iTnews: Australian telcos champion Voice over Broadband for SMBs

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is not a new term. Touted as a low cost alternative to traditional telephony, VoIP has a major role in a new wave of converged network solutions that are pervading the telecommunications market.

But while consumers and large enterprises have adopted the technology to some degree, Australian small to medium businesses (SMBs) have traditionally been deterred by VoIP's reputation for poor call quality at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and the large set-up costs of premium, business-grade services.

With the new introduction of Voice over Broadband offerings from telecommunications behemoths AAPT and Optus, however, VoIP adoption by SMBs is set to take a new turn.

Telecommunications solutions for businesses have been tiptoeing towards Internet telephony for some time. Although the copper wire still dominates a majority of outbound phone calls, traditional IP PBX systems that rout intra-office calls via a Wide Area Network have been utilised by large enterprises since the turn of the century.

"If you're using an IP PBX, and you set up your system so that you can call another office at another location through the Wide Area Network, phone calls that you make within the office are technically VoIP," explained David Cannon, senior analyst of telecommunications at IDC.

Cannon mentioned IDC's global telecommunications network as an example of a typical IP PBX set-up. When calling a counterpart in IDC's New Zealand or Singapore offices, Cannon makes an internal VoIP phone call. Meanwhile, other outbound calls to non-IDC phone numbers are still routed through the PSTN copper line.

But the reign of the copper line may not be long lived, as Internet telephony marches beyond IP PBX, and towards complete VoIP offerings that encompass all outbound communications.

Internet-based VoIP services such as Skype are fulfilling an increasing portion of small businesses' telephony needs – as well as those of the casual workplace instant message addict. And now, with the support of the likes of AAPT and Optus, as well as ISPs like iiNet and Primus, Voice over Broadband technology is expanding VoIP's reach to the SMB market.

"Voice over Broadband is probably the most interesting subject matter at this point in time, in terms of VoIP for SMBs, because it’s actually being championed by Telstra's primary competitors, being providers of other network infrastructure," Cannon said.

Cannon highlighted Optus and AAPT as the primary providers of Voice over Broadband services in Australia. The first SMB-centric VoIP service was launched by AAPT in 2006; however, Cannon is of the opinion that Voice over Broadband has only really become a viable telecommunications option for SMBs in the past six months.

Like the services that came before it in the Internet telephony space, Voice over Broadband relies on its low operating cost to attract users. Current offerings of Australian service providers involve packaged Internet and phone line deals, which cut down on line rental.

Such Voice over Broadband packages are estimated to save businesses around $15 per line per month on access fees alone, not to mention the added convenience that consolidated suite voice and data connections provides.

"Historically, what's going on is that the price of local, national and international phone calls have gone down," Cannon said. "The only part of the telephony bill that isn't coming down is the access price.

"The fee that you pay for access of phone lines, whether it be PSTN or ISDN, is sitting around about $33 per month. With a broadband connection at 512 kbps plus, telcos can deliver multiple phone lines on top of that.

"That means that over that one broadband line, you can literally replace the PSDN or the ISDN access component, and at the same time, you can consolidate your VPN connection, and you can also consolidate your Internet connection, all through that one pipe."

Current offerings

AAPT's Business Connect boasts to be the first fully managed and customised VoIP solution developed especially for Australian medium enterprises.

Launched in July 2006, the service was recognised at the 2007 Australian Telecommunications Users Group Awards as one of the most innovative products in the communications sector.

"Business Connect demonstrates AAPT's success in expanding our existing capability as a telecommunications service provider to a complete ICT provider in the business market" said Gregg Roy, general manager of AAPT Business Solutions.

"It is an innovative, market-first VoIP solution for medium business that represents true convergence of Information Communications Technology," he said.

To entice SMBs to make the jump to Voice over Broadband, AAPT's Business Connect advertises no set up costs and a service that is compatible with existing analogue phone equipment.

Other benefits include: the ability to rout a single incoming call to multiple phones – for example, an office line, home phone, as well as a mobile number – which increases the contactability of sales staff; the ability to forward voicemail to e-mail inboxes; low per-minute call rates and free inter-office phone calls.

One adopter of AAPT's Voice over Broadband technology is Global Insight Market Research. The Queensland-based full-service market research firm makes an estimated 2,000 calls per month, so cost was no small consideration in the search for a telecommunications service provider.

