Disruptive Telephony

FYI - I'm speaking at Ingate SIP Trunking Seminar Series Sept 11 in LA (concurrent with Internet Telephony Expo)

FYI, for those of you attending the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Los Angeles on September 10-12, I'll be participating in a panel session that is part of Ingate's SIP Trunking Seminar Series.  I expect it will surprise no one to learn that I'll be on the panel about "Enterprise Security and VoIP" wearing my VOIP Security Alliance hat.  My particular session is Tuesday, September 11, 2007, from 9:30-11:00 am.  (And yes, I guess it is appropriate in a way to be talking about security on 9/11!)   More details and the schedule are available online.

The sessions are free and open to anyone to attend.  Simply fill out the pre-registration form.

Technorati tags: sip, sip security, sip trunking, ingate, ingate systems, voipsa, voip, voip security, dan york

iLocus - 2.23 million licenses of pure IP PBX sold in 2Q07 (Cisco, Mitel are the market leaders)

Just out on WebWire today, research firm iLocus indicated that 2.23 million IP-only PBX lines were sold in the second quarter of 2007, apparently generating revenues of over $208 million.  Cisco was the market leader and then, according to the news release, Mitel (my employer) was the leader of the non-Cisco shipments.  Mitel apparently had 42% market share (of non-Cisco shipments, I presume), followed by 3Com, ShoreTel and Inter-Tel (now part of Mitel).

Now the point of this news release is obviously to entice people to buy iLocus' research report, but I do find the data rather curious.  Mostly due to the fact that there is no mention of Avaya and Nortel, two of the other major competitors in the IP-PBX space.  Now perhaps this is due to this statement:

"iLocus has discontinued coverage of shipments related to legacy PBX upgrades or the hybrid systems. We focus on only the pure IP PBX shipments in the enterprise VoIP equipment quarterly tracking service."

I don't know.  I do just find it curious.  (Not that I'm complaining, mind you.)  In any event, this research is now out there and available to purchase.

It would be interesting to know how this 2.23 million licenses relates to the overall number of "lines" sold in the last quarter.  How many total IP and TDM lines were sold, and therefore what percentage of overall lines does this 2.23 million represent.  And is 2.23 million an increase or decrease over last quarter?  I want to see trends, charts... and I suppose in order to that I'd probably need to buy the report, eh?

Technorati tags: voip, ilocus, cisco, mitel, 3com, shoretel, inter-tel

RebTel's "Reb Me" VoIP/telephony application for Facebook let's you easily make cheap calls

As I've written about previously (here and here), with all the excitement about Facebook's application platform there haven't been a whole lot of apps focusing on VoIP.  Back on August 15th, though, another VoIP/telephony app did emerge, although at the time I was too caught up with VoiceCon travel preparations to blog about it. 

The application is "Reb Me" (actual FB application here) from the folks over at RebTel.  Essentially it allows RebTel users to very quickly call each other at cheap rates.  (With RebTel, you get a local phone number to call international friends.  You therefore only pay the costs for your local call, and some small rate to RebTel (or free).) Given that I'm rather "late" to the game on this app, I'll point to other coverage for more details:

• RebTel blog:
• A developer's take on our new Facebook app
• Reb Me brings mobility to the party
• blog of some of the developers of the RebTel Facebook app
• Jeff Pulver: Rebtel: One Year Later. And now available on Facebook (Q&A with RebTel CEO Hjalmar Winbladh)
• Russell Shaw, ZDNet: Rebtel adds Facebook calling capability
• Facebook Observer: Facebook Gets Another VoIP Application

According to the Facebook stats (in the new way they are counting) there are 84 daily active users of the app, as of today.  The RebTel folks have also launched a Facebook group for RebMe users, although there doesn't seem to have been much activity in the group after its initial launch.

I'm also not entirely sure I'd call it a "VoIP application", because it's really all about making cheap calls from your mobile phones.  No doubt there is VoIP involved someone in the infrastructure, but when I think of a "VoIP app", I'm really thinking of something that does use VoIP protocols (like SIP)  and that involves IP endpoints in some fashion.  In any event, it's cool to see another telephony app inside of Facebook.  Kudos to the RebTel team for launching the app.

