Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s been a busy day here at the VON show.   I managed to run into fellow bloggers Richard Stasny, Phil Wolff (Skype Journal), and my old friend Bob Frankston.  Following the three industry insight sessions by Jeffrey Citron, Tom Evslin, and Maddog Hall, we headed over the main exhibit hall.  I don’t know whether the hall is much larger than in previous years, or whether it was an optical illusion created by the fact that you had to walk downstairs into the hall, but it seemed huge! 

I’d say that fall VON 2005 is shaping up to be a great show! 

Jeffrey Citron is here to talk a little about Vonage, and a whole lot about regulatory — that’s what he says.  That’s great.  The last time I saw him speak it was a stump speech for Vonage — a live press release.

Vonage’s strategy has four key planks:

• Improve people’s lives.  Using Vonage should be a better and easier experience than your old phone service.
• Erase geographic boundaries.  It should be as easy to call friends and family on the other side of the world as it is to call next door.
• A culture of innovation.  Continual innovation on new features.
• A strong commitment to value.  Great price and value with Vonage services.

Jeffrey then makes an announcement – his broadband bill of rights.  This is defined as:

• The right to connect any device to the network.
• The right to transmit and receive data.
• The right access anything on the internet
• The right to privacy.
• The right to broadband.

He relates the right to connect any device to the network back to the victories in the 1960’s and 70’s that allowed consumers to connect any handset to the telephone company’s network.  Devices that don’t harm the network must be allowed to connect.

The right to transmit data is the right to send packets on the network without being modified by the network operator. 

The right to access the internet is the right to visit any site, application, or portal unencumbered by the service provider.

The right to privacy gives you the right to use the internet for any kind of communications or other lawful practices without your permission. 

The right to high quality broadband is the right to transmit and receive at last 1 megabit/second continuous service.  It must mean all of the time, not some of the time.

Obviously these are all things that the broadband voice providers like Vonage need.  He couches these in terms of consumer rights, and regulatory requirements. 

So, he announced the Broadband Bill of Rights.  He’s working with industry leaders to draft policy guidelines, to released in a few weeks as an industry whitepaper.  Ultimately he would like to see these "rights" become FCC policy.

Net net, he would like to see the disaggregation of transport and application enshrined in FCC policy.  Hear hear!  No argument from me on that one.

I don’t think of these as "rights" per se, so although the ideas are incredibly important, the presentation really grated on me.  Maybe I’ve been living in Canada too long.

We are NOT at a tipping point, we are at a FLIPPING point, says Tom Evslin.  He’s going to tell us about the coming catastrophe of VoIP.

This is a speech about Hurricane Katrina, and how we could have done better.  The PSTN performed as expected, but we could have done so much more with VoIP. PSTN standards are no longer acceptable, says Tom. 

He provided a lot of information about what happened, from a VoIP perspective, including talking up Contact.LovedOnes.Org, an organization that mapped old phone numbers to voice mail boxes.  Family members could call an 800 number, and then get access to a voice mail box representing their old phone number.

Stuart Henshall suggested that the old numbers be simply rerouted to VoIP lines, and VoIP mail boxes.

Who’s numbers are they anyway, says Tom?  Why weren’t all the out of service numbers put directly into mailboxes?  He suggests that we, in the technology community, weren’t ready.  We wanted to help, but we weren’t ready.

We haven’t made the case that VoIP could improve emergency services.  Tom points out the fact that a drowned phone line is locatable doesn’t help you locate the person who owned the drowned phone line.  He thinks the industry ought to step up and press this issue, rather than being defensive.

It’s an interesting argument.  The model of the PSTN is to call address to address –> each phone line is essentially represented by a 10 digit E.164 address (the phone number).  The VoIP model is to call person to person.  You could design a better 911 system.

He calls for:

• Location awareness.  Every phone should be.
• The FTC to regulate what basic lifeline service is.  Turn the problem from a bureacracy regulating services, to a problem of truth in labelling.
• Define new lifeline services. He talks about mapping emergency services onto Google Maps.
• All carriers should be required to facilitate this conversion.  If customers want the basic lifeline service, and customers want that service, then the provider (PSTN, or otherwise) needs to facilitate the move.
• Remember who owns the numbers — the customer.
• Don’t use public money to rebuild obsolete networks. 
• Get our solutions in order for the next catastrophe.

We have a responsibility, now that we have the best technology, to be prepared to help mitigate the next catastrophe.

And, go visit http://hackoff.com, Tom Evslin’s new blook — a book told on a blog.  It’s a murder mystery.  Sounds fun!

Maddog Hall is the first session "industry perspective" at the VON conference.  He’s here as Executive Director of Linux International.

He begins by recounting the history of software and computing.  From 1943 to 1977 software was an expensive, custom built item built as work-for-hire for the owners of the computers.  From 1980 to 1983 the mass market software was born, at about the same time as the micro-computer industry started to take off.  My recollection is a little different from his — I think it started a little earlier than he described.  I remember Apple II Pascal on an add-in card, around 1978 or so.  It’s a nit, though.

Enter Richard Stallman, who thought software should be free.   Maddog is now talking through the four freedoms of the Free Software Foundation.  "A lot of people have said that this amounts to communism", but it’s really more of a libertarian manifesto for software. 

His arguments about the economics of mass production, and the problems with mass production are compelling for custom software.  However, he makes the assertion that software is not a commodity because business processes are not commodities.   Many business processes are, however, identical or nearly identical from one company to the next. So the argument doesn’t really hold water for all scenarios.

Maddog advocates a return to a service model for producing software. Instead of building software products,  you would pay for copying and distribution, getting new features built, integration, training and so on… He estimates that there is probably a work force of over 30 million people able to change and modify free software.   It’s a bit of a rant about lack of service, because the software product industry says things like "it’s not in our interest to provide that service".  But isn’t this a business process / customer care problem, rather than a problem with the business model?

My thoughts?

I think he’s barking up the wrong tree.  It’s not that the business of software products is a bad business, or the business of distributing software in binary form is a bad business.  For many customers this is a perfectly viable business model, and the customers have no interest or ability to modify the software.

Rather, I think that Maddog is pointing to the lack of skilled programmers, the lack of intelligent product management, and customer service models.  His "cure" for those problems is to let anyone modify the products to suit themselves.  But the skilled workers aren’t there to do it, and free software won’t bring them.

The acquisition wave continues this morning.  Avaya announced they have just acquired Ottawa based, privately held Nimcat Networks for C$46 million.  As Rich Tehrani pointed out, that leaves only Peerio as a Peer to Peer IP PBX play.

Peer to peer is probably most suited to the small business market, as well.  Embedding the basic functions of the IP PBX in each station eliminates the requirement to purchase and manage a central PBX.  That’s exactly what small businesses are looking for, and one of the reasons that hosted IP PBX solutions are so popular.

Watch for Skype to introduce more small business oriented features — features like call transfer, park, and managed attendant consoles, or auto-attendant.  These will be required as they integrate their services with EBay merchants.