WebRTC - LTE - Over The Top (OTT) services and disruption - or opportunity?

I've recently been looking hard at IMS and LTE - as both these technologies are finally gaining traction in the market place with Carriers upgrading their networks to 4G with VoLTE to follow very soon - within a year or so for many.

I've also been closely following the rapid rise of WebRTC and its deployment in browsers, Firefox and Google Chrome on you desktop now support WebRTC APIs and very soon it will be on your smartphone (http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/chrome-beta-for-android.html).

Carrier vendors such as Genband and others are all ready with their implementations of App servers capable of providing WebRTC.

There is plenty of support in the Open Source community with Asterisk, Freeswitch and Kamailio and OpenSIPs support SIP over websockets and OverSIP (http://oversip.net/) and the sipML5 HTML5 (Javascript SIP/SDP stack)... Not to mention MobiCents Open source IMS app server's support for it (http://www.slideshare.net/johntel/crocodile-launch-mobicents-html5-web-rtc-and-sip-over-websockets).

More Interesting on this front as well is the recently announced Project Clearwater (http://www.projectclearwater.org/) IMS in the cloud.

It seems to me there is about a 1 year opening for the Over The Top providers (OTT) to get in on LTE and capitalise on the carrier's reluctance to use VoLTE. Its not to say there won't be issues - carrier's LTE implementations will probably be restricted to a single Data service offering for this first year, offering Dongles and WiFi Personal hotspots (MyFI) over a none QoS bearer service, which might not be the best for offering voice and video services (but that doesn't stop most of us using Skype!)

From the carriers perspective it might also be worth considering their position with respect to partnerships to enable OTT providers or deep packet inspection technologies to block the OTT vendors from utilising WebRTC applications. Partnership in my mind is better for both. It gives OTT providers the opportunity to get a QoS bearer service for their applications (QCI 5 and QCI 1 EPS Bearers) and potentially a custom APN to support this. For the Carriers innovation has not historically been a carrier's strength - partnership brings the opportunity to gain revenue from innovative services with little or no cost of development, and prevents them from the constant fear of becoming a bit-pipe provider only.

Whilst thinking about QoS/QoE it also struck me that its going to be a bit more tricky (not impossible) for 3rd party QoS/QoE software probes to monitor the Quality of Web RTC traffic, on two counts, 1) its peer to peer - unless forced to be otherwise (media anchoring); 2) the media and RTCP is "munged" (technical term) together into a single UDP stream to improve on the chances of successful NAT traversal. And on a third count - the media may also be encrypted.

Future communications networks and services

Like most professional's inbox, mine fills with news, messages and sales pitches. Amongst this ever present background noise, every once in a while the title of an email or news item catches my attention. This week two items caught my eye:

• [Special Report] Towards the New Intelligent Network, from V2M, sponsored by Cisco
• TechRepublic: Microsoft conjures up the future of mobile productivity.

Below is direct extract from the overview of the Special Report.

An intelligent network can be a platform for new business models and differentiators, by enabling network segmentation, partnerships with content partners and the creation of personalized services. This is especially important in a landscape that has seen the rise of content, applications and devices as having the primary relationship with the customer from a brand perspective. Driving intelligence in the network isthe primary strategy for mobile operators looking to architect for the next-generation business model.

This report includes:

• The Intelligent Mobile Broadband Imperative: Why Intelligence Matters
• The Network as Profitability Engine
• A New Approach to Analytics

The special report as you can see from the description above showed promise, and service design and "intelligent" services is a bit of a pet interest of mine, started when we tried in the early nineties to crowbar  out the control logic from the stored program controller functions of the TDM switches in to a centralised execution engine (called a service control point - SCP). We've moved on from this with IP networks now dominating over traditional TDM and even a short life for ATM (I know its lasted in the mobile space - and oh yes its still heavily present in ADSL networks).

Alas I was disappointed by the content, admittedly I should have spotted the Cisco sponsorship of the paper, but the focus of the paper was on network traffic flows, rather than the actual services and how to make the best use of infrastructure to support these.

This is the comment I emailed to the editor at V2M:

I've just picked my way through the "Special Report", and I have to say I found very little new material or real content of value. It could have been written 10 years ago, in fact I think there was better material around 10 years ago about the challenges facing both fixed and mobile operators by the Internet's growth and the Telco's challenge of not being just a bit pipe provider. Having worked in the telecoms industry for over 20 years now and seen the analogue exchanges replaced with TDM switching and the usurping of the traditional telco model by open source VoIP, I feel the challenges telcos face are far greater than the material you have put out. Traditional telecoms operators are having to face the challenges of services which no longer rely on centralised telco controlled (walled garden) network architectures.  IMS, EPC and LTE architecture just prolong the pain for operators who cling to this centralised control model. If telco's don't adopt a decentralised collaborative approach to services, rather than build their castles on an old and frankly out-dated model for services, they will fail and become what they're most afraid of stove-piped carries of traffic with no share in valuable content and services it contains. Discussions of traffic shaping and understanding customer trends and usage and traffic flows will not make network operators "rich" look at the richness embodied in modern applications, the report mentions facebook, but misses the point of what the APIs to services like facebook offer by discussing traffic patterns. Facebook's value to organisations looking to increase revenue is about the relationships and activities the "friends" on facebook are engaged in. Glue-ing the richness of the applications with the network operators "crown jewels" - ubiquitous access is where the gold mine lies.

The tech republic blog entry was actually slightly more enlighting and the video from Microsoft, if a little "Minority Report" (as pointed out by one of commenters on the tech republic blog) was actually quite refreshing and potentially close to a future communications and office environment. It was yes full of gloss, but looking beyond this at some of the underly technical considerations for this future view of communications and it's all pretty plausible from flexible OLED 3D display technologies, with the Xbox motion detection (Kinect) built in to interactive displays augmenting touch gestures. For near and remote comms between devices we have ZigBee and bluetooth and LTE and HSPA.



If you view the Microsoft video whilst thinking about my views on intelligent networks. Whilst I fully support the views in the V2M paper on capacity and flow management (this is really important since this addresses the scarce resources of the service provider), if you view the video, think about the value to the customers of the network providers, its in the content and services they're using. The key single element that mobile operators in particular have the advantage - Ubiquitous access. Mobile operators by offering access and taking note of the services their customers are using, can use this to personalise each customer's experience - both of the underlying network, but also the services themselves.