OneVoice for LTE + IMS : Necessary but not sufficient

EDIT: If you are interested in learning more about the Future of Voice, I am running a series of small-group Masterclasses together with Martin Geddes, as well as providing private internal workshops. Email me at information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com for more details

 This will surprise a few people: I'm actually quite impressed with the announcement the other day about the OneVoice profile for defining an IMS-based approach to voice on LTE. I've now had a chance to read through the full document.

It essentially de-options a lot of the implementation vagueness and distracting flexibility around using IMS for mobile voice, creating a lowest common denominator "Profile" from the existing standards. It strips away a lot of the unnecessary fripperies and boils it all down to what amounts to the minimum set of requirements for basic telephony to work - if you happen to be an operator bought into the IMS world-view, that is.

Exactly two years ago I published a report on VoIPo3G (which included an analysis of the role of VoIP on LTE, HSPA and EVDO). I wrote "Too much emphasis is placed by 3GPP on unproven ‘multimedia’ telephony concepts rather than ‘plain’ VoIPo3G". More than three years ago I wrote another report on IMS-capable handsets (or the lack thereof) in which I wrote "There is little consensus on the answer to the question "What exactly is an IMS phone?""

Well, this document is an IMS-centric take on "Plain VoIPo3G", and it does go a little further in defining the capabilities of an IMS phone. It makes it very clear that "other media types" like video are not essential, for initial deployment at least. There is not a single mention of the word "presence" in the whole document. It talks about AMR codecs and not the "HD" wideband version AMR-WB.

It appears to have taken a long hard look at the unloved MMTel standard for mobile IMS VoIP and turned it into something more practical. It might even make "bare-bones IMS VoIP" a bit cheaper and easier to implement for some of the operators who are skeptical.

All of which is good. -But the problems it addresses have been obvious for at least 2 years, and this announcement is a start of a process and not its end. This document is just a suggestion, not a standard. It will be forwarded to 3GPP and GSMA and other bodies. It's written on a template that *looks* like a standards document, but for now it's just a helpful suggestion from some interested parties. "this specification defines a common recommended feature set and selects one recommended option when multiple options exist for single functionality"

Hopefully, it will become more widely adopted over time - although it will be interesting to see if any changes are made when other companies have their say. Notable major omissions from the roster of participants are NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, LG, Apple, RIM, Motorola, Telecom Italia, T-Mobile, Qualcomm, NEC and quite a few others.

Various other commentators have suggested that this means that OneVoice is "One Ring to Rule Them All" (....and in the darkness bind them), spelling the end for Frodo (aka VoLGA), Gollum (CS Fallback) and all the other hobbit-like contenders for Voice on LTE.

I disagree.

OneVoice is necessary but not sufficient. It makes IMS less painful for mobile voice, but it doesn't make it ideal either. It makes interoperable IMS mobile voice less slow to develop, but it doesn't make it fast. It makes it less cumbersome, but doesn't make it elegant. It makes it less costly, but it doesn't obviously make it profitable. It's an important step, but it isn't the whole journey.

When the OneVoice press release came out, I was at the Telco 2.0 conference listening to Vodafone's Internet Services team discussing 360 and commenting on IMS RCS, saying "it was going in the right direction, but taking too long". They also mentioned they might think about putting a VoIP client into 360 at some point. I initially thought Voda's presence in the press release a bit strange given it seems in no hurry to deploy LTE, but on second thoughts I see no downside for them either: simplifying IMS is either neutral or positive for them, depending on which part of the company you talk to.

Either way, OneVoice isn't going to happen ubiquitously, nor overnight. Handset vendors must be breathing a sigh of relief that they *finally* have bits of a specification to work to for IMS handsets. But it's unlikely to be quick to hit the market or be optimised. And the overall business case for mobile operators to deploy IMS is still not exactly pretty, as it offers no obvious new revenue streams. For fixed IMS, there have at least been some decent arguments around cost-savings. But it's far from clear that the mobile IMS spreadsheets have a similar bottom line benefit.

So there is still likely to be a need for an interim solution for several years - as well as something that works on non-IMS LTE operators' networks. CS fallback is a bit of a train-wreck which nobody seems to like. So I think that VoLGA still makes sense for those wanting to make the most of their circuit-switching assets. And Internet-based voice services like Skype or a future "VodaVoIP" may have appeal for the more 2.0-style operators deploying LTE.

Music industry: stop whingeing

OK, a little off-topic here, but having sat through a lot of hand-wringing during the Media session at the Telco 2.0 event this morning, I thought I'd stick my oar in as well. There was a lot of discussion about banning P2P filesharers, DRM, ISP responsbilities, traffic-shaping and so on, particularly about music. We had the esteemed presence of 1980s singer Feargal Sharkey.

Now don't get me wrong - I produce content myself, and I don't like it when fake spam blogs rip of this site, and I also take steps to protect my published research from illegal copying.

