Until now, Nokia has been top of the heap in the category of VoIP-friendliness. When I spoke with Richard Watson, CTO of DiVitas, last year in the course of my test drive of the DiVitas system, he pointed out that dual-mode phones are not normally VoIP-friendly. At that time the only phone he recommended was the Nokia E71. There are several reasons for this, primarily the treatment of the voice path and the ease of integration of the VoIP software with the built-in phone software user interfaces. Since then, DiVitas has been working closely with Samsung, and now Richard says several Samsung phones are well suited to Voice over Wi-Fi. Let’s hope this shakes the other phone OEMs loose and gets them working on improving Voice over Wi-Fi performance.
Apple’s App-roval process
I wrote earlier about AT&T’s responses to FCC’s questions concerning the iPhone App Store and Google Voice.
Now Apple has posted its responses to the same questions, which are basically the same as AT&T’s. Among the differences are that Apple’s responses contain some hard numbers on its controversial App Store approval process:
- 80% of applications are approved as originally submitted.
- 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of submission.
- 65,000 applications have been approved.
- 200,000 submissions and re-submissions have been made.
- 8,500 submissions are coming in each week.
- Each submission is reviewed by two reviewers.
- There are 40 reviewers.
These numbers don’t really add up. So what Apple probably means is that 95% of the applications that have been approved were approved within 14 days of their final submission. Even so, each reviewer must look at an average of 425 submissions per week (8,500*2/40), which is 10 per hour per reviewer – an average of 12 minutes of reviewer time per submission, which doesn’t seem to justify the terms “comprehensive” and “rigorous” used in Apple’s description of the process:
Apple developed a comprehensive review process that looks at every iPhone application that is submitted to Apple. Applications and marketing text are submitted through a web interface. Submitted applications undergo a rigorous review process that tests for vulnerabilities such as software bugs, instability on the iPhone platform, and the use of unauthorized protocols. Applications are also reviewed to try to prevent privacy issues, safeguard children from exposure to inappropriate content, and avoid applications that degrade the core experience of the iPhone. There are more than 40 full-time trained reviewers, and at least two different reviewers study each application so that the review process is applied uniformly. Apple also established an App Store executive review board that determines procedures and sets policy for the review process, as well as reviews applications that are escalated to the board because they raise new or complex issues. The review board meets weekly and is comprised of senior management with responsibilities for the App Store. 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of being submitted.
Of course much of this might be automated, which would explain both the superhuman productivity of the reviewers and the alleged mindlessness of the decision-making.
Dual-mode technology maturing
The Rethink Wireless newsletter is always worth reading. An article in today’s edition says that according to ABI dual mode handset shipments are on track to double from 2008 to 2010, and more than double from 2009-2011 (144 million units to 300 million units).
Rethink’s Matt Lewis cites improved performance and usability as driving forces, plus a change in the attitudes of carriers towards hot-spots. Wireless network operators now often have captive Wi-Fi networks and can use them to offload their cellular networks.
The upshot is a prediction of 300 million dual mode handsets to ship in 2011: 100% of the smartphone market plus high end feature phones.
The attach rate of Wi-Fi will continue to grow. By 2011 the effects of Bluetooth 3.0 will be kicking in, pushing Wi-Fi attachment towards 100% in camera phones and music phones in ensuing years.
AT&T, Apple and VoIP on the iPhone
The phone OEMs are customer-driven, and I mean that in a bad way. They view service providers rather than consumers as their customers, and therefore have historically tended to be relatively uninterested in ease of use or performance, concentrating on packing in long checklists of features, many of which went unused by baffled consumers. Nokia seemed to have factions that were more user-oriented, but it took the chutzpah of Steve Jobs to really change the game.
A recent FCC inquiry has provoked a fascinating letter from AT&T on the background of the iPhone and AT&T’s relationship with Apple, including Voice over IP on the iPhone. On the topic of VoIP, the letter says that AT&T bound Apple to not create a VoIP capability for the iPhone, but Apple did not commit to prevent third parties from doing so. AT&T says that it never had any objection to iPhone VoIP applications that run over Wi-Fi, and that it is currently reconsidering its opposition to VoIP applications that run over the 3G data connection. Since the argument that AT&T presents in the letter in favor of restrictions on VoIP is weak, such a reconsideration seems in order.
