BroadTouch provides easy-to-use interfaces to access unified communications (UC) services across a users’ preferred communications device.  In addition to our newly enhanced call center agent and supervisor clients, BroadTouch also includes the Business Communicator.  Leveraging a single interface over both mobile and desktop platforms, the Business Communicator brings together voice, video and instant messaging and presence for a superior user experience.  At our annual users’ conference, BroadSoft Connections, we were excited to introduce the Business Communicator — you can see a quick demonstration from our show floor here:

Please feel free to share the demo: http://bit.ly/broadtouchdemo and look for more BroadTouch enhancements in the coming months.

Before we dive into Net Neutrality, maybe a good place to start is with what BroadSoft would like for the Internet as a whole. Here’s what we’d like to see promoted and protected:

• Accessibility – the Internet should be available to all Americans, and preferably via fast, broadband access wherever feasible. We applaud the FCC’s work in this area and it’s great to have in Chairman Genachowski someone who really “gets” how vital this access is for the productivity of individuals and the country.
• Openness – the Internet should be accessible via open standards and should not discriminate based on device or protocol.
• Privacy – consumers need protections so that they control how, when and by whom their personal information is viewed and/or used.
• Security – consumers deserve to have the safest, more secure networks and online experiences possible.

On Thursday, October 22^nd the FCC approved a notice of proposed rule making that will look into what regulations are necessary to assure what they call the “Open Internet.” The principles are:

• Allow sending and receiving all lawful content.
• Allow all lawful applications and services.
• Allow all lawful devices that don’t harm the network.
• Allow access to all network, application, service and content providers.
• Ensure there is no discrimination against particular lawful content, applications, services and devices.
• Reveal practices necessary to allow for network management that might limit the other five principles.

What the FCC has laid out in principle is totally in line with how we look at the issue. The only thing that concerns us at BroadSoft is the focus on how service providers manage their networks. Restrictive regulations here could negatively impact progress and prevent consumers from enjoying the productivity and collaborative benefits of broadband access.

Why? Because of explosive Internet traffic growth. The telecom infrastructure provider Tellabs did a study in 2008 of industry professionals on this issue. Over half thought there was the chance the Internet could actually “break” without major investments! Other notable findings:

• Video is 30% of Internet traffic today, and will be 75% in five years
• 80% of respondents felt that operators need freedom in managing their networks to address congestion
• 81% see mobile video as an even heavier burden for networks

So why hasn’t the Internet collapsed (yet anyway!) under the weight of such growth? The biggest reason is because service providers have invested billions of dollars in their networks, and they are now well positioned to see a return on that investment. The Internet backbone today is at a critical juncture, migrating from infrastructure designed to support the transmission of analog phone calls via circuit-switching to all IP architecture.

As the survey figures show, internet traffic growth is because of the new IP, real-time communication options we as users are all choosing. Video usage in particular is soaring, and the explosion of mobile internet usage is just beginning.

It’s critical we get the regulations right as our national communications infrastructure undergoes a massive migration from circuit-switched to fully IP.

The FCC has an important role to play as the Internet migrates to a fully IP infrastructure in this country. We think it’s exciting to have a chairman and an agency that clearly give these issues the priority they deserve. We simply suggest the commission remember that a powerful reason behind the Internet’s growth and innovation and productivity has been the absence of excess regulation. The competition to provide advanced services to users is already robust, and as we expand broadband access let’s not burden the Internet with regulations from a by-gone era.

The value of IMS is in providing a single network for any access supporting multiple services. Given the complexity of communications networks, it’s really the only way to successfully launch new applications and ensure low operating costs.

For BroadSoft and our customers, IMS provides defined interfaces that ensure interoperability in multi-vendor networks and across different service providers. We are seeing service providers using IMS for innovative services on new broadband access.

Where We Are and Where We’re Going

Today IMS is focused on basic services that mainly replicate PSTN services. Looking forward, the true value of IMS is enabling a richer set of services—which will include things like IPTV, messaging, presence and gaming—and driving new revenue streams.

We are already seeing service providers using IMS to deliver rich services, and expect this to become the norm, in the very near future. This will look something like this:

• Voice moves to rich media including high-definition voice, video, enhanced messaging, presence and content-sharing.
• Fixed broadband moves to fixed-and-mobile broadband—all access is IP, and the applications are access-independent.
• Basic service moves to a set of advanced, integrated services that offer a seamless user experience.
• All siloed networks move to a single core network for all access types.

IMS is quickly migrating to multimedia and multiservice applications with end users taking advantage of feature-rich, high-value services.

BroadSoft Tackles IMS’s Toughest Challenges

This evolution is putting some IMS design principles to the test. Specifically there are two key challenges: 1) service orchestration and 2) service data management.

