CXTech Week 30 2023 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 30 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:

  • Tanla buys ValueFirst from Twilio
  • Syniverse Reorganizes, Where’s Twilio?
  • TADSummit keeps growing
  • MLS, the world’s first fully specified, end-to-end encryption standard
  • Apple may pull iMessage and Facetime from the UK
  • A Final Mention on Lead Sheathed Cables
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Tanla buys ValueFirst from Twilio

Tanla acquired ValueFirst from Twilio, the acquisition was closed on July 03, 2023, for an all-cash consideration of $45.5 million. Twilio bought ValueFirst in 2021 to accelerate its India business, which it had tried to grow organically for many years. I covered that in CXTech Week 12 2021. The rumour at the time was the purchase price was $100M, though the details were never made public.

I’ll be watching how the Proximus purchase of Route Mobile fairs in comparison, covered in CXTech Week 29 2023. It is structurally different as Route Mobile continues as is, while ValueFirst became an outpost for a much larger company. I’m also putting a comparison together between the Kaleyra deal and the Route Mobile deal. However, I’m still at the phase of finding more questions than answers on Kaleyra.

Tanla recently reports a solid set of results, their shares climbed 7% to hit a 52-week high at $15 after the CPaaS provider’s profit after tax (PAT) for the Q1 FY24 increased by 35% year-on-year (YoY) to $16.5M. BTW, Twilio’s Q2 results are coming out on the 8th August.

Syniverse Reorganizes Again. Where’s Twilio?

In 2020 Syniverse reorganized into Carrier and Enterprise groups, and now it’s moving back to a single group. Likely the enterprise group did not meet its targets, given the reorganization and layoffs.

Some of Syniverse’s competitors also have this Carrier / Enterprise split, while the majority by revenue of those ‘enterprises’ are other aggregators. Its done to make the business look more diverse, and more like Twilio with all its enterprise customers and better valuation multiple. But really there’s little business benefit from such a split, as shown by this reorganization.

The surprise for me is John McRae will leave Syniverse, he’s been with Syniverse for years, and is on the CTIA board. Likely he’s got an interesting offer elsewhere.

Syniverse is critical US telecom infrastructure. Without them the US SMS/MMS market stops. They do both p2p and a2p traffic between the carriers. Sinch does some, mainly for Verizon. Syniverse is in a unique and critical position with the carriers for SMS/MMS. Given the growth in SMS and their unique position, they should be printing money. Well, what gets printed is mostly printed to service their debt. Twilio did a far better job in making money with A2P SMS by selling solutions direct to solve enterprises’ problems.

Carlyle are canny folks. They bought Syniverse for $2.6B in 2010, and Syniverse has made several large acquisitions over the years: MACH, $700M, 2012; and Aicent, $300M, 2014. The SPAC valued Syniverse at $2.8B in 2021, and today given layoffs and lower valuations it must be worth <$2B. They must be keen to find a way to cash out?

The question for me on this announcement is ‘Where’s Twilio?’ Twilio paid $750M to Syniverse for what? At the time of the transaction the claim from Syniverse was the funds would pay down debt, but then they raised another $1B in debt, and $340 million in new preferred equity. Did the funds go to Carlyle? What % of ownership did Twilio receive, the 28% at the SPAC valuation, or something closer to 49% after the SPAC failed?

Twilio became a minority shareholder, Carlyle group remained the majority. I think Twilio gained 2 seats on the board from that investment. But I haven’t seen any strategic initiatives, no change in the aggregator partners Twilio uses. Perhaps Twilio’s stockholders should be asking questions? What did the $750M investment in Syniverse deliver for them?

TADSummit keeps growing

This week we added TelecomsXChange as a TADSummit sponsor. Ameed’s keynote is focused on the role of programmable communications for carriers’ wholesale services.

How TelecomsXChange is Transforming the CSP’s Wholesale Business.

Ameed Jamous, Founder and CEO TelecomsXChange (TCXC).

  • Success Story: How Telin (international arm of Telkom Indonesia) leveraged TCXC PaaS to streamline their wholesale business operations and built a carrier community along the way.
  • TCXC platform overview, technology stack, and unique value proposition.
  • A deep dive into some of the platform’s most innovative features, such as openness, programmable wholesale, Transparency by design, Unified AAA, CYOC & Market Place.
  • Enhancing CPaaS Growth
  • A sneak peek into the company’s future roadmap, including new partnerships and product enhancements.
  • Call to action: We’re partnering with CSPs looking to unify and digitize your wholesale business, reach out to learn how TelecomsXChange can help you achieve this goal in just days.

I’m really excited to add a presentation from Lorenzo Miniero, chairman Meetecho and author of the Janus WebRTC server. Over 25 years ago I was studying ways ISDN/PSTN video telephony and IP based video broadcast could be combined. Back then we were in the stone age of video communications. Today is miraculous in comparison.

WebRTC broadcasting: standardization, challenges and opportunities

Lorenzo Miniero, Chairman Meetcho, Author of Janus WebRTC Server

  • Traditional broadcasting has been effective and reliable for a long time, but does suffer any time low latency is a requirement.
  • WebRTC can help bridge that gap and foster new applications, but it does come with a few challenges.
  • Lorenzo will introduce the standardization efforts, and will cover where we are by also looking at a few available implementations and what they could make possible.
  • AQ: Over 25 years ago I was studying ways ISDN/PSTN video telephony and IP based video broadcast could be combined. Back then we were in the stone age of video communications. Today is miraculous in comparison.

