I was reading the latest issue of ITU News and on the front cover of the magazine is as titled above. It is a informative article, particularly with survey of the 132 ITU Member States on the regulatory regime for VoIP. But unfortunately, never really answer the question: To Regulate or not Regulate?

While many people advocate for no regulation citing Internet as a successful precedence, the landscape for voice in general are very diferent, at least in Asia. Unlike US where there are strong competitions at various exchanges where carriers fight to provide interconnection with you, this does not exist in most part of Asia where there is usually an incumbent player.

Secondly, VoIP is too dependent on many of underlying infrastructure which are very also often heavily regulated. LECs can do a lot of stuff to screw up VoIP – throttling, port blocking etc etc, and these requires some regulatory intervention of some sort.

PSTN is still an regulated industry even in US to some extend. Thus, while it might be easy to classify pure voip as “unregulated”, the voip might interconnect with PSTN makes it hard to draw the line. Then add law enforcement consideration, security, social obligations, the whole thing start to feel like mission impossible even in countries who believe in deregulation and not trying to protect their own incumbent¹.

Most important of all, investors and businesses will be less willing to put their money in areas where there is no regulation certainity. Would you put 10M to start a VoIP business knowing you might be forced to close down some day?

That’s why I feel the fundamental question is not regulate or not regulate :- As much as I hate to say, I think the answer is yes, we need regulation. The more important question is the principles behind the regulation: is it one that will stifle the technology or is it one that will remove barriers and foster innovation? I am all for the later.

¹ Even FCC only classified pure voip as unregulated (see Pulver petition) but have remained silent on those that touches PSTN.

This is related to my duck slide : Swim like a duck, quake like a duck, looks like a duck but it is not a duck: what is it? It is a duckling. Not a duck yet but lets not kill it too early. And that’s how we do it in Singapore.

My talk on VoIP at APRICOT.

Sadahiro Sato, GM of BB Phone Service Division of Softbank, gave a very informative presentation. You can find the backbone of Yahoo! BB in Japan and they have acquired Japan Telecom last year really for their backbone network across Japan.

And since Yahoo! BB has 22% of the telephony market share in Japan, nearly 33% of their revenue comes from voice termination from the other telco. (so they want to do well but not too much to kill off all their competitors :-)

The network protocol is a mixature of MGCP, H.323 and SIP but he talks about moving all to SIP eventually (yeah!). And watch out for Yahoo! BB offering WiFi phone services, particularly, he mentioned about a WiFi+CDMA phones. He also asked the audience to talk to their government to give Yahoo! a mobile license :-)

Some other interesting note: Yahoo! BB has 4.4M subscribers now and 95% of the Yahoo! BB subscribers took up BB Phone services. And yes, it is finally confirmed: Yahoo! BB TA (terminal adaptor) redirect all the emergency calls, toll-free calls, etc etc (ie, all the money losing calls) and fall back to the NTT. Haha, no wonder NTT is pissed!

ps: I am blogging this on stage.

Reported on Nikkeibp (Sorry, Japanese only):

アジア太平洋地区におけるENUMの普及団体APEET（Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team）が，国内初となる公開通話デモンストレーションを実施している。2月21日から25日にかけて京都で開催中のインターネット基盤技術のアジア太平洋国際会議「APRICOT2005」の会場内で，参加者同士が自由に体験できる。実験の責任者である日本レジストリサービス（JPRS） 技術研究部の米谷嘉朗部長代理によると，「ENUMの実験を国内で一般公開するのは初めて」だという。

(my bad translation: APEET conducted the first telephony trial in Japan. Participants at APRICOT 2005 can experience the new technology and make calls freely among themselves from 21st to 25th. Yoneya-san @ JPRS “This is the first public ENUM trial in Japan.”)

The surprisingly part is how fast this made onto the news. Hotta-san and Yoneya-san sat down with the reporters at 5:30pm after the Internet Telephony track and we saw the report at 9:00pm.

This is an exciting day for me. We are giving out Hitachi WiFi SIP Phones at APRICOT 2005. This is part of the APEET ENUM/SIP Live Trial we have been putting together for the last few months. Every wifi phones are assigned with a SIP address which also comes with an ENUM¹ number and this allows APRICOT delegates to call each another. Additionally, we also put up PSTN gateways in China, Taiwan and Singapore (US pending) so these phones can also be used to call back to PSTN phones in these countries (free of cos).

We also pre-registered every APRICOT delegates with a SIP account and ENUM numbers which they can used with their softphones with instructions on how to set it up. There is also an ENUM registration system where they could use it to configure the ENUM to associate it with their webpage, emails etc etc. ENUM client is also provided, of cos.

