Home » 2005 » November

Archive for November, 2005:


IPTV – A case of sum of parts

Published by in world 2.0 on November 21st, 2005

IPTV is another area that I have been tracking for a while. I read recently that Cisco bought Scientific-Atlanta for close to $7 billion. I wasn’t as exasperated as when I read that eBay bought Skype for a total of more than $4b, because I think I know the direction where this is headed, and it has more potential that what eBay might do with Skype ! Scientific-Atlanta is a well known hardware, STB, dish provider in the IPTV world, and amongst others ,has good in-roads in delivering equipment to SBC for their IPTV trial (if I recall correctly, having partnered with Alcatel). First let’s talk about IPTV in general and if I think it will ever see light of day in terms of earning profits. After all, most of us who have gone through the last downturn of all things IP have grown to be more cynical about anything that does not make money yesterday. In addition, it is much easier to say ‘Gee, I don’t think it really is going to work’ vs. trying to lay out a vision saying ‘Here is why it will work’ and ‘here is how to do it’. So I am going to

(Read More…)

1 Comment »

UMA: Bridging the future – but does it have a future ?

Published by in 3gpp, voip on November 18th, 2005

Somewhere around 2004, a set of vendors came up with a specification called ‘Unlicensed Mobile Access’ (UMA) . The problem that was being solved was this: There is currently no standard mechanism that bridges the unlicensed spectrum (Wifi and related) to the carrier mobile network. There was a need to bring ‘mobile services’ to the unlicensed spectrum, especially for phones that could do VoIP while on WLAN/ethernet and switch to the mobile operator network when out of range. In addition to being able to call both from unlicensed spectrum and licensed mobile spectrum, it was necessary that the same services tha were configured in the mobile operator network was also available when I was connected via a broadband access point so that people calling me would not know the difference (and even the caller would not feel the difference between the two different networks, from a service availability perspective.) So UMA was born. It is important to understand that is is an access technology and all it does is that it provides a bridge between unlicensed spectrum and the licensed spectrum of the mobile operator. It is pretty much a no-brainer – this was just the bridge that operators and

(Read More…)

2 Comments »

Ozzie Speak: "Discover, Learn, Try, Buy, Recommend"

Published by in general technology, world 2.0 on November 14th, 2005

A couple of weeks ago, ElusiveCheese (the co-poster in this site) pointed me to some interesting reading material which were internal microsoft memos by Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie (one of the 3 CTOs at microsoft) where they talked about ‘a disruptive tidal change’ in the way MS must do business to remain at the top of the technology curve. I seriously doubt if they were really internal or if it was just a well planned leak to show the world that microsoft is at top of the innovative chain. Anyway, that is besides the point. I read Ray’s memo with a lot of interest and one thing that really stuck with me was a particular para in the ‘Key Tenets’ section of his lengthy memo that said: “Limited trial use, ad-monetized or free reduced-function use, subscription-based use, on-line activation, digital license management, automatic update, and other such concepts are now entering the vocabulary of any developer building products that wish to successfully utilize the web as a channel. Products must now embrace a “discover, learn, try, buy, recommend” cycle – sometimes with one of those phases being free, another ad-supported, and yet another being subscription-based. Grassroots adoption requires an

(Read More…)

No Comments »

Being a Good Manager

Published by in corporate on November 13th, 2005

Being a good manager is not only about getting your job done, but more importantly, earning the respect of your team. Some thoughts, based on personal experience: Stop thinking of youself as a ‘Boss’ – whether you are the manager or not, you are first and foremost a part of the team. Don’t alienate yourself by sitting in a high chair. Nobody likes a windbag. Lead by example – I always think that to be a good manager, you need to understand what your team is doing. Even if you are not ‘hands-on’, you need to earn the respect of the team and make them believe that you have an overall guiding vision of what the team is working on. If not, you will end up, at best, being a resource manager. Learn to Delegate – one of the hardest things for new managers is to delegate to and trust other team members. Typically, when a good engineer steps into the shoes of a manager, he still wants to do everything on his own – don’t fall into this trap. If you do not delegate responsibility to your team, your team members will feel stifled and will not be able

(Read More…)

1 Comment »

Is IMS for Real?

Published by in 3gpp, voip on November 12th, 2005

IMS is collection of carrier network functions that promises a future where their networks will be able to offer an dizzying array of services and applications. IMS, at the same time offers these carriers the same level of access control that they are used to today. While the architecture is evolving, there are already solutions from various vendors (who also happen to sell a lot of gear to carriers) that offers a taste of the IMS vision: POTS. IMS vendors make a big deal that they chose SIP as the signaling protocol, but all their focus is on POTS. I poked around a few IMS call flows. They basically take a 600 odd bytes signaling message that travels between a SIP user agent and a proxy (offering a service) and turn it into 4000 odd bytes of Record-Route headers, P-Charging-Vectors, and mystical GUIDs added to it. No new functions except that there are two more boxes inspecting and serving the “user”. Kiss 3261′s Bob and Alice flows goodbye! Thankfully, all this is very complex and unrealistic and will take a long time to bake. I am fairly certain IMS will be a distraction since it will fail to create any

(Read More…)

No Comments »
© Arjun Roychowdhury. My personal opinions only.