Long time member of the TADS community Hugh Goldstein, is now the CEO of WebTrit. We’ll have an intro to the service and framework for real-time communications, as they invite developers to join their project.

Intro to WebTrit and Call to Action to join the WebTrit Open Source Community

Andriy Zhylenko, CEO PortaOne and Advisor WebTrit

  • WebTrit is a new service and framework for building softphones and Real-Time-Communications into apps and websites.
  • WebTrit was started in the Ukraine in 2021 and throughout the last year and a half of war, the team built an exciting new initiative.
  • WebTrit provides its front end code on Open Source. The WebTrit clients communicate with a managed cloud platform, which is also built on Open Source.
  • The WebTrit cloud can then connect to the service provider or enterprise systems over a consistent SIP connection, while leveraging websockets and the Opus Codec for communication with the client over dynamic network conditions.
  • We invite developers to use and contribute to the WebTrit code. We will also explain the process we went through in developing this initiative and why we chose Flutter for the client framework.

MLS, the world’s first fully specified, end-to-end encryption standard

Messaging Layer Security (MLS) has finally becomes an official standard in a move welcomed by AWS, Android, Cisco, Wire, Matrix and many more.

After five years of work the world now has its first “standardised and fully specified end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protocol” – Messaging Layer Security (MLS) – which anyone can adopt, irrespective of implementation language or cipher suite.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published MLS as an official standard, in RFC 9420.

Compared to existing protocols such as the Off-the-Record and the Signal protocol, MLS offers improvements in multiple ways.

  • Efficiency: Do more with less. MLS use of a binary tree. This means that the number of required operations and the payload size do not increase linearly with the group size but rather only logarithmically after a short warm-up period. Example: In a group with 1000 members, the number of required operations to calculate new group keys would only be 10 as opposed to 1000 with existing protocols.
  • A new security notion: Group Integrity. In MLS, all group members cryptographically agree on the current state of the group, including who is a part of it. As a consequence, a group member can only decrypt messages from other group members if the sender and the receiver generally agree on the group state and specifically on who is in the group. In other words, it becomes impossible for a third party to add a member to a group without all existing members of the group being aware of it.
  • Synchronizing data in a distributed system. Distributing and synchronizing data across multiple clients is a PITA. Aside from confidentiality, MLS also addresses the issue of synchronizing data between members of a group. The corresponding mechanism is directly derived from the group integrity property. Instead of only agreeing on a member list, members of a group can agree on arbitrary data. MLS relies on a component called Delivery Service that ensures an in-order delivery of MLS messages. This ordering then dictates how clients move incrementally from one group state to the next.
  • Extensible. MLS can be modified, or additional data can be added to the state of a group. The latter can be used, for example, to attach data such as a group name or an image to the group state. The protocol has a negotiation mechanism that ensures that extensions are only used if they are supported by all members of a group. Group members also agree on which extensions are mandatory in a group.
  • Future-proof: Version and cipher suite agility. MLS allows members to signal which versions of MLS and which MLS cipher suites they support.

MLS will likely become the default protocol for messaging. For example mimi, discussed in CXTech Week 16 2023, has adopted it.

Apple may pull iMessage and Facetime from the UK

Apple has warned that it would rather stop offering iMessage and FaceTime services in the U.K. than bowing down to government pressure in response to new proposals that seek to expand digital surveillance powers available to state intelligence agencies.

Matthew Hodgson from Matrix has been fighting the good fight on this issue. But the UK government seems to struggle with technology issues these days.

A Final Mention on Lead Sheathed Cables

The press and analysts continue to get their knickers in a twist on lead-sheathed telecom cables. Lead sheathed cables were also used in homes for electrical cables, but economics halted that sooner than for telecom cables.

Lead pipes for water should be by far the greater concern, because the risk from lead is it’s a cumulative poison when eaten, especially by kids. The EPA only banned the use of lead water pipes in 1986, while the early ’60s was when it became uneconomic to use lead sheathed telecom cables. The EPA estimates there are 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the US, continuously pumping lead into children.

Lead is used for roofing, even today. Lead shot is used for pheasants, grouse, partridges, quail, and dove hunting; though it is banned for waterfowl. Lead remains widely used.

Carriers have been removing lead from their networks for decades, as part of network maintenance, and rehabilitation. Here’s a great piece on the process for lead sheathed cable removal from AT&T.

I predict the current furore, will subside, and the focus will return to the lead water pipe problem that has a far greater impact on society.

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Yann Christophe is now Ingénieur VoIP N3 at Wazo International. I’ve known Yann since his apidaze / ottspott days. Congrats to the Wazo team 🙂

Kristina Markovic is now a frontend developer at Devtech. She was a winner at TADHack Belgrade in 2019.

Dimitrije Krunic is now Head of Regional Business Development at Mitto.

Matt Hall is now End to End Solutions Director at BT Group.

Alexander Sobin is now Sales Director at Telnyx.

Barış Erbil has joined Commencis as a product owner.

Ian Ferguson has joined Iceotope Technologies Limited as their Director of Sales for EMEA.

Marc Samson is now Unicorn – Evangelist – Innovator – Storyteller – Business Partner- Technology adoption manager at Department of Justice and Attorney-General QLD.

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