Free Adds 17 More VoIP Destinations

Free in France has added 17 more countries that its customers can call using its broadband VoIP service. It now provides free calling to 87 countries globally. These countries include major the Asian countries India and Indonesia as well as Colombia and Costa Rica in Latin America, Bahrain in the Middle East, and Georgia, Macedonia, and Albania in Europe.

Free arguably provides the most attractive broadband bundle globally with 24 Mbps Internet, IPTV, and free VoIP calling to 87 countries at less than 30 euros per month. (If anybody needs a telecom analyst in Paris, je peux parler Francais. (:-)

Seriously, I would like to better understand how Free does this. I assume that it is based on interconnect agreements that are not encumbered with usage charges. If this catches on with other carriers, it will cause a complete collapse of the long distance calling business model.

Cisco Introduces Connected Consumer Electronics Devices

Cisco introduced a line of audio and video connected media systems for consumers. At the same time Cisco introduced Eos software platform that lets content provider create web sites that can provide content to these systems. Cisco also announced a licensing program that allows other consumer device manufacturers to offer devices that can operate in this environment.

This announcement appears to be a major step forward in making the Internet the central source for entertainment media. Internet content will become very important during the next decade. The Internet will give the cable TV, the satellite TV, and the Telco IPTV providers a real run for their money.

FTTH Broadband Stimulus Proposals

The U.S. Fiber to the Home Council has published an economic analysis of its proposals for including broadband deployment as part of the stimulus package that the U.S. government is currently considering. These proposals include tax incentives to support fiber to the home in urban and suburban areas and DSL in rural areas.

Including FTTH as part of the stimulus package could bring the U.S. into the 21st century with respect to broadband. The problem will be competing with other kinds of projects, such such as roads and bridges. The second problem will be to keep the focus on FTTH and not have the funding and incentives diverted to VDSL and other short term technologies.

Femto Cell Survey Article

Light Reading has published a nice survey article about the state of femto cell technology. Femto cells are likely to very important but are just getting off the ground now.

Upgrading TCP for the Heavy User

Bob Briscoe from BT wrote an article that appeared in the December 2008 IEEE Spectrum that discusses proposed changes to TCP that would help the Internet cope better with so-called bandwidth hogs. It basically does this by providing a mechanism that allows network routers to discard packets from the heavy users before discarding packets from casual users.

Heavy users will declare their packets to be eligible for discard and a feedback mechanism will be created that will inform core routers of congestion that is occurring in the network so that they can start discarding packets.

This approach should provide better performance to the casual user than they experience today without significantly degrading performance for the heavy user.

You can get more details from Briscoe's web site.

It looks to me that this is a much better approach than the limits being proposed by carriers today. It also seems to resolve the Net Neutrality argument by redefining what fairness means and equalizing the performance of the network to a broad set of users rather than equalizing access to bandwidth.

I question how much these techniques will help in an IP network dominated by TV traffic. TV traffic wants to use a lot of bandwidth and have a high QoS at the same time. An HDTV viewer will not like it if discarding packets from his or her video stream causes visual or audio defects.

Altair 4G OFDM Chips

I recently spoke with Altair, which is an Israeli company that is building OFDM chips to support both WiMAX and LTE. It is focusing on 4G technologies by building handset chips. The company currently has chips for WiMAX and for XGP, which is an OFDM technology deployed by Willcom in Japan.

Altair plans to introduce an LTE chip in the middle of 2009 and a multimode chip by the end of 2009 that will support WiMAX, XGP, and LTE. This will enable support of all three technologies in a single hand held device. The company is also working with a 2G/3G supplier to offer the ability to add WiMAX, XGP, or LTE to a 2G/3G device using the Altair chip as a coprocessor.

This is interesting because it shows that progress is being made on chips that will facilitate the integration of 2G, 3G, and 4G WiMAX and LTE networks. This will help with the evolution of existing networks to WiMAX or LTE. It may also facilitate roaming between WiMAX and GSM, WCDMA, and LTE networks, which may keep WiMAX from becoming the dead end that CDMA has become.

FTTH Green Postitive in U.S. in Six Years

The FTTH Council has published a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers that shows that the environmental impact of the deployment of a typical FTTH network in the United States will be positive within less than 6 years in average considering only benefits associated to telecommuting.

FTTH is much greener than DSL or VDSL in the U.S. Both of these technologies require powered remotes, which significantly raises their energy requirements. This is a much more significant problem for VDSL than DSL.