FYI, over on his blog, Pat Phelan put together a list of Facebook voice apps.  Nice to see... and I was not aware of the GrandCentral app (although, since you have to copy/paste the web call button embed code from your Grand Central page, the "app" really doesn't seem to be anything more than a box on your profile that can contain HTML code... and a way for the app developers to put some Google Ads in front of you on your Facebook app page).

Technorati tags: facebook, facebook platform, rebtel, voip

Skype is now 4 years old...

Since voipstutter thinks I should rename this blog "Skype Telephony", I may as well feed into that image by noting that, per the Skype blog, Skype is now 4 years old.  I was not a user then, but judging by the screenshots of the client in 2003, it certainly has come a long way.  Whatever your opinions of Skype, it certainly has caused disruptions in the world of telcom... and it definitely does keep things interesting.  Congrats to the folks at Skype for hitting that birthday.

Technorati tags: skype

Given that we already have Jajah, do we really need nonoh?

Given that there was a service called Jajah, I suppose it was inevitable that someone would come up with a competitor called nonoh whose main point seems to be "We are cheaper than Jajah"! Indeed, if Jajah could run a table like this on their website:

You can pretty much expect that a site like nonoh is going to run the inevitable comparison to Jajah:

The race to the bottom and the commoditization of all phone calls (at $0) continues... who will get to the bottom first?  (And what, exactly, will their business plan be?)

Tom Keating has more info about the difference between Nonoh and Jajah.

Technorati tags: voip, jahah, nonoh

It seems I've been added to the "Friends of Skype" blog roll on Skype's blogs

I noticed late last night that this weblog was added to the "Friends of Skype" blog roll that appears on the side of Skype's blogs.  Thanks, Skype, for adding me... I certainly don't mind the potential for others to find me. I do write about Skype, although often some of that writing can be critical.

I'll note, too, that Skype's list is actually a great compilation of the various bloggers out there who write about VoIP and collaboration.  Many of them would think of themselves as  (and accept the label of) "VoIP bloggers", but others are from the larger blogging space (ex. Neville Hobson, Robert Scoble, Ross Mayfield).

Technorati tags: skype

VoiceCon - OnState expands their call center solution for Skype

At VoiceCon this week, one of the smaller booths that looked quite interested was that of OnState, a company launching a Live Chat capability for their call center solution based on Skype.  With my schedule at the show, I was unable to spend much time going through a demo, but what I did see looked quite interesting and I thought I might blog about it at some point.

However, it turns out that Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal has written a rather comprehensive post about OnState, with all sorts of links to prior articles, resources, etc.  Now, Jim wrote his story primarily to address issues he found in two other stories about OnState, but the result is a nice profile of what the offering is all about.

I would have to wonder, though, what kind of reaction OnState was getting at VoiceCon given how recently the massive Skype outage was.  Anyway, I would recommend checking out Jim's article and the various links off of it.

Technorati tags: skype journal, skype, call centers, onstate

IBM announces acquisition of WebDialogs, makers of Unyte!

Wow!  From the stage here at VoiceCon, Michael Rhodin, General Manager of Lotus Software at IBM just announced that they are acquiring WebDialogs, the makers of Unyte!

IBM just issued a news release announcing this acquisition.

For those of us following the Skype space, Unyte has been known for a long-time as one of the leading business/collaboration extras available for Skype. 

Congrats to the WebDialogics folks and it will be VERY interesting to see where this goes!

Technorati tags: ibm, webdialogs, unyte, collaboration, web conferencing, skype, voicecon

Skype offers further clarification on the outage and the Microsoft connection (or lack thereof)

In answer to the many questions raised after their announcement yesterday, Skype today issued a clarification FAQ: "The Microsoft connection clarified".  For starters, they clearly stated that there was no connection to Microsoft:

1. Are we blaming Microsoft for what happened?

We don’t blame anyone but ourselves. The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst — a trigger — for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it. And Microsoft has been very helpful and supportive throughout.

