Year: 2011

Archaic Telecom

ITExpo Stream of Consciousness

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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.

Continue reading

The Rack

The Great Printer Die-off

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When future paleontologists examine the fossilized remains of today’s corporate printers, they’ll re-use dinosaur die-off theory to explain the mystery of these inkjet beasts: “A series of environmental changes and perhaps a disruptive technology or two set them on the path to extinction.”

One of those disruptive events has only recently meteored through the tech sky. Anyone passing an empty Barnes and Noble— say for example, the Brontosaurus-size flagship near NYC’s Lincoln Center—knows that ebook readers have smashed the book industry into bits. Borders ain’t doing so well either.

But what’s happening in the consumer world is also recurring more quietly in the closed corporate ecosystem.

Instead of feeding their printers with reports, PowerPoints, and emails, enterprise workers have been using their laptops and now their mobile gadgets as electronic readers.

When will printers disappear from the enterprise scene altogether?Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

ITExpo East 2011

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Babak Gholizadeh/Grand Bazaar, Istanbul

No, I’m not attending.

But I am soaking up this VoIP trade show’s ambiance remotely by dipping into tweets, blog posts, and video snippets.

At past VoIP conferences—it’s frankly been a few years since I walked those aisles—there was a divide between vendors selling their enterprises wares and service providers with their service offerings.

ITExpo is instead a mashup of companies from both sides of the wire.

Of course, the cloud has much to do with this blurring of the lines. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Zoom Telephonics Tests Open Internet

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Back in November 2010, Zoom Telephonics, makers of cable modems, filed a complaint with the FCC against Comcast.

The modem manufacturer cited anti-competitive practices in Comcast’s new Physical and Environment (P&E) acceptance testing of their modems. According to Zoom’s filing, “Comcast’s P&E testing regime contains a host of unreasonable, irrelevant, time-consuming, and costly requirements.”

Current statutes in the Communications Act (Title VI, section 629) allow cable operators to restrict the use of modems to those that do not cause network harm or enable service theft.  Zoom says that its modems are being excluded based on testing criteria involving, ahem, modem weight, labeling, and packaging.

With  the approval of the FCC’s new Open Internet rules in December, Zoom seems to have a new line of attack.  Continue reading

@NYC

A MegaPhone Labs Kind of New Year

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I first learned about Megaphone Labs’  DialPlay TV product last month at HTM. This startup turns a boring DTMF keypad from your cell phone into a remote control for TV games, surveys, and trivia contests.

The same idea of reading a massive number of  dialtones in real-time also works at sports venues with giant LED displays standing in for the family-room TV.

If you were at New York City’s Times Square to watch the ball drop, you would have witnessed MegaPhone’s software in action on a building-size screen.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Netflix’s Favorite ISPs

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Yesterday, Netflix released bandwidth data measuring how well leading ISPs do at transmitting its HD videos to subscribers. All the usual suspects were listed, but it’s interesting, although not altogether surprising, that cable companies grabbed the top spots over the traditional carriers.

The number one slot is owned by Charter communications, the 4th largerst cable operator in the US, which has achieved download speeds of over 262.6 Mbps. Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner can be found battling it out for the next three positions —though Comcast has an edge.

I can’t be much more accurate in my ratings since Netflix has presented the data as a timeline graph using jarringly psychedelic colors that are giving me a migraine.

What makes this data a pretty good test of an ISP’s network is that Netflix has positioned its video content within special content distribution networks or CDNs, which are essentially video caches that resides closer, network-wise, to the actual video subscribers.

So the collected data points factor out the backbone traversals that are normally made by vanilla bit traffic. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Do You Really Need Ubiquisys’ Portable Femtocell?

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Ubiquisys, a startup backed by Google, lays claim to “the words’ first attocell—a personal femtocell.”

Femtocells are small cellular base stations that connect to the Internet on one side, and wirelessly link to a 3G cell phone on the other end.

They’re often used by cellular carriers to provide coverage for homes and businesses that are in or near dead zones.

The novelty factor of Ubiquisys’ attocell is that it’s really small, and meant for gadget-centric international business travelers who do their business in regions with high roaming charges.

