Mobile UC with the Emphasis on EuropeMobile UC with the Emphasis on Europe

Why should there be a difference between Mobile UC in Europe and the States? One reason is the fact that the US doesn’t have nationwide 3G, and you need 3G in order to see presence on the IP data channel and be able to make a cellular voice call at the same time. Europe does have good 3G coverage and the Old World has been at the forefront of mobile innovation and deployment — it's where digital cellular telephony started — so one would expect to find that mobile UC is a deliverable today.

That assumption is more or less correct, but despite the tangible and much-talked-about benefits, this application has only reached the early adopter stage. Why?

I've been writing about this subject for around five years, and it has long been clear that desktop UC had to come first and that you needed FMC in order to reach the next level. And for a long time, enterprises had desktop UC on hold because of uncertainty about the timeline and functionality of Microsoft’s solution. The number of name changes along the way — different versions of "Live Server," which were followed by the OCS designation — indicate that this solution has been a moving target. So where are we now?

Well, dual-mode phones are needed to enable voice call continuity when transitioning between cellular and Wi-Fi networks, the most important of which is the company’s premises/campus. Hot spots are a shared VoIP resource, so voice quality can and does fall off, therefore for business purposes you need a solution that can monitor call quality and handover to cellular when quality becomes impaired. And finally, desktop UC has to be in place and the mobile devices should be seen as regular extensions. The latter function can be realized using a circuit-switched PBX extension solution (like that of UK vendor OnRelay), or the mobile can register directly with the PBX over IP.

When everything is in place it's a wonderfully productive application — there’s a real Wow factor — but getting there represents a significant investment. Ross Brennan, CEO of Cicero Networks, said: "The beauty of wireless Internet access is that I can be connected to all my favorite IP-based services, including enterprise UC services, regardless of my physical location." Cicero is an Irish company that has developed a converged, multi-mode softphone that supports Fixed, VoIP and Cellular calls and media services on a single device. This UC client is available on Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile devices. The company also has an FMC solution that it markets to service providers.

For SMBs that have limited technical resources, the obvious alternative is to get Mobile UC as a service, but mobile network operators (MNOs) are way behind the curve. Moreover MNOs love voice mail and telephone tag: the more wasted calls you make, the more money they bank, so why should they support presence? And why should they support roaming presence, i.e., why should they enable this communications parameter for the subscribers of other MNOs? These are rhetorical questions.

SMBs: A HUGE NICHE MARKET

There are a lot of SMBs in Europe: they make up around 50% of the average gross national product. The informal definition of an SMB is different for Europe and the United States: in the US, an SMB maxes out at around 500 employees, while in Europe the figure is much lower.

Another key difference is the size of the geographic markets and the need, in Europe, to service them in many languages. If the SMB has less than, say, 25 employees, then Mobile UC isn’t going to make much of a difference in most cases--or so I thought until I started thinking about desktop applications like MSN. Purists may not see these as being UC solutions, but the key functionality is the same, i.e., presence, availability, IM, VoIP and even Video. MNOs now (finally) provide reasonably priced Internet access without restricting your access to their walled garden of services. Therefore, with the right client software on the mobile device you can reach IP-based services: Websites, e-mail, presence, etc.. Sure, the cost goes up when using a cellular data connection on a foreign network, but everything still works because the presence server and presence client see the cellular network as a dumb IP bearer.

A couple of phone calls established the technical feasibility of this concept and the most likely candidate would be a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator). The service could be offered to consumers as well as SMBs. Watch this space.

ROAMING ISSUES

The GSM standard and roaming agreements between network operators created a global, intelligent network that we take for granted. It also resulted in a huge market for communications devices and services, so one would expect there to be a similar Mobile UC development. It’s on the radar screen: RCS (Rich Communication Suite) was started by the big European vendors and operators, and it went on to become a worldwide initiative within the GSMA. The focus is on the use of IMS for providing mobile phone communication services. The idea is to enable communication such as instant messaging, video sharing and buddy lists and to make them available on any type of devices that uses open communication between devices and networks. However, this initiative targets consumers.

Right now, roaming is enabled because UC is implemented over IP and therefore Mobile UC services should be accessible from any IP-based access network. That’s not to say that there won’t be problems in gaining remote access due to network policies and configurations. What will probably take years to develop is interconnect between different service providers for presence and instant messaging (so-called "federated" presence).
CALL QUALITY

The IP protocol was designed for data, and Wi-Fi LANs are really a set of wireless extensions--and again, they were designed to transport data. Thus, the quality of VoIP calls made over Wi-Fi is problematic, and while there are solutions that hand calls over to the cellular network when quality deteriorates (see Figure 1), cellular telephony isn’t that great, either. We’ve come to accept this, but part of the Mobile UC proposition is based on mobile devices used as an extension to an individual’s desk phone, which means that voice quality should be equivalent. The same is true for voice over WLAN.

