Young and Smart with a Future in Technology, Cheikh Mbacke

omar shaikh — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:15:15 +0000

Young people everywhere as well as those through the senior citizen years have so much potential and with today’s user-centric and enabling technologies, anything is possible.

You will think you are listening to a young version of the smart, tech-savvy Barack Obama, Justin Frankel, or Rob Malda, but … in just three months, Cheikh Mbacke has over 8,000 customers on his calling card services over IP with DID from all over the world and a targeted audience of . We finally met up with him at the VIPeering Forum (http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/v i-peering/vi-peering-agenda.aspx?buttond own=agenda) during ITEXPO West 2010 when he introduced himself to Suzanne Bowen, who was one of the speakers on the value of services leveraging e164 phone numbers.

He’s got more great ideas after attending this conference for more services that will meet the needs of customers in ways not met before.

Cheikh shares his respect for DIDX and how it enables him and thousands of others around the world in IP communications related business. He is willing to explain ways that DIDX can improve especially in regards to the steps to take in adding funds and then adding talk time and the relationship between the two on DIDs where vendors charge per minute from minute one or after a certain number of minutes.

We decided after our talk that an video icon in each area of DIDX to show how to use that area should be added. Links to Youtube are no problem.

He likes the choice on DIDX, lots of it but was hoping that more DIDX vendors would offer two choices on billing:
1. Buy DID with a certain number of minutes and channels and charge per minute after included minutes.
2. Or Buy DID with unlimited minutes and as many channels as needed.

He shares the ease of use. All areas of the world where he needs DID are available on DIDX and he is eager to see new areas, especially good quality Africa DID.

A lesson in user-centric, users rule, users drive innovation and improvement and businesses need to ask for criticism and improvement and follow up on the same. Like Cheikh says, “We go where our customers go.”

Creating Value in Phone Numbers

omar shaikh — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:16:58 +0000

Want to know all the hullabaloo among your telephone or cellular service providers regarding one of your most valued sets of personal numbers? Your phone number? Read on and watch the video. Turn up the sound a bit, and put on a head set.

“There is nothing that can stop anyone from filing a petition. Let’s just change this. In fact, this is ridiculous,” says Richard Shockey, Dir. Strategic Technology Initiatives at NeuStar, Inc and Board Chairman of the SIPForum. “Now, Verizon, AT&T, and Quest go apoplectic at the same time. But if you want to create value in phone numbers, the first thing we need to do is make them as portable as domain names.”

Richard Shockey makes sense of the DID, the phone number, its value for traditional carriers and NextGens like Skype and how we must add more value to them and consider the opportunities of peering.

More transcript follows…

I can change who hosts my website, who hosts my email. I can actually change the registrar for my own domain name.

The other aspect of phone numbers is we have to consider is that they will continue to erode in value if you don’t actually make services available on them. Obviously as chairman of the SIP Forum, I have been preaching to my membership and whenever anyone will give me a microphone… the things like HD voice and particularly point to point video are where service providers in the industry create new kinds of value.

Certainly we know we’ve seen Apple go to the marketplace with Facetime, marketing with 125 million dollars for a point to point video application on mobile. I’m not talking about interop enabled landline. This is the type of peering technologies such as ENUM, SIP redirect… it actually creates value.

Let’s be blunt about this. Can we actually get a dollar or two more on ARPU (average revenue per user) from the customers to enable these applications? I would certainly argue that the answer is, “Yes.”

I think there has been some recent market research that says, I can have interoperable point to point video from my mobile device to a desk top and from the desktop to a television set, back and forth using E164 numbering. People would actually pay more money for that.

What we all know in this industry and I will talk about it a little bit later is that the telecom industry whether we like it or not is slightly dysfunctional. The aggregate revenue in the telecom industry has been relatively flat for several years.

An average revenue per user for voice has been declining approximately 2-3 percent over the last five years. This goes across the board. Obviously we have seen landline losses. That has been 8 percent per year for the last five years. Now, we begin to see, especially in the United Kingdom, in statistics from Ofcom… basically you are seeing 3 percent decline in average revenue per user on voice in mobile because we now have *market saturation.

(What is market saturation? For example, in advanced economies an extremely high percentage of households own refrigerators (more than 97% of households) i.e. the diffusion rate is more than 97%, and the market is said to be saturated i.e. further growth of sales of refrigerators will occur basically only as a result of population growth and in cases where one manufacturer is able to gain market share at the expense of others. From Wikpedia)

When you have market saturation, you will have competition. When you have competition, you will have declining revenue. Even the cable operators who have been extremely successful in landline operations, for the first time in history had a net drop in video subscribers.

The recession has finally cut into cable operators’ revenue on their principal product which is premium video. If we are going to create value, we need to be able to use the tools we have.

The other issue in terms of regulatories, who actually gets a phone. Typically phone numbers have been organized by the classic service provider one way or another. The only people who can get phone numbers are carriers and only in certain geographically-defined areas and rate centers. They can be only ported through processes they designed.

If you want to change things, you have to get involved and unfortunately, that happens to be Washington, D.C.

Add value to what you have got. Even Skype … look at their revenues. It is easy to pull down their S1 filing from the securities and exchange commission. 85% of Skype revenue is SkypeIN and SkypeOUT. (???? A ha!)

And that’s phone numbers. They are just as dependent upon phone numbers for their revenue model as is a traditional telecommunications carrier.

These are just a couple thoughts I want to throw. I’ll certainly answer your questions. The idea from peering is we need to do something better, better than traditional G711 voice, something better than landlines, better than G729, voice for mobile… I believe that modern peering technology whether ENUM or other database technologies… SIP Redirect can actually add value, increase revenue, make everybody happy, one way or the other.

Richard Shockey of the SIPForum and Neustar as well as a dozen other industry * movers and shakers and thought leaders participated in panel talks during the VIPeering Forum during ITEXPO West Oct. 5, 2010 in Los Angeles.

* Jim Dalton, Steve Musick, Sean Kent, Bryan Hertz, Suzanne Bowen, Doug Davis, Doug Fanalli, Mark Benisz, Ian Campbell, Charles Studt, Matt Bramson, Micah Singer, Scott Warton, Alan Percy, Carlos Da Silva, and Kevin Mitchell

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Young and Smart with a Future in Technology, Cheikh Mbacke

Creating Value in Phone Numbers