Today’s standard service orchestration model is very basic and very limited—well suited for loose integration of some applications but ill suited for more complex blending of services. Most service orchestration issues aren’t apparent until integration—a point where it may be too late to address them.

We’re working closely with service providers and third-party application vendors to simplify service orchestration for common-use cases that we’ve experienced and those we expect to see in the future.

Service-data management also poses some tough challenges in multi-service offerings. If every application requires its own data and exposes a separate provisioning interface, the need to maintain multiple subscriber databases drives up operating costs.

Many service providers are now looking toward centralizing their subscriber provisioning and service data. In this scenario all user-centric application data is hosted on the home subscriber server (HSS).

We have a number of key customers who are designing network architectures in which all user profile and service data is stored in a central repository.

BroadSoft is the leading IMS application server vendor. By focusing on the hard problems and working closely with our customers, we will continue to lead the industry’s evolution.

I’m sure that many of you have seen the Infonetics report indicating significant growth in VoIP and unified communications – with revenue exceeding $21 billion in the first half of 2009. They forecast that the second half of 2009 will top $22 billion—7.3 percent growth in just six months.

Many of us have experienced similar growth rates in our businesses. We are all well positioned to leverage this growing demand for IP-based communication services.

At BroadSoft we are very pleased with where we’ll end 2009—most likely up 26 percent year-over-year in shipped lines. More encouraging is comparing that result to PBX shipments, which are down about 20 percent.

These statistics reflect a shift in the communications industry. End-users are seeking more interactive, advanced communication solutions. BroadSoft has kept pace with solutions that are designed to delight the end-user.

As we prepare for 2010, it’s a good time to share our thoughts on the current environment and our strategies for moving the communications industry forward. There are key indicators that IP communications solutions are the future of our industry.

Our mutual growth starts with broadband adoption. Fixed broadband penetration is about 440 million subscribers today, and it is expected to grow to more than 600 million by 2013. Today VoIP is provided on approximately one-third of all broadband lines.

Broadband penetration will continue to grow at a rapid pace. There will be exponential growth of mobile broadband and new devices. As rich communication options become available, they will require broadband access to ensure a superior user experience.

As end-users quickly embrace IP and hosted communication services, service providers are well positioned to focus on innovative services and applications that deliver greater value to consumers. We must all ensure that we evolve our network architectures so that products and solutions easily integrate with new applications that can be delivered quickly and inexpensively.

To build on our business success, BroadSoft will focus on four key areas going forward:

• Smart Devices – new innovative multimedia, always-connected devices
• Personalization – the ability for users to customize communication services for their devices and preferences
• Rich media – moving beyond voice to video, messaging and content sharing
• Mobility – communications anywhere, anytime and any device

Our goal is to enable service providers to integrate a set of smart devices with network services to maximize the user experience. You will see BroadSoft define solutions in which BroadWorks services complement our partners’ smart devices. We are working on end-to-end solutions that are pre-integrated with partner devices to ensure that service providers can take them to market quickly. As the penetration of smart devices increases and end-users have multiple devices, it becomes more important to ensure that service data end management is centralized.

Storing data directly on devices is problematic due to the need to synchronize the data between the devices—for example, the problem of synchronizing contacts across two mobile phones. It’s better to provide an end-user with a service profile in the network. A single service profile will work across all of the end-user’s devices—their desk phones, soft clients on a netbook, IP media phones, smartphones, connected consumer electronics and so forth. With a network-based service profile, end-users can configure their social interaction or communication preferences. Basically they can define the how, when and where rules for their communication services.

BroadSoft’s strategy is to transform BroadWorks from a VoIP platform to a multimedia, real-time communications platform. The goal is to provide a comprehensive set of user and group features that work independently of the medium. For example, simultaneous ringing should work for voice calls, video calls, text messages and content sharing. Smart devices working together with hosted services will deliver a superior user experience.

It is good to talk about where we are going, but it is always better to SEE where BroadSoft is focused. We just demonstrated more than 25 innovative new solutions at our recent users’ conference. Here are two applications that will give you a sense of the evolutionary trend.

Hosted Home Monitoring . See how a home monitoring system can be converted to a surveillance tool to care for your home and watch over family members.

The Mobile Office. Imagine a more flexible and productive work environment through UC solutions for the Mobile Business.

So our strategy on the user front is to enable a smart user experience, which will be critical to success. Our focus is on communication services that are intuitive, easy to use and available from any device.

While this is a significant accomplishment we are proud of, the purpose of this post is more than chest-beating, it’s about why putting proof behind quality claims are important across the industry, beyond the issue of integrity.

Quality of Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications (QuEST) Forum’s TL 9000 defines measurements as an industry standard way of benchmarking various products. Results are sent monthly to QuEST and compiled along with all other companies in the same product category. Measurements include indicators for things such as the number of software defects in a product, the reliability of a product in terms of outages, quality of software fixes delivered for defects and on time delivery, and how fast product issues are resolved.

