All, I may have posted this before. In any event, this is the Spring '98 VON transcript by Al Niven of PlanetTel.com that speaks to some of the international settlements issues that the smaller independents face. Enjoy, and Regeards, Frank Coluccio
---- from planettel.com
Transcription of my presentation at Spring '98 Voice On The Net at the
session, "WideSpread Deployment of Gateways".
I always speak without slides, AV, or written notes.
Dr. Michale Ramalho
Our next speaker is Al Niven from Planet Telecommunications, and he
has been in the CTI and IVR business for 10 years. He is now president of
Planet Telecom, a Next Generation Telco, with nodes deployed in 100
cities around the world.
Me
Planet Telecom has nodes deployed in 100 cities around the world, in
many countries that I never heard of before; We are 75% deployed in 3rd
world countries...10 in Africa, South America, Asia, etc. It is a retail
operation.
Each of the node owners come from many different backgrounds. Some of
them are ISP's, some are traditional telcos, some are Dialogic developers.
I put together a list of 96 Next Generation Telcos and it is a list of URL's.
It should be on the CDROM that comes with the conference, but in case it
is not on the CDROM if anyone is interested, you can drop me an email, I
will hit reply, and then you will get the list of URL's underlined and in
blue, and you can just click, click, click, and peruse this list of 250
URL's, including 96 Next Generation Telco's. Just drop me an email at
adn@pop.net, Allen David Niven at pop.net, I will hit reply and send you the
list. I know Jeff loves this list, he has asked me a few times for permission
to publish it on Pulver.com. I never give it, but you folks have it by virtue of
being at this session.
I want to describe how Planet Telecom works.
We have a lot of nodes, we have 100, they are all installed. Each node at a
very minimum is a $10K PC with Dialogic cards, a gateway for fax to fax,
and a gateway for phone to phone, and now we are adding Unified
Messaging so each node owner will have 3 gateways, fax to fax, phone to
phone and unified messaging.
The way we work I think is unique so I am going to try to describe that.
Lets say we have a node owner in Paris and a node owner in Tokyo and lets
say the customer wants to send a fax or make a call from Tokyo to Paris.
So he goes to his fax machine and calls the local node in Tokyo which then
establishes an internet connection with Paris; Paris goes off hook and
delivers the call or fax in Paris. Now Paris has gone off hook lets say for 5
minutes and has incurred an expense with the local Parisian PTT so lets
say it is 10 cents per minute or something, so the node owner in
Tokyo now owes the node owner in Paris 50 cents. We are just talking
about the node owners right now.
What happens with us is that each of the node owners has a deposit with
the clearinghouse, and at the end of every call and at the end of every fax
there are 3 copies of the Call Detail Record that are generated. There is a
CDR in the originating node, there is a CDR in the destination node, and
there is a CDR that comes to the clearinghouse. And at the end of the day I
take all the CDR's and I toss them up on the ftp site and I say OK I am
going to take 50 cents from the Tokyo account and give 50 cents to the
Paris account and we take a fee for ourselves for doing the clearing, and
that is essentially the way it works, as far as the settlements are
concerned.
But having a system for the settlements is really not sufficient because
how do you stop one guy from saying "I am going to charge $5 to
terminate in Paris". And this is how I think we are unique and this is the
thesis of my presentation today and that is the only way this thing can
succeed is if you operate this thing on the basis of group consensus and I
am going to elaborate this point quite a bit because I don't think any
alliance can possibly succeed outside the basis of group consensus,
because to quote our famous Vice President Al Gore, "there is no
controlling legal authority" (laughter in the audience)...you cannot sue
someone halfway around the world, and in terms of carrot and stick, it is
almost all carrot. The only stick you have is if the group gets together and
takes a vote and says "OK we are going to vote this guy out, he is history,
this guy no longer exists in the least cost routing tables, he no longer
exists in the database, he is gone he is out".
And we've done that. We actually voted one guy out, who was unbeknownst
to us a representative of Destiny Telecom (has anybody here heard of
Destiny?) it was shut down by the Feds and we told him you can do one or
the other but you cannot do both so we took a vote and actually gave him
his money back.
How do you manage such a group? How is group consensus achieved? We
have a teamware web site, right now we are using Alta Vista Forum, which
has a discussion group, voting page, collaboration tools so we can work
together on a spreadsheet and edit it at the same time, a broadcast email
list, a chat room, so each of these 100 people is in touch with each of the
others I would say every day. Its like being naked with everyone else every
day, it is like having a board meeting with everyone else every day.
