Category: Archaic Telecom

Archaic Telecom

Cisco Loses $3.7M Patent Suit

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Cisco Systems, lnc.

A federal jury in Texas decided in favor of closely held Commil USA in its patent infringement suit against Cisco. Commill USA owns a fixed mobile convergence patent that was developed by an Israeli tech company, also called Commil.

The Israeli company, started by three engineers in 2000, gained early success with a networking architecture to switch calls between Bluetooth and cellular.

With the networking industry’s move to WiFi , Commil couldn’t develop a similar type of technology and the company was closed down by CEO Yuval Duvev.
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Archaic Telecom, Social Studies

Multimedia Fun with SIP

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In my evolving unified communications projects, I’ve been searching for a way to switch media between voice and text. My current two Tropo apps (the headline reader and the Gov 2.0 bill browser) are voice-centric, but at times I would like to eliminate the text-to-speech part and just send the text.

This should be possible with SIP, which underlies the unified communications platforms I’ve been accessing with my X-Lite softphone.

So called “multi-modal” communications, in which device capabilities (plain cell phone, smartphone with keyboard, smartphone with video,etc.) and presence ( in meeting, on the road, in the quiet car) are acknowledged in routing and rendering decisions, is one of the important advances of this session technology.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Wideband Audio Anyone?

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Glad I’m not the only curmudgeon who’s troubled by the state of 21st century audio! The lower quality of digitally compressed MP3 (compared to CD ) made the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. Economics and convenience are to blame for the lossy, lower-sampled recording formats that are used to cram more tunes into our portable devices.

So why are our cell phone conversations still stuck with a slice of audio spectrum that dates to the 1930s? I’ve written about a newer wide band codec (G.722 standard) that could deliver a far broader 7kHz of sound. Unfortunately, you’re more likely to experience that on station-to-station calls in a large corporate environment (courtesy of Avaya, Cisco, and other enterprise players).

Outside of the confines of an office park, we’re all struggling to make ourselves heard over a skinny, tinny sounding 3.3kHz swath. I found some of the answers as to why this is the case from a presentation given at this year’s eComm event.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC’s Third Way Approach

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As expected, the FCC has decided to reclassify Internet broadband as a telecommunications service. It’s approach is to apply Title II common carrier requirements to Internet broadband, but forbear most of the provisions except six, those associated with denial of service and unreasonable practices (in other words, net neutrality).

You can read the legal theory behind the reclassification and forbearance here.

Updated: After reading through the legal reasoning behind the FCC decision, I was nodding in agreement with some of the ideas being explored. One is that different parts of Internet communications require separate regulatory approaches.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Reclassification: Vonage, Nay.

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Based on “anonymous sources”, the New York Times is reporting that the FCC will reclassify cable broadband today as a hybrid beast, part information  and part telecommunications service. This is based on the well known principle that voice (a transmission that doesn’t involve a change in format) can infect the information part (a format changing transmission) and… forget it, it’s too painful to go into.

So you would think that information and content providers would uniformly welcome the FCC’s new classification scheme as a way to preserve net neutrality? Not so fast.

As I had argued in an earlier post, facility-less VoIP carrier  are not going to be very excited about having the legacy telecommunications legal superstructure of Title II placed over them.

If you dig into recent FCC filings, you’ll see that at least one major VoIP provider, Vonage,  has concerns about the FCC’s helping hand.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

And one more thing … SIP

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I have been writing lately about my experiences setting up several unified communications applications, most recently one involving an open government project with hosted service provider Tropo. The projects were cell-phone centric, and assumed I would be issuing commands into my aged Samsung model while I was managing other activities—driving, drinking coffee while driving, etc.

I do engage with larger devices, and with my new MacBook Pro I am now evolving a nomadic lifestyle. In between appointments, I’ll pitch camp at Starbucks or another WiFi friendly oasis and fit in a few licks of work before I pack up.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Answering David Pogue's Cable Puzzler

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Last week David Pogue, The New York Times technology reporter, was perplexed (in a good way) that his local cable company, Cablevision, had been setting up free WiFi hotspots during the last year in the tri-state area (NY,NJ, CT).   Pogue’s been delighted that Optimum WiFi has been showing up with greater frequency on his menu bar for whatever gadget he’s currently holding.  He’s not sure why CableVision is doing this.

(Glad to hear it , David.  I’m not getting the same WiFi love from Comcast, my “information service” provider, who seems more reserved in dispensing her wireless gifts.)

But wait there’s more. Pogue said that Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner have formed a partnership that will begin letting subscribers roam between WiFi networks for free.

Wow.

Pogue asked his loyal readers (count me as one) to explain why three competitors have joined together.  I think I have a partial answer.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Gov 2.0: Unified Communications Meets Social Networking

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Were you distracted by iPad mania and overlook this year’s Emerging Communications Conference that was held this week in San Francisco?  I did.  eComm is the successor to the short lived  O’Reilly  eTel conference. The talks and presentations all looked quite tasty, and I’m hoping videos will be made public soon.