The high number of post-update reboots affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources at the time, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

(more in the FAQ)

In response to the question that many of us raised (for instance, in my post yesterday) about "why this month's update?", Skype wrote:

2. What was different about this set of Microsoft update patches?

In short – there was nothing different about this set of Microsoft patches. During a joint call soon after problems were detected, Skype and Microsoft engineers went through the list of patches that had been pushed out. We ruled each one out as a possible cause for Skype’s problems. We also walked through the standard Windows Update process to understand it better and to ensure that nothing in the process had changed from the past (and nothing had). The Microsoft team was fantastic to work with, and after going through the potential causes, it appeared clearer than ever to us that our software’s P2P network management algorithm was not tuned to take into account a combination of high load and supernode rebooting.

The FAQ continues with answers to more questions.  All in all, a decent set of responses. 

Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal also offers his perspective on this statement.  I join Jim in thanking Skype PR for recognizing that their initial responses were insufficient.  I think a common thread in many responses to the initial communication was that we were looking for more transparency. Stuart Henshall, a very early Skype user and one of the founders of the Skype Journal, posted a good piece about communication and Skype:  "Outing Skype Communications".  Well worth a read.

With that, we can probably wrap up the outage coverage...  it looks like Skype users are already back to using it.

P.S. Phil Wolff just put up a post "Skype and Crisis Communications 2.0" that looks like a good read...

Technorati tags: skype, skype journal, skype outage

Mashable offers "Skype Toolbox: 50+ Enhancements for Skype"

Mashable.com often comes out with various lists, and today they offered "Skype Toolbox: 50+ Enhancements for Skype" which offers a nice list of the various add-ons that have been developed for Skype. Some good ones in here that I know of... a number that I'd not yet heard about.  The Skype ecosystem continues to grow...

(Hat tip to Julian Bond for pointing out the list today.)

Technorati tags: skype, mashups, skype api

It's official - Skype blames the outage on Microsoft (indirectly)

Well, the official word is out from Skype and it can be summarized: the reboots from Microsoft patches triggered a previously-undetected condition and crashed out network. 

Skype PR staffer Villu Arak writes in "What happened on August 16":

On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.

The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Okay... I can buy that this type of thing could trigger some kind of chain reaction, but I don't understand why this month was different than any other month.  For.. what? two or three years now (more?) Microsoft patches have been coming out like clockwork on the second Tuesday of each month.  Each second Tuesday or Wednesday, the millions of computers set to auto-update do so.  All those zillions of computers restart automatically.  Each and every month.  What was so special about this August that was different from every other month?  Was the number or restarts in a short period of time really that much different from other months? Why? Is the issue that there are so many more Windows Skype users than in previous months and years? Was this just the so-called "tipping point" when there were enough Windows Skype users that the normal restarts triggered this chain reaction?

The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.

In other words, it was not a DDoS by Russian hackers, as one rumor had it (which had actually already been dismissed by every security researcher who looked at the alleged exploit code).

This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope. We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions.

Fair enough statement - if you are looking at data or web technologies... but the PSTN, to which Skype would seem to like to be compared, is designed to operate without interruptions (or with as minimal as possible).  You know, there is this wee little market for "carrier-grade" equipment/software/etc. that is designed to be highly available without downtime.  If a carrier's network were down for over 48 hours, there would be a zillion lawsuits, intense government inquiries and more.  The carriers that make up what we call the "PSTN" put an incredible effort into ensuring availability.  If Skype wants to play in that game, they have to be ready to play at the same level.

Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring.

Good. We would expect that.

I appreciate that Skype has been as communicative as they have through their blog and heartbeat site.  Thank you, Skype, for communicating - and leaving the comments open.  However, to me the information provided today is still lacking one key piece:

Why were the mass restarts associated with the August 2007 Microsoft updates different from the mass restarts associated with any other month's Microsoft updates?

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage, microsoft

Skype outage appears to be over? What will be the long-term impact to Skype?

According to Skype's "Update at midnight GMT", the Skype outage should be resolving over the next few hours:

We are pleased to announce that the situation continues to improve. The sign-on problems have been resolved. Skype presence and chat may still take a few more hours to be fully operational. We know what our faithful users have been going through and we thank you for your patience and kind support.

