel (10 min each):

Why is the Talking Net so Quiet?, Panelist from Microsoft

1996 was a year of great progress for Internet Telephony: But we are not there yet. H.323 products are starting to ship, but it will take time before they have acceptable quality. So, what does the industry need? PACIENCE! The technology and market will soon mature, and Internet Telephony will happen.

He talked then about the development and timeline for NetMeeting product.

[Eui-Suk: I got a (weird) feeling that he was traslating the timeline for Internet telephony development into the timeline of NetMeeting development...]

Panelist from NetSpeak

Message: WebPhone telephony features work TODAY!

Read more about their products in www.netspeak.com.

Panelist from OnLive

According to the speaker, OnLinve is the leader in multipoint Internet audio. They had a bunch of demos, and now first commercial shipment in Nov 1996.

Internet audio will not be Internet Telephony (cf telephone is not a talking telegraph). Internet audio will not be Internet Radio. Usage segments will emerge that exploit the unique attributes of the new media.

They demonstrated an audio conference tool on the web, where you call participants by email, and then everybody goes to a URL to join the conference. [Eui-Suk: It looked very nice.]

Panelist from VocalTec

Internet telephony is here, and there are 3 setups: phone-to-phone, phone-to-computer, computer-to-computer.

He talked about quality of service; to human beings, the distortion in audio is more disturbing than the distortion in video.

To maximize quality of service :

Michael Goldsteen from Voxware

He explained how codec performance can affect the overall audio quality of an application. I.e. how bandwidth relates to jitter issues, and how jitter issues relate to integrity (i.e. no loss, no delay of audio)

Processing Process: 

Record - compress - packetize - send - [INTERNET]- receive- buffer - decompress- play
Note: Jitter buffer is now exhausted. Future robustness will depend on how quickly buffer is restored. --> delay at least 3 times packet length; wait for at least 2 packets, and then start playing.

H323 has a lot of packet overhead, e.g. UDP header, which is bad. Voxware is doing better.

Conclusions: Codec choice affects not only fidelity, but also latency and integrity of the system. Maximizing quality requires a total system approach.

What's next in the world of standards based Internet communication, by Rick Yeomans from Intel

H.323-Security (now H325).

Firewall solutions: current H.323 does allow firewall solutions to be developed.

Supplementary services:

Improved dial-up support : Reference Information:

2. Effect of Internet Telephony on Business

Panel (10 min each):

Panelist from VocalTec

Again, same stuff: Internet Telephony is here to stay, it costs less, is a threat to telcos (and they have to move quickly), etc etc etc.

VocalTec revenue comes from shipping telephone gateway, conference tool etc, and it is about 2-3 Millon dollars per quarter.

IP Telephony and Business, by Howard Bubb, president and CEO of DIALOGIC

Dialogic provides computer telephony components, and revenue in 1996 was $ 214 millons.

Next generation Telcos :

Talked about Call Center Integration, which enables web surfers to connect to service agents over one phone line. He mentioned that they are working with Ericsson, and showed a video of Ericsson's Phone Doubler, which caught a lot of attention.

Last Mile Applications:

For more information, visit www.dialogic.com.

IP Telephony's Effect on Business, by Panelist from Natural MicroSystems

Same story again: Internet Telephony changes business practices, brings new opportunity, etc etc.

3 Key Markets :

Key issues : They have a product for IP telephony, called NMS Fusion. Take a look at it.

Panelist from ???

Have exactly the same thing as other speakers presented.

Don't market Internet Telephony as a new thing that will replace what you have today. It should be offered as an enhancement to it. (It was difficult to sell digital PBX to replace analog PBX.)

They have an IP-based PBX (with automatic routing).

Kathy Mayer from Lucent

She demoed Lucent Gateway.

Talk by a Washington Lawyer

[Eui-Suk: This was a lawyer, and you know how they are --- lots and lots of talk. I wrote down just a few things that I thought were important.]

He said: "Never underestimate the level of ignorance about technology in Washington!!! Help me educate my colleagues in Washington!"

He (or the Government) needs to understand the technology better in order to be able to regulate it. He said he's going to take the message from VON 97 conference to Washington.

He also asked VON community to put people into technology, not just do technology! (Don't get too attached!)

Self-regulation is not the same as no regulation!

Message: Help us to understand technology and its impacts!

Scott Adams

Scott Adams is a syndicated cartoonist, known for Dilbert cartoons. (I guess most of you have seen his cartoons...)

His talk was very entertaining, but it was just it --- it had nothing to do with Internet Telephony.

[Eui-Suk: hmmm... I was about to put a nasty comment here, but I think I'll pass.]

Effect of VON technologies on Traditional Telco Models

by Glenda Norton, Advanced Internet Services, VP, AT&T

Customers want value, i.e. convieniece, usability and ???!

Service provider readiness:

Internet Telephony Gap : Internet Telephony is not ready today. Pipes and packets are needed to close the gap.

Web Commerce calls : we need not only click-to-dial, but Agent Assisted Transactions. (launch calls, route calls, whisper information, share)

AT&T provides Electronic commerce store front hosting service.

Other applications: AT&T Worldwide Intelligent Network + Internet (interactive call setup, handling, management, visual sharing)

Summary :

ATT strategy :

An RBOC's view on VON

by Ed Balkovich (R&D network architecture) Bell Atlantic

VoN architecture

Internet Telephony: a Sprint Perspective

by John Heiman, Group Manager for Internet Telephony, Sprint

Sprint views Internet Telephony as an opportunity, not a threat.

He talked about moving up the value chain: voice -> fax -> voice around the net -> audio conferencing -> data collaboration -> video conferencing -> VPMNs.

Conclusions:

Eui-Suk Chung
Created: Apr 6, 1997
Last modified: May 6, 1997