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Despite having been quite a skeptic a couple of years ago when it came to Instant Messaging (IM), I have realized these days that I have fully integrated IM into my working and private life and today I wouldn't want back. In fact, if somebody calls me on Skype these days without sending an IM first to ask if I am available or to let me know what it is about, it feels a bit strange, almost like an intrusion.

Communicating with IM people

I usually don't call people on the phone that regularly use IM. In most cases the questions I have can be answered in a few words. No need to call and 'hard interrupt' the other person or myself. To me, IM seems more like a 'soft interrupt' with the option to ignore for a little while to finish something else first. I can even continue my work and once I have the answer I can quickly go back and fill in the gaps, if the task at hand permits.

While the amount of incoming and outgoing messages remain reasonable, I can get answers and answer questions myself pretty much on the fly without fully interrupting the main task I am doing at the moment. Much more efficient than making a phone call for both parties involved.

I can also see right away when somebody is busy or not available. So instead of calling and leaving a voice mail, I can set a 'notification event' in my messenger so I don't have to guess when the other person might come back or waste time in trying to call.

Communicating with Non-IM people

Seeing people being present gives me a sense of connectedness and the reassurance that I can quickly get help or advice when necessary. With people that are not connected, however, my business practice is quite different. Here, the only way to contact them is by phone or e-mail. While e-mail is definitely less intrusive than IM, you never know when the other person reads it or when he will answer it. And making a phone call will definitely interrupt whatever the other person is doing or I might not be able to reach him at all. It feels a bit like walking in the dark or playing the lottery.

No mobile-IM yet

What I haven't come around to using yet is IM on my mobile phone. Not that it's a technical issue, there are enough mobile IM clients available. Maybe that's because I also don't read my business e-mails on a mobile device since my questions and answers I get/send by e-mails are usually longer than what small keyboards, screens and not being able to look up things in documents, support. Or maybe I just don't want to be bothered while in transition!?

Interesting though how many of my friends, co-workers and customers are using mobile-IM these days, even those that generally questioned the usefulness of Internet access from mobile devices a couple of years ago.

So my question to you is: How do you feel about / use IM today?

P.S.: Have you noticed that almost everyone now uses an avatar (picture) in their IM program. I wonder how that happened!?

While ATM is used as a transport technology in backhaul and core networks for UMTS and ADSL today it looks like the technology is pretty much on the way out in next generation networks. In LTE for example, ATM no longer plays a role, everything is specified only down to the IP layer. The technology used below is up to the network operator. In many cases this will be Ethernet over copper (e.g. VDSL), fiber or Ethernet microwave.

Another example is the VDSL deployment of Deutsche Telekom (DT) in Germany. According to heise magazine 22/08, DT uses Ethernet over a Gigabit fibre (802.3ah) to their outdoor VDSL DSLAMs. Ethernet is also used over the last few meters of copper cable to the customer instead of ATM. While the VDSL modems can still do ATM, DT has decided to use Ethernet in combination with VLAN (Virtual LAN) encapsulation (802.1q). At the moment, only VLAN-ID 7 is used for all kinds of data, but there are rumors that DT plans to use several VLAN-IDs to separate IPTV from normal Internet access in the future with their IADs (Integrated Access Devices) that support Internet access, IPTV and (SIP) telephony.

Recently, while in the dentist’s waiting room I had a bit of time to read another article from the always very interesting Ericsson Review Magazine. In the 2/2008 issue there are lots of articles on IMS. In the article on delivering the optimal end-user experience, the authors describe that their IMS application environment allows to share with other users which IMS applications one is using. This way, one can not only see if it is possible to use a specific application to communicate with someone but it’s also possible to see which applications others are using and thus to discover new services. Kind of a viral marketing approach.

I haven’t read about this in any IMS articles so far and it strikes me as a good idea, not only for the IMS domain. From the article, it’s not quite clear if this is something proprietary of the Ericsson IMS client environment or something that was standardized in 3GPP or OMA. If this is part of an IMS standard and you know where to find it, please leave a note in the comment section.

Unified Communications – The holy grail of combining information technology and telecommunication. There are lots of different opinions on what exactly UC is and when I was offered to have a look at a book giving an introduction, I couldn't resist.

Unified Communication Solutions – A Practical Business and Technology Approach by David Kim, Michael Gibbs and Bob Decker, published by Nortel press, approaches the topic in four steps. The first part of the book introduces the reader to how the evolution and integration of messaging, voice telephony and business applications forms a Unified Communication Solution. Business processes are streamlined with UC by making business applications interact directly with each other and by improving the interaction between people working on a common project and goal.

The second and third part of the book then show how UC can be used to enhance business processes such as Customer service, Customer relationship management, Supply chain management, enterprise resource planning and sales force automation. Quite a thorough analysis which not only discusses UC but also gives an overview of how companies are run.

UC is not a low hanging fruit, as lots of thought has to go into how to introduce UC applications into business processes and how to secure them. By tying information and communication together, new angles of attack for the bad guys emerge and the final chapter of the book gives an introduction of how to secure VoIP, SIP and UC solutions.

Personally, I've been using some of the UC elements described in this book for a couple of years now. Take my VoIP soft-phone and the IPsec VPN software on my PC for example. I can't remember when I last used a desktop phone as I find headphones and a proper address book for phone numbers navigated with the mouse much more convenient than anything a desktop phone could offer. This has opened totally new ways of working to me as I am no longer bound to a specific place but can do my work from pretty much anywhere where an Internet connection is available. Over an encrypted IPsec tunnel my e-mail, SIP telephony and corporate IM work just as well as at my desk in the office, which I rarely use these days.