TL 9000 also means a company can CONSISTENTLY meet a set of quality expectations that parallel rapid technology changes and customer expectations. Consistency is so important here because it proves a long-term commitment to quality, not something that a company can adjust products or services to quickly achieve.

A committed team at BroadSoft, spearheaded by Vice President of Engineering Bob Weidenfeller, invested over a year in the certification process (although creating a culture of quality has been a company focus since inception). The investment paid off as the team reviewing the audit noted that our business practices went above and beyond the compliance requirements. An interesting thing to point out was that BroadSoft Engineering and our Technical Assistance Centers (TAC) already had most of the processes in place and documented and were following them in our day-to-day routine.

TL 9000 is not only important to telecommunications providers who demand products and services with ever increasing quality. It benefits the industry as a whole by enabling technology providers to be more efficient and deliver innovative products to market in a shorter time frame. This supports business growth and provides end users access to better, more reliable products sooner. In today’s need-it-yesterday society – these are values coveted by companies. However, very few can attest to this level of commitment, BroadSoft is one of only three U.S.-based, and ten worldwide to have been certified in the 1.2.7 application server category. So to use a cliché… quality really does count.

“[the Fed] has no idea where people without broadband live — which is like planning targeted radiation therapy for a cancer without knowing where the cancer is.”

Last week, four large carriers – Qwest, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast – announced they would not be applying for broadband stimulus funds in the first round of applications that concluded 8/20. The companies cited restrictive regulations, enforced net neutrality and a flaw definition of “underserved areas.” Sean Buckley of Fierce Telecom reached this conclusion in his coverage:

“I can only hope the NTIA spends more time analyzing how their rules affect smaller service providers seeing greater demand for high-speed connections in smaller communities.”

To get the picture where the shovel breaks ground, Broadband Ignite spoke with John Stuart, Operations Manager at Midvale Telephone Exchange, an Idaho-based Local Exchange Carrier serving very rural areas across Arizona, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. John has been at Midvale for 22 years and knows a lot about wiring up remote communities. He sees a lot of room for improvement in the current plan and shared some thoughts with us.

The topic of right-of-way requirements – or the permits that are necessary to break ground, build towers and run wire and cables – came up throughout our conversation.

“Some departments don’t even have the people or specialists to process permits,” John explains. “To process them you need to hire these people – stimulus funding won’t address these hurdles.”

John also highlights the rigid and perhaps arbitrary requirements for grant applications, such as one that gives priority to projects that can commence immediately upon approval.

“Program administrators want shovel-ready type projects,” John says, noting that it doesn’t work this way.

“Many of these efforts are multi-year projects that can’t be completed in a two-year time frame (another provision in the grant guidelines). You can’t just throw Federal dollars at projects and expect the local and municipal challenges go away,” he adds.

We asked John what if anything might improve the plan and ultimately help to bring broadband to rural areas.

He offers a few ideas such as investing in the municipal departments the telephone companies have to work with to provide these services. He also suggests broadening the grant provisions around the time frame for project completion, and in some instances removing a time frame. His final recommendation was for the administration teams overseeing the plan to bring in front line experts to learn more about what is involved in the process of connecting rural regions.

Despite some of the challenges John sees in the current plan, he says Midvale is applying for some of the grants to do middle mile projects where they have permits in place or pending, and that they have already received several Rural Utility Service (RUS) loans.

So as is turns out, billions of dollars sure attracts attention, and the funding is definitely designed to address a vital issue. But where the rubber hits the road Washington needs more input from the operators who have been fighting the good broadband fight for many years now.

Satellite transmitted calls are now a reality.  You most likely saw the news that the first ever satellite call between two smart phones via TerraStar-1 took place a couple of weeks ago.  This “extra-terrestrial” event was particularly exciting for us as BroadWorks was the IP platform used to route the satellite call over TerreStar’s all-IP core network between 2 integrated satellite-terrestrial smartphones.

Individuals want and need continuous coverage for their voice, data and multimedia communications anywhere.  In areas where wireless coverage doesn’t exist or when cell networks go down customers still want to use their phones.

Now with the successful completion of the first satellite call,– TerreStar can move forward and roll out their satellite – terrestrial mobile network service across the United States and Canada to help government, emergency responders, enterprises and rural communities solve communication challenges and enhance productivity and efficiency.

Skeptics who questioned the possibility of an integrated satellite/terrestrial network are now scratching their heads wondering what is next now that the concept has been proven and the technology tested.

Bottom line — IP is the only way this could have been done! The migration continues towards personalized communications – your message delivered your way, when and where you need it. And our BroadWorks platform is the first to support all these types of access – wireline, wireless, cable and now satellite.

