Category: Archaic Telecom

Archaic Telecom

OnSIP: Real PBX Flavor in the Cloud

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Junction Networks is a hosted PBX app provider that lets startups and small businesses pull a VoIP phone systems out of thin air or, more accurately, out of the cloud.  The company was founded in 2004, and open standards were practically written into their constitution.  In other words, they support SIP.

Their OnSIP hosted PBX service has a maturity level that will appeal to businesses—tech and otherwise—that want a phone system and not a collection of APIs with some sample apps.

I spent a  morning setting up and testing auto-attendants, hunts groups, conference bridges, and voice mailboxes on my OnSIP demo system.  It worked without a hitch.   And it was rewarding, in a telecom kind of way, to  finally use my collection of free SIP softphones (X-Lite and SIP Communicator) as true office phones and bask in the glow of emulated message waiting indicator lights.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Google Puts its Foot Down on Title II

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The FCC just posted an ex parte filing from Google in which the search giant makes it feelings on net neutrality and Title II reclassification crystal clear. Here’s the money quote:

“The FCC needs to assert affirmative oversight and enforcement authority regarding the broadband services sector, much as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission uses its more general jurisdiction to oversee other industry sectors, such as providers of Internet applications and content. In that regard, I discussed how, in light of the Comcast decision, continued use of Title I ‘ancillary’ authority to oversee the broadband sector likely would expose the agency needlessly to repeated significant litigation risks affecting a wide range of broadband- related policy priorities. ” Continue reading
Archaic Telecom

Dueling Headlines on iPhone 4

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Duct tape: also helps iPhone reception

I’m getting a little dizzy reading the opinionating and newsitorials on Apple’s antenna problem in its newest iPhone.  The latest data point that’s being argued about is Consumer Reports’ lab test. The venerable pro-consumer testing magazine couldn’t recommend the iPhone 4 after detecting signal degradation in their radio frequency isolation chamber.  And  CR placed the blame on the iPhone rather than the AT&T network.

However, they did suggest a quick fix: afix duct tape or another non-conducting material to the lower left hand corner of the iPhone.

In any case, the Consumer Reports story has generated some amusing  headlines.  Take a look at two Dan Frommer’s pieces today in Silicon Alley Insider: Suddenly, Everyone is Talking about an iPhone 4 Recall (this morning, 9:51 am) and Sorry, But This Whole iPhone 4 Thing is a Non-issue and Will Blow Over (11:17 am).Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Deal of the Day in 2015: “No Data Limits btwn 8-9 PM”

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You can sense where the Internet may be heading by looking at the bandwidth policy platforms that core infrastructure vendors are offering to carriers.

With equipment from Tekelec, a major networking equipment player, cable companies can monitor and allocate bandwidth dynamically, as well as grant special deals to subscribers.

For example, a video web site could temporarily allow downloads to not count against a customer’s data limits as set by the cable ISP.  Or the web site of a content provider could purchase better QoS—lower latency or more bandwidth—between its servers and subscribers’ endpoint devices.

Tekelec’s Camiant Policy Management platform would handle all this.

There’s nothing inherently illegal with allowing carriers to price discriminate based on volume, service, or even time of day.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Cisco Cius: Unimaginative, but Slightly Intriguing

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Cisco Systems Logo
Image via Wikipedia

Perhaps only a company of Cisco’s still considerable market heft can foist its recently revealed Cius (pronounced “see us”) tablet on the citizens of cubeland. Many of the tech bloggers are underwhelmed and ask the question, “Why?”.

This tech blogger has the same query. Once upon a time the gadgets in the office were not obtainable on the street; now consumer gadgetry is far better than what’s available or officially allowed in walled off corporate castles.

For the record, the Cius is a 7” tablet that supports a multi-touch screen, WiFi/BlueTooth, HD video (720p), HD audio, 8-hour battery, and front and rear (for taking pictures of your coworkers?) facing cameras. The company expects to ship the tablet in 1Q2011.

Price? Under $1000. (long pause) Now for the intriguing part: Cius will run a modified version of  the Android OS.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Non-innovative ISPs

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A article in Wired by Ryan Singel does a nice job of explaining why the cable ISPs need regulation. As this blog has also been saying, reclassification of their services as telecommunications, the current FCC strategy, undoes a bad course steered by the Powell FCC with help from the Supreme Court.

Here’s the money quote:”The broadband barons don’t want to provide you fast internet. It’s too close to being a utility for their tastes (that’s boring and lacks huge profit margins) and requires too much investment.”

What he said! The broadband cable providers’ business model is about restricting the possibilities of the Internet. For example, I suspect your ISP is like mine (I’m stuck with Comcast) in redirecting bad URLs (“404” errors) to their own highly-skewed page of alternative suggestions. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Is Google Voice Net Neutral?

