CXTech Week 3 2023 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 3 2023 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

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Covered this week:

  • TADHack and TADSummit dates through 2023
  • IoT+ Review TADSummit 2022
  • Open Source Review TADSummit 2022
  • Fixed Wireless Access with 5G
  • 10 million voice subscribers now benefiting from cloudified voice production – hmmmm
  • Mobi to use WG2 Core hosted on AWS
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

TADHack and TADSummit dates through 2023

The first event of the year is TADHack Open, 25-26 March, the weekend before Enterprise Connect.

For TADSummit 2023 we’re thinking about the Thursday/Friday before Network X in Paris. With TADHack Global over that weekend, so the dates would be:

  • 19-20 Oct TADSummit in Paris
  • 21-22 Oct for TADHack Global
  • 24-26 Oct, Network X where we have a TADHack session

Please let me know what you think of this idea? Nothing is set in stone, we have complete flexibility. Thanks.

IoT+ Review TADSummit 2022

The last TADSummit 2022 reviews covered the presentations focused on IoT, a maturing segment of programmable communications, that’s moved beyond the silly hype. The ‘+’ is because I include Mark White’s M&A presentation as well.

Thank you to STROLID, Broadvoice / GoContact, Radisys, RingCentral, Stacuity, and AWA Network / Automat Berlin for sponsoring TADSummit 2022. And thank you to all the presenters and attendees in making the event excellent.

I covered in this review:

  • What makes a cellular IoT API great? Tobias Goebel, Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Twilio (REMOTE). Slides and Video
  • How a Multi-IMSI architecture makes global cellular IoT deployments manageable. Tobias Goebel, Principal Product Marketing Manager, IoT, Twilio (REMOTE). Slides and Video
  • eSIM as Root of Trust for IoT security. João Casal, Head of R&D at Truphone. Slides and Video
  • eSIM Reality. Fredric Liljeström, Co-founder and CEO, 10T Tech (REMOTE) Slides and Video
  • M&A in Communications Technology. Mark White, Tech M&A, Investor, Founder, Board Member, Startup Mentor, SVP Corum Group. (REMOTE) Slides and Video

Open Source Review TADSummit 2022

The penultimate review of TADSummit 2022 covered the presentations focused on Open Source, the bedrock of programmable communications. Here are the links to the review of the Keynotes, to my presentation What Happened Since we Last Met?, the review of Conversation Intelligence, the review of Telcos and Programmable Communications.

I covered in this review:

  • Programmable Testing for Programmable Telcos. Andreas Granig, Founder & CEO at Sipfront. Slides and Video.
  • Open Source Telecom Software Survey Results. Alan Quayle, independent. Slides and Video.
  • How to bring down your own RTC platform. Running DDoS simulations on your own. Sandro Gauci, CEO / Senior Penetration Tester / Chief mischief officer at Enable Security. Slides and Video.
  • OpenSIPS 3.3 – Messaging in the IMS and UC ecosystems. Bogdan-Andrei Iancu, Founder and Developer at OpenSIPS Project. Slides and Video.
  • Architecting your WebRTC application for scalability, Arin Sime and Alberto González Trastoy. Slides and Video.
  • Building a sub-second virtual ThunderDome: Considerations for mass scale sub-second production broadcasts. Jerod Venema, CEO and Co-Founder, LiveSwitch (REMOTE). Slides and Video.
  • Beyond “simply meeting” in a connected world: research and case studies. Luca Pradovera, Lead Solutions Architect, SignalWire. Slides and Video.

Fixed Wireless Access with 5G

Kyllesbech’s analysis reminded me that about 30 years ago I was modelling LMDS and MMDS as broadband access options. One piece of a BT board analysis that also included satellite, LEO, MEO, balloons, xDSL, mobile networks, and more. I was even researching blue-green laser satellite communications (penetrates the sea for submarine communications) to understand their link budgets.

FTTH has always been the destination, but there have been so many other options along the way, xDSL being the big one for many telcos, also cable. FTTH’s problem is it requires a ‘strong’ commitment, investing billions in the ground. And it only gets more expensive the longer you wait, so it encourages more waiting.

BT could have roll-out FTTH throughout the UK in the ’90s, the market was exploding. Some countries have achieved close to 100% FTTH coverage, e.g. Singapore and South Korea. But that took a strong push from the government. BT never had that, just words from the government about UK technology leadership.

