60 Seconds with Mark Foster

By Richard "Zippy" Grigonis, COLUMNS: Q&A

Mark Foster has been with NeuStar (http://www.neustar.com) since November 1999. He was an independent consultant from 1994 until November 1999, during which time he was the lead inventor of local number portability, conducted the first industry field trial of local number portability in the Seattle area, and was heavily involved in industry technical, policy and regulatory discussions leading to the adoption of local number portability. Foster has also held important positions with Stratus Computers, Phone Base Systems, and Quest Communications. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics and computer science from the California Institute of Technology.

Richard “Zippy” Grigonis recently spoke with Mark Foster about SIP, IMS and ENUM.

RG: Most people probably don’t realize that NeuStar is not only heavily involved with SIP but also with ENUM — tElephone nUmber Mapping, or “Electronic NUMbering” as it’s also known.

MF: NeuStar helped define SIP at the IETF. NeuStar’s Jon Peterson wrote most of the core RFP documents for SIP. Obviously we’ve been one of the lead developers and contributors to the core SIP standard, as well as ENUM. We’re also active with a different group called the Liberty Alliance, and that also deals with identity management. Indeed, we’ve brought a lot of that work into the IETF, and one of the most recent areas of work on SIP itself relates to closing the final security issues around SIP, which is what we refer to as SIP Identity. We think this is the critical final part of the core SIP standards, to make SIP truly secure on an end-to-end basis across a large number of differing usage scenarios.

RG: Will SIP retain its identity as IMS [IP Multimedia Subsystem] takes off?

MF: Frankly, an area of very strong commercial and deployment interest we see now around SIP is actually in a pre-IMS context. IMS is fairly large set of technology standards, protocols, hardware — a whole huge architecture. Many industry segments are trying to understand what the business case is; in other words, what new revenue or cost savings can be achieved by undertaking large potential IMS infrastructure investments. While this massive IMS work is underway, we’re seeing a quiet revelation among various developers and operators that SIP technology is actually far more deployable today in terms of addressing immediate problems and generating very real revenue streams. Not coincidentally, this is a major theme of NeuStar’s work; specifically, our recent acquisition of FollowApp, which specializes in next-gen messaging products for mobile operators. Mobile messaging is the second biggest revenue stream for mobile operators — about $60 billion year generated by 1.3 billion users. Most mobile operators offer text messaging, which has remained unchanged for about 10 years, and which in turn is built on 30-year old SS7 technology. FollowApp’s 19 mobile network operator customers worldwide have already bought, deployed and are in the process of launching a next-gen messaging product that uses SIP at its core and will be used to upgrade existing mobile messaging products, such as text and multimedia messaging. FollowApp adds essentially instant messaging features, such as presence, to mobile messaging. The ability to use SIP-based technology to upgrade an existing revenue segment for mobile operators is a huge opportunity. It does two things: The addition of presence and multimedia boosts the mobile messaging volume of individual subscribers 4 to 6 times over current usage rates. At the same time, it drops the cost of using existing SS7-based technology, which adds up to a third of the total cost.

At 3GSM in Barcelona we saw that the biggest single area of activity in the mobile industry today is the emergence of this next-gen mobile IM capability. It’s exciting because it’s SIP-based at the core and we think that over time it will not just revolutionize messaging, but also will help to introduce in a gradual, phased way, the core essence of IMS, without the need for making available the total IMS infrastructure from the outset.

This is a completely different approach from what most operators in the industry have focused on as it relates to SIP and IMS technology deployment. It’s much more phased, seamless and organic — and revenueand cost-oriented. We’re talking about making a huge revenue and cost savings impact today, as opposed to groping for the IMS promise of the future. So what’s not to like about that?

Richard “Zippy” Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.