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Not according to, er, AT&T.  “Intellectual contradiction” and “noisome trumpeter” and other mean words were lobbed at Google by AT&T in a letter to the FCC in September 2009.  You get a little dizzy reading this contrivance especially when AT&T is holding this search provider’s feet to the fire by quoting an  FCC policy statement on Internet competition: “consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service.”

Wow, so does that mean AT&T is suggesting that the FCC should be regulating Internet applications to promote competition?

This would all be another day-in-the-life of squabbling service providers—read below the he-says-she-says between AT&T and T-Mobile over competitive pricing for TDM-based backhaul — but this is Google, and Google Voice is now open to the public.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Twilio’s OpenVBX: Open Source Attendant

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I downloaded OpenVBX, Twilio’s bendable, programmable cloud-based unified communications platform, tried out a few call control flows, and then drifted off into a reverie about telecom start-ups before the dot.com crash.

When the CLECs and ASPs first came on the scene in the 90s, they were offering hosted personal attendants (or assistants)—which was the term used before “Google Voice-like”—that allowed subscribers to configure find-me/follow me schedules for cell, home, and office numbers,  set up voicemail notifications, and craft simple IVR menus. They would often  throw in  speech rec, and support virtual presence through local phone numbers.

Maybe $30 per month, with a cap on minutes. These personal auto attendants were  tasty telecom appetizers and considering what was available from incumbents at the time, practically disruptive.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Notice of Inquiry on Broadband Reclassification

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Let the games begin and ex parte filings flow! The FCC formally opened its proceedings yesterday on the classification of broadband Internet.   The agency released a 64 page, footnote-chocked Notice of Inquiry, Framework for Broadband Internet Service, to set this round in motion.

The document nicely explains the recent  history that led to the agency’s third-way approach and the policy considerations at stake (universal service, privacy, public safety).  I reviewed parts of this thing, especially the section covering recent legal history, and it all stands as a sobering reminder of how the FCC (under Chairman Powell) went completely off-course in 2002.

In the FCC’s 2002 Declaratory Ruling that cable modem was an information service, it called broadband cable a  “single, integrated service that enables the subscriber to utilize Internet access service,” and that telecommunications component (the transmission part) was “not . . . separable from the data processing capabilities of the service.”

Even in 2002 that clearly wasn’t the case.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The AT&T-Verse

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Waves of bad news coming out of AT&T recently stand as a reminder of what life would be like if the crown was restored to this former monarch.

First there was the iPad security escapade wherein a group of hackers fooled a very insecure AT&T web form to display email addresses of iPad owners. Then the pre-order web meltdown in which customers for Apple’s iPhone 4  were faced with an AT&T back-end order entry system that stopped working. Then there’s the customer who received a terse cease-and-desist voicemail response after he emailed AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson to complain about the new caps on data—Zappos’s Tony Hsieh is probably smiling and FedExing a copy of his latest book, Delivering Happiness, to Randall.

Add to this brew the usual problems with AT&T’s 3G coverage (see TechCrunch’s  wireless frustrations) and barely acceptable customer service, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of how telecom was delivered in the Middle Ages (circa 1970s) when AT&T and the Bells were the only games in town.

And to rub salt into our wounds, AT&T is threatening to cut off investment in its U-verse/IPTV cable rollout if the FCC doesn’t reconsider its reclassification of cable broadband as Title II telecommunications.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Free WiFi at Starbucks Starting July 1

MIAMI - JANUARY 28: A Starbucks Coffee is see...
Image by Getty Images

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced free WiFi  yesterday at Wired’s Business Conference.

Obviously, this is good news for Web-browsing-coffee-slurpers everywhere, and is another validation for Starbucks as a third place between work and home.  It is also a win for AT&T against cable operators Comcast, Comvision, and Time Warner, who were planning on offering free WiFi hotspots in the NYC metropolitan area.  AT&T provides WiFi for Starbucks.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

From AT&T Picturephone to Apple FaceTime

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AT&T Picturephone

It’s been a long standing journalistic practice that when writing about the failure of yet another video phone product, you march out AT&T’s Picturephone launch at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. I believe it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple’s new FaceTime will break the long losing streak of this concept and make video chats as natural and popular as, well, a cell phone call. Even though we finally have a video phone winner, it’s still instructive to look at that early Bell product, if only to understand why it will take a company like Apple to make it a mass success.