"We were interested in moving from our traditional telecommunications infrastructure to something that could streamline our operations and provide advanced functionality not available in standard services," said Murray Dempsey, managing director of Global Insight Market Research in an AAPT Business Connect case study.

"The AAPT Business Connect solution offered us great call rates and volume discounts, halving our communications spend by allowing us to use a DSL connection for all our communication needs. We no longer need to maintain and pay for separate access for voice and data needs."

While Business Connect primarily targets medium-sized businesses, Optus has opened its arms to the entire SMB sector with its ipPhone service. Launched in June 2007, the service bundles 12 cent flat local and national calls with a variety of traditional telephony features including call transfer, call hold and call wait, as well as newer Internet telephony features like the ability to rout incoming calls to multiple lines.

Available to Optus Business DSL customers, ipPhone comes in two flavours - Optus ipPhone Premier and Optus ipPhone Express. The former offers superior call quality at $19.95 per month excluding the set up costs of a professional installation. The latter is priced at $12 per month and comes as a simple, plug and play service.

According to Optus' estimates in its IP Index 2005, almost one half of its IP customers already utilise a VoIP solution, and a further 17 per cent are evaluating or trialling VOIP technology. Optus expects VoIP adoption to yield between 30 and 50 per cent in cost savings for a typical organisation.

"Broadband penetration has really accelerated in the SMB market over recent years and as a result customers are now looking at how they can better utilise their communications infrastructure," said Paul Kitchin, managing director of Optus SMB.

"Optus recognises that SMBs want and need more than the traditional core telecommunication products of fixed, mobile and internet to complete daily business operations," he said.

Shove over, Telstra?

Despite the benefits touted by its champions, the uptake of Voice over Broadband technologies has been slow. IDC's Cannon estimates VoIP to occupy no more than 300,000 phone lines in a six million line market, representing a mere five per cent of Australian phone lines.

"It's not [a large uptake]," Cannon said, "but then again, because the big, competitive telcos have only launched these products in the last six months, in reality, it's [VoIP] got a long way to go."

One major hurdle that VoIP currently faces is its reputation for poor, unreliable audio quality. And indeed there have been VoIP service providers for which the popular opinion holds true.

As network infrastructure improves, however, so does the quality of Internet telephony. Using the business-grade broadband connections of today, which advertise 99.95 to 99.99 per cent availability uptime, Cannon expects the call quality degradation associated with VoIP services to be negligible.

Recent guidelines developed by the Communications Alliance to regulate the quality of VoIP services and Internet Protocol (IP) networks are also expected to increase the uptake of the new wave of converged voice and data offerings.

"I think that a phone call going astray here and there isn't that huge of an issue," he said. "I think that that happens regardless [of if a company is using VoIP or PSTN], and people can accept that.

"It's just that a majority of the time, the audio quality in particular needs to be clean. You can achieve that now, certainly with the business-grade broadband infrastructure that's out there."

So, should Telstra be kissing its landline monopoly farewell?

Cannon is doubtful. The quality of IP infrastructure is still not as good as the traditional PSTN, and as he points out, current champions of Voice over Broadband also have large shares of the traditional telephony market.

"I would say that it [VoIP] doesn't at this point in time pose a threat [to Telstra]. Anything that is a competitive service is threatening, but I wouldn't suggest that Telstra are about to lose market share as a result of this product – not at this point in time,"
he said.

"Going forward, maybe five years from now, perhaps," he said.

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Linux.com: Online library reaches million book milestone

As a freelance contributor to Linux.com:

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.

One and a half million books in more than 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, and various Indian languages, are now accessible via a single Web portal. The online library includes rare and out-of-print books from private and public collections around the world.

"There are plenty of books that are no longer in copyright, and that have long been forgotten, but which would be useful to scholars, students, and just the general population," says Michael Shamos, a copyright lawyer, computer science professor, and co-director of the project at the Carnegie Mellon University in the US.

"There is a tremendous amount of knowledge that we thought would be lost to mankind if we didn't start digitizing," he says.

