Interview of Brough Turner SVP & CTO NMS Communications

Brough Turner is considered to be one of the pioneers of VOIP technology. He studied in MIT. He and some of his friends founded NMS Communications. NMS Communications has a significant presence in the wireless industry in the whole world. Mr. Turner is a very hard working person and even at the age of 61, he is traveling different cities of Asia and Europe. Brough Turner has an excellent blog called: Communications. You can find more information about him in About page. He was featured in the ‘cover of January 2006 issue of VON magazine’.

I met Brough Turner two years ago in Internet. He is a keen observer of Asian mobile phone industry. That is why, I became interested about him. He has been very busy lately with the possible acquisition of his company. You can read more about it here: Dialogic to Acquire NMS Communications Platforms Business

 Brough Turner is very busy right now with this acquisition. Still, it was extremely kind of him to agree to give me an interview by email. In the interview, he talked about his company, outsourcing and he has given some valuable tips to Asian companies who want to make it into the global level. Here is the interview for the readers:

 Razib Ahmed: You have been involved with the mobile technology for quite some time. What are the major changes you can see now compared to the time that you started working in this field.

Brough Turner: The biggest change has been global adoption of mobile phone service – roughly three billion new subscribers in the past ten years.  In areas with a substantial base of fixed line telephones, there’s been a cultural shift as telephone numbers are less often associated with a place (home, office, friend’s house) and now associated with a person (call my number and you always reach me).  And the idea that your mobile phone is the most important thing you pick up when you leave home is a major change from ten years ago.

We’ve also learned a lot of things about mobile phones in the past ten years.  It turns out that deployment of mobile phones does more to increase people’s wealth than comparable investments in almost anything else — electricity, roads, even education.  At the same time, when you ask new phone owners what they most like about having a phone, they rank the ability to reach their family and friends as the most important, with economic benefits merely secondary.  We’ve also learned that competition really works, even in countries with substantial corruption.  Countries with four or more viable mobile operators typically experience much more rapidly declining costs and rapidly expanding subscriber bases, compared to countries with only one or two operators.

With hindsight, it’s clear the mobile phone revolution was possible because of exponential improvements on several fronts:  silicon of course (following Moore’s law), and increasing fiber capacities (for backhaul and core networks), but also new modulation schemes, new coding and new forms of spectrum reuse which have driven exponential growth in the number of bits per second that can be usefully provided per Hz, per hectar and per watt.  These exponential improvements continue, so the next ten years should be equally exciting.

 

Razib Ahmed: Tell us something about your company. What kind of projects are you involved right now?

Brough Turner: Actually, at this moment we are in the process of splitting up NMS Communications.  Over the past several years we started several new businesses.  We sold off one business (AccessGate, a wireless backhaul optimization product line) last year and we are currently in the process of dividing the two remaining businesses.  As a US public company, there are several steps required, including a shareholder vote, but by early 2009, we expect Dialogic to acquire our Platforms business and our Live Wire Mobile business to be off on it’s own.

The NMS Communications Plaforms business makes enabling technologies and platforms that help application developers create and deploy new value-added telephony services.  Our strength have historically been scaleable platforms, particularly for voice and/or video services provided in or through mobile networks.  By and large, our products are quite complementary to Dialogic’s products.  They have a substantial footprint in enterprise telephony where ours is minor.  At the carrier end, they have the Snowshore media server which is controlled via a SIP paradigm (with MSML. etc.) while we have the Vision media server that’s programmed via web paradigms (VXML and CCXML, etc.).

 

Razib Ahmed: These days, we hear a lot about outsourcing. How do you feel about it? How does outsourcing affect your business?

Brough Turner: From our beginnings (as Natural MicroSystems more than 20 years ago) we chose to focus on what we do best and outsource everything else.  That’s the only efficient approach for any business.  For example, our products involve both hardware and software, but our manufacturing has been outsourced from the very beginning.  At the moment, we happen to outsource manufacturing to a company in the US because they are well suited to our current production requirements (moderate volumes of many different products delivered on short lead times).  But, when we have had high volume products (e.g. AccessGate, a mobile network backhaul optimizer that was subsequently sold off), they have typically been manufactured in Asia (in Malaysia in the case of AccessGate).

We’ve also had a widely dispersed development team for many years.  Our headquarters is in Framingham Massachusetts in the US, but we have major development centers in Montreal and Bangalore.  We also have smaller teams in Schaumburg Illinois (near Chicago), Moscow and Hong Kong.  Most of these people are direct NMS employees because product development is core to our business.  It does take extra efforts and skill to manage a globally dispersed team but there are many paybacks.  It’s easier to find experts in specific fields when you can look across multiple locations, the mix of cultures among our staff helps us better address international markets and, more generally, teams with diverse backgrounds produce better results.

 

Razib Ahmed: You have traveled widely and you are aware of the latest happenings in mobile phone industry both in America and Asia. What are the similarities and differences you can find among these two markets?

Brough Turner: People are very similar at their core, but cultural differences certainly impact the success of specific services.  For example, ringback tones popped up in Korea in 2002 and quickly spread to many other parts of Asia, including China, then to India and, more recently, to Africa.  On the other hand, ringback tones have had relatively smaller uptake in Japan, Europe or the US.  I’ve postulated various reasons for this but I’m not sure I really understand the phenomenon. 

