The quality of network service is increasingly a big concern for many users and for many applications. That's because more and more people are being exposed to real-time applications running over IP. Sure, some of these are store and forward apps - Xbox-based Netflicks or Zune streaming - and some are real-time - Xbox-based live game playing, VoIP and video conferencing.

Either way, the user's experience is negatively impacted when there is a network outage or congestion. My own Xbox-Netflicks experience has been degraded in recent weeks for no apparent reason. First, I thought it was my physical LAN connection, so I made a new Ethernet connector.

Then, I thought it was my DNS configuration, so I posted my own DNS server and my cableco's DNS server addresses.

Now, I think it's just congestion on the cableco network at a certain time of day, near 4 pm where there may be many kids in the neighborhood playing Xbox live... I'm keeping a log of when the service interrupts so I can speak intelligently about the problem and maybe even see patterns over time.

But, this Internet Health Report tool from Keynote Systems provides a simple mechanism to view inter-network connection quality. The tool presents the matrix of latency results measured in ms, and averaged over 1 hour, four hours or 24 hours. Similarly, I can click on the metric drop down box and choose to see network availability in % over the past 1 hour, four hours or 24 hours. Or, packet loss over the same period.

Users can click on any one origin-destination pair and see all three results for that combination.

This kind of independent, third-party service performance tool will increasingly be useful as users ask the question, what's wrong with my ____ and what can I do, if anything, to fix it? Users will use it to choose carriers or at least integrate it into their troubleshooting practices.

I have written about how various folks are attempting to use Twitter for business in our January 2009 report, Twitter in Business and in general, it's not particularly successful.

I've experimented with Twitter myself in early 2008/9, but found it to be too onerous to stick with it. Ergo, my followers are only about 5 dozen friends, family and people who searched me out (scary thought). But, now I have figured out how to use Twitter in a way that integrates the service with my firm's web publishing engines - www.brockmann.com and www.mobileUC.net.

Using one of two commercial components that I have implemented on our sites, the Joomla plugin from TriniTronic called Nice Article Tweets Plugin, I have managed to send a tweet, automatically whenever I publish (or optionally update) an article on these sites. The post to Twitter incorporates the flag New-, the title of the post and a tiny url that links back to the article. Very cool.

In this way, Twitter becomes a kind of RSS stream. I'll see if my list of Twitter followers actually grows as a result, or better yet, if the typical average traffic to our site improves. Stay tuned...

This morning's edition of the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) published the story, Non-Campus Recruiting, by Diana Middleton which discussed how corporate recruiters were avoiding travel and interviewing MBA graduates using video technologies including Skype with PCs and web cameras and larger room-based systems. Although it seemed that no offers were made on the basis of video interviews, it was clearly shown as an inexpensive, useful and highly productive screening tool.

A user of the site commented about his employer's experience with Skype video and screening interviews calling it a positive initiative for screening interviews, but not enough to make a hiring decision.

ADTRAN, the $500 million Huntsville Alabama manufacturer of over 1,700 products, acquired in September 2009 the Ottawa Canada Microsoft-focused unified communications company, ObjectWorld. More recently, ADTRAN announced the Netvanta UC portfolio, which incorporates the rebranded ObjectWorld offering.

The Netvanta portfolio includes a wide range of busines-oriented communications products including SIP trunking gateways for hosted service providers (Netvanta 6000 series gateways), gateways for CPE deployments, SIP phones, small business IP PBXes and the new Netvanta UC solutions. Extending their presence in networking boxes, ADTRAN now enables software applications through the range of Microsoft-focused software-enabled UC:

• UC server - allows VARs to offer feature-rich, software-driven communications-flows as an add-on to existing IP PBXes, or PBXs. This is the original ObjectWorld product line.
• Business Communications server - this offer is a bundle of the ObjectWorld software and the ADTRAN Netvanta 7000 IP PBX for less than 100 users.
• Enterprise Communications server - this software-only bundle integrates an IP PBX that scales from 75 to 2,000 users with the UC server software.
• Business Applications server - the incredibly flexible formerly-ObjectWorld-branded software is available for developing specialized communications-enabled business processes.

Although ObjectWorld had been successfully addressing the needs of hundreds of companies for many years, it struggled as have many others, with the development of sufficient scale in distribution channels to effectively enable the small business market. With the combination with ADTRAN, however it strikes me that in fact, this channel challenge will disappear for these software products. ADTRAN has, over many years successfully built relationships with resellers and customers that reflects their no-nonsense approach to products and their total attention to functionality.

Video MSPs and carriers offering telepresence and video managed services have a substantial conflict to address. For a couple of reasons, they define their world in a much smaller dimension than enterprise users think of. This gap, the Expectation-Service Gap is represented by the Venn diagram on the left.

Users think of their eco-system of customers, suppliers, potential customers, potential suppliers and coworkers. Naturally, they define that scope of expectation to communicate by the large green surface area labelled 'User Expectation.' It's a big domain and somewhat shiny since expectations are high. Users have been spoiled by the excellent quality and enormous reachability available in the modern global telephone network, which includes the mobile telephone network, is capable of reliably delivering connections between any of four billion persons today, and probably another two billion before the decade is out.

On the other hand, VMSPs and carriers, being engineering-types and not necessarily entirely sympathetic to users, think in terms of on-network and off-network. They think in terms of their own service limits which are defined by the little green area labelled 'Service Limits.' Service providers are generally bound by two constraints. One, the commercial constraints of their customers where they don't get paid to worry or do anything about things that haven't been specifically contracted for, and secondly, by physical limits of control, where they can't worry about things they cannot see on their network monitoring hardware and software.

These competing views are the setup for two disappointments and two perspectives on the Expectation Gap. Users are disappointed when their service providers cannot do what they expect, and service providers are frustrated that their service doesn't meet the user's expectations. So what's at the heart of the Gap?

In the past, the Gap was the experience. Frankly, it sucked. But, with the rollout (for completely different reasons) of inexpensive high speed networks, and the availability of high definition hardware the foundations are in place to close the experience dimension of the Gap. The Gap, from the user's perspective today is the inability to conveniently, automatically, securely and inexpensively connect via video or telepresence to any other user. The Gap from the VMSP's perspective today, is the inability to make money from greatly expanding the service limits envelope to reach many, many other users.

VMSPs have the wrong view. Instead of recognizing how a greatly expanded universe of potential connections increases the value of their service to their paying user, they worry about how they're going to get paid for enabling that extra value. They think they should be paid for enabling the equivalent of the 'long distance call' between two companies. They look to the roaming fees available to mobile operators and think that's the model for them. I'll get the other service providers' customers to pay me for access to my customers.

This is a delusion. Roaming is an anomaly unique to mobile service, that has been perfectly exploited by mobile operators to the chagrin of their customers. Mobile operators get to blame the other operator for such high roaming fees even though they get a share in the charge, and negotiated it. In the USA and through regulation in Europe, roaming is not the golden goose it once was. In the USA, it's free and in Europe roaming fees between countries are smaller and getting smaller through the intervention of the European Commission.

High prices for long distance is such an obsolete notion. In the early days of telecom, people overpaid for long distance so that the high costs of local networks could be quickly paid back to the investors who would then have an incentive to invest in building networks. That's why it was a protected monopoly. Technology and competition ultimately changed all that. Today, LD is free.

We've learned that the carrier participants in the Cisco TelePresence Exchange are gathering in Paris later this month to discuss economics and possible billing methods. In the coming days, I plan to blog more about the economics of Exchanges and perhaps offer some insights on how these questions should be addressed.