So one of the things we decided was how we were going to manage these
settlement fees. So one of our guys who is an MBA from Yale, said look,
we really want to focus the group on the outbound, because we don't want
people sitting around, just hoping they are going to receive traffic,
because a node is in control of how much traffic goes out to the extent that
they market or advertise but they are really not in control of how much
traffic comes in.
So we said we need to cap, we need to put a limit, on the landing charge. A
landing charge is the charge a node charges another node to terminate.
Going back to our example, what Paris would charge Tokyo in order to
terminate in Paris. And the way we did it is, there is a public database
called Lynx, (that is on the list of URL's), and you can use Lynx to verify
what the PTT charge is in any city in the world. That is public knowledge.
So we said we are going to cap the landing charge at 500% of local PTT.
Practically speaking what that means is that there is not a city in the
world where making a local call is more than 3 cents per minute, so it
means no landing charge can exceed 15 cents per minute. So if you work
with PlanetTel you know you are never going to pay more than 15 cents
per minute to deliver a call, plus the clearinghouse fee so lets say 17.5
cents per minute....you are assured you will never pay more than 17.5
cents per minute to deliver. On the outbound though, you can charge
whatever your heart desires. There is no limit to that at all, whatever you
can get, relative to the PTT or callback, that is what you are allowed to
charge.
And that kind of illustrates the way we work. We took a vote on this. We
actually voted on the name PlanetTel. I was not in favor of this name but we
took a vote and that is what won.
So that is the way the clearinghouse works.
You can divide the Next Generation Telco's into 3 types top down,
horizontal, or bottom up. Top down would be say where one company owns
all the nodes, and examples of that would be UUNet, or AlphaNet Telecom.
Horizontal would be most of the Next Gen Telcos and is kind of like a
franchise structure, where the company that does the clearing and the
company that owns the nodes decide to be part of the same company. That
can be very limiting because you wind up being contractually obligated to
the company you are part of and it can be like a constrained marriage that
you did not anticipate. Other companies have a bottom up structure, and
ITXC and PlanetTel are both examples of a bottom up structure and that is
where you have the clearinghouse and the nodes as completely separate
companies. They are absolutely separate companies. So any time a node
can say Al you are charging us 5% clearinghouse fee, we don't like you,
we are going to go to Harry, Harry charges 4%. And there is nothing
contractually obligating any node to stick with me, I have to earn the
business every day. And it makes the clearinghouse vulnerable, but the
paradox is, to the extent that the clearinghouse is vulnerable, is the extent
that the group as a whole is very powerful.
And that is why our group has a tight fabric.
So ITXC and ourselves would be what I would call bottom up structures
the companies are separate, the clearinghouse is separate from the nodes,
but within the bottom up structure there is really 2 different ways you can
go about it and this is where I think ITXC and PlanetTel are really 180
degrees opposite. A company like ITXC takes the information broker
model. Going back to our example of Paris and Tokyo, ITXC may not want
the guy in Paris to know the name or identity of the guy in Tokyo, he may
want it to be a secret, and basically you are dealing with
ITXC as a black box and he really controls the network. We are 180
degrees opposite. Everybody is in touch with everybody else every day. We
have had this network for like a year, and everybody is always in contact.
Now ITXC, could argue and say "Al, if you do what you do, you are
basically guaranteeing you are going to make the least amount of money
possible in clearinghouse fees because you are not arbitraging
information, you are not arbitraging your knowledge." And I would agree
with that 100% that is correct, I am actually making much less that I
would make if I kept certain things secret, but on the other hand I have
generated a tremendous amount of goodwill with the nodes, because every
week I distribute who the latest competitors are, and people within the
group are cutting deals left and right, and those deals also create goodwill
and expand into other areas in telecom and it makes PlanetTel as a group
very strong. For example going back to our discussion page, we have many
topics and one of them is Computer Telephony Applications Wanted and
Offered (30% of the group is Dialogic developers). Well a guy in Rome
needed a debit card application so he posted on the page he needs a debit
card switch. It turns out the guy in Mexico makes debit card switches. The
guy in Mexico offered the guy in Rome the debit card switch for not much
over cost and these are the types of things that happen routinely in the
group.