This is so cool to see people queuing up and asking questions about their new phones. It is also fun to see people excitingly calling each another as if they never made a phone call in their life. Most are just impressed that it just works! (out of the box, battery included ;-)

There is also a booth setup where we explained to people how we setup the system and we have some SIP phones on display. Particularly of interest is this phone from Panasonic which comes with ENUM resolution built-in!

Thanks to APEET members who are still hard at work yesterday trying to get things setup. Keep your fingers cross and I hope we survive this week :-)

¹ Technically, it isn’t ENUM because we are not using e164.arpa. The numbers we gave out is assigned from apenum.org, ie. 8.8.8.apenum.org.

² Disclosal: I am the chair for APEET. But we are not-for-profit and doing this really to promote awareness of the technology (beside the learning experience). In fact, we did the whole thing with zero budget, thanks to all the sponsors :-)

via Telecom Asia

The emergence of VoIP apps like Skype isn’t just bothering fixed-line telcos – the prospect of VoIP over wireless LANs is making cellcos nervous too. Some see it as a threat, some as an opportunity, but many see it as inevitable and something that can’t be ignored.

“VoIP is a huge threat, but it’s one that’s coming from outside of the constraints of the mobile environment,” said Mike Mulica, president and CEO of BridgePort Networks during a panel session discussing the ramifications of VoIP on the mobile sector at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes on Thursday. “Skype and these converged voice/data models are providing a low-cost alternative to voice substitution for in-building minutes of use that allows you to go to a low-cost model.”

Read the whole article – Good read. Particularly, note the part where John O’Connell (CEO of Kineto Wireless) said “I think that within three to five years, everyone in this room will have a Wi-Fi enabled handset. During that time, there’ll be a lot of things happening to drive it along the lines of Skype and Vonage. If you sit and do nothing, that’s probably a mistake.”

Remember me about last year at Supernova where I asked the audience how many have WiFi SIP phone and only a few raise their hand. Next week at APRICOT, we going run a trial with SIP/ENUM and giving out WiFi handset!

Now imaging what will happen 3 years later…

Speaking of which, let me help Kevin advertise about Supernova 2005. Supernova 2004 is absolutely one of the best conference I been to – a small crowd but with lots of interesting folks!

The expected has happened: LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) started to block Vonage (or SIP in general) to protect their telephony services. (via Slashdot).

What was surprisingly is how stupidly they did this – they could just do a bit of trottling, limited the bandwidth, drop a few packets now and then, and it would take a long time before someone figure it out while in the meantime, people will think how bad the Vonage and SIP services sux and will just stay-put. But no, they go ahead and block the port totally.

And thank God for that. Now that Vonage has filed a complaint with FCC and hopefully this will set a precedence to all those who wish to try this block or trottling trick.

This is also one of the reasons why I am anti-port-25-blocking as a solution for antispam. Blocking port 25 is a quickfix but would destory the end-to-end connectivity – it is similar to blacklisting except you are blacklisting ports. Most importantly of all, the same equipments that does port 25 port blocking (and the fact they have confidence now that it will work properly) will allow them to do port 5060.

Remember DualPhone which I got so excited about? Several people also email me to ask me what I think about it. Sorry for the not replying but that’s because all I get from DualPhone is ‘Sorry, we don’t ship to Singapore’.

Anyway, Taiwanese manufacturer Sysgration gave this new cool Skype device ASG-300. The way it works is the same as DualPhone except you have to plug in your own phone.

As the saying goes, if you make it, Taiwanese will make it cheaper and better :-)

US warns on risk of net-based telephony reports FT

Internet-based telephony known as voice over internet protocol, or VoIP promises lower costs and greater flexibility by using existing data networks. But a report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which develops technology guidelines for US government agencies, warns of the “inherent vulnerabilities” of VoIP.

Huh? NIST, the group that looking after Internet warns about VoIP?

And I am surprised at some of the statement like “VoIP systems can be expected to be more vulnerable than conventional telephone systems, in part because they are tied in to the data network, resulting in additional security weaknesses and avenues of attack” which is trying to imply Internet is not good enough. Oh wait, I think I have heard similar statements before at ITU (and also OECD).

Furthermore, it goes on to say “VoIP adds a number of complications to existing network technology and these problems are magnified by security considerations” and recommends “using separate voice and data networks when feasible“.

Now now now. I seem to hear these before too…Yep, Cisco! That’s exactly the same marketing message Cisco has been using selling their telephony solution – “Security is big problem- We are the expert and all our product has security build in; Provision more subnets – buy more routers”

It is hard to argue against a report that warns about security (nothing is 100% secured) but I think there is something going on here… but I am just guessing based on what I have seen at various forums…