Figure 1. The schematic illustrates the handoff between cellular and Wi-Fi networks. The DiVitas solution has been included in this Euro-centric article because (a) it is innovative and (b), the company recognized that Europe leads in this area and that is where the company’s marketing efforts were initially focused.

As Figure 1 shows, the DiVitas client incorporates a mobility manager that constantly monitors the viability of the active network link and collaborates with the DiVitas Server on network roam decisions. This is done using an Environment Aware Roaming Technology. The server incorporates a mobility management service to monitor network connections with the clients, and it proactively identifies the optimal network connection for each call. The voice quality engine monitors the audio stream and makes decisions based on jitter, error rates (transmit/receive), out of sequence order, and loss of RTP conditions.

THE ENTERPRISE COMMUNITY

Right now, the heavyweight players are Cisco, IBM and Microsoft, but the company that has been in the enterprise space from the very beginning is Siemens. I saw a proof of concept demo of OpenScape in 2003 and wrote about it at that time. I described the company making a "leap to the top of the VoIP food chain;" OpenScape was "co-developed with Microsoft" in order to create "open communications and information environment;" and there would be "integration of real-time communications in the SAP environment." Heady statements at that time, but they are coming true five years later. The corporate excuse, "We were ahead of the market" is normally somewhat lame, but in this case it was true. Another reason OpenScape didn’t take off was the omission of Mobile UC: Such devices weren’t available five years ago, nor were the requisite services.

Figure 2. OpenScape was way ahead of the market. Marketing started around 2004, but right now this solution is looking particularly good, e.g. the ability to integrate real-time communications into mainstream business processes.

So what does OpenScape have to offer the enterprise community? In a nutshell, a lot, as illustrated in Figure 2. Access is enabled over any IP network: Fixed LAN/WAN; Cellular GSM/UMTS/WiMAX; and Wireless DECT/LAN. There is tight integration with real-time business processes, e.g. CRM and ERP, and there are heavy-duty authorization and authentication mechanisms. There’s a lorry load of communications goodies.

THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF FMC

FMC is an enabling technology for UC. Without seamless handovers and mechanisms that maintain call quality, the business benefits are marginal. This is particularly true for large enterprises. Calls made to customers when on the move should replicate those made in the office. Agito Networks is a key player in this space, and they have partnership agreements with Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft, i.e. the kit is widely deployed in Europe. In addition, the company has indicated that it will open a UK office in Q1 2009.

The company's RoamAnywhere Mobility Router currently supports over 30 dual-mode phones and it has a UC client, but in the enterprise space the UC software will often come from Cisco or Microsoft. Thus, Agito does not offer an end-to-end or replacement solution: instead the FMC focus is on integration with existing infrastructures, and enterprise-grade resiliency (full stateful failover and redundancy) plus end-to-end security.

Agito claims to have the only architecture that has a full set of handover metrics that enable predictable call quality with sub-100ms handover. These include reactive, proactive, and policy based metrics. Reactive metrics are used to measure signal strength degradation, packet loss and voice quality. Defined thresholds indicate the level at which the users will start to experience poor quality, and handover is triggered just prior to these thresholds. The proactive metrics combine location information with triggers generated by the WLAN infrastructure. This enables deterministic location boundaries to be automatically defined at which a handover is triggered, to ensure that calls can complete handover between networks before the thresholds of the reactive metrics are reached.

CONCLUSIONS

Presence and the ability to manage your availability save time and money--these parameters make workforces more productive. Therefore one might expect a more rapid take-up given the economic climate. However, there is an equally effective low-tech way of achieving the same objective. Send an SMS and ask if the other party is free to talk; it's a low-cost, non-intrusive solution. And maybe we’ll start to see wider deployment of Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM).

MIM is much cheaper than SMS, so why should MNOs support it? The answer is the fact that MIM is an IP service that currently runs over 3G’s data channel, so you can do the multimedia and social networking stuff fairly easily and start generating new revenue streams. Moreover MIM is not expected to cannibalize SMS. The latter is a store-and-forward medium — the mobile equivalent to email — while MIM is real-time, and it's a medium that enables group-based, multimedia communications.

Bob Emmerson is a Freelance Writer & European Editor of No Jitter. He is based in the Netherlands.