Skype has come back online for me and the Skype client tells me there are now over 4 million users online, which is the first time I've seen it show that since Wednesday.  Given that it's been going up and down all day, I'll withhold judgement for a while, but that number does seem to be climbing (if we can believe the number, which is an open question).  My contact list is slowly repopulating with its normal list of people.  We'll see.

So the question really is - will Skype see any long-term impact because of this outage?

Certainly in the short-term Skype will have an awful lot of explaining to do.  There are certainly some number of business users who have come to rely on SkypeIn and SkypeOut.  I know a good number of freelance consultants who have cut their landline and give out their SkypeIn number to everyone and use Skype or SkypeOut for their calls.  Countless small startups are "virtual organizations" where Skype is used for all the communication. Skype will definitely need to reassure them that this won't happen again.    I expect that many of them will be looking now at what alternatives they have, if for no other reason than to have a backup.

Skype's competitors are definitely circling like sharks that smell blood in the water.  Sightspeed's CEO came out with a very pointed blog entry today, "All Peer-to-Peer Models are NOT Created Equal", about how their p2p network was better.  Supporters of Damaka seem to be running around leaving glowing praise and inviting people to try Damaka on various blog entries related to the Skype outage (including my own).  There have been any number of blog entries and comments out there extolling the virtues of the Gizmo Project.  Even Jeff Pulver couldn't resist and tossed in a tweet encouraging people who were missing Skype to try out FWD.

Being the open standards geek that I am, I would love to believe that Skype users would try out many of the other services, many or most of which are based on open standards like SIP.  I'd love to see the level of interoperability you have can have with things like (SIP-based) Gizmo.  Skype's walled garden approach does concern me.  I'd love to see massive adoption of some service to which other services could easily interoperate - and which could have peer-reviewed protocols that were definitely secure.  I'd love to see all of that - and that's certainly a potential outcome.

But I'm also a bit too jaded to think it will really happen.  The seductive aspect of Skype is that it makes it very simple and easy to use the product.  It has (at least for the moment) a massive directory of users.  It has APIs that let it be readily integrated with other web sites and services.  It's easy to use... and I expect that probably many if not most users will simply go back to using it as they have always done once it comes back into full operation.  People have short-term memories... 

If there are any beneficiaries of this outage, I would think that they might be AOL, Microsoft, Google or Yahoo!, all of whom have similar consumer services and have voice as an option now.  Skype's certainly been perceived as the leader with regard to voice... but all of those others are there... and they all have simple interfaces and massive directories as well.

What do you think?  Will Skype suffer any major impact because of this?  Will the newer services like Gizmo, Sightspeed and friends win customers?  What about the other consumer IM services? 

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage

The human impact of the Skype outage... (real pain being felt right now)

As of this moment, Skype is back working for me and tells me that 3,181,959 people are online.  However, given the performance this morning, I am not expecting it to stay up.  It's been fading in and out all day.

The last we heard from Skype was about six hours ago in their "Where we are at 1100 GMT" post. The comments (currently 81) to that post are quite fascinating to read.  Some are the typical kind of outrage you expect.  Some are passing along the latest speculation. Some are giving reports of continued outage.  Some include links to news articles.  Some bash Skype.  Some praise Skype.  As is typical, some bash other commenters (like this one apparently from a Skype-using-solider in Iraq).  Some plead for a return.  Some suggest alternatives

In the midst of that (and the other entries with comments: here(183), here(54) and here (64)), you see the comments dealing with the human side:

I miss my friends!!

Thanks for the information, I miss my parents in Mexico, they have the same problem as well, hope today the system comes back

come on guys i need to make an important phone calls plz fix it as soon as possibles

I've not seen any changes in service. Pretty fed up because this is important to bme doing business with my clients.

Now I know not to take a conversation with my boyfriend, who currently is living in Denmark, for granted. Irritating indeed

Hey everyone in the world using SKYPE...wow didn't realize how much we all rely on SKYPE. We use SKYPE for our business. That is how we connect to the world. We connect to all of our contacts using SKYPE. We miss it terribly. All I see is a grey X...need to see the green CK MARK! We basically used our cell service and emails it worked..but made it hard to teleconference...tomorrow is another day Skype..hope we are connected.

