Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Push-to-talk Standards and Interoperability

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 14:36:14 -0400

Push-to-talk Standards and Interoperability

MAY 11, 2004 1:00PM ET

HOSTED BY: BIGTALK / WIRELESS WEEK
John Burns

Except for Nextel Communications' Direct Connect service, push-to-talk
services on wireless networks are still in their infancy. As with the
early stages of many technologies and their various implementations, PTT
must go through a series of interoperability challenges, whether they
involve networks or different handsets.

Join Sonim Technologies' CEO and President John Burns for a  May 11
BigTalk discussion on Push-to-talk Standards and Interoperability.

John Burns joined Sonim from Acta Technology, where he was vice
president of worldwide operations. Prior to Acta, Burns was vice
president, global sales for VXtreme, provider of business video
solutions for the enterprise, packaged and delivered through telecom
service providers. Burns joined VXtreme from Madge Networks; a
multi-service networking equipment provider focused on the enterprise
and telecommunications markets, where he served as director, global
accounts division based in Europe.

Sonim was started 4 years ago when wireless IP-based data networks were
first introduced, with the idea to send voice over these networks at a
fraction of the cost for normal voice calls. At the this year's 3GSM
Congress in Cannes, Sonim received a best-in-show award in the
'Push-to-Talk over Cellular' area.

You may submit your questions any time in advance or during the
discussion.

Please note: BigTalk discussions are editorially moderated. Guests
reserve the right to choose or decline specific questions.

BigTalk Discussions

===================================================================================

John Burns: Hello and welcome to today's Big Talk where we are
discussing Push-to-Talk Standards and Interoperability. It is excellent
to be here and I look forward to discussing the hottest topic in the
wireless industry today! It is a thrilling time for PTT and Sonim
challenges those interested to ask questions and explore opportunities
within Sonim too, please visit us at www.sonimtech.com.

San Francisco, CA- Kristin: Hello. I have been reading a lot about
Sonim. Can you answer this question- thank you. How should PTT be
positioned vs. voice?  John Burns: Hi Kristin. PTT is a half duplex
service, with only one person speaking at a time, and users need to push
a button to speak. This is very useful in many situations, especially
for short, action or information-seeking scenarios. It is generally,
however, different to normal voice calls, and needs to be priced
accordingly. IP-based PTT has a much more efficient cost structure and
will thus support business cases with lower fees per minute.
Circuit-switched PTT solutions are naturally stuck with a high cost
structure and therefore is left to position as a premium to normal voice
communication, which is a non-starter for the mass market.

Cannon Starr, Nashville, Tenn: I saw your announcements with LG and
Samsung.
Do you have any more partnerships?
John Burns: Sonim is partnered with Ericsson, that holds over 40% market
share in infrastructure, and with Motorola, Siemens, Samsung, Sony
Ericsson and LG in handsets. We’re expecting to announce more handset
partnerships shortly.

John, San Mateo, CA: How do you see standards defined and is there a
standard today?
John Burns: Sonim is a member of the PoC consortium that has published
the only open and publicly available PTT specification available today.
We together with vendors representing a majority of market share of both
handset and infrastructure are today delivering PoC phase 1 compliant
products.

Franco Gionnini, Rome, Italy: Hello. I was wondering why you think a
carrier will choose PoC before OMA PoC is published?
John Burns: Products from multiple vendors that are fully interoperable
are available today. These products will also be forward compatible with
future PoC evolutions. This is a much safer path than to bet on a
proprietary standard supported by a single vendor and being forced into
an extensive upgrade/change-out program of infrastructure and handsets.

Michael Carr NY, NY: How big is your team and where are they based?
John Burns: Sonim employs over 100 professionals with all development
being done at our headquarter in San Mateo, California. We have sales,
marketing and business development personnel throughout Europe and Asia,
but it just makes more sense to have local development staff working in
one location to provide the best possible service to our partners and
customers. Sonim continues to actively expand its product organization
by adding the brightest and best talent in the Bay Area.

Miami, Fl- Pat Odell: Who will be doing the interoperability testing
before OMA has published its PoC standard?
John Burns: Ericsson, Siemens and Motorola have announced an
interoperability program for conducting end-to-end PoC interoperability
testing that will include additional handset vendors as their products
become available.