The argument goes as follows: the explosion of the mobile Internet led by the iPhone was catalyzed by cheap iPhones. iPhones are cheap because of massive subsidies. The subsidies are paid for by the voice services. Therefore, AT&T is justified in protecting its voice service revenues because the subsidies they allow had such a great result: the flourishing of the mobile Internet. The reason this argument is weak is that voice service revenues are not the only way to recoup subsidies. AT&T has discovered that it can charge for the mobile Internet directly, and recoup its subsidies that way. It will not sell a subsidized iPhone without an unlimited data plan, and it increased the price of that mandatory plan by 50% last year. Even with this price increase iPhone sales continued to burgeon. In other words, AT&T may be able to recoup lost voice revenues by charging more for its data services.
This is exactly what the “dumb pipes” crowd has been advocating for over a decade now: connectivity providers should charge a realistic price for connectivity, and not try to subsidize it with unrealistic charges for other services.
HD Communications Project
As part of the preparation for the fall HD Communications Summit, Jeff Pulver has put up a video clip promoting HD Voice for phone calls. It goes over the familiar arguments:
- Sound quality on phone calls hasn’t improved since 1937. Since most calls are now made on cell phones, it has actually deteriorated considerably.
- The move to VoIP has made it technically feasible to make phone calls with CD quality sound or better, yet instead VoIP calls are usually engineered to sound worse than circuit-switched calls (except in the case of Skype.)
- Improved sound quality on phone calls yields undisputed productivity benefits, particularly when the calls involve multiple accents.
- Voice has become a commodity service, with minimal margins for service providers, yet HD Voice offers an opportunity for differentiation and potentially improved margins.
The HD Communications Summit is part of the HD Connect Project. The HD Connect Project aims to provide a coordination point for the various companies that have an interest in propagating HD Voice. These companies include equipment and component manufacturers, software developers and service providers.
Among the initiatives of the HD Connect Project is a logo program, like the Wi-Fi Alliance logo program. The logo requirements are currently technically lax, providing an indicator of good intentions rather than certain interoperability. Here’s a draft of the new logo:
Another ingredient of the HD Connect project is the HDConnectNow.org website, billed as “the news and information place for The HD Connect Project.”
It is great that Jeff is stepping up to push HD Voice like this. With the major exception of Skype almost no phone calls are made with wideband codecs (HD Voice). Over the past few years the foundation has been laid for this to change. Several good wideband codecs are now available royalty free, and all the major business phone manufacturers sell mostly (or solely) wideband-capable phones. Residential phones aren’t there yet, but this will change rapidly: the latest DECT standards are wideband, Gigasets are already wideband-capable, and Uniden is enthusiastic about wideband, too. As the installed base of wideband-capable phones grows, wideband calling can begin to happen.
Since most dialing is still done with old-style (E.164) phone numbers, wideband calls will become common within companies before there is much uptake between companies. That will come as VoIP trunking displaces circuit-switched, and as ENUM databases are deployed and used.
Tsera, LLC v. Apple Inc. et al. Patent troll?
Here’s a little fairy-tale about what might have happened: Chuang Li took an idea to his boss at Actiontec who determined that it wasn’t of interest to the company and told him the idea was all his if he wanted to pursue it. Chuang ultimately refined the idea into the user interface that would become ubiquitous on MP3 players. The Patent Office rejected his application on a technicality. Chuang labored for years patiently jumping through hoops for the patent examiner while educating him on the validity of his claims. When the patent was finally issued, Chuang took it to Apple and requested a reasonable compensation for his idea. Unable to reach agreement with Apple after five years of effort, Chuang found a reputable firm of New York lawyers who were willing to take the case on a contingency basis.
Now here are some facts: the slashdotscape is alive with outrage about another patent lawsuit, this time filed by a company called Tsera LLC against Apple and 18 other companies over a touchpad interface to personal media player type devices (iPods).
Tsera was formed a couple of weeks ago on July 10th, and has filed no ownership or officer information with the Texas Secretary of State. Its registered agent is National Registered Agents, Inc. of New Jersey. Five days after the company was formed, Chuang Li, the inventor of US patent number 6,639,584 assigned that patent to Tsera. That same day Tsera filed suit in the notorious U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Tsera’s attorneys are Kaye Scholer LLP of New York (specifically James S. Blank, Patricia A. Carson, Leora Ben-Ami, Oliver C. Bennett and Tsung-Lin Fu.) Tsera’s local counsel are Jack Wesley Hill and Otis W. Carroll of Ireland, Carroll and Kelley, P.C. of Tyler Texas.