I had to plan a flight today with some one in the U.K. this was not very easy sending text messages back and forth on our mobile phones. This problem needs to be fixed soon

Please, please try to resolve this system glitch soon. My business relies so much on Skype voice calls. We are losing business connections every hour if skype isn't availabe.

Hurry it up! This is bad for business!!

You get the idea.  (Kudos to Skype, by the way, for leaving their blog comments open during this situation.)  In another forum where someone was venting, the person somewhat frantically wrote this:

yes but I put my skypein phone # on my resume!!!!

Ouch.

I, too, am impacted to a degree.  Although I am more of a casual user of Skype, i.e. I don't rely on Skype for communication, the number I put in the sidebar to this blog is my SkypeIn number.  Why?  Just because I didn't want to put my home or cell number and figured that it might be a good way to test SkypeIn.  (And in the 7 months I've had it up there I've probably had maybe 2 calls on it resulting from the blog!)  But still, this does cause me to rethink that.  (In fact, I may very shortly change the sidebar number to my GrandCentral number as a layer of redirection.)

The outage looks like it will continue for a while. (I am disconnected again in the time it took me to write this.)  And in the meantime there are real people out there suffering because they have come to depend upon a particular VoIP provider. 

Yes, I work for a company that on one level could be seen as competing with Skype when it comes to business (but we don't run into Skype, really), but an outage of this length isn't good for us as an industry.  Already there are voices out there saying that this shows inherent weaknesses in P2P VoIP (it doesn't, in my opinion).  Perhaps the good news is that people are looking around at alternatives and they are asking these questions now about availability. 

Julian Bond said it perhaps best in an IRC chat room today:

This debacle is proving to be a bit of a shocker. I guess we all got lulled into thinking that Skype was at least as reliable as the Cell networks.

Yes, we did.  Some much more than others (especially those who dropped their landlines and used it for business).

In another post when this is all over, I'll write a bit more from the security side about "lessons learned", but for the moment I think we need to remember that there are real people right now being impacted by all of this.  For better or worse, Skype has become a communication that is (or has been) relied upon by many.  Hopefully the folks in Estonia and other locations can get this fixed soon.

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage

Returning (at least for a moment) to the tried and true for group chat.... IRC

In the beginning, there was IRC. 

Well, okay, not exactly... BITNET Relay was around before that and there were other multi-chat environments in some of the walled garden services (CompuServe, GENIE, etc.) and BBSs... but for most of us who were online from the late 1980s onward, IRC was the place to be for "chat" and realtime IM communication.  Of course, it lived primarily in the geekier side of the Internet.  The "real" Net users used IRC and looked down upon all the "newbies" who were drawn to these new IM services from ICQ, AOL and later MSN and a zillion others.  Sure, they were pretty and had cute emoticons.  Yeah, okay, so they could include videos and knew when other people were typing and had little "toast" popups... all that would just be added to IRC clients at some point.  And, oh yes, I said "clientS" because of course we had many different clients that you could use for IRC from all different platforms.    We had our bots and our "/me". Clients had nick completion and a ton of other features.  We were IRC users and we were vastly superior.

But over the last five years or so I noticed that more and more of the folks with whom I had been communicating on IRC... stopped... using... it.

Myself included.  The last time I seriously used IRC was probably 4 or 5 years ago.

I would put a large part of the blame on corporate firewalls.  Somewhere along the way IRC got the stamp of being a waste of time and a productivity drain (which, like any technology, can be true if mis-used).  It was way too easy to simply block port 6667 on the corporate firewall (and/or the IRC protocol).  As botnets proliferated and used IRC as a control channel, there became a security reason to block the protocol as well.

Many IRC users continued, of course, but to do so from behind a corporate firewall usually meant creating a VPN or ssh tunnel to an external server and running the IRC client there.  Easy enough to do (I did it myself for a while), but not quite as easy as all those consumer IM products that just sat down in your Windows systray and gave you a toast message when someone was contacting you.  Plus, while it was easy for the tech-savvy of us to ssh or VPN out to an external server, many of our less-tech-literate colleagues didn't know how to do that.  So they didn't - but they were the ones with whom we often wanted to communicate.

So over time, we gave in.... and fired up AIM and ICQ and MSN/WLM and Jabber and Skype and.... 

Skype, especially, seemed to have caught on for group chats.  In part perhaps because of the ability to create "public group chats" that were persistent (i.e. they survived logout/login and in fact you basically stay in them forever until you click "Leave").  I've often thought, though, that part of it was also that Skype groupchat is the closest that I've seen to replicating what is in IRC.  It is basically "IRC with a prettier face".  It has "/me" (admittedly a favorite of mine) and many of the other "/" commands.  For IRC users, it is a very easy and seductive change.

But now, with the continued Skype outage, those of us who have come to rely on Skype groupchats as a component of our daily communication are suddenly left without an easy vehicle for the group communication to which we are accustomed.

Jabber, of course, is one option.  Like IRC, it's all about open standards, there are many Jabber servers and a ton of Jabber clients.  But I personally never saw it take off for larger groupchats to the degree that Skype did (or IRC).

So in the end this morning, I dusted off an IRC client I had installed (Miranda) and connected in to good old freenode, where some people with whom I communicate indicated they would be, talking, predictably, about the Skype outage (in "#skype"). 

Will I return to using the Skype groupchats when Skype comes back up?  Probably.  It's way too simple and easy.  Plus, part of what I do is analyze Skype and you can't really do that without participating in it.  But for now... for this moment anyway... I'll return to an old friend.

/me stops reminiscing and returns to work

---

UPDATE: For those not familiar with IRC, you may want to visit IRC.org and particularly the history page.

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage, irc, im, instant messaging, group chat

A not-very-publicized change with the Blackberry 8830 unleashes the real power of unified messaging!

There's one little feature in my Blackberry 8830 that I just discovered today that I didn't see anywhere in any of the promotional materials about it.  Put simply:

Unified messaging works!

Here's the thing... given that I work for Mitel, I of course have "unified messaging" set up so that whenever someone leaves me a voicemail message, I get an email with the WAV file attached to it.  It's truly a wonderful thing because I never dial in to check to see if I have messages.  I get an email that clues me in to that fact - and generally when I am on my desktop PC, I just play the attached WAV file and listen to the message through my email program.  I don't dial into voicemail to listen.

Before, with my Blackberry 7290 or any of the other earlier models, having this unified messaging feature enabled was really only a "half solution".  Receiving the email clued you in to the fact that you now had a voicemail message... BUT...

you couldn't listen to the WAV file!

The Blackberry operating system couldn't play the WAV file, so you had to dial into the voicemail system to listen to the actual message.  So the nice part about UM was that you got the notification... but you couldn't hear it right there.

Well today a blog post by Russell Shaw over on ZDNet pointed me to this excellent 8830 FAQ over on EVDOInfo.com that contains this little gem:

Q - What are the enterprise advantages of the new 4.2 OS?
A - The biggest 4.2 feature is the ability to listen to WAV files that are attached to an email by a Unified Voice Messaging service. NOTE: The customers BES server must be version 4.1.2 or later.

Naturally I had to try it out so I called my Mitel extension and left a message (a virtue of having multiple phones around). A moment or so after I hung up there was an email msg with a WAV attachment sitting in my Blackberry inbox.  I opened it, scrolled down to the attachment area and chose "Open attachment" and... ta da!  There I was listening to the voicemail message!  (And since the 8830 has a speakerphone I could listen that way which would enable me to easily write things down were it a real message.)  Nice and easy.

Of course, I would be charged for the download of that WAV file but I'm on an "Unlimited Data" plan with Verizon which does, in fact, appear to be for an unlimited amount of data (no fine print that I could see).

So to me this is a wonderful addition to the Blackberry operating system... now I can receive my voicemail messages in my email and listen to them right on my phone.  Very cool!

Technorati tags: blackberry, 8830, blackberry 8830, rim, unified messaging, voicemail

Mitel and Inter-Tel announce the completion of their merger (and there was much rejoicing!)

