Cloud Telephony: High Availability with sipXecs

My world was shaken a little when Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud or EC2 collapsed two weeks ago, temporarily closing the doors on such sites as Quora, Reddit, FourSquare, and  others.

The trigger appears to have been a mysterious network event that occurred at Amazon’s “USA-EAST-1” availability zone, leading to delays in Amazon’s EBS and eventually bringing the show to a stop.

If you are not familiar with AWS—oh sorry, Amazon Web Services—and its terminology then most of the accounts in the news may have left you more, not less, anxious about the state of cloud computing.

Because I recently completed a DIY project (see reference below) in which I tested a very intriguing open-source SIP comm server called sipXecs (pronounced sipX, the ecs is silent) in Amazon’s EC2, my free-floating cloud concerns now settled on cloud telephony.Continue reading

Afternoons With sipXecs

Two weeks ago I contracted the cloud-based telephony bug and found myself experimenting with sipXecs, SIPfoundry’s 100% SIP communications system.

I only advanced so far: just enough to visit and push the buttons on the sipXecs web-based configurator before I ran into a brick wall called DNS.

Translation: without an Internet phone book to look up addresses, I couldn’t register a SIP phone and actually use this thing

Figuring that it would be good for my soul, I decided to spend a few lunch hours last week learning just enough DNS to set up a cloud-based sipXecs system that actually was usable.

I assumed that this effort would reward itself in spiritual IT and SIP wisdom.

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Brand X and Information Cooties

With pre-election talk of new telecom laws and in the aftermath of the Comcast decision, I was hoping to not revisit the spooky crypt containing moldy Supreme Court decisions and worm-eaten FCC regulatory rulings for a few months. But I was dragged back into this basement last week, when I received an email about a new study commissioned by “Broadband For America.”

BfA is “dedicated to making broadband available to all Americans” and counts former FCC commissioner Michael Powell as an honorary co-chairman. There’s not much else about the organization on their web site, besides a list of, ahem, grass-roots organizations that make up its membership. You can read more about BfA in the reference section.

Written by University of Pennsylvania law professor, Christopher Yoo, “Reclassifying Broadband as a Title II Telecommunications Service” takes the view that because the FCC’s third-way approach is in contradiction of statutes, rulings, Supreme Court decisions, and plain common sense that it can not possibly pass legal muster..Continue reading

Non-innovative ISPs

A article in Wired by Ryan Singel does a nice job of explaining why the cable ISPs need regulation. As this blog has also been saying, reclassification of their services as telecommunications, the current FCC strategy, undoes a bad course steered by the Powell FCC with help from the Supreme Court.

Here’s the money quote:”The broadband barons don’t want to provide you fast internet. It’s too close to being a utility for their tastes (that’s boring and lacks huge profit margins) and requires too much investment.

What he said! The broadband cable providers’ business model is about restricting the possibilities of the Internet. For example, I suspect your ISP is like mine (I’m stuck with Comcast) in redirecting bad URLs (“404” errors) to their own highly-skewed page of alternative suggestions. Continue reading