The generation gap: Moving from POTS to RTC
by John Trembley
Communication took a fundamental leap in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell conducted the first transmission of a complete sentence using electricity. This groundbreaking experiment morphed into the foundation we use today for POTS, or Plain Old Telephone Service. Remarkably, more than a century later, the way we communicate has not taken too many fundamental steps forward. Some might consider this an egregious claim given the significant developments around data networks and applications, such as e-mail becoming a mainstay of communication. However, e-mail, phone service and even wireless are all, at their core, part of the same generation of POTS-based communications–that is, they are all one-dimensional.
The premise for POTS communication is to engage in conversations without knowing if the party on the other end is even there or available to speak. In other words, it is a passive means of communication. A century has unfolded, yet we still approach communication in much the same way–a model of inefficiency fraught with poor productivity.
In 1996, we finally saw a glimmer of hope. Four young Israelis rolled out a program called ICQ that sought to capitalize on the power of millions of people connecting to the Internet. They devised a technology that allowed Internet users to locate each other and create peer-to-peer communication channels. As a result, Instant Messaging (IM) was born, and two key communication concepts arose: presence and availability. Presence refers to the state of a user’s device, such as a phone not already in use or an IM client connected to the Internet. Availability expresses a user’s willingness and ability to communicate. The knowledge of these two elements is quite powerful, as it dramatically increases the number of completed or successfully executed communications. IM not only capitalizes on presence information, which has always been available from various network elements, but also overlays a simple and intuitive user interface that provides more granularity for users to define their availability.
This represents a gigantic leap forward: Communication becomes deliberate and active rather than passive and reactive. With IM, a user knows before initiating a session if the person with whom he wants to communicate is online and available to engage in a conversation. This is as fundamental an advancement as the advent of the telephone, as it moves us away from the reliance on numerous forms of time-consuming activities such as leaving voicemails, calling multiple numbers or sending an e-mail. Additionally, the use of presence and availability blurs the lines between devices and communication medium, thus increasing productivity. Presence and availability characteristics are just the tip of the iceberg, as industry bellwethers such as Microsoft, AOL and IBM are vigorously pursuing this new paradigm of deliberate and active communication. The potential for new applications is limitless and introduces the new concept of real-time communication (RTC).
Today’s teenagers and university students communicate in different ways than the average professional. They have grown accustomed to multimodal communication, or the ability to communicate with their friends across different devices and mediums, which is the cornerstone of RTC. For instance, short message service (SMS) is reaching unparalleled levels of usage in countries like the U.K. The U.S. has been much slower in its adoption of SMS, or “texting,” but has seen IM usage inch its way up to match the number of overall PC users. IM has also been popular among the younger generation, providing instant gratification when conversing with friends. The notion of instant access to other users is especially appealing within the online gaming community, as it provides the ability to engage and compete with other online users, thus enhancing the gaming experience.
A growing segment of the so-called Generation Y–or RTC Generation, as I like to call it–is accustomed to having immediate access to their peers, leaning on presence information to understand who is available. They are also used to the flexibility offered by IM and other services such as three-way conferencing, which facilitates one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communications. Maintaining multiple IM chat sessions and combining conversation threads is a way of life for the RTC generation. Whether they realize it or not, this flexibility translates to increased speed and productivity when used appropriately.
On the mobile front, Verizon Wireless, Sprint PCS, Alltel and most recently Orange have all launched press-to-talk (PTT) capabilities similar to Nextel’s Direct Connect offering, which is seen as the voice equivalence of IM. PTT provides instant access to users and is rapidly leveraging the use of buddy lists similar to those found in IM. This service demonstrates the growing interest in real-time communication and the ability to more efficiently connect with friends, co-workers and family. Nextel achieved the highest ARPU and lowest churn by offering innovative services such as PTT. The carrier has mainly focused on the corporate environment, believing that the utility and dispatch properties of PTT apply best to business users; on the other hand, Verizon Wireless and Orange believe that in the near future, it is general consumers who will be the most avid users of PTT.
Judging by the resources allocated to these new services, it is clear that major wireless companies are anticipating significant growth in RTC. In addition, the integration of presence and availability through IM is a key indicator that real-time communication and enterprise applications are converging. For example, Microsoft and IBM are both offering application suites that help integrate presence information with mail clients and other enterprise systems. Companies like Avaya and Nortel are looking to integrate presence into their PBX and call center products to enable multimodal communication, which seamlessly operates across enterprise systems. Cisco has also indirectly seen a bottom line benefit from presence-enabled applications through the record sales of IP and SIP telephones, which, along with the right applications, can provide presence and buddy list integration.