Many of the alternatives are more of an incremental investment, spend less today, but you’ll need to spend more tomorrow to get to the end goal. With 4G/5G, the telco has made the investment in the spectrum license, some customers already self select to mobile broadband only, so extending a fixed offer over the mobile network is incremental as long as you do not look too closely at like-for-like performance to FTTH.

Kyllesbech’s analysis reminded me of my LMDS / MMDS analysis, old-school fixed wireless access. The core problem is noise, fiber is Gaussian, wireless is Rayleigh. Which means you need a big fat link budget for indoor wireless to be even close to FTTH in reliability. And sometimes it’s just not going to work, e.g. wet leaves on a foggy day with the indoor unit behind a damp brick wall. Fiber can deliver gigabits to each customer regardless of weather. When storms hit and the electricity goes down, FTTH just keeps on running with a generator at home, I’ve done that many times. The same is not true for cable, as their access network is active not passive, the mobile network slows to a crawl as many use it as broadband back-up.

As a broadband customer I’ve had FTTH for about 15 years, using some of the work I did at the Full Service Access Network initiative in the ’90s. Things just work, generally reliably, the only issue has been the CPE failing, which I fixed myself. FTTH is nice because I do not need to deal with my telco so often, which generally leads to sadness and frustration.

10 million voice subscribers now benefiting from cloudified voice production – hmmmm

Interesting article with no explanation on what the customers’ benefits are, only the telco’s. Quoting from the article:

Telekom has created an innovative and highly-collaborative multi-vendor ecosystem to deliver on the vision of this highly-automated, cloud-based architecture. Current partners are Juniper Networks (Cloud Infrastructure & Prime Integrator), Mavenir, Metaswitch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo und Red Hat. Due to the high level of disaggregation and the horizontal cloud approach, more technology partners can easily be added as the demand for services grows.

Mobi to use WG2 Core hosted on AWS

Mobi is a wireless service provider founded in 2004 and based in Honolulu. It provides 4G/5G services across the islands. It plans to launch a cloud-native mobile core from Working Group Two hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, to launch a nationwide service on T-Mobile’s network.

The move to owning a core as an MNVO is because: “Being a light MVNO can be a real bummer sometimes,” Justen Burdette, Mobi’s CEO, told Light Reading. “I didn’t want to be stuck in that boat ever again.”

The spin is on service innovation through APIs. Though to date MVNOs in the US have focused on price, due the lack of competition in the US mobile market. BTW TMO is rumored to be considering buying Mint Mobile, pricing in the range of $600 million has been mentioned in the past. MVNOs tend to get bought up when they become too popular, which Mint is doing.

This is a significant step forward for Working Group Two. It’s not being used as an adjunct core, it’s the core network. Here are some of WG2’s TADSummit presentations from over the years:

Let’s see if Mobi focuses on the usual MVNO value play, or tries to differentiate with services on its WG2 core.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Dan Nordale is now Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Symbl.ai. I’ve known Dan since his time at Flowroute, and after that Nexmo / Vonage. He’s worked for quite a few TADHack and TADSummit sponsors.

Michael Lazar is now Co-Founder at CyberLogic Security, LLC, security governance, compliance, and risk management. I’ve known Michael since his time at DataArt, which were a TADSummit and TADHack sponsor.

Prashant Lamba remains the CEO of Phonologies, and added a role as a mentor to Brinc. He continues to support the work of TADHack and TADSummit.

Sita Vasan is now Venture Capital Manager at Healthworx, innovation and investment arm of CareFirst of Maryland. I’ve known Sita for nearly two decades, since she was with Intel Capital.

Luka Milošević has joined TomTom as a Software Engineer. Luka won at TADHack Global 2019 with Inbus by Andjelka Milovanovic, Stefan Kapunac, Luka Milosevic. InBus automatically notifies users on someone’s distance or time needed to reach a destination, using TeleSign SMS API. They won the Telesign Global Prize of $1000.

Omar Paul is now Senior Vice President Product Management at Mambu. I’ve known Omar for almost a decade, since his time with Shango.

Carlos Pastor is now Sr. Director, Americas Marketing at HashiCorp, zero trust security. I’ve known Carlos for over one decade, since his time in Juniper.

Jack Wainwright is now Patient Liaison Lead at Sciensus. Sciensus works with the NHS, private medical providers and pharmaceutical companies to bring patients the life-changing treatment they need, in the comfort and convenience of their own homes. 

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