Archaic Telecom

Deep Packet Inspection and Revolution

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One of the corporate blogs I review on occasion is Cisco’s The Platform.

In a post published on Sunday, and in time for the press deluge coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco pre-announced its new “framework” for mobile operators, called MOVE or Monetization, Optimization, and Videoscape Experience.

Run of the mill marketing prose. My attention was instead engaged by a product referred to in some of the MOVE marketing material, Cisco’s ASR  5000  “gateway mutlti-media platform.”

The impressively engineered ASR 5000 could probably stop a Facebook inspired revolution at the speed of a mouse click. And as a propaganda minister, you wouldn’t have to take your country’s Internet off the grid to accomplish this.Continue reading

@NYC

New York Tech Meetup 2/8/11: Hackopolis

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Last night at New York Tech Meetup there were clear signs that the local tech ecosystem is growing and evolving.

First, the NYTM organization itself is looking for a managing director to essentially oversee the affairs of the organization—events, outreach, special programs, marketing.  The jobs starts at $65k per year (see below).

The second data point was NYTM board member, Evan Korth, announcing that hackNY.org, which he helped co-found, is doubling the size of its summer intern program. Last year, hackNY, placed 12 students in NYC startups, including etsy, 10gen, and others. Note to startups: you  have till February 18 to submit an application for interns.

The third data point was that the demos last night were really good.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC to Launch New Rules on USF

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FCC Chairman Genachowski has set a vote tomorrow for a  Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation reform.

Some of the ideas Mr. G sketched out in a speech today, in which he called the ICC System “flawed” and “unstable” and the USF “plagued with inefficiencies”,  had already been outlined in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.

The most striking proposal in the speech, delivered at The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was a plan to “phase down intercarrier payments.”

As I’ve written about before (see the “Shoot the Laywers” post), the ICC rewards local carriers, mostly rural, with high per minute payments for calls terminated on their switches.  These access fees are split with services that have set up intimate talk —read porn—conference bridges in what is referred to as “traffic pumping.”

Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

ITExpo Regulatory 2.0: Shoot All the Lawyers

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There was one part of ITExpo I was able to attend remotely.

The Regulatory 2.0 sub-conference at ITExpo is an under-appreciated gathering of lawyers, FCC observers, engineers, and legally-savvy telecom entrepreneurs, who all had definite viewpoints on net neutrality and other regulatory matters.

Thank you Rich Tehrani and TMC (the organizers of ITExpo) for live-streaming the panel discussions of this “co-located” event to the millions of policy wonks who care about section 706 authority. 😉

Not knowing what to expect, I tuned into the “If Engineers Wrote the Rules” chat. It was less than an hour, but I thought someone on this panel would suggest how the telecom rules should be organized in a more logical, Spock-like way.

Other than wanting to remove lawyers with great prejudice from the FCC, the only policy recommendation offered was less rules.

While I didn’t agree with many statements coming from the panel, which included Richard Shockey, co-author of the SIP RFC and now board chairman of the SIP Fourm, it was a stimulating discussion and I learned a few things.Continue reading

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