The next few years will see much easier access to and tighter integration of enterprise applications, merging communication with common day-to-day productivity tools to create dynamic address books and dynamic calendars. After all, what is the point of looking at the entire list of people and phone numbers in an address book when your goal is to reach one or a few? It is far more powerful to display all active contacts and the best means to reach them at any given time. Tapping into calendars can take communication to yet another level, utilizing schedules to define how communication should be conducted throughout the day for a particular individual. For example, those with permission can see when someone is in a meeting and then efficiently select the best time and means of communication. This introduces a concept even more powerful than presence and availability–context.
Context will be the catalyst for the next revolution in communications. Although the foundation is presence and availability, contextual communication goes beyond these two attributes to form a complete integration of devices, applications and mediums. Networks are becoming increasingly more subscriber-aware and able to understand each user’s context, resulting in far more productive communication. As the RTC generation permeates the workforce and enterprises realize this level of convergence, a new model for business will emerge with greater flexibility and speed where Generation Y will feel right at home.
This is hardly a new concept. For years leading networking vendors have promoted a similar vision, touting the financial benefits that offset the costs of presence-enabling networks. For instance, by knowing the availability of a user, a service provider can save valuable network resources by not sending information–a stock quote, for example–via SMS to a user whose device is turned off. Instead, the service provider can wait until the device is available to send the message. This not only translates to a cost savings on infrastructure, but it also increases call completion, which, in turn, increases revenue. Taking this concept a step further, a user could predetermine a communication path for the service provider to follow if their mobile device is off, directing the quote to come as an instant message on an active PC client instead.
This is not to say that there are no challenges or skeptics. Naysayers will downplay the probability of this revolution in communications due to the difficulty in bringing wireline and wireless mediums into seamless harmony. The existing inconsistent wireless coverage in some areas and a lack of handoff between different mediums has been a significant obstacle. My response is that for the most part, densely populated areas have sufficient and consistent coverage. There are also “in-building” challenges to overcome, where certain structures such as office buildings or trains/metros make it harder to maintain signals. There are many ways to address these, however, from in-building repeaters and signal enhancers (numerous start-ups in this space have formed to address this market need) and even Wi-Fi. Mobile phone manufacturers including Nokia have announced handsets that can roam from mobile to Wi-Fi. These new technologies will deliver the necessary tools to bridge all mediums into a unified domain that cuts across enterprise and service provider environments to offer seamless, real-time communications on a common framework.
At the heart of a unified domain is Internet Protocol (IP), embraced by companies such as Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft. IP provides the only end-to-end protocol connecting single-user devices such as SIP phones, PCs and, soon, wireless devices. It is my opinion that this innovation is only years away, and it will be grounded by IP. Shortly, communication networks will offer coverage that delivers consistently in at least 90% of imaginable circumstances with RTC at their core.
As a foundation, RTC requires a fundamental shift in how we think about communication. Context requires a clear position on several policies and issues. The three macro concepts to consider are:
Call Control: With RTC, presence and availability are at the heart of defining the context for how users want to be contacted. User-defined policies will establish behavioral patterns that suit each user’s needs and identify how a call is routed and controlled. For instance, a user in a meeting may decide to only accept SMS on his/her mobile from a predefined list of users; all other calls go to voicemail. The exception might be a call from one’s manager–this way, if the phone rings, a user knows it is important.
Privacy: Protecting user privacy is a cardinal issue. Many users will fear that with RTC comes a loss of privacy, where one’s context is accessible by anyone. For RTC to succeed, the right safeguards must be in place for users to control their information by making it very easy to configure and update their profiles.
Application Integration: RTC convergence implies a tight integration with a number of applications to simplify and automate sophisticated call-routing capabilities such as calendars and address books. Application integration can even extend to location parameters such as GPS-enabled mobile phones, Wi-Fi networks and car ignition status. All these parameters can be combined to better understand and automate a user’s context and reduce the need for manual intervention.
With RTC, convergence implies that communication will be available across any medium, whether wireless or wireline, and any device from a PC to a traditional phone. The idea of a converged device, however, is the wrong way to approach convergence. Using presence and availability to make communication contextual and subscriber-aware is the ultimate way to reach that goal. The full realization of such a vision will take time, as today’s executives and investors don’t always understand the power of RTC. As the economy improves and the RTC Generation matures and enters the workforce with an expectation of this level of flexibility, speed and productivity, one can expect a significant advancement in how we communicate. But for now, most of us will have to live with the generation gap that still exists as the POTS generation continues to set the standard.
John Trembley is the director of telecom and networking for TimesTen, Inc. He can be reached at trembley@timesten.com.
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