The complaint reveals that Tsera has no parent corporation, and that no public company owns 10% or more of its stock.
The original application for patent 6,639,584 was made exactly ten years ago, on July 29, 1999. At that time (and still) the inventor, Chuang Li was apparently working for Actiontec Electronics, Inc. of Sunnyvale, CA. Chuang Li did not assign the patent to Actiontec, although other patents he applied for around that time were assigned to Actiontec. Companies like Actiontec normally require their workers to assign all the intellectual property they generate, especially when it is relevant to their business. Actiontec makes an MP3 player called the PocketRave.
Chuang Li’s application was rejected on October 9, 2001, just two weeks before Apple launched the first iPod (which did not have a touch-sensitive interface.) Three months later, on 28th January 2002, Chuang Li submitted an amended application, which was again rejected, in November 2002. In May of 2003 Chuang Li appealed the rejection and submitted another amendment. The appeal was ultimately successful, and the patent was issued on the 9th of October, 2003.
Looking at this chronology, you can see that the patent application was amended after the July 2002 launch of the touch-wheel iPod. Numerous rejections and resubmissions are common in the patent process, but they can be symptomatic of a “submarine patent,” where an inventor (famously Jerome H. Lemelson) files a vague patent and tweaks it over the course of several years to make it apply to some successful product that has appeared in the interim. The most egregious type of patent trolling is when the patent at issue is meritless, but the troll demands a settlement that the defending company determines is cheaper to pay than to go to court over.
The Tsera patent doesn’t cite as prior art Xerox’s US Patent 5596656, filed in 1995 and issued in January 1997. The basic idea of the Xerox patent is to replace a keyboard by forming strokes on a touch-pad, while the basic idea of the Tsera patent is to replace buttons and knobs on a portable electronic device by forming strokes on a touch-pad. The Xerox patent has a system of “unistrokes” on a touch-sensitive surface that can be performed “eyes free” and in which unistroke symbols can “correlate with user invokeable control functions.” The Tsera patent has a “device controlled by a user tracing a command pattern on the touch-sensitive surface with a finger,” “without requiring the user to view the portable electronic device,” with each of the “patterns corresponding to a predefined function of the portable electronic device.”
These descriptions actually apply better to the iPhone and the iPod Touch than they do to the canonical iPod touch-wheel, where the annular touch sensitive surface doesn’t really accommodate free-form strokes.
The Xerox patent was the subject of extensively reported litigation running from 1997 to 2006.
The Xerox patent, which is prior art to the Tsera patent, includes free-form touchpad strokes used as control functions. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that application of this same idea to portable devices would have to be non-obvious or the term “control functions” would have to be narrowly defined in order for the Tsera patent to be valid.
Is Tsera acting as a patent troll? You be the judge.
GIPS webinar on Wideband Voice
GIPS yesterday sponsored a webinar on HD voice in the teleconferencing and videoconferencing industries. It was introduced by Elliot Gold of Telespan Publishing. Elliot made the point that HD video will be running at 90% of video equipment sales by the end of this year, and that HD audio is at least equally important to the user experience and should be the next technology transformation in the equipment and services markets.
Dovid Coplon of GIPS gave a more technical presentation, starting with a very accessible explanation of the benefits of HD audio.
Dovid made some interesting observations. He named some users of GIPS wideband technology including Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger. He cited a May 2009 poll that showed 10% of respondents used HD audio all the time or whenever they could. To me this is a surprisingly high number, possibly reflecting a biased poll sample, or perhaps a large number of respondents that didn’t understand the question.
Dovid compared the benefits of the GIPS wideband codecs, iSAC and iPCM-WB. iSAC is a lower-bit-rate, higher complexity codec than IPCM-WB. Dovid pointed out that with IP packet overhead being so high, decreasing the bit-rate of a codec is not as useful as one might think. The implication was that the lower complexity of IPCM-WB outweighed its bandwidth disadvantage in mobile applications. He also included a codec quality comparison chart based on a MUSHRA scale. The chart predictably showed iSAC way better than any of the others, and anomalously showed Speex at 24 kbps as inferior to Speex at 16 kbps.
Dovid also echoed all the codec engineers I have talked with in emphasizing that the codec is a small piece of the audio quality puzzle, and that network and physical acoustic impairments can have a greater effect on user experience.
You can download the slides here.
Caller ID Arms Race – update
In my last post I mentioned two services, Trapcall and Spoofcard, that exploit some technical features of Caller ID. The post provoked an irate but interesting comment, to which I wrote a lengthy response.