The project believes digital books on the Internet should be free to read, instantly available, easily accessible, printable on-demand, translatable to any language, and readable to both humans and machines. Additionally, with the advent of low-cost technology like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptop and ebook readers, digitized books are expected to reduce the cost of learning by replacing the repetitive cost of books with a one-off computer purchase and freely downloadable information.

According to the researchers' estimates, the Universal Library collection currently represents a mere one percent of the approximately 100 million books to ever have been published. Shamos expects only half of the published books in existence to be found in physical libraries around the world, so the task of physically locating a rare book can be a tedious process.

"The only way you can obtain an out-of-print book is to find a library that has one, and either travel to that library, or obtain that book through an interlibrary loan," he says. "It's a very slow process, especially considering that without seeing the book, you might not know if there's anything interesting in it for you."

When the project was initiated in 2002, members expected other research and commercial projects to digitize only around 50,000 books. Google Book Search is one such project that was started since that time; in recent years, it has come under fire for alleged breaches of copyright. While Shamos expressed a high regard for Google's efforts and the publicity it has attracted to book digitization, he said the Universal Library Project had "similar but different" goals.

"We want to digitize all published works of man; I don't think that anybody at Google would ever say that's what their goal is," he says. "Their goal is to sell advertising, and one of the ways that they find to sell advertising is to create a Web site that has such rich content that people want to visit it all the time. I don't think that Google has any interest in putting Sanskrit works up on their Web site."

Like Google, the Universal Library Project faces issues in publishing copyrighted books online. As such, books currently under copyright are only available in part via the Web portal, while books that are not bound by copyright restrictions are fully and freely available online.

Citing a need for information to be freely available, Shamos expects these copyright restrictions to become less of an issue in time, as publishers adapt to the low-cost business model that digital books offer.

"Copyright is going to become less and less significant [because] through digitization, the cost of publishing is vanishingly small," he says. "As the cost of copying goes down, the value of works goes down, and the ability to make profit from them goes down.

"There is a difference in reading for pleasure and reading for information; what is going to happen, I think, is that copyright is going to end up focusing on works of entertainment and not works of information."
High numbers

The Universal Library Project is the brainchild of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and has received $3.5 million in seed funding from the National Science Foundation. The project has also received in-kind contributions from the Zhejiang University in China and the Indian Institute of Science in India that have been valued at $10 million each, and has more recently forged a partnership with the Library at Alexandria in Egypt.

With more than 1,000 workers in about 50 scanning and digitization centres around the world, the Universal Library collection is growing at an estimated 7,000 books per day. There is a fair way to go before the project reaches its lofty book digitization goals; even so, the researchers have set their sights on eventually including content like music, artwork, lectures, and newspapers in the library.

"We believe that by having a universal library with all published works of man, and having multiple sites all around the world that house the entire content, it will be impossible to destroy these works," Shamos says.

"There can never again be a destruction of the library of Alexandria. There could be a destruction of the building, but there can't be a destruction of the works, and so this makes the creation of man impervious to changes in political regime, culture, Moirai."

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iTnews: Sun's petabyte datacentre in a box makes its Aussie debut

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

In a bid to tackle the array of data storage issues facing today's IT industry, Sun Microsystems has unveiled a prototype of an eco-friendly, mobile virtualised datacentre in Sydney Harbour this week.

Dubbed "Project Blackbox", each datacentre packs more than three petabytes of storage in a 20-foot shipping container. Sun's new offering is expected to allow customers to quickly and easily add datacentre capacity that can be moved as their circumstances change.

"Everybody's either out of space, power, or capacity; one of the three," declared Cheryl Martin, Sun's senior director of business development for Project Blackbox.

Boasting a processing speed of 4.5 teraflops, Project Blackbox is designed to house computational, storage and network infrastructure. Each datacentre can handle up to 700 CPUs, and supports a range of operating systems and third-party equipment.

All storage equipment is contained within a standard-sized 20 x 8 foot shipping container to add to the datacentres' mobility. For safety, the shipping containers are also fitted with GPS devices and reinforced with steel bars, and all equipment is mounted on earthquake-worthy shock absorption springs.

The datacentre can be deployed anywhere there is AC power, water and a network connection. When connected to a portable power supply, such as a generator, Project Blackbox can even operate on the move; a capability that is expected to benefit mobile operations in the military, oil and energy industries.