San Diego, CA- Jack Mouser: How do you differentiate your PTT solution?
John Burns: PoC solutions are clearly functionally better, critical for
interoperability and more cost efficient than circuit-switched
technologies. Sonim is the company with the broadest portfolio of
PoC-based handset partners, and the largest infrastructure provider in
the industry in Ericsson. Sonim’s implementation of PTT is unique in the
user experience that our solution provides, complete with ‘command
control’ functionality that empowers the recipient, not just the
initiator of a PTT call. We’ve also included many elements of instant
messaging, really bringing the best of several worlds together in one
solution.

Farooq Kumar, Sunnyvale, CA: Good Morning John. Just a quick question-
Will PTT extend beyond Blue Collar?
John Burns: Good morning. Yes, through next-generation feature
functionality and interoperability. Command control functions, an area
that Sonim has spent considerable time researching as well as
developing, is critical for the larger white collar as well as consumer
markets require. Also, interoperability is also important to enable a
large footprint – we’re seeing incredible subscriber adoption from
Nextel’s national roaming plans – but we believe that more pervasive,
interoperable coverage will be required by the broader market as well.

Toronto, CA- Adam Warhol: Can you discuss what standards work is going
on for PTT?
John Burns: The PoC phase 1 specification really describes the feature
functionality and protocols required for next generation PTT – OMA is
scheduled to ratify this specification. Additionally, there is a PoC
Phase II specification that is almost completed that takes the PoC Phase
1 functionality and adds a presence specification as well as
inter-carrier interoperability. It’s as simple as that. We believe that
given major constituents, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Motorola,
Sony Ericsson, Cingular and AWS and now other operators are part of the
PoC specifications process, the foundations are well laid that the PoC
standard is the way of the future.

Joe in Washington, DC: How do you make sure this is not another MMS?
John Burns: To clarify this question: The launch of MMS had many
problems, with lack of applications and therefore revenue being the
biggest obstacle. PTT is in itself an application, and therefore
naturally revenue generating. Interoperability is also key, which has
been managed through the standards process. We’re working very closely
with the carrier community to design comprehensive market launch plans,
including extensive market trials, to ensure that PTT is successfully
deployed.

Chicago, IL- Josh Beckham: Does a PTT handset need to be ruggedized?
John Burns: Ruggedized handsets are focused on the Blue Collar segment.
Other segments have very different requirements, and that’s why we have
partnered with a wide range of handset vendors across a broad number of
models to provide a solution for the very large PTT play – the
horizontal consumer markets.  Availability of different types and price
levels of handsets is an absolute must for PTT to succeed in the mass
market – We feel that Sonim is very well positioned here.

San Francisco, CA- Jim Weisenberg: OMA is not going to be ready with
their specification until end of this year/beginning next year. When do
you think we will see PoC based solutions?
John Burns: This summer. OMA’s work is a continuation of the PoC phase 1
specification. This is a complete specification, and already multiple
vendors are actively developing PoC phase 1 compliant products that are
fully interoperable with each other. Motorola, Ericsson, and Siemens
recently announced that they provide joint interoperability testing
based on this specification.

Dallas, Texas: Existing carriers Verizon, Sprint, Altel all have long
call setup time, will your service be the same and does it matter?  John
Burns: Nextel has set the bar in the industry for session set up times
thatn differentiate a PTT call from a voice call. You’re correct that
the commercially deployed systems other than Nextel have long call
set-up times and that has caused issues with take-up rates. Our testing
with Sonim’s solution, working closely with Ericsson to provide network
optimization and Quality of Service (QoS), are performing very well.

Dallas, Texas- Wayne Pross: Will you be able to support major carriers?
You are still a small company?
John Burns: Selling and supporting mission critical infrastructure to
carriers is an extensive undertaking and requires partners with large
infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson. Our application server
infrastructure is a key component of the total solution that insures
that carriers, big or small, are provided with the best possible service
and network optimization.

Ken Mitsuhashi, San Francisco, CA: I heard that PTT using VoIP would not
take off due to its bad performance. How do you address this issue?
John Burns: We showcased a complete, end-to-end, PoC based system at
CTIA in Atlanta without any radio network enhancements. The convention
center radio environment is about the most stressful environment to
operate, and Sonim’s solution worked beautifully. PoC, an IP-based
configuration that uses the GPRS network, has an extremely efficient
protocol that delivers a one second in-session latency and session
set-ups in two seconds or less. That’s performance! By working closely
with the carriers and infrastructure providers, we have ensured that the
networks are correctly tuned.