We have similar discussions. We have regional discussions, Africa,
Indian SubContinent, etc. and there are topical discussions, such as
unified messaging, or callback (10 of our node owners are callback
agents) and we want to develop PlanetTel as a global brand. And I think
that is really important. Because I think when
retail customers see a global brand they feel more comfortable and they
think you are a serious vendor, so we have PlanetTel do Brazil, PlanetTel
d'Espana, PlanetTel of England, etc.
I want to harp some more on the issue of group consensus
because I was struck very recently by an article in Data Communications
magazine this week about Global One the Sprint, FT, DT alliance. And the
article, was about this whole issue of not having controlling legal
authority. You would think these large companies are on the up and up.
The article was saying that Global One was saying we had a profit of $1B
and the president quit for personal reasons and analysts are saying that
Global One really had a loss of $800M and the president was fired. And
end users are really getting nervous. And the article asks "how do you
run an international alliance? there is no controlling legal authority"
Well one of things we discovered at PlanetTel, is that the fear of losing
face in front of the others, in front of the group, is a far more frightening
prospect than the prospect of being sued because if other people in the
group see that you are greedy or selfish, basically you can get cut out of
the least cost routing table..poof, you don't exist, you are gone. So what
happens in practice is that the group tends to elicit, what we have
discovered as a group, very high quality social interaction, people are very
self-initiated, very self-motivated,
they wind up contributing energy. Our logo was done by a node owner he
contributed it, and everyone sees the logo and says
"Oh it is such a beautiful logo" and people wind up offerring themselves
because of the group dynamic. And another side effect is that it moves very
rapidly. We probably have 3 broadcasts per week, somebody is always
broadcasting something or responding to something with a cc to
everybody so there is a ton of emails, that are flying by and it makes us
move quickly, especially with the use of the teamware and the ability to
vote, so you wind up moving on "internet time". And the reason is that I
never say to anyone or can say to anyone, "you have to do such and such"
because I could never force anyone to do anything anyhow....it is always
the carrot.. you always have to entice people to get things done, and th at is
the group dynamic.
Questions
Q
Are you doing realtime fax over the public internet?
Yes, let me address that, thank you,
First of all the fax we do we wrote in house. The fax to fax is store and
forward. We will not do real time fax because 75% of our guys are in 3rd
world countries and you are just not going to get the pipes there. So the
way store and forward fax works is that we guarantee delivery say in 30
minutes.
Actually, it delivers in 1 minute. But if there is a lot of traffic, the public
internet itself becomes a queuing mechanism, and you can stuff a lot of
faxes into that queuing mechanism. And most of the people in 3rd world
countries are starting off with 4 line analog systems.
Now for phone to phone it is a very interesting situation. Those people,
even in 3rd world countries, that have shelled out the money for a digital
line for phone to phone, (and to give you an example, Argentina is $6,000
per month for a 64K line to the net), which only handles 5 conversations at
once, well, what we have done is that we have designated that the 3rd world
countries for phone to phone originate only, and the 1st world countries
basically terminate only.
It is a little restrictive but the guy who is in a 3rd world country does not
want to receive traffic from a 1st world country, because
he does not want to make 5 cents per minute or 10 cents per minute. But
when he originates he may be making $1 per minute.
When we tested phone to phone with our Ghana node, (he is the largest
ISP in Ghana), the phone quality sounded like he was next door. But he
originates only, he is outbound only, 1st world receives, 3rd world sends.
Now this arrangement does not solve the problem, but it helps.
In addition what helps is the way we market it. We tell the retail
customers right up front that this is internet. We say to them up front the
internet is like the New Jersey turnpike. (laughter). Sometimes it is
bumper to bumper and sometimes it is clear. And when we go to the
customer and we want to prove to them that we are honest we say, look try
making a call at 7 PM after dinner, at 4 AM and at noontime, and see for
yourself that there is a time of day effect. Once you have the customer has
demonstrated to himself there is a time of day effect, he sees we are
making a best efforts endeavor, and goodwill is generated, and the limits
of the service are clear.
Now mind you a lot of this would not cut the mustard in 1st world, but 3rd
world is a different ballgame. People say how do you market in 3rd world?
The way you market in 3rd world is "pssst, I have dialtone" (laughter).
There is no need to market in 3rd world. The second people hear that you
have dialtone they come to you, and we can get away with a lot more in
terms of quality of service, in 3rd world compared to what would be
acceptable in 1st world.
Moderator starts to take questions for all 3 speakers
Q
One of the speakers spoke about fast connect time.
How fast is that?
Ofer Gneezy You are asking about the post dial delay?
