Axel Rouvin/Wikipedia
Fax over IP … Aculab cloud … AT&T mobile hotpot … Kevin Martin recalls threat to change FCC vote … Sprint’s WiMAX … Startup Camp this evening … the end of POTS in 10 years … open source UC with Asterix and Elastix … Allworx gigabit Ethernet phone … SIP trunking … hosted PBX … cloud-based media processing …
That’s as much as I’ve picked up reading tweets, watching short videos, and dipping into a few blog posts. I’ve not been to a telecom-focused trade show event recently. So it’s reassuring and a sign of industry health (except for, er, fax over IP) that many of the same players, products, and big themes that ruled a few years ago still are making waves at ITExpo 2011.
What’s really new is the rise of powerful data centers —the cloud—and the virtualization technology that makes it all possible.
I was therefore most intrigued by the buzz around the keynote speech on cloud-based VoIP delivered by Aculab’s Alan Pound.
From what I can gather, Pound shared his vision of a telecom-media platform in the cloud that would be programmed using web languages and techniques. I took a brief visit to the Aculab web site to learn more about their AMS platform, which is the source of Pound’s optimism.
The idea of programmable telecom infrastructure is not new; it’s been around since the telco’s Intelligent Network was first thought about and partially implemented in the 80s and 90s. It never fully achieved all its goals, and a successor platform to IN, called Parlay, which took up the open infrastructure mantle, has languished if not already passed on to the Great Platform in the sky.
It seems AMS (Aculab Media System) moves the IN concept in the right direction, in theory allowing operators to create services using Python or C# with a set of open building blocks.
I’ll get back to reading ITExpo tweets and contacting a few sources tomorrow. I hope to have more to say on cloud-based telecom services.
Related articles
- ITExpo East 2011 (technoverseblog.com)
- Aculab Media System (aculab.com)
- Rich Tehrani’s TMC blog (tmcnet.com)