Amanda in Philadelphia, PA-: Kodiak is promoting availability as one of
the really important elements for PTT, and they are using SMS? Do you
have the same functionality?

John Burns: Availability/presence is a fully integrated capability in
our solution and it’s based on the upcoming PoC phase 2 specification.
It is using the always-on, real-time GPRS network for updates. Using SMS
for availability is a very poor solution that does not provide real time
presence information, and generates SIGNIFICANTLY increased SMS traffic
that encumbers the network, while generating no revenue for the carrier.

Alan Ramos Santa Barbara, CA: How do you view that Nokia has a
proprietary solution and still is part of PoC consortium?
John Burns: I see this as a temporary situation. All members of the PoC
consortium are committed to deliver products according to the PoC
specification.  The large operators need standards-based and
interoperable solutions and I believe we will see announcements to this
fact shortly.

Santa Monica, CA- Mohit Bhushan: How do you calculate spectrum usage?
John Burns: We’re looking at two factors: 1) The quantity of spectrum
actually used by the system when transmitting. Today’s GPRS system
provides about 11kbit/s per time slot in urban areas with significant
interference. A PoC conversation only requires 6.8kbit/s, thus using
only 60-70% of a timeslot.  Circuit-switched solutions use that entire
time slot all of the time. 2) PoC is only transmitting when there is
actually something spoken. This tends to be about 60-70% of the time.
And only in one direction, since PTT is half-duplex. Circuit switched
solutions, such as Kodiak’s, use the entire channel resource through the
full conversation in both directions – grossly inefficient for a service
that has to be priced significantly below circuit-switched to penetrate
the mass market. Circuit switched solutions are just not economically
viable. The only solution is the PoC solution.

Alan Cheung NY, NY: Can Nokia dictate the PTT market with their large
market share? (How will you deal with the fact that carriers usually pay
attention to what Nokia says/does since they own a large chunk of the
handset market?) John Burns: Sonim’s current partners now have a
combined market share that is larger than any other single provider.
Therefore, the answer is no! No one can dictate this market, and we will
continue to sign handset contracts to prove this point.

Jeff from San Mateo, CA: Hi John. Thanks in advance. Can PoC offer
priority service and support FBI’s “eaves-dropping” requirements?  John
Burns: You are welcome. PoC has the ability to offer priority service
and eaves dropping. This first is achieved by utilizing the service
priorities that are available in GPRS, giving selected user priority in
the network. The second is achieved in two ways; there is the normal way
of eavesdropping on a GPRS session, and there is functionality to
eavesdrop directly from the PoC/IMS infrastructure. Standard call
intercept can be accomplished by both these solutions.

Steve New York City: Do you see any interest in Europe and Asia?  John
Burns: Sonim has a very strong presence in Europe and is ramping its
Asian force to deal with the demand. We are receiving multiple RFPs/RFQs
per week from each of those markets right now. Carriers all over the
globe are moving forward with their selection processes and we feel
confident in our ability to grab a major portion of them.

Alan Stephenson, Durham , NC: It is of my opinion that Nextel has done
such a fantastic job developing and marketing their service, with over
10 million subs to date, and with most other carriers offering "free
mobile to mobile" type services, I really do not see anyone really
competing for customers that need "push to talk" technology. Verizon and
Sprint seem to have shelved their products, with no advertising
recently, Do you believe that this segment/product can truly become as
competitive as the other carriers had hoped for and does Nextel have too
big a headstart?

John Burns: Nextel has done a wonderful job with 2 out of 6 market
segments, the blue and smaller grey collar markets. However, their
solution still doesn't appeal to the white collar segment, which means
they've missed the enterprise wide market segment. Also, Nextel's
intrusive service offering will have only limited market appeal to the
consumer segment (teens, families and young adults). Therefore there are
significant opportunities available by next generation solutions such as
that provided by Sonim.

Detroit, MI- Peter Shin: I saw that Kodiak is using gateways to connect
with other systems? Are you using the same method to interconnect?  John
Burns: No. Interoperability should be based on a common standard – an
interconnected system should speak a common language. Gateways or
translators are very expensive and complicated solutions. Gateways are
not scalable and become a bottleneck – especially proprietary ones –
we’ve seen it time and time again. I can’t stress this enough – you’ve
got to be “standard” or be “stranded” with these proprietary boxes.

http://www.wirelessweek.com/index.asp?layout=big_talk_discussion&talkid=369

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