2/26/2006

Open Source Telecom

Om Malik’s article The Black Box That Would Conquer Telecom went online on CNN Money the other day. For those of you who may not follow or be famliar with Om, he’s a senior writer at Business 2.0 and author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 billion telecom heist.

The article is about Vyatta, a startup that’s built a commercial open-source router. The intent it obviously to compete with Cisco at the low end. That’s an interesting enough story. We all follow the David and Goliath stories. (and yes, we know Goliath almost always wins).

Om also opens the door to the idea of open source telecommunications. Here’s what he had to say:

The scramble for open source in networking comes because two primal forces tearing the old telecom order apart. First, the Internet-based technologies are replacing the closed legacy phone systems, thus helping the convergence of computer and the phone systems. In old times, in order to build a networking box, companies would design specialized chips, and run specialized software on them to get the best performance. Now you can buy extremely powerful processors like Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron chips for a few hundred dollars, run special networking software on them, and get similar performance. There are nearly half-a-dozen open source projects that capitalize on the cheap processing power.

Five specific open-source products are identified:

Asterisk, the ultra low cost PBX
Nagios, a network monitoring tool
Open VPN, for virtual private networking
Snort, a longtime firewall, IDS, antihacking favorite
XORP, the router based on any PC

Let’s follow the Asterisk trail briefly It’s the most directly related to our VoIP focus, and Alex Saunders posted something that also made me think about it the other day when he posed the question How Big is the Asterisk Market, Really?.

Asterisk is the wildly popular open source PBX software that’s been taking many sectors by storm. It requires minimal resources to run what can effectively scale to a substantial PBX system replacement. I have an Asterisk server running on a Dell laptop in my office for some testing and experimentation.

I’m trying to honestly get some real-world perspective on VoIP penetration rates with numbers that make real sense. Alec couldn’t find solid numbers from the analysts, and I can’t either. He noted that “in January 2004, Mark Spencer reported 20,000 Asterisk installations globally. In June 2005, he was saying 200,000. In January of 2006 he said “over 250,000″. 250,000 installations is a number that soungs big, but isn’t really. When you think of the number of PBX systems and key systems installed in the US alone, a quarter million systems is a drop in the bucket at best. It shows growth and positive results, but I don’t know if it’s enough to be viewed as a trend. And the numbers don’t indicate any enterprise size. Most of the companie’s I find using Asterisk are small business, heavinly in the tech sector, so they already have the skills in house to manage the system.

For me, substantial penetration in the small business market will be apparent when non-tech sector companies (real estate brokerages, auto parts stores, insurance offices, title companies and the like, are seen installing and maintaining their own systems. At the very least, managing the operations. Key systems today may be installed by resellers, by the admin assistant (that gal up front who really runs the company) doubling as the operator is who really keeps that thing going.

Alec mentioned chatting with Jeff Pulver who observed that half his FWD users were online using Asterisk. FWD is great for people involved in the growing VoIP market, and it does work wonderfully. But again, the penetration rate statistically against the PSTN and global deployment isn’t, in my mind, a statistically valid or accurate sample.

Don’t misunderstand me. I think Asterisk, and the other open source efforts are the real centers of innovation in VoIP technologies. With apologies to Cisco, they haven’t shown us a real innovation in quite some time. They buy innovation. The small companies, the open source efforts, the entrepreneurial spirits - these are where innovation lies, and they are the true R&D of VoIP.

FWD and Jeff’s work demonstrate innovation from the network perspective. Without Jeff’s tireless efforts, VoIP would be 3-5 years behind its present maturity and penetration. His personal contribution to the success of VoIP can’t be measured. But FWD remains a niche in networking. It’s the nature of being the strident voice on the fringe pushing for innovation and new ideas. That’s not a bad thing.

I guess my point to all this is as much a set wondering questions as anything else - Where does open source software fit in telecommunications? Perhaps the large question, where does it fit in corporate or enterprise business? Does open source represent a avenue that large business can or will adopt and embrace in any widespread fashion? I think that’s a great unknown, but my experience with enterprise business is that they will always lean toward established commercial solutions. That outdated mindset “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years - just substitute a different name…pick one. For me, they key to consider really came in Om’s conclusion:

The biggest interest in XORP and future Vyatta products will be in emerging economies like China and India, which are not cash rich, but have broadband ambitions. No one wants to pay for expensive commercial routers. “In the near future there would be ad-hoc networks on a person, and that could conceivably need a router with a tiny footprint, like XORP,” Ghosh predicts.

The emerging economies of India and China are emerging quickly. Many countries aren’t trapped in the corporate mindset of the US and much of Europe.

Business as usual is being invented every day in these areas. Perhaps it’s time to rethink business as usual. We need to rethink how we use open source, innovative networks, peer-to-peer technologies and a host of other solutions that small business and individuals are already leveraging to competitive advantage.

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* Filed by Ken at 11:06 am under Unified Communications

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