Caller ID arms race
Keeping your phone number or even your email address secret kind of defeats the object of having a phone or an email service, which is to communicate with people. From this perspective your phone number should be easily available to anybody who might want to call you. Hence phone books.
But the phone book has taken a beating in recent years. Most numbers are not listed because they are cellular numbers and the mobile service providers don’t publish phone books. Plus many consumers keep their land line numbers unlisted. I don’t know why mobile numbers don’t appear in directories – I presume some form of laziness on the part of the providers. But I believe that the reason people request unlisted numbers is for privacy. Paris Hilton or Brad Pitt could legitimately expect tiresome intrusions if their numbers were published. Less famous people may affect similar concerns.
A new service avaliable in England takes the issue one step further. Now to avoid intrusive phone calls you have to keep your name secret, too. An article in the London Times on June 9th described a new service from a company called Connectivity Ltd.
It will function along the lines of an old-fashioned telephone operator: users will call the service and ask to be connected to the mobile phone of a person. The service calls that mobile phone and asks for permission to connect the call.
My point about keeping your name secret was hyperbolic. You don’t need to keep your name secret because you can opt out of the directory. But this solution shows that you don’t really need to keep your number secret either, and could get a similar degree of privacy protection without giving up the benefit of reachability. Your service provider could keep a list of numbers that have called you, and a call from a number not appearing on that list could offer you the options of accept, reject, whitelist, blacklist. Blacklisted numbers would never ring again, whitelisted numbers would ring through without asking. I don’t know who currently offers such a service, but in the teeming world of VoIP services I presume somebody does.
Another manifestation of the idea of privacy through secrecy is Caller ID blocking. It has always been my policy to reject calls with blocked caller ID, because it seems kind of rude to block it. The caller knows who they are calling, so why shouldn’t the answerer know who is calling? The caller blocking his ID seems to be saying “I know your number, but I don’t want you to know mine.”
To defeat such rudeness, the call recipient may turn to a service called Trapcall, which purports to unmask blocked Caller IDs.
Trapcall seems like a nice way to render symmetrical the information of the caller and callee, but it becomes problematical in cases where call anonymity is essential. An example of this is a battered wife shelter, where a resident may need to call her husband, but does not want him to discover where she is.
In the spirit of an arms dealer supplying weapons to both sides in a conflict, the people behind Trapcall offer a service to defeat it.
Both Trapcall and Spoofcard rely on the fact that PRI subscribers have greater access to the signaling information than do regular POTS subscribers. In particular, the number of the calling party can be conveyed to the called party by two different methods: ANI and Caller ID. Even when Caller ID is blocked, calls to an 800 number disclose the ANI. As I understand it the rationale here is that the person paying for the call is entitled to all the information associated with it. This seems like weak reasoning to me, especially if the caller is paying for Caller ID blocking, and consequently has a reasonable expectation that their number will not be disclosed. Caller ID contains whatever the originating switch happens to put in it. For POTS lines the service provider puts the originating subscriber’s number unless he subscribes to Caller ID blocking. PRI subscribers like Spoofcard can program their PBX to put whatever they want in this field.
Interview with Jan Lindén of GIPS
In my ongoing series of wideband codec interviews I have discussed SILK with Jonathan Christensen of Skype and Speex with its primary author, Jean-Marc Valin. I have also written about Siren from Polycom. So it is high time to look at one of the best known and most widely deployed wideband codecs, iSAC from GIPS. I spoke with Jan Lindén, V.P. of Engineering at GIPS.
The entire interview is transcribed below. The highlights I got from it are that the biggest deployment of wideband voice in the world is from QQ in China, that the next revision of iSAC will be wideband, that 3G is still inadequate for videocalls and that GIPS indemnifies customers of iSAC against IPR challenges.
MS: GIPS has been in the wideband phone call business longer than anybody else. What do you think about the market?
JL: I think the market is definitely going towards wideband. Part of it is all the soft phones that people have used, that’s one step. The fastest way to make it really move is to get the cell phones to support HD Voice. Then people will realize that you can’t have anything else that is worse than what you have on your cell phone. And in the conference and video conference space, whoever has tried an HD Conference as opposed to a regular one immediately recognizes the advantage. The question is, how do you make people experience it? You can’t just wait for demand. You have to offer solutions so customers see the benefit.
MS: Do you think 2009 will be a watershed year for HD Voice?