In any case, I  stumbled across a slide deck delivered at eComm by electronic government evangelist Mark Headd. (Check out Mark’s excellent blog, Vox Populi.) In it he describes a few practical projects involving on-line government docs, cloud-based telephony, and crowdsourcing-social networking, areas that I’ve been focusing on recently.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Telecommunications By Any Other Name….

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I’d like to put aside, permanently, the debate about the correct classification of cable service, which has been argued in the courts for years.  In fact,  the underlying question—what is digital communications—has been endlessly and unproductively analyzed in legal and regulatory areas since the 1970s.   The classification question during the disco era,  is it basic or is it enhanced service?, is still with us in the iPad age in the form of,  is it telecommunication or  information?

To me, the bigger issue is why making the right choice from the FCC’s categorization menu—telecommunications, information services, advanced services, advanced services with telecommunications (DSL),  advanced services minus telecommunications (cable modem), etc. —has become the only way to impose non-trivial obligations on carrier and service providers.Continue reading

@NYC, Archaic Telecom

Tropo Puts Unified Communications in the Cloud

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About a year ago, VoiceXML pioneer Voxeo started a cloud-based unified communications service called Tropo.  It’s a tempting free development environment in which you craft unified communications apps in your favorite web programming language without having to wade too deeply into VoXML tags and voice grammars. The words “free”, “development environment”, and “VoiceXML” struck the right note with me.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Ancillary Authority, Estoppel Gotchas, and New Statutes

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I had two shots of espresso and then  tackled  a few parts of the U.S. Court of Appeals decision favoring Comcast.   I am an  informed technologist with no legal training.   It does appear to this blogger that the FCC’s case was—sigh—very weak.

In navigating this legalistic obstacle course and trying to unravel the thinking of a a generation of technology challenged attorneys, you are forced to make the unlikeliest of associations. First, telecommunications means voice and cable TV, but not data.  Data is called information services, and voice can be an information service when it is VoIP.  (Hmm, not sure I want to know how the FCC viewed the phone systems’ digital TDM protocols.)

And then voice has something like cooties, and can contaminate the data part, turning it into telecommunications. Follow?Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Pricing a Broadband Bit

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In 2008, Comcast, my internet service provider, instituted broadband caps, setting a  250 Giga byte monthly limit. Time Warner started a trial program that year as well, which has since become standard practice in more cities (Rochester, Greensboro, San Antonio).

Well, how do I do know how much I’m using, so I don’t go over the cap and face the consequences?

Comcast solved that problem (at least in my area)  last week with a usage meter. I now know that I consumed 10 Gigabits last month, which works out in my situation to over $6/Gb.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meanwhile Back at the Enterprise

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I’ve been so focused on apps and trends outside of the office space that I thought I’d have a difficult time grokking the keynote speeches at  Voicecon 2010.   VoiceCon (now renamed to Enterprise Connect) is the place where business communication vendors announce their visions and initiatives for the coming year.

I’m happy to be misinformed in this case. Consumer-grade social media, open software,  and smartphone-like apps—areas I’ve been immersed in the last few weeks—are pretty much pre-requisites to enterprise communications coursework.  To varying degrees, Siemens, Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft acknowledge, promote, and  support  micro-blogging, location information, transcription services, SIP, cloud-based software, and slicker interaces in their wares.

I took a quick tour through the recorded videos of the presentations given by Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, and Microsoft. A few impressions after the jump.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Sprint 4G is Spelled W I M A X

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Image from Gizmodo

I am very  excited about the new Sprint 4G phone revealed at CTIA 2010: a mashup of Android OS-CDMA-WiFi-WiMAX and encased in an HTC Evo package (see  more sexy pictures here). It should be available this summer.

Why does the phone earn the 4G signifier? Not sure. This smartphone’s high-speed data bits pass through Clearwire-Sprint’s wireless data network (voice is still CDMA), which  is  based on more of a 3G standard, 802.16   or WiMAX.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The Road to UTOPIA

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In the National Broadband Plan, there is hardly any mention of a wholesale or “unbundled” model of fiber-to-the-home. That’s unfortunate. There are many examples of successful deployments of fiber in which the physical part is built by the public sector (or through public-private partnerships), with private providers stepping in to resell access for voice, video, and data at the retail level. For a nitty-gritty description of one European city’s experience laying fiber under cobblestones and into canals,  you can read about Amsterdam’s CityNet project, written by the company’s CEO.

The US does have many open access projects in which municipalities in underserved areas take the lead in financing fiber’s significant sunk costs.  There’s one deployment that stands out, linking together over 16 cities in Utah and serving about 40,000 households. It’s called the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency, which acronymized becomes UTOPIA.Continue reading