Realize VoIP, March 2010

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In This Issue

Editor's Note

By Amir Zmora, VP Marketing

The world is going wireless. For many years we have been discussing mobile broadband and always-on services and applications. To make this vision come true, however, there are a few fundamental requirements:

Device price
Battery life
Usability and user experience
Network bandwidth & Quality of Service (QoS)
Network reach (meaning being able to consume the service everywhere)

In the early days (that is less than 10 years ago) when a large APAC mobile service provider launched its mobile real-time video communication service using 3G-324M, it was a huge phone with a battery that lasted for 20 minutes of video call and with service only available in the center of a few major cities.

These days are long behind us. We are now at an inflection point where all these requirements are fulfilled and LTE is a key element on the network side.

Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley addressed this at the Web 2.0 summit 2009. It is very interesting to look at her slides or view the video of her presentation. She says that in 2010 3G+ penetration is reaching the sweet spot making this year an inflection point.

This newsletter is dedicated to the technology that is now being adopted to enable real mass deployment of mobile broadband on the network. RADVISION has a wide range of solutions that will keep you up-to-date with your products and tap into this revolution. Sagi Subocki and Tsahi Levent-Levi share their insights on this below.

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IMS Realization in the Age of LTE

By Sagi Subocki, Product Manager

Operators today face real challenges:

Future of voice service usage: Due to migration of customers towards mobile VoIP solutions over their data networks or WiFi: Skype's smartphone application for example.
The App Store: Apple's success with the iPhone App Store, along with the rise of the Android Market Place, is the beginning of a trend that can eventually lead to a reality where the actual services that run on the network are not controlled by the network operator.
LTE: the next generation network for mobile operators is all about IP connectivity. In such a world, they need to find a solution for their traditional voice and SMS services.

These challenges are bound to increase in time - especially in the LTE-era: Today's 3G data connectivity is limited. iPhone in the US has caused AT&T a lot of aggravation over the amount of IP data that iPhone users consume on a daily basis. LTE will significantly improve the network's quality, inevitably causing more users to consume more mobile data. Through time, mobile VoIP services will become more robust and more accessible to users, making them a huge threat to the service provider's basic services, and in effect make them into "dumb" data pipes.

Operators cannot let that happen: they need to find a solution that is competitive in both price and flexibility to those of mobile VoIP companies. To that end, they need to embrace VoIP. IMS is a standardized VoIP architecture that provides them with a solution they can deploy and manage while providing all of the capabilities operators have today in their network such as quality of service, interoperability, security, emergency calling, roaming and more - things that mobile VoIP companies don't deal with today.

IMS is the' enabler for the operators to continue to be the service provider of the standard telephony services, as well as advanced services, over the all IP LTE access networks.

Therefore, in the age of LTE, IMS will emerge and deliver on its promise as the operators simply have no other choice if they wish to stay in the game.

Simplifying IMS: The VoLTE Story

By Tsahi Levent-Levi , Project Director and Community Facilitator

IMS is the selected architecture of choice for mobile operators' infrastructure. But how will operators make it happen on LTE? How will they deliver on that promise?

A new initiative which started under the codename "One Voice" and has now grown up to VoLTE has been adopted by the GSMA. The goal of VoLTE is simple: make sure that everything you can do today on a GSM network (=a circuit switched network) can be done over IMS using VoLTE. It takes IMS, removes everything that is more than a simple voice call, SMS or supplementary service. It also indicates which option to use in your implementation, making it easy for developers to work with.

Simplifying IMS: The VoLTE Story

While VoLTE is focusing on voice and SMS, it is only viewed as a first step by operators - a step that will be enhanced as they move forward into providing a rich communication suite (RCS) that includes presence, instant messaging and video services (among others).

As the chairman of the IMTC IMS Activity Group, I have spent a lot of time on conference calls with One Voice members and GSMA representatives. The group of One Voice companies wanted to make sure that they will be getting it right with IMS this time, and have made a real effort in building the infrastructure and the ecosystem in place for VoLTE.

The end result?

The GSMA taking ownership of the technical specification through GSMA PRD IR.92. This will be publicly available later this year.
The IMTC taking responsibility of the interoperability test specification and the testing work itself, through the IMTC IMS Activity Group.
The GCF might be taking care of certification and validation once the time comes - just as it did for 3G-324M.

And if you are interested in this activity, then here are a few more things to know:

Our SIP Developer Suite is fully capable of supporting the VoLTE specification
The IMTC's blog has more information and resources related to VoLTE

How Will Networks Migrate to LTE?

By Sagi Subocki, Product Manager

So the mobile operators have decided to bank on LTE. They selected VoLTE as their solution of choice for their first IMS deployment. But how will that migration look like?

The sad truth is that networks will not switch overnight from GSM and 3G to LTE. There will be a long transition period where coverage of LTE will be flaky; roaming between LTE to other types of networks will be the norm. A mobile phone will move from LTE coverage, to GSM, to WiFi during the day.

Migration to LTE

To that end, operators will need to be able to provide service continuity - the ability of a user to "roam" from one network to another seamlessly. Mobile handsets will come equipped with basebands capable of supporting multiple network access - ST-Ericsson already demonstrated such capabilities with a chip capable of supporting LTE, HSPA, GSM and EDGE networks. The difference this time is that voice calls will need to switch not only between circuit switched networks, but also between circuit switched and IP based networks.

