You can read excerpts from AT&T filing to the FCC on their website. AT&T claims with the purchase of T-Mobile there’ll be fewer dropped and …
How could I have missed that birthday? I’ll have to send the CRS-3 a belated card.
You may recall that Cisco raised expectations just a little a year ago when it proclaimed that it would reveal a product that would change the Internet forever.
My sources tell me that Internet has said it doesn’t feel too much different.
Last week the FCC made it official: they’ve opened a new docket—that would be 11-65—for the “proposed transfer of control of T-Mobile USA, Inc. and its subsidiaries from Deutsche Telekom AG to AT&T Inc.”
Let the ex-parte comments and presentations flow.Continue reading
Is it the right time to put together a golden oldies album of our public phone system’s greatest app hits?
I think so. Even the FCC is currently scrutinizing carrier comments on sunsetting the copper wires and rusting switches that gave us five 9’s of dial-tone.Continue reading
Telecom companies have long held dominance over the way we communicate, specifically by controlling phone calls. The Internet is threatening to change this entirely – …
Maybe it’s the result of a second espresso I had this morning, but Google’s recent comment on the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund reform doesn’t read like a typical carrier screed.
It’s their engineering culture. They won me over a little when they said that “IP transmission, in itself, is not ‘magic pixie dust’ that somehow creates a regulation-free zone.”Continue reading
Sometimes grand visions, say the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, can depend on something as basic and overlooked by the lay person as a utility pole.
Think about it: to wire up the country with high-speed fiber, carriers need quick access to utility poles.
The Communications Act as amended in 1996 weighs in on this matter, calling for “nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it.”
Think of it as net neutrality for wiring.Continue reading
Having declared victory over DNS (Domain Name System) for my sipXecs project, I vaguely recall that a Supreme Court justice wrote extensively about DNS in …
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.
Now that Larry “Willie Wonka” Page has named Kansas City, Kansas the winner of the golden gigabit contest, residents there will soon be like kids in the broadband candy store.
If all goes to plan, they’ll be gorging out on super high-speed Internet goodies in 2012
You’re probably asking what the broadband situation is like in Kansas City currently, and what about a color-coded map based on the FCC’s 477 data?
We gave this project to our own oompa loompas, and they’ve cheerfully come with just the right map.Continue reading
Google announced that it will build its gigabit fiber network in Kansas City, Kansas. Pending approvals, service is planned for 2012.
Missed Aspen Institute’s IDEA Plenary (“a transatlantic dialogue to address common interests in a free and open Internet capable of enhancing economic growth”) held in Brussels, Belgium yesterday?
Not to worry, FCC Chairman Genachowski was there to address the gathered international leaders, and his talk, “The Cloud: Unleashing Global Opportunities”, was posted on the FCC site today.Continue reading
My curiosity got the better of me. While I’m completely content to use turn-key cloud telephony–OnSIP, in my case—the lure of DIY telecom is sometimes too enticing to resist.
This led me to SIPfoundry’s sipXecs, an open-source PBX that many are using instead of an on-premises metal-based solution.
SIPfoundry has grand goals for open VoIP solutions. They are an independent non-profit that hopes to promote “free and unencumbered” telephony. Which is another way of saying their sipXecs PBX software is 100% standards based. So if enough companies, small and large, install sipXecs on their servers, we can all communicate via SIP over the Internet and not pay a dime in per minute charges.
I thought I’d experiment with sipXecs to see what all the shouting was about.Continue reading
With the announcement that AT&T will be ending its all you can eat broadband for DSL and U-Verse customers, I decided to take a look at how US broadband compares with the rest of the world.
And I mean beyond Canada.
I perused data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which tracks broadband metrics, among many other economic indicators, internationally.
The US now joins Iceland, Australia, Turkey, Ireland, and the UK, as a place where major ISPs market monthly pricing plans with overusage charges.
From a global perspective, it appears that AT&T’s plan is (gasp) generous: a ceiling of 150 GB for DSL (250 GB for its fiber-based U-Verse) and $10 per 50 GB of additional usage.
As has been reported everywhere, last week Gizmo5 users learned that Google will soon be hanging up on this open-source softphone. Acquired by Google in 2009, the SIP-based Gizmo5 service will do its last “INVITE” in early April.
Now some fleeting good news: Over at OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX company, there’s an interesting post about a SIP door that opened over the weekend and then just as mysteriously closed.
For a shining moment, Google Voice numbers had associated with it a SIP address of the form: +1GVnumber@sip.voice.google.com.
In other words, it was possible for a few days to make free calls on any device that supported a SIP stack!
Why colocate? Because your data center is key to your business survival. It’s not just running your internal IT applications, but is central for communications …
New state telecom and cable regulations are not the stuff of compelling headlines. But here in New Jersey, the optimistically named “Market Competition and Consumer Choice Act” , which was recently approved in the Assembly, has actually attracted the attention of our local news outlets.
Also known as A-3766 ( S-2664 for Senate folks), this legislation has managed the neat trick of drawing complaints from both consumer groups and local municipalities.
This latest effort to modify cable franchising rules can be seen as the end-game to a 2006 law that introduced state-wide franchising (aka “The Verizon Act”).Continue reading
I raise my cup of espresso to the FCC for starting the process to reform the Universal Service Fund with the ultimate goal of modernizing a rusting regulatory structure that is not up to task of universal broadband service.
Reading the beginning of the FCC’s recent Proposed Rule Making on the USF, I was all to ready to discount the glib appraisals of the Service Fund as “inefficient” and “broken”. Sure it’s not perfect, I thought, and of course there are loopy incentives encouraging some inefficient activities, but…
A dispute between XO Communications, “one of the nation’s largest communications service providers”, and the Fund’s administrator, the Universal Service Administration Corporation or USAC, unfortunately seems to validate some of the harsh criticisms hurled at the current USF regime.
It has all the makings of an on-the-edge-of-your-seat FCC caper: battling attorneys, hyper-diligent auditors, endless bureaucratic procedures, ambiguous forms, battling attorneys, and battling attorneys.Continue reading
Yesterday’s Q&A session at the House Communications and Internet Subcommittee felt a little bit mockumentary, a little bit reality TV show with a few movie …
Casa Mila, Barcelona/Wikimedia
Australian telco rejects femtocell … Intel CEO talks wireless electric lamp … Cisco’s WiFi fail at MWC … Vodafone to avoid closed vertically-integrated systems … Android booth has awesome slide … Euro operators are over-regulated … HTC Desire S runs Gingerbread … Operators have their own app store … Augmented reality navigation app
These are a few of the themes and memes that I picked up while checking out the Mobile World Congress web site and scanning Twitter hashtags. Continue reading