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss of privacy, but thought it would be counterbalanced  by the public’s just-under-the-surface narcissism. Their original advertising slogan was “Some Day You’ll be A Star” (see P. Coburn’s, The Change Function). This was a  bold call to arms for a pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, and pre-Youtube America.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T’s New Pricing Plan

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Perspectives from David Pogue (New York Times) and Stacy Higginbotham (Gigaom) are a good starting point to understanding what data caps, pricing tiers, and tethering charges imply about the state of wireless competition (less than thriving) and profit expectations of a big carrier (“greedy”).  The money quote from Pogue after the jump:

Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Visualizing Broadband Competition

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After tuning into parts of Google’s IO  conference last month,  news about version 3 of the Maps API slowly made its way into my waking consciousness. I had some time last week to explore this newer, cleaner Map interface as part of a project I’ve been thinking about.  I wanted to get a handle on competition in the broadband sector, a topic I’ve been covering since the start of this blog, and was hoping to use visualization tools to get answers and also generate new questions.

While trolling the FCC’s Gov 2.0 sitelet, I came across files containing service provider competitive data.   I then  learned about the extensive data the FCC captures from carriers on a per zip code basis as part of its “Form 477” database.  Some of the 477 statistics are publicly available, but much is still closed off, (Hey, FCC open those files!)

I just needed a way to render zip codes into geo data suitable for mapping. A few more Google searches led me to state-by-state files of zip code polygon paths at the US Census Bureau’s page of cartographic boundary data.

I had enough to get started.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

700 MHz Public Spectrum at Work on the Gulf Spill

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The FCC reported that  emergency agencies in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were able to stitch together a 700 MHz radio network to connect first responders and government workers.   This was an ad hoc telecom effort to, in effect, route callers into the right conference group.

The agencies in these Gulf states created a workable, but still somewhat primitive (compared to what’s coming), radio trunking system to share available frequencies more efficiently and allocate them into separate radio talk groups.

A better solution is in the works.
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Archaic Telecom

Verizon's Good Deal: 1 Mbps for $20/month, forever

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Carriers have always loved to meter. They are utilities after all.  Of course, then came the Internet,  dirt cheap bits,  and a generation of consumers brought up on free.  Wanting to charge on a piecemeal basis but fearful of consumer outrage on being nickel-and-dimed, the telecom industry has been adopting pricing tiers (see AT&T) as a compromise solution.

With tiers, the meter isn’t running. Instead, customers pay a fixed amount for a given level of service (speed, capacity, quality, etc.)   This has traditionally been the arrangement in business telecom—of course, in that world you’re protected by service level agreements that pay out for disruptions, excessive latency, and packet errors.

I was excited to learn about an interesting variation on the pricing tier model that was revealed in a  letter from Verizon.  In its latest  marketing campaign, Verizon promises to lock in a  stingy 1 Mbps broadband for its subscribers at $19.99 per month, forever: “...low price you can count on, month after month, year after year.”
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Archaic Telecom

Communications Act Version 2.0

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Congress announced on Monday that they will start the process of revising the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The key committee players (Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Henry Waxman, and Rep. John Boucher) will bring together “stakeholders” in a “series of bi-partisan, issue focused meetings beginning in June.”

As you may vaguely remember, the ’96 legislation was intended to spur innovation and competition by forcing the incumbents to unbundle parts of their networks and make them available to competitive carriers at wholesales prices.

The incumbents resisted mightily both in the trenches and in the courts, and the competitive carriers that have survived to this day are just holding on.

There is a big difference this time around as Congress rolls out 2.0 of the Act. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Apple: World's Most Profitable Mobile Manufacturer

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According to tech research firm Gartner, Apple sold over eight million mobile handsets in 1Q 2010 for a 2.7% share of the market and ranks 7th on the leaderboard (hat tip to MacRumors.com).

Nokia is in the first spot with over 110 million units sold in the first quarter.

However, Apple’s iPhone sales add up to over $5 billion, while all of Nokia’s unit sales across its many models accounted for $9 billion.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The Real FCC Plot: Open Internet Access

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After the FCC lost its net neutrality case against Comcast, I put on hold a project to review a series of YouTube videos involving Chairman Genachowski. The rough plan was to gain some insight as to how the FCC would approach net neutrality, open internet, and universal access based on Genachowski’s public statements. I wasn’t going to do this alone, instead I would enlist the resources of Crowdflower’s cloud workers to help with the analysis.

That was ages ago (last month). Since then the FCC has announced its plan to place has placed broadband transmission under Title II regulation and has regained the net neutrality high ground. And in response, one well known, respected FCC watcher, Glen Beck, has said that the President plans to regulate the Internet and control the “misinformation” through net neutrality—there was also some talk about Marxism and public utilities.

This was enough to spur me into action and get those videos scanned for certain keywords.Continue reading