We find it is between 2 and 8 seconds. The post dial
delay is the time between your dialing the last digit and the time the starts
ringing. We find it is faster than
many international calls you place over the PSTN.
Q
This is for Al. You mentioned outbound traffic from 3rd
world countries. Can you quantify that?
Me Well we just started our first commercial traffic
out of Portugal a few weeks ago, and I expect Singapore, Greece, and
Nepal to start soon. I cannot quantify yet because it is too early in the
game, but you are raising an interesting point I forgot to mention, namely
that there are a few 3rd world countries, that due to political
considerations, are inbound only, most noticeably Pakistan and PRC, they
don't dare go outbound. The inbound only nodes can charge what they want
they are exempt from the 500% rule. It is a little too early for me to give
you figures, I am sure the traffic volumes will get high, I certainly hope
so.
Moderator
Definitely a lot of creativity here!
Q
This is for Al. Could you give us the URL again.
Me adn@pop.net
Q
This is for Al. What about variability on the internet
access fees.
Me Most people use analog dial up. They keep the analog dial up 24/7. If it
drops it redials. Some are using WebRamp, this analog mux that takes 3
analog dial up lines, and aggregates the bandwidth. Some of the countries
do have per kilobyte charges, but most
of the node owners are savvy enough to get around that so it is not a threat.
Q
Most of you are using PC based gateways. Do you see
a shift to higher capacity embedded systems and what
features would you like to see in those systems?
Ofer All the gateways I am aware of are PC based and the maximum
capacity is 1 or 2 T's/E's, and you get more capacity by adding PC's. From
my perspective I would like to see higher densities.
Me I am pretty excited about the offerings from Ascend and Cisco and the
people on the router side.
In many of the countries the regulations make life easier if in fact you
ARE an ISP yourself, so the whole possibility of having a router combined
with a VOIP gateway in one box, is attractive to me.
So in case Cisco or Ascend come knocking on our door and they want to
offer us a package deal, I am all ears.
Q
This is for Al
What happens if someone originates and gets bad quality?
Me All the gateways that we use, the fax to fax we developed in house and
the Array phone to phone gateway, before a call is attempted it pings, and
it checks for latency, and it asks "is the internet usable?" and if the
internet is un-usable, well right now it is a manual system where the
caller will get a recording
that says the internet is unusable. In the near future, it will be automatic
to go into a TCPIP triggered callback. We are using successfully now a
TCPIP triggered callback from one of the node owners who also is a
callback operator. It works flawlessly. The optimum scenario will be you
try to make a call or you try to make a fax and the lines are maxxed out or
the internet is un-usable, you get a bong, so you know you that instead of
being on rate plan "A" over the internet, you are on rate plan "B" over
callback. A fallback to callback. Of course, in those countries where we
don't have nodes to begin with, it is re-routed. Right now, it is re-routed
through Sweden,
and USA, depending on least cost routing.
Q
This is for all 3.
Do you see a gateway that would support OC3 directly?
Moderator Look for the large scale gateway announcements.
Q
This is for Al
What is the average size of the gateways deployed?
Me 3rd world, 4 port analog. UK, NZ, Germany, Sweden,
HK, USA, Canada, T1/E1.
Q
This is for Al
Don't customers reject store and forward fax?
Me Store and forward fax is actually more common in 3rd world.
India for example, has a PTT affiliated domestic store and forward fax
provider. And my friends in Dhaka and Katmandu actually faxed me full
page advertisements in the newspapers of Dhaka and Katmandu of
companies offering store and forward fax services. Many callers in 3rd
world use fax as a poor man's voicemail, there is a higher reliance on fax
relative to voice traffic, so it is far more acceptable. We would not use it
here in 1st world, but in 3rd world it is not a show stopping issue.
Q
This is for Al
How do you deal with restrictive 3rd world regulations?
Me Basically we stay under the radar and/or we push the legal grey area
where-ever possible.
Q
This is for Al
How do you deal with user identification and security?
Me The store and forward fax is encrypted and each node identifies itself
to the other nodes via Node ID. The end user identifies himself to the local
node with
account number and password.
Q
What is percentage of worldwide traffic is fax?
I heard 36%. What do you think?
Me I have heard that in the Orient it approached 50%.
Moderator
I would like to thank our panelists, Juan, Ofer, and Al.
Transcript of Al Niven's presentation at Spring Voice On The Net
re: Widespread Deployment of Gateways |