In every culture people want to stay in touch with their family and friends and, potentially, share things like jokes, cartoons, photos, video clips and so on.  People also want respect from their friends and associates.  This is especially an issue with teenagers who may not be confident about their identity yet.  One reason for the popularity of ring tones and ringback tones, is proving to your friends that you are cool!  While there are cultural differences, these general motivations apply to all people.

For the last 5-8 years, Asia has led the world in new mobile applications, with Europe following a year or two later and the US a year or two after that.  The reason appears to be a mix of culture, high mobile phone penetration (especially in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, etc.) and the business practices of the mobile operators (less tight walled gardens).  This might change as 3G mobile penetration in the US recently surpassed that of the EU, but at ~30% neither the US nor the EU can approach Japan or Korea where 3G penetration is over 75%.  (There is even talk of phasing out 2G in Japan by the end of 2009).  As long as Asian runs ahead of the US & EU in adoption of the latest underlying mobile technology (currently 3G), I expect Asia will lead in new mobile applications.

 

Razib Ahmed: Recently, you talked about “Asian innovation in mobile social networking” in your blog. You wrote:

“Some of his numbers may be a year old, but the impact is clear.  Asian services like QQ (740M registered users), CyWorld (used by 90% of young Koreans) and Mixi (10M mobile users in Japan) typically started before Facebook, have many more features, and are profitable!”

Still, Asian services like QQ are limited to some Asian countries. What strategies should they follow to emerge as global players like Facebook.

Brough Turner: Support as many languages as possible.  Get your users to help.  Obviously English is important, as English is at least a second language for a large number of people around the world, but it’s critical to get into as many other languages as possible as quickly as possible.  The Internet is global, but Internet communities tend to align around shared languages.  If your new application is the first in a language group, it will capture that community, gain critical mass due to network effects and end up with a sustainable competitive advantage.

Right now, there appears to be a lot of innovation in Internet applications going on in China.  Most of it’s in Chinese, but some of that innovation is showing up in other languages.  For example, italki started with a focus on helping Chinese speakers learn English and English speakers learn Chinese, but they have rather quickly expanded so, today, their website supports 16 languages and is expanding language support with the help of their users (who speak more than 50 languages).

 

Razib Ahmed: These days we hear about the LTE vs WiMAX rivalry. I think that most of us know something about WiMAX. Tell us a bit about LTE. What do you think would be the outcome of LTE vs WiMAX rivalry?

Brough Turner: Technically, LTE and WiMAX are very similar, at least in terms of radio technology.  They are likely to end up on different frequency bands in many countries but, except for differences in frequency bands, it shouldn’t be very expensive to build radios (handsets or base stations) that conform to both specifications.  LTE has to take into account the existing GSM/3GSM legacy and provide a smooth migration for existing voice telephony.  WiMAX has had the advantage of a clean slate, so it has been deployed first.  Going forward, I expect the relative performance of WiMAX and LTE to be similar at any given point in time (although I’m sure there will be many white papers written, each proving one is better than the other!).

In the long term, LTE’s GSM heritage will be an advantage.  Today, GSM and 3GSM technologies are used in 88% of all mobile phones.  GSM/3GSM-based equipment is manufactured in enormous volumes and thus ends up costing less.  So far, there are only about 6 million WiMAX subscribers and, even if there are 100 million a few years from now, WiMAX will be a fringe technology compared to GSM/3GSM/LTE.  So 5-10 years from now, if WiMAX and LTE have not merged, LTE will be much more widely deployed than WiMAX.

 

Razib Ahmed: Recently, you visited India. India is now the second largest mobile phone market. Still, iPhone received a lukewarm response in the Indian market. What should American companies like Apple do to thrive in the Indian market?

Brough Turner: Yes I was in India in June, but I’m afraid that trip was entirely devoted to visits with NMS customers where the dicussions tended to focus on more efficient ways to provide existing services (like ringback tone or missed call alerts), more efficient ways to run subscriber self-provisioning and on video technologies (as our Indian customers are looking forward to 3G services in India).  So I have no great insights into iPhone in India.

Based strictly on annecdotal information, I expect Apple needs to focus on Bollywood music and they deal with the many, many local languages in order to get traction in India.  Two major advantages of the iPhone are:  it’s the best mobile Internet browser so far and it’s easier to buy and install 3rd party applications from the Apple store than from Nokia or anyone else.  As the Indian Internet expands and 3G speeds become available, there may be more and more perceived advantages to the iPhone as a browser.  And, as Indian applications developers produce applications in local languages, that should drive iPhone adoption.

 

Razib Ahmed: Tell us something about your personal and professional background.

Brough Turner: I am an engineer in origin and I’ve been interested in complex networks (like the telephone system) since high school.  I graduated in electrical engineering from MIT and went to work for an instrumentation business (which made Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometers).  My early work was in digital signal processing and graphics.  I formed Natural MicroSystems with some friends in 1983.  Our first product, Watson, was a PC-based single line unified communications system that included both voice and a data modem (done in DSP software).  Many people loved the product and we sold tens of thousands of systems but we never figured out how to make it a commercial success.  Eventually we were very successful in the computer telephony business and then in making platforms for mobile telephony services.  Along the way I have run many parts of the business, including manufacturing (mostly outsourced!), product marketing, strategic marketing.  I’ve also done sales, sales support, IT, customer support and so on.

At this point I think of myself as an entrepreneur, but my spare time interests include physics, economics and biotech, as well as computers and communications and the impact of Telecom and the Internet on people globally.  Oh yes, and ride-on model railroads. 

There is more on my background in the cover article of the January 2006 issue of VON Magazine.