It does seem like this will become one more piece of hardware, along with adapters, battery chargers, cables, etc. that many will leave behind in hotel rooms, convention booths, or bistros/enoteccas/tapas bars.Continue reading

The Rack

Inventin’ with App Inventor, Part II

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I have completed a .1 release of my first Android app, hammered together with Google’s App Inventor toolkit.

It’s a simple but trailblazing RSS displayer that pulls in bill status from the New York State Senate’s own open government platform, called unsurprisingly, Open Senate.

To be truthful there’s nothing unique or groundbreaking about another Android app that displays government information.  In fact, half-way through my work I discovered Open Senate already has shrink-wrapped iPhone and Android apps.

The revolutionary part of my efforts has little do with me; they reside with Google.  Thanks to its App Inventor, any somewhat technically evolved person can make and customize useful mobile apps that are just right for their purposes.

And it’s all free, minus your own perspiration equity. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Verizon’s Full Court Press

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To everything there is a season. A time to propose Open Internet rules. A time to seek relief from these arbitrary and capricious rules in the courts, specifically the DC Court of Appeals.

Let’s say it’s not a complete surprise that a carrier, Verizon in this instance, has decided to challenge the FCC’s recent rules on the Open Internet. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

OnSIP Evaluates Gingerbread’s SIPness

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OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX startup, has reviewed the native SIP capabilities of Gingerbread (Android 2.3).

Within the fine print of Google’s Gingerbread announcement last month was a reference to Internet calling using an onboard SIP stack. So the crew at onSIP got their mitts on a Nexus S and tried it against their own servers.

You can read the evaluation in their blog post. They note that you can’t enter a SIP address directly on the virtual numeric keypad: you first have to add it to the Nexus’s contacts app.  And the Nexus apparently blocks SIP calls that terminate on the PSTN.

It all points to Google’s ambivalent relationship with the carriers. Continue reading

The Rack

FeedSquares: A Google Reader for Archos

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I finally found one.

With all my relevant RSS feeds already nicely organized in my Google Reader, I naively thought it would be easy enough to view my feeds with an Android app.

Wrong.

For those who have tuned in late, the Archos 7o Internet Tablet doesn’t come loaded with Google Market. It’s a serious inconvenience  since I don’t have access now to Google’s free Android apps, although not fatal.

My first idea was to try loading a semi-official Google Reader apk onto my tablet. The one I eventually tracked down in an Android forum predictably failed to register with my online Google credentials.

I turned next to Archo’s own Android app store, AppsLib. After a few false starts, I discovered a winner.Continue reading

@NYC

Hoboken Tech Meetup: 1/17/11

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I’ve read many, many tech white papers sprinkled with the conventional bizspeak phrase, return on investment. But at Hoboken Tech Meetup last night, I came across a new metric, social return on investment or, in acronymese, SROI while listening to founder Malcolm Arnold discuss his company RubyNuby.

RubyNuby is a social good company that teaches Ruby on Rails programming to at-risk and disadvantaged youth. The startup matches teens with professional mentors, sponsors start-up competitions, and gets its youthful members high-paying jobs.

There were other startups with big dreams and compelling demos.  You should’ve been there!Continue reading

Social Studies

Same as it Ever Was

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Wikipedia

I’ve yet to read Nick Carr’s latest, The Shallows, which takes a pessimistic view of the effects of writing and scanning  tweets, SMSs, IMs, etc. on our neural wiring.

It’s on my reading list. Certainly his claim that our attention spans are being stunted, which may ultimately degrade our overall ability to follow more complex, non-shallow arguments when needed, has made its way into our public arguments on the Internet and always-on digital technology

In his Rough Type blog, Carr recently responded to an essay by Justin Smith that takes an opposite view. Smith, writing for Berfrois, points out that transient, non-deep relationships have been  with us since the first “have a good day!” was uttered.

The Internet just turns what were trivial, meaningless interactions within our own small social groups into trivial virtual interactions with our friends, along with a much larger network of  “friends”.Continue reading

@NYC

New York Tech Meetup 1/10/11: The Nobility of Failure

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With a case of post-holiday ennui setting in, I decided to forgo a visit to Skirball and instead tuned into last night’s NYTM video stream from my couch.

It was great entertainment and far more edifying than what’s transmitted over my archaic bronze-age remote vision box. I may go so far as to claim that it was the most interesting and, in a way, uplifting set of demos I’ve seen since I started attending NYTM nine or so months ago.