JL: For sure the industry has woken up, and seen that this is an interesting area. The question is how much it will be in demand by customers. We know that if you try it you definitely want it, but how do you make the customers see that? We are seeing all the enterprise IP phones going to wideband, and we have started to see that move to residential solutions as well. Of course not for the ATA, but for anything like video phones and IP phones, there is much more interest in wideband. Especially for video, because people expect a higher quality in general. There is a lot of interest in video. People are building all kinds of solutions.
MS: What is driving the video solutions?
JL: In the softphone space obviously the biggest use is for personal use where you call your family – I live in San Francisco and my parents and all my siblings live in Sweden, and we talk all the time over video so the kids can see each other and the grandparents can see the grandkids.
MS: Which video solution do you use for that?
JL: Right now I use a solution from one of our customers, for which we supply the audio and video subsystems. I am using a pre-release of that; when it becomes available it’s going to be pretty good.
MS: So who are your main customers?
JL: The biggest names are IBM, Google, Yahoo, WebEx, Nortel, AOL, Citrix, Avaya and Samsung. For example we supply the audio and video subsystem for IBM Sametime. Maybe our biggest customer in terms of deployment is QQ in China. They have hundreds of millions of users. It’s similar to Yahoo or Google. They are not very well known outside China, but they are much bigger than Skype for example, in terms of online users at any given moment. They use iSAC.
MS: So all these customers run on PCs, right?
JL: We also have people who use our stuff in embedded solutions. IP phones, a few mobile devices – Samsung has some of our technology on their cell phones as an application. There is a video phone called the Ojo phone. There are a few ATA devices in Asia, a Wi-Fi phone from NEC. We will have some announcements later.
MS: How does cell phone video work?
JL: Most of them it’s not really videophone, more regular streaming. It depends on the service provider’s solution, which can be expensive. To get effective video phone performance you need Wi-Fi – 3G is still inadequate for good video quality. If the picture is small it can be decent, but you get delay, and the inconsistency of the data network means that a Wi-Fi solution is much more stable and gives better quality.
MS: Does GIPS sell complete conferencing systems?
JL: No, just the audio subsystem – for example Citrix Online’s GoToMeeting uses our audio subsystem to provide HD Voice on their conference bridge.
MS: What is the difference between iSAC and iPCM?
JL: The biggest difference is that iPCM wideband has a significantly higher bitrate, better quality, more robust against packet loss. The biggest reason people don’t use it is that its bitrate is about 80kbps, while iSAC is variable between 10 and 32, so it has a much lower bit rate. They both have a 16 KHz sampling rate.
MS: Do you see the necessity for a super-wideband codec?
JL: We think that’s something we should support. We haven’t done it previously because the benefit from narrowband to wideband is a much bigger step than from wideband to super wideband. We are supporting super wideband in our next release of iSAC.
MS: What about the transcoding issue?
JL: Pragmatically, you will have to have transcoding in some scenarios. You will not find a way to get everybody to agree on one codec or even two or three, but you will probably get two or three codecs that cover most of what’s used.
MS: What about the idea of a mandate to support at least 3 different WB codecs – would that give a good chance of having one in common?
JL: It’s a good idea, but the question is, will you get everybody to buy into it? It’s the most crucial point. Of course those codecs will have to be good codecs that are not expensive, and preferably not too associated with one player that will create political issues with other players in the market.
MS: You mentioned “not too expensive.” iLBC is royalty free, but narrowband. Does GIPS offer a royalty free wideband codec?
JL: No, our iSAC codec is not free per se, but if you look at other pricing available today in the market we are effectively only charging for the indemnification. We are not charging even close to as much as typical codecs like AMR-WB.
MS: So that’s huge that you offer indemnification.
JL: Yes, and no free codecs do that, obviously. If you want indemnification you have to pay something.
MS: Who else indemnifies?
JL: Typically not the codec vendor, but if you go and buy a chip from someone that has a codec on it from somebody like TI you will typically get indemnification, but from the chip vendor, not the IPR vendor.
MS: So GIPS is unique among codec vendors in offering indemnification?
JL: Yes, but we don’t see ourselves as a codec vendor. We offer broader solutions that have codecs as just one element, engines that have all the signal processing and code you need to handle an implementation of voice and video on a platform. That’s where the value is. And the codecs we indemnify as they are a part of that solution. You can also buy our codecs separately, and then we also indemnify. Since we sell a product rather than just supplying IP, people expect indemnification.