The mobile handset is only one side of the story. To achieve true service continuity, services such as VCC will need to be deployed over the operator's infrastructure, allowing a call to seamlessly move between the circuit switched and packet switched networks of the operator.

SMS, which seems like a simple service, needs to be routed from circuit based networks into the packet based one, depending on the location and connectivity of the handsets.

There are interesting times ahead of us. Operators need to acquire and integrate a large set of new technologies to stay relevant and start adapting these. Operators who are already making moves in this direction are taking different approaches:

Telefonica and BT have invested heavily into the VoIP game with the acquisitions of Jajah and Ribbit respectively. While these don't provide them IMS, it does give them insights into the operation of VoIP networks
Verizon have teamed up with Skype to provide VoIP services
AT&T are learning firsthand what it means to route huge amounts of data over their networks with their exclusivity of the iPhone in the US
SKT, CSL, AT&T and a few other operators are experimenting with IMS video sharing service

Product News and Updates

Below are links to a number of new product releases:

SIP Developer Suite just released version 5.5 GA3. You can find out more about this release on the community forum.
The 3G-324M Stack is now available for the Android operating system.
The ICE NAT Traversal Stack now includes TURN capabilities.

The new versions above are available to customers under maintenance agreements.

Community Facelift: The Product Page

By Tsahi Levent-Levi, Project Director & Community Facilitator

We've been busy on our community site in the past several months; making improvements based on the initial months of usage. While many changes were made, I'd like to focus this time on the product pages here:

The new design

So what's new here?

We've added some more zest to the page. The first thing you'll notice is that the products now have an icon associated with them. As it is quite hard to relate an image to a protocol stack, we've decided on giving each of them an abstract building blocks diagram icon. You'll also notice the added visual icons to the different tools available for products.

The new icons

As there is more information available that might be of interest but isn't available on the community, we now have some additional links that have been placed for each of the products. You can find them just below the forums section.

Blog Highlights

Enjoy this quick glance at some recent interesting blog posts on our blog network:

Android OS: Ofer Goren shares his experience working with Android.
Desktop Video conferencing: Vincent Chavy gives his spec for the perfect desktop conferencing PC.
Smartphones: Tsahi Levent-Levi about what should a smartphone be good for.

Here are two more posts that have interested our readers in the past two months:

The war on desktop video is heating up. Amir Zmora discusses the available options of personal visual communications.
Is software telepresence real? Sagee Ben-Zedeff doesn't really think so.

We would also like to make you aware of an initiative we're running - a series of posts about designing hardware for HD video conferencing. You can follow it here.

In the Press

RADVISION takes part in the new VoLTE initative of the GSMA
The IMTC IMS AG selected for interoperability testing of VoLTE
RADVISION chosen as video-enabled UC company of the year
RADVISION acquired selected assets of Aethra
RADVISION awarded patent for video conferencing via instant messaging

Webinars and Events

Where and When?

Date

Location

Event

May 11

May 13

May 25

May 26-27

Korea

Taiwan

Japan

China

Developers APAC Roadshow

The annual APAC roadshow will take place during May this year, and we will be splitting it into two; in terms of the countries that will be covered.

This year, our main theme is HD visual communication for the masses. We plan on providing an overview of the visual communications market and demonstrate how HD video capabilities can be added to embedded and PC based Consumer Electronic Devices using RADVISION's advanced video client frameworks.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

Your opinion matters to us. If you are (or were) a RADVISION customer of any of our developer tools, we would appreciate if you would complete our Customer Satisfaction Survey. It will only take a few minutes of your time and would help us a great deal. We will be leaving this survey open for you to fill in at your own leisure, but why wait? Take the survey now.

Past Webinar: SIP Beyond Telecom

SIP is an extensible protocol with a general event-notification mechanism, defined in RFC3265, and contains other activities in the IETF that can be used for many purposes other than pure voice and video communications.

View our webinar online to learn how SIP can be utilized for non-telecom applications in varying industries and segments such as transportation, cars and medical.

Past Webinar: Carrier Grade IMS Developer Solutions from Core Network Infrastructure to Endpoint Devices

This web seminar reviews the challenges and opportunities of the development of next generation network elements. Speakers will discuss software building blocks, from the carrier grade open platform foundation to the underlying IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), for building infrastructure and endpoint devices.

View our webinar online to gain an insight on a development trend to improve the time-to-market through the adoption of a scalable common platform for multiple network elements.
(Presented jointly by RADVISION and Wind River)

Past Webinar: HD Video Conferencing to the Masses

High Definition video has become standard in most venues of media, yet it is still uncommon in video communications. Though the necessary technology is available, the complexity and cost of building an HD video solution is substantial. In RADVISION's online Webinar, you can learn how the RADVISION BEEHD offers the framework for developing economical HD video communication products while bypassing existing challenges. You are invited to register and view the Webinar online.

In Closing

This newsletter aims to be useful to you. If you are not finding any value, tell us how we can improve. For more information from RADVISION, you are invited to follow the links below: