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

@NYC

Last Night’s NYC Tech Meetup

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I was lucky to get one of the few seats that suddenly became available for what I had thought was a sold-out  New York City Tech Meetup. I assume Spring fever infected a few early RSVPers. Anyway, I grabbed the opportunity, and took the train into Manhattan.

It was worth it. These events—it is my second— are a little bit of a grab bag. In my mind, the theme last night could be described as  quirky.  My impressions were  heavily colored by RandomDorm, the college video chat service, and stickybits, the bar-code-the-world company.  I think both will find their markets, but I just have to process them a little more before I can say anything else.

There’s one that stood out and was familiar as the sound of a batter swatting a ball. The start-up is  GameChanger, and they have a free iPhone app (Android and Blackberry planned ) that lets the zillions of school coaches score their team statistics in real-time.

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

Quote of the Day

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining …

Social Studies

New York Senate Telecom Committee Is on the Phone

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Earlier this month, I glued together two neat apps using parts supplied by two different VoiceXML unified communications companies. The first lets me call in to a VoXMLPHP script hosted by Tropo, which then interprets my voice commands and reads news articles using their API wrappers.  The  second sends SMS headlines (using Twilio’s APIs) from my favorite news sources to my not-so-smart-phone (it’s an ancient model).

Both have their place in my work schedule.  Another idea that’s been taking root in this blog is crowdsourcing of public policy  and moving government documents to the Internet, accessible using open-standards protocols (RSS, et. al.)

Hold these thoughts.

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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

Quote of the Day

Perusing Apple’s quarterly earnings and commentary, I am almost moved to tears. This is unusual, I know, to feel the romance of strategy and long-term …

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