But at the same time, I absolutely disagree that the whole of the Internet industry should be paying much attention to a very small minority, worried about a very small amount of what the Internet is about. I've written before that content is just a small, special sort of application, and the more I think about it, the more my opinion is confirmed.

There is no reasons that music piracy should drive government policy or Internet regulation, any more than software piracy or the online sale of fake pharmaceuticals. However, the entertainment industry tends to enjoy cosier relationships with policy-makers (the French President's wife being a musician, for example, while UK Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is closely linked with the content industry).

Ultimately, the music industry is designed to be (a) noisy, and (b) emotive. That's it's job. So it should be no surprise that they tend to be louder and more emphatic when it comes to shouting about its concerns.

Yet I cannot believe that anyone entering the music industry in the last 10 years has done so expecting to make $$$ from record sales. All the musicians I know are well-aware of the score. They've probably illegally downloaded music themselves. They know the value of live performances, which have been incredibly strong in recent years. If they want to exercise their creativity for purely money-making purposes, they'd be writing iPhone apps instead.

I'm not aware of any decline in the number of bands being formed, despite reducing music sales. A quick glance around the web suggests that musical instrument sales are still pretty robust too.

Bottom line - while piracy is definitely bad news for the record labels, it doesn't seem to be too apocalyptic for performers. But irrespective of the rights and wrongs (and I'm not especially animated one way or the other personally) the noise generated by the music industry is far out of proportion with its overall importance. Turn it down, please.

Finally, an MNO breaks the service/access link. Vodafone 360....

I have long been of the view that the greatest challenge to operators' hold on mobile value-added services will not necessarily come from Google, Skype and other Internet players. It will come from each other.

The unspoken threat has been that other MNOs could represent the scariest so-called "over the top" risk. That they would decouple access from service, and start providing branded services over *each others* networks and handsets.

In particular, I suggested in June this year that Vodafone's acquisition of Zyb might turn into its attempt to break out beyond the narrow confines of its own access-customer base. This follows on from an early warning last year when it launched a cross-operator Facebook SMS app.

I wrote: "My view is that it's an extremely healthy development - if you're Vodafone, or for that matter NTT DoCoMo or a small mobile operator from Africa, why *shouldn't* you have inhouse-developed cool mobile apps, which you want to make available to everyone, not just people on your own network? Sure, maybe you *optimise* for people who have both access+app from you, but why not distribute your software as widely as possible?"

In a nutshell, I was right. Vodafone 360 is available to everyone, not just Voda access subscribers. It's on PCs, there's a client downloadable to other operators' (or vanilla) Symbian or Java devices, plus there's support for other OSs in the pipeline. Yes, the in-house optimised phones from Samsung and others give a *better* 360 experience, but Vodafone has recognised it has to be available as widely as possible to gain traction.

In a way, this is completely intuitive. Businesses like Facebook can succeed because they are addressable by *all* Internet users, not just those confined to a specific broadband provider. This is the way to gain network effects, scale, loyalty and ubiquity. Why would anyone prefer an operator-specific, walled-garden service? The same is true for music (I'm watching Spotify present right now), video (YouTube) or many other services.

One last comment: Vodafone 360 is not based on IMS or RCS, it's. If at some point that changes, I might revise my views on RCS.

Update: just listened to Voda's Director of Internet Services Marketing on a panel talking about 360. RCS was "going in the right direction, but taking too long".... so they used standard web technologies instead.

Obfuscating customer behaviour to maintain privacy

Listening to a discussion about telecom operators aggregating customer data, profiling people based on behavioural software and so on. Not surprisingly, there's the usual questions about privacy, peoples' dislike of personal advert-targetting and so forth.

Don't get me wrong, some of this stuff may be useful in terms of making sure adverts are more interesting and entertaining. But many people (and some countries' legal systems) will take an exceptionally dim view of telco data mining. It fits a bit into what I mentioned last week about the "social web" last week - who really wants all their contacts and behaviour and calls and traffic aggregated and analysed?

For those who do value their privacy, I see a broad set of options emerging to ensure fragmentation will endure. Firstly, the ability to share and federate anonymised connectivity via devices using Joiku Boost or MiFi-type connection sharing. And then I would also expect to see software that makes decoy calls/SMS's with your "spare" minutes and texts, or visits random websites on your flatrate data plan. That should make for some interesting "social graph" analysis.... lastly, I expect a fair amount of messaging or other traffic to be extracted by independent platforms like Facebook (and maybe Vodafone 360)...

Telling anecdote about US views on prepay mobile

I'm at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm in London this morning. I just heard a comment which, to me, epitomises the difference between US views on prepaid mobile versus most of the rest of the world. It was made by someone who looks at subscriber data management, talking about crunching data for a "hypothetical" prepay provider.

Setting the scene, he referred to the likelihood that c50% of users would be "illegal immigrants or former convicts".

Utterly amazing. I've always recognised that prepaid had a stigma amongst many people in North America, but I hadn't realised it was that bad.