Instead of requiring air-conditioning, which can require large amounts of power, Project Blackbox uses a water-cooled heat exchanger and a series of fans to keep the temperature low within the shipping container. Sun estimates its cooling technique to be 40 percent more efficient than a traditional datacentre.

Project Blackbox was said to have been inspired by customer feedback that indicated a demand for convenience, flexibility, and eco-friendliness when increasing datacentre capacity.

Martin highlighted four target markets for the datacentre: companies looking to augment their current storage capacity; companies in need of temporary storage solutions; specialised industries such as the military, oil or gas; and large scale network services that are undergoing rapid expansion.

Since the U.S. launch of its first prototype in October 2006, Project Blackbox has been deployed by select customers, including the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the U.S., and Russian telecommunications provider, Mobile Telesystems.

One datacentre has also been deployed in Sun's High Performance Computing grid in Menlo Park, U.S. Martin said Sun expects to use more of its new datacentres in-house as soon as there are more available.

Contrary to its name, Project Blackbox is usually shipped in a white shipping container, but Martin said the container can also take on custom paint jobs. She noted a particularly strong demand for datacentres with a camouflage veneer.

The datacentre will be available to Australian customers in March 2008, costing upwards of $700,000.

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iTnews: Aussie company comes under fire for probing scandalous poker site

As a freelance journalist at Haymarket Media:

The engagement of Australian consultancy Gaming Associates to investigate an alleged $7 million scandal has raised more questions about the integrity of Absolute Poker and its parent companies.

Gaming Associates was commissioned last month to conduct an audit into a suspected security breach that gave one player full view of the cards held by his opponents.

The audit comes several months after the scam was first uncovered by a group of players on the Two Plus Two online discussion boards. Current investigations have, as yet, failed to placate users of the popular U.S.-based forum.

"This proposed investigation makes us uneasy for a few reasons," said Mason Malmuth of Two Plus Two Publishing. "First, according to its press release, Absolute Poker is funding the investigation directly, with no third party involved to ensure objectivity.

"Finally, Two Plus Two believes that a report from Gaming Associates, an Australian company apparently dealing primarily with Antigua and Barbados companies, may not maintain the same weight and reliability as the international law firm retained by Two Plus Two."

Earlier this month, Two Plus Two Publishing was approached by an Absolute Poker representative, who wanted Two Plus Two to release a statement supporting Absolute Poker on its forums, Malmuth said.

Malmuth responded with a fraud investigation proposal in which Two Plus Two would act as an unbiased, non-profiting arbitrator between Absolute Poker and the investigators. The offer was declined.

"Two Plus Two is essentially the only entity that would be considered unbiased in this matter. So anything done with our name on it would have much credibility," Malmuth told ITnews.com.au.

"We felt this problem was bigger than Absolute and that by doing this investigation it would be good for the whole industry.

"Absolute Poker has now told us that they have no interest in our proposal. So I expect nothing will come from it," he said.

Gaming Associates' audit report is not expected until 7 December. In the meantime, however, the online poker community has been handing out its own version of Citizens' arrests.

Fingers have been pointed at Absolute Poker's co-founder, Scott Tom, and former Operations Director, Alan 'AJ' Green, and punishments range from degradingly edited images, to accusations of drug abuse, and even to what might be perceived as threats to Tom's family.

"Is this Scott's first wife and child," asks one discussion board user. "What's her name? Any previous wives and/or children? Any other weak spots besides father? Mother, siblings, other family members?"

"Does anyone know AJ's educational background," another post reads. "Where did he go to college? What were his majors and/or minors?"

Official statements released by Absolute Poker to its users seem to confirm allegations that an employee had been involved in the alleged security breach.

"Based upon our preliminary findings, it appears that the integrity of our poker system was compromised by a high-ranking trusted consultant employed by AP whose position gave him extraordinary access to certain security systems," writes Joe Norton, owner of Tokwiro Enterprises ENRG, which holds 100 per cent interest in Absolute Poker.

"We consider this security breach to be a horrendous and inexcusable offence," he said.

Absolute Poker is currently in the process of reimbursing players who were affected by the cheating account. It is yet to be seen if the scandal leaves a permanent scar on online poker, which requires a great deal of trust between players, their opponents, and gaming platforms.

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