While we firmly believe in the industry’s move to hosted communications services, we understand there will be situations where a business can not convert overnight. During this transition period, service providers have an opportunity to show their customers a clear path to the benefits delivered by a fully-hosted environment. They can accomplish this by delivering SIP/VoIP PSTN connectivity to an enterprise’s IP PBX. But since no one wants to repeat that too many times, the process is commonly referred to as “SIP trunking.”

SIP trunking has traditionally been pitched by service providers as a lower cost alternative to TDM voice circuits, but the truly exciting aspect of SIP trunking is the numerous other benefits and capabilities it enables. Unfortunately these advanced communication capabilities haven’t been well communicated to the business community. Put that together with initial technical implementation challenges and spotty PBX vendor support, and it’s no surprise there has been slow adoption. However, the industry has focused on promoting the benefits of SIP trunking recently, and we’re seeing increased adoption and a greater awareness of SIP trunking in the enterprise space

This trend is also confirmed in a recent Infonetics report, showing that the SIP trunking market has finally moved into the mainstream. It’s now a very big growth opportunity for service providers. According to Infonetics, SIP Trunking is currently the fastest-growing segment of VoIP services. It’s expected to have an 89 percent CAGR from 2008 to 2013.

We’re definitely seeing that in the market today, especially with larger organizations. We have seen a rash of recent SIP trunking RFPs that indicate enterprises are finally realizing the benefits of SIP trunking over traditional TDM voice.

So how does SIP trunking go with hosted? SIP trunking is a highly complementary service offering to hosted Unified Communications (UC) – and something that significantly increases the addressable market for service providers. They can now support customers regardless of where they are in their migration path. SIP trunking also helps service providers sell into companies with hybrid hosted/premise deployment models.

To date, SIP trunking has been largely focused on recreating current TDM voice services (“trunks”) over IP. While useful, that’s only one possible use. We see the true market potential of SIP trunking in its ability to act as a hosted services “conduit” and to carry media other than standard PSTN quality voice – capabilities impossible with TDM.

Here are some examples of the unique capabilities that a service provider can deliver to an enterprise with SIP trunking:

• Unified Communications “as a service”
• Fixed Mobile Convergence “as a service”
• Wideband audio and video telepresence
• Fixed Line Short Message Service (SMS)

These capabilities are in high demand by enterprises – especially during the economic downturn – and represent a significant opportunity for service providers. Companies are not going to toss out their telephony networks overnight. Providers need to offer businesses an evolutionary path for advanced communications services that in many cases makes use of existing telephony infrastructure.

Change is scary, especially for the largest enterprises. But the productivity gains and the cost savings are undeniable, and SIP trunking puts companies on the path to the future of communications.

The bulk of the funds — $4.7 billion — will be distributed through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and the rest through the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) program out of the Dept. of Agriculture. The government is making a very clear statement — broadband is so essential that funds will be made available so telecommunications service providers can expand access and reach every citizen in the country.

As you might guess from the name of our blog, we think this is an extremely valuable and important investment in the country’s future. It significantly impacts millions of Americans, service providers and our company as well.

We believe the stimulus bill will help service providers — both fixed and mobile — expand their footprint and speed up the deployment of broadband, especially in the Tier 2 and 3 rural markets.  Wireless carriers welcome the stimulus dollars since it helps them support ongoing investment in so-called 4G networks, which will provide much higher broadband speeds to the smartphones of the future.  And the millions of Americans who gain access through the investment will help keep those networks busy.

For providers, the stimulus bill will create new and significant revenue streams.   In addition to providing access, providers can layer on value-added services, e.g., VoIP, IPTV, etc.

Some would say it’s about time we had a national broadband policy. (Actually we’ll officially have the national plan in 211 days, when the FCC is required to publish it.) The U.S. has fallen behind many industrialized nations in offering broadband to citizens, as measured per capita by population size.  A report published by the International Telecommunications Union showed that the U.S fell from 11^th to 17^th from 2002 – 2007. That slide represents millions of people shut out from the communication and productivity tools provided by broadband access.

Broadband powers a new wave of multimedia communications, including video and mashups that marry VoIP with Web 2.0 — these are revolutionizing how consumers and enterprises connect, communicate and collaborate.  VoIP technology makes possible features like unifying voice mail and email, “find me, follow me” calling and integration into business applications like Salesforce.com and social networks like Facebook.

What does the bill mean for BroadSoft?  More broadband deployments = greater opportunity for more advanced, multimedia communications over IP. Entirely new business models have emerged thanks to broadband, such as cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). These new models help make advanced communication services available to businesses of all sizes, and residential consumers as well.

BroadbandIgnite will return to this important topic on a regular basis. The expansion of broadband to every American citizen is overdue, and is vital for maintaining the productivity and competitiveness of America in the 21^st century.