Category: Archaic Telecom

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

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.”

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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.

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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

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

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

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

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

Archaic Telecom

2010 Favorites

 

With 2010 closing up shop, it’s time for an obligatory list of favorite posts from this past year.

Based on a non-scientific review of this site’s web traffic, a few of our more popular can be found after the jump:Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Snowed In with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules

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After burning off my holiday calories shoveling out of Snowmageddon 2010, I was ready to settle down with a good book and a flagon of mulled cider. Perhaps I was still looking for more Sisyphean exercises, so instead of Harry Potter, I reached for my MacBook and downloaded the FCC’s complete Report and Order in the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet, otherwise known as the Net Neutrality rules.

Published on Friday, this 87-page document, excluding appendices and the commissioners’ separate statements, contains over 400 footnotes. A lot of work was expended, so kudos to the FCC’s paper-meisters.

Spoiler alert: the good part starts at Section IV ( paragraph 115, page 62), “The Commission’s Authority to Adopt Open Internet Rules.”

I am all for the Report’s net neutrality rules for transparency, no blocking, and no unreasonable discrimination. But after reviewing the FCC arguments in section IV, along with the usual relevant cases, I don’t think this dog will hunt.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC on Specialized Services: Yawn!

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The FCC voted 3-2 (along the usual party lines) to approve the Open Internet Order  or as the media refers to it, NET NEUTRALITY.  I suppose a set of rules that has brought condemnation from both sides of the argument can’t be all that bad. Consumers received some protections with a non-blocking rule subject to reasonable network management. As expected, the FCC did not approve its third-way approach (Title II reclassification with forbearance of many statutes).  And the agency also decided to leave mobile broadband to its own devices, so to speak.

I was most curious about the fate of specialized services, the new category of vaguely defined advanced (or as  the Google-Verizon proposal put it “additional”) capabilities that was in the FCC’s original Notice of Proposed Rule Making issued back in late 2009. And which the FCC asked for additional comments again in September 2010.

Anyway, after the FCC’s barrage of questions and stated concerns—most significantly over anti-competitive practices and re-allocation of telecom investments—it ultimately  took the completely radical stance of doing nothing.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Google Delays Announcing Fiber Winners

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Fiber optical lights

scott_waterman/Flickr

Communities waiting to hear if they’ve been selected for Google’s high-speed Internet access contest will have to wait a little longer.

In February Google said it had plans to  deploy a 1 Gig per second, fiber-to-the-home network in several communities in the US. Over 1100 towns and cities responded to their request-for-information feeler, hoping to become one of the Google fiber finalists.

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Archaic Telecom

SIP on Android

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One of my very modest goals in finding an inexpensive, usable Android tablet is replacing my cell phone with an open source SIP client. I spend enough of my time near WiFi hotspots that an Android gadget could do double-duty as a browser-email-ebook as well as a phone. And the chance to free myself from Verizon’s tentacles with WiFi telephony has been tempting me for a long time.

With the Yixin 7200 MID I finally had the right platform. Could I locate a functioning SIP client in the Android Market, Google’s answer to the App Store?

So I walked the virtual aisles of the Market and pulled a few SIP clients off the shelves for testing.

I did discover a working client and learned that the quality of Android freeware is, charitably, very uneven.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meanwhile Back at the FCC

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In case you weren’t at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this month to hear FCC Chairman Genachowski, O’Reilly has published the interview on YouTube. My Google Reader had already bombarded me with excerpts of Genachowski’s remarks (“net neutrality will happen”) and his unhappiness with the Google-Verizon proposal.

Still curious about what he said, I decided to sit through most of the interview during my lunch hour. It was a typical Genachowksi performance that he gives to interviewers who are not entirely up to speed on the issues. He was gracious, jocular, and made sure to sprinkle his conversation with the right words: innovation, competitiveness, less government, openness, and market-based forces.

And then he took an indirect swipe at the carriers when he said : “…it’s the market and consumers picking winners and losers, not people who control access to the Internet.”  Followed by a right-jab when he called the Supreme Court’s Comcast decision “seriously incorrect.”

Somewhere in course of my viewing I started to stare at a map behind the Chairman. I first thought it was a map of the world, the kind you see in television newsrooms. It was actually a conceptual Web 2.0 geography that broke the Internet community into separate islands and land masses.

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