Ron Close, President of Bell Canada New Ventures, discussed Bell’s recently launched Bell Digital Voice (BDV) service. While BDV Lite involves a traditional VoIP set up of connecting a phone set to a broadband Internet service via an ATA box, the main BDV offering uses a different architecture that moves the ATA back to the Central Office. This has several advantages from a telco operations viewpoint:
• Installation and provisioning is done at the Central Office eliminating a truck roll
• No compromise on enhanced 911 services, power failure issues, local number portability
• All Internet connectivity is at the CO, eliminating the need to have broadband Internet at the consumer residence.
• Five 9’s reliability
Yet Bell Digital Voice offers all the comprehensive range of services associated with other VoIP offerings including call forwarding, cal waiting, voice mail, etc. at $40 per month. Long distance is extra and still involves all of Bell’s traditional long distance offerings. The one major downside is that this service is not physically portable.

Ron made the following points on costs:
• 15% of marketing calls and enquiries are converted to BDV (vs 1%-2% for BDV Lite)
• Servicing costs for BDV Lite are 3 to 5 times the cost of servicing the main BDV service
• Capital costs are significantly lower

I will report on a session on the Skype API’s in a separate posting.

The day closed with a panel on blogging, featuring five well known Canadian bloggers: Ron Hyndman (lawyer), Mark Evans and Matthew Ingram (technology news reporters), Alec Saunders (CEO Iotum) and Jon Arnold (independent telecomm analyst). In summary they pointed out that blogging:
• Provides an outlet for discussing issues and subjects beyond the bounds of traditional publication. Mark and Matt pointed out how it allows them to expand beyond the editorial limitations of print; Ron mentioned how it provides a platform to get out his point of view on issues.
• As the ideal conversational tool, is addictive; those who have tried to stop could not.
• Opens doors to new opportunities
• Provides a means of “branding’ for the author; this does require that the blogger establish only a few themes to their blogging activity to sustain their audience
• Comments are the “good stuff”; the vibrancy of comments provides a good measure of blogging success

Jeff Pulver participated in the blogger session but preceded it with a brief discussion and expansion of his theme from VON Spring whereby he sees VoIP changing to stand for Video over IP during 2006. He had just returned from an event in Israel where he had met five startups who were developing TV over IP. While he sees lots of opportunity for this evolving video technology, he also warned of the potential for vested interests, such as the traditional networks to seek regulatory means to limit or even halt its growth.

In summary an excellent day for getting up to date on many of the issues in the VoIP space. In particular I want to thank Jon Arnold and Mark Evans for the hospitality they gave to me on my first assignment as an Associate Editor of Skype Journal