Thanks to 3.5G networks now common pretty much everywhere I go, I don't even have to worry much anymore about how to connect. The first question of many callers these days is 'Hey Martin, where are you today', because they know I travel a lot or work from home and simply can't tell the difference from the connection or the caller ID of whether I am in the office or somewhere else. That's UC in action.

What I am still missing in my personal setup is the proper integration of voice telephony in my business applications, i.e. in Microsoft Office and Outlook. But then, what would the world be without some room for improvement?

While the book talks about mobile devices in some places, it's clear that this is not really the authors domain and I think this part of UC was treated a little bit too lightly in the book. (Yes, I know, I work in the mobile domain, so that comment had to come…). Another area that I wished were a bit more  discussed is Web based tools for integrating communication functions into programs and web applications for communication inside the company and with the customers.

All in all, a great book and I managed to read it in about a week. In total, the book has 17 chapters and each can be read in 30 – 60 minutes. That's just the right time that can be set aside every now and then before other matters require attention or that train you are sitting in arrives at where you want to get off.

A quick note to point you to the Carnival of the Mobilists, this week over at VoIP Survivor. An incredible amount of posts are featured this week, they should keep you busy for a while 🙂

Recently, David Wood shared a couple of interesting numbers on his blog on the importance and relation of smartphones compared to 'ordinary' phones. In his post he says that while smartphones only account for 10-15% of sales units, the sales revenue is between 20-25% and profits may even exceed 40%.

So far, I wondered if big mobile manufacturers are mainly working on smarthphones as a way to secure their future by developing new features on these platforms and then work on finding ways of implementing them on cheapter platforms. These numbers, however, suggest that even for their running business, smartphones have a major impact on the bottom line, despite the small unit numbers.

By now I guess you must have heard of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a method of looking at each IP packet passing through a gateway router for the purposes of making statistics or to shape the traffic of users depending on the content of the packet.  A recent article in Heise News now describes what kind of other features such gateways seem to have built in these days. The report states that wireless network operator of O2 (Telefonica) had “accidentally” activated a feature for some time that did not only look inside the packets but also modified their content to prevent email being sent over an encrypted connection.

It’s easier than it sounds: Most email programs encrypt the connection, if they activate it at all, if the SMTP email server tells them at connection establishment that encryption is available. To this end, the server includes a “250 – STARTTLS” notification in the startup information exchange. To prevent the email client from activating encryption, the network based router simply overwrote this string with “250-XXXXXXXA”.

If the email program is configured to use optional encryption, the email is transferred without establishment of a secure connection and the user does not notice anything at all. The email transfer only fails if the email program is set to require transport encryption, which for example, has to be set manually in Thunderbird and is thus not used very often. In this case the user gets an error message which is how the whole story was uncovered. The same approach also works to stop encryption being activated between SMTP servers exchanging email allowing to look into email transfers between any two SMTP servers such a router sits in between.

Clearly this kind of packet inspection and modification does not serve traffic shaping purposes…

This weeks Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Steve Litchfield, whom many might know from his Smartphone Show no rebranded to "The Phones Show", the definite video guide on the latest smartphones appearing on the market. As always, the carnival is a great read and summarizes the week in the blogsphere on mobile topics. So head over and enjoy!

Recently, I came across Trapeze Networks and the name instantly rung a bell. Yes, that's the company Matthew Gast works for, author of THE book on Wifi. Trapeze does a lot beyond the MAC header with Wifi and has a couple of features in their equipment I was not aware one could do with Wifi these days. I was especially amazed by the location tracking features they have put into their equipment.

By triangulation with several access points and some other tricks, it's possible to detect the location of a client device within a few meters. This feature can be put into good use for a number of applications:

• Access Restrictions: It's possible to restrict network access for a set of users to specific parts of the coverage area, i.e. one can use the same Wifi infrastructure for both employees and guests. Besides restricting guests to pure Internet access it is also possible to limit their access to meeting rooms. This is not done on a per access point limitation but by triangulation, which means permission to use the network can be granted for a location that is much smaller than the coverage area of an access point. It's also possible to limit access to the network to the building, and stop anyone from accessing the network from the parking lot nearby.

• Equipment Tracking: The location of active and passive WLAN Tags  (e.g. have a look at AeroScout) can be monitored to track the location of equipment or devices.

• Find rouge access points: One of the biggest threats to company security is employees bringing their own Wifi access points from home and connecting them to the network. If not properly secured they can be an open door into the company's intranet for anyone in range. With localization, the Trapeze access points can not only detect the presence of such access points and warn the network administrator but also include the approximate location of the equipment in the message.

• Find unwanted devices or attackers: In case outsiders try to penetrate your network, the system can not only warn the administrator of such attacks but again include the location of the attacker, which is an invaluable help in large campus wide networks. Trapeze says their access points and controllers can detect over 200 different types of Wifi attacks and warn the administrator. The system even offers the possibility to "shoot back". I am not quite sure what that means in practice but I am sure it would be fun to find out more about this feature.

Also quite amazing are their tools for site surveys, maintaining the network, their features for VoIP over Wifi for QoS on the air interface (WMM), optimized routing of VoIP calls through the network, their 802.11n implementation in their new MP-432 access points, which by the way look like smoke detectors, etc. If you want to check out their site, bring some time, there is tons of good information to be discovered there.

Chetan Sharma has taken over the Carnival of the Mobilists this week on this blog Always On Real-Time Access. As always, the carnival is diverse, entertaining and thought provoking, so head over and enjoy! The two posts that especially stood out for me personally this week were James Cooper's report on mobile Internet use in South Africa and C. Enrequie Ortiz's short enty on one click for effective use of bar codes and NFC.