IP Telephony Applications for Handhelds

1
IP Telephony Applications for Handhelds

• Keith Weiner
• DiamondWare

2
The hard sell
3
Technogeek on steroids
4
Presentation goals

• Differentiate from cellular
• What is IP telephony for PDAs?
• Why use it?
• How does it work?
• Issues technical and business
• My predictions for a new model

5
PDA telephony is not cellular

• Those are cool Devices!
• Samsung I300, Nokia Communicator, Handspring Treo
• Its a cool Application
• Combine two functions into 1 device
• But different.

6
Cellular advantages

• Nationwide WAN coverage
• Roaming at 90mph
• Low capex
• Free or near-free
• But no advantage within enterprise space

7
Cellular cellularness

• Monthly bills
• High latency
• Hello, Over?
• Poor voice quality
• Especially transcoding between carriers
• Doesnt work well in some buildings
• Fabs, dense high-rises

8
But everyone uses it

• On the road
• At lunch
• In coworkers offices
• Out of habit, even at their own desks!
• Give out one number the mobile
• Mgmt. losing control and predictability
• PSTN minutes negotiated in bulk

9
We need to do better
10
IP telephony for handhelds

• PDA is becoming mission-critical
• With decent CPU, audio chip, wireless NIC
• Leverage it with a softphone
• Inherently cheaper than dedicated phone
• Cheaper to build and to upgrade
• More powerful

11
PDA VoIP advantages

• Same as desktop or laptop, plus mobility
• Features
• Address book
• Recording
• Presence
• Better voice quality (wideband)
• Your confirmation number is FSBP3TD
• Try that on a cell phone

12
Applications

• Workforce communication in factory floors,
  warehouses, campuses
• Walking over to the next office
• Desktop phone replacement
• Wired call becomes mobile when you get up
• Take it with you to Starbucks, airports, hotels
  and other hotspots

13
Why wireless PDA? I

• PDA deployment is growing
• Wireless IP deployment is growing
• Leverage them
• Network convergence
• Wired data
• Wireless data
• Voice

14
Why wireless PDA? II

• See list of conference attendees
• Control your availability as seen by others
• Whiteboard, Text (IM)
• Often begin with IM, can escalate to voice
• N-way calling
• Line is never busy
• Why limit to just 3-way?

15
Softphone architecture I

• IP connectivity
• Call control protocol
• SIP (H.323 if abs. necessary, or even MGCP)
• Realtime audio transport (i.e. RTP)
• Audio is broken into packets

16
Softphone architecture II

• Microphone capture
• Process (e.g. echo, AGC, disguise/effects)
• Compress (e.g. G.711, G.729)
• Wrap in an RTP header
• Send to remote host

17
Softphone architecture III

• Network receive
• Decompress
• Process (e.g. dejitter, echo)
• Send to audio chip

18
What does it take?

• Real computer (PocketPC, Zaurus, Webpad), with a
  real audio chip
• Sorry Palm
• Headphones
• Wireless network, typically 802.11b
• 802.11a gets cheaper (under twice 802.11b)
• For PSTN calls, IP-PBX gateway

19
802.11 issues I

• Bandwidth Constrained
• 802.11b has only 11 Mbps
• 802.11a has 54 Mbps
• 802.11g has 54 Mbps also, but 2.4GHz
• QoS
• Cannot add segments, like w/wired LANs
• Sto dow..oading so I .c.. ta..k
• No standard yet

20
802.11 issues II

• Airwave contention
• NICs hidden from each other
• RTS/CTS
• RF Interference
• 802.11b uses 2.4ghz, not great spectrum
• 802.11a uses 5ghz, better spectrum

21
802.11 issues III

• Security
• Wired Equivalency Privacy is a toy
• Warchalking
• MAC address filtering helps, somewhat
• Access controllers
• Built-in authentication
• Connect to auth server (e.g. RADIUS, LDAP)
• Painless subnet roaming

22
VoIP issues

• For IP calls to or from the outside
• NAT
• Firewall
• Proxy
• Some solutions
• Outside server (e.g. Ridgeway)
• UPnP NAT
• Back-to-back peering agent (e.g. Jasomi)

23
PocketPC issues I

• Speaker and mic coupled
• Headphones reqd
• Mic-less headphones
• 50 lashes with a wet noodle
• Compute-limited for echo cancellation

24
PocketPC issues II

• Limited battery life
• Powered down when idle
• But cant receive calls!
• Tethered, the PDA is not very valuable
• Just a small, weak computer
• Or a very expensive Day Timer
• Wireless enables it

25
Other issues

• Inside your space, build what you want
• Not many outside hotspots yet
• Roaming problem
• Dynamic routing
• Mesh Networks
• Mass acceptance reqd for business model
• 200 users at airport gateholy QoS, Batman!

26
Marketscape

• Existing products
• Avaya, support for their PBX
• VTGO, supports Cisco Call Manager
• SoftJoy Labs, supports H.323 and SIP
• Telesym, connects to 3rd party PBXs
• In Development
• DiamondWare, lowest latency
• Others

27
Resistance is futile!

• (You will be assimilated)
• The PDA is/will be mission-critical
• You will carry it for many reasons
• Why not use it for the voice function?
• No worse off than before
• Within wireless zones, much better

28
Necessary next steps

• Ubiquitous wireless access points
• Outside the enterprise
• Answers on the business side
• 30 free minutes with every cup at Starbucks?
• By the hour at airports?
• 1000 minutes/month like cellular?
• By the day at hotels?
• Drive Miami to Seattle while on VoIP call?

29
A New Model I

• Who makes when I email john_at_dw.com?
• What makes voice fundamentally different?

30
A New Model II

• Enhanced voice services?
• Enhanced web services?
• Enhanced email services?
• Enhanced FTP services?

31
The Connectivity Model I

• Its the pipe, stupid!

32
The Connectivity Model II

• DNS record for yourdomain.com
• Optionally, host the website
• MX record for email
• Optionally, host the email server
• SIP server record
• Optionally, host the SIP server
• Less file storage than email server
• Low compute burden

33
The Connectivity Model III

• Savvy consumers, SOHO
• If they can do yourdomain.com now
• Larger enterprises
• In-house or outsourced, based on
• Finance objectives
• Resource management
• Not enhanced services
• Just database administration

34
New Economic Model I

• Buy software
• unlimited use until new version is compelling
• Rent the wire
• By the month
• Rent the wireless
• By the month
• Mores Law

35
New Economic Model II

• Innovation at the edge
• Wideband
• Voice processing
• 7-way calling
• Not captive to carrier
• Multibilliondollar network, 30 yr amort. sched.
• App development, network provision
• Different businesses, models

36
Drivers

• Deregulation
• SIP
• Wireless IP
• Handheld computers
• Lion batteries
• VoIP technology
• GPS

37
Conclusion

• Take control back of your communications
• New life/work style
• Decades-long logjam is breaking up
• Look forward to rapid innovation
• Unheard-of features
• Unheard-of computer wiz kids
• PDA encourages and leverages it all

38
About me

• CEO of DiamondWare
• Developers of VoIP building blocks
• mailtokeith_at_dw.com
• cell [phone]
• SIPkeith_at_dw.com (coming soon)