Before I run down my list of favorites, something that Nate Westheimer said captured the spirit of tech in New York and, I think,  just about any other town where there’s a startup scene:

“If you’re working on a startup, you’re gonna fail. Seriously, if you don’t think that’s true, you’re delusional.”

Nate’s larger point was that we’re all part of a community who want to change the world, and while our own efforts may not achieve success in a narrowly defined way, we may just inspire someone who will.

Here’s my quick rundown of inspiring demos: Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Twilight of POTS Regulation

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Telecom consultant Gary Audin has recently come out with a solid overview article on a question that has no doubt kept telecom wonks up at night: Can the PSTN be Shut Down?

I include myself in that geeky group who ponders whether the public switched telepone network (PSTN) can be unplugged. For those not familiar with the building blocks of our legacy telephone system —class five and four switching points, trunks, copper pairs—his article should be edifying.

Audin’s end-of-life discussion (available from webtorials.com) was triggered by an AT&T comment submitted to the FCC back in December 2009. The unthinkable is more than an academic exercise for our nation’s largest carrier. In their filing, AT&T asked the FCC to workout a “firm deadline for the phase out of POTS service and the PSTN.”

AT&T was writing in response to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan inquiry, and their suggestions and advocacy are framed as a way to achieve this agency’s call for universal  broadband: dropping support of the PSTN, they say, will allow it to focus on in its major IP initiative, U-verse (more on that later).

I suppose I’m impressed that AT&T is looking to the FCC for leadership in this area, considering their overall low opinion of our nation’s telecom regulators.

So you know they must want something.Continue reading

The Rack

Android on Archos: Annoyances

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Wikipedia

I like my newest gadgedroid, the Archos 7o Internet Tablet. It is usable in a way that the lower cost tablets I purchased earlier, and returned, were not.

With sipdroid now installed and configured to work with my onSIP virtual PBX, I’ve turned airy cloudware into a working, low cost mobile phone solution. The Archos’s email app is completely usable, the browser is browsable, and as I just wrote about, I’ve started introducing my own apps using App Inventor.

But …

Archos tablets do not have Android Market installed. That’s not completely bad news, though certainly a disappointment. To load a free Google app onto the Archos 7o (and presumably the rest of their product line), you’re forced to hunt for .apk files in various forums and Android-dedicated sites, and then install manually.

I’ve begun to experience in the nitty details of Android what many others have already gone through: open Android software does not mean software that will install and work uniformly on all devices.

For example, I tried to get the stand-alone Google Reader app to behave on my Archos. Continue reading

The Rack

Inventin’ with Google App Inventor, Part I

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I first learned of Google App Inventor’s existence through David Pogue’s New York Times column. Over the summer, Pogue reported on his experiences using an early beta version of this then invite-only software.

As a former user of visually-oriented rapid development environments, I had a good sense of what the Googlers had come up with.

So it was fun to read how Pogue, no technical slouch by any means, and an expert assistant (his 13-year old son), struggled with this early, glitchy release of Inventor.

Pogue decided that App Inventor was not, in the words of Google’s marketing team, “programming for the masses.”

Based on a long afternoon’s work with the new public release of App Inventor, I would describe it as follows:  “a lightweight Android development environment that lets programmers, students, hobbyists, corporate IT-types, and others in this demographic install a simple app onto a smartphone.”

I can see why Google went with their more enticing call to action slogan. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

New Year, New Android, New SIP Client (Sipdroid)

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I made good on the first of my New Year’s resolutions by overcoming my Android Thriftiness Syndrome and splurging for the Archos 7o Internet Tablet. As soon as I powered it on, it was clear my investment (about $270) had almost paid off.

I watched as the 1 GHz Cortex A8 processor and graphics accelerator made the grass in the default wallpaper gently sway in the virtual breeze. Everything else was equally fluid: WiFi, keyboard, and gesturing. And then with an over-the-air firmware update, I finally was able to enjoy the stabler Froyo (Android 2.2).

I was ready to download a SIP client app, preferably cSipSimple, which I had written about before. Unfortunately, Android Market is not available with the Archos tablets.

Darn.

I had known this before the purchase, but  didn’t realize how limited Archos’s own “AppsLib” was. Less choices, and more importantly the CSipSimple version I installed on my Archos 7 was not the same as the Market one. Continue reading