Topic: Telephony

The number of calling minutes in the world is growing since it was created in 2003, but their shift towards Skype is growing faster. Sten Tamkivi, chief spokesperson for Skype, looks behind this trend, sharing what Skype has learned about simultaneously serving both the most and less developed markets in the world and why this is important. Skype handles one-third of all call minutes, is the only quality video conversation provider with a global footprint and sees increased growth due to video cameras on mobile phones and notebook computers.

Dean Bubley exposes the obstacles and politics surrounding development of the 3GPP LTE effort for optimizing radio access architecture. LTE is being held hostage by the telephony industry and the mobile world is being overlooked, but this must change. Several possible solutions exist, such as IMS voice and Circuit Switch Fallback, but they pose excessive call setup times and compatibility issues. The best resolution is a collaborative effort by carriers and third party VOIP vendors to produce a test vehicle.

We have all heard that technology is changing, and that the world is changing alongside it. RJ Auburn, CTO at Voxeo, presents several ways his company keeps this idea in mind by changing their customer service and products in reaction to and anticipation of present and future technological trends. He also explains how technology is changing the ways in which people hear, communicate, and use communication tools altogether.

Telecom innovation has been stagnant for too long. Andy Abramson of Comunicano, Inc. leads this panel of experienced analysts and strategists to explore what or who is holding the industry back: regulators, vendors, technologies, or markets? Are telecom legacies like seven digit phone numbers and copper wires impeding new possibilities, and if so, is it technology or psychology that prevents us from moving forward?

During the dot com bubble of the 1990s European bankers went to telecom company CEOs and said you can be as sexy as the American dot coms. This is the basis of what went wrong for the telecom industry according to James Enck. He observes that this panel discussion has a wide range of speakers and backgrounds but there are commonalities he guides the panel to discuss with the 2008 financial meltdown in hindsight.

Agilent's lead technologist offers predictions for 3GPP LTE cellular technology. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is not a done deal, he explains, because its performance advantage is not yet proven. It has to be economically viable. The future of wireless is bright, but it has to be based on low-cost, low complexity technology. In the end, Rumney says, watch out for WiFi, because it is delivering where cellular isn't.

In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.

The over-the-top audio and video services occupy a major part of Unified Communications landscape today. Cullen Jennings, Distinguished Engineer, Office of CTO at Cisco speaks during the recently held eComm conference about the major trends that may affect the VoIP industry in the future. Cullen analyses the major hardware and software expenses incurred in offering these services and how the increasing cost of wideband codecs are vital considerations in the decisions that the voice service providers and open source communities make.

The adoption of High Definition Voice communication has gained grounds with the advancement of VoIP based communication technologies from companies like Skype, Cisco and Microsoft. Martyn Davies, Principal Consultant at Dialogic, speaks on the evolution of HD voice at the recently held eComm conference in Amsterdam and discusses how HD voice is gradually becoming a reality not just in VoIP based systems, but also in legacy mobile networks despite their inherent bandwidth limitations.

"Telephony is dying and voip is not much better off". Where are telecommunication companies to look to next? Colin Pons, Senior Architect at KPN, thinks it's in enterprise applications, social networking services and mobile devices. The future of mobile is bright. The future of the internet is mobile.