Very good news here in Mitel-land today - at about 4pm the merger of Mitel and Inter-Tel was completed! At least, in the legal sense... obviously there will be more work to be done on the integration, but for now the celebrations can begin.  The company has now doubled in size, gained a very strong US organization and is all-around well-positioned for growth. As the news release stated:

The company will now be #1 in the North American SMB market¹, #2 in the Western European IP PBX market², the overall leader in the U.K. communications market³ and continues to grow its operations globally. With three trusted brands (Mitel, Inter-Tel and Lake), the company offers customers a broad choice of solutions from the very small to the very large, from IP enabled to pure IP unified communications, from standard solutions to tailored, from single site to multi-site and from outright capital purchase options through sophisticated managed services. 

It should be a fun ride to see where this all winds up!

Technorati tags: mitel, inter-tel

More Skype outage coverage... (cue "It's the End of the World As We Know It!")

Somewhat predictably, the blogosphere is going nuts about the Skype outage.   It's currently at the top of Techmeme.  As Tris Hussey notes in his post, Skype has indeed become a key communication tool for many individuals and businesses.  Other VoIP bloggers offering commentary:

• Om Malik: "Does Skype Outage Expose P2P's Limitations?"
• Tom Keating: "Skype Outage" - wonders if it had to do with the Microsoft updates (I would think not because the outage happened to me prior to me installing the updates)
• Andy Abramson: "Skype Suffers Major Outage" - helpfully points people to Gizmo and SightSpeed as alternatives

The Register, of course, chimed in with their normal attitude.  Ars Technica, meanwhile, commented that the outage was surprising mostly because of ""how often it doesn't happen".  Taking another view, Mashable is reporting that eBay's stock has dipped this morning.

Meanwhile, Skype users around the world consider what other IM programs to use and some of them will, maybe, just maybe, have to actually pick up a phone today!

Technorati tags: skype, skype outage

Skype... disrupted. Skype login possibly down for 12-24 hours...

As a Skype user, I was a bit surprised when, after restarting my computer today (due to a crash when I was trying SecondLife with voice, but that's another story), the Skype icon just kept on spinning and spinning saying "Connecting".  And then it would be online... and then it wasn't... and then it was... and then it wasn't....

My first sign that it was something larger than my (sometimes flaky) laptop was a Facebook status update by Jim Courtney saying that Skype might have an outage for 12-24 hours.  About the same time I saw a tweet from Chris Brogan.  The "social networking information sharing network" was hard at work...

A trip to Skype's "Heartbeat" page showed the problem:

Oops.

Nicely, though, Skype staff have posted a status update on their heartbeat page:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

So sometime within the next while it will be back up.  It will be curious to see if anyone at Skype will provide technical explanations of what happened.  I note from another status update that they performed some planned maintenance last night.  Perhaps something did not work quite right?

In any event, I would think Skype will need to offer some post-resolution reassurance to all those businesses they are so eagerly courting...

Technorati tags: skype

Telephony - It's the API's, stupid!

After already publishing my last post about mashups, I came across Jim Courtney's Skype Journal post about the Skype mashup competition, which in turn led me to Thomas Howe's excellent "API of the week" post (got all that?) which had these wonderfully-written words (so much so that I feel compelled to excerpt them here, something I seldom do to this extent):

If you were to ask me, I would say the twenty year old software engineer has a distinct advantage over the older telephone guys (such as me) in the realm of innovation.  Since the barriers to entry to deploying a service provider have fallen through the floor, the larger challenge is not in complex engineering, but is instead in innovation.   The younger engineers are free of the legacy of the PSTN, and many things would occur to an experienced engineer won't to them, and it's not a bad thing. 

<snip>

What does this have to do with telephony? Nothing. What does this have to do with next generation applications? Everything.  Applications that use the Internet as the platform use APIs from a large number of sources, and by and large, these APIs are not telephony. However, nearly every time a telephony API is used, an API such as GoogleMaps, Amazon SQS or DBPedia will be used right alongside it.  As a developer in this market, it makes a lot of sense for you to get to know your neighbors for two reasons. First, the more you can make your API play well with others, the faster the adoption of it will be. Secondly, the more you can understand your customers, their problems and how they need your part for their solution, the better you can make your API for them.   I'm supposing this means that you need to get familiar with APIs like this.

Which leads me back to my original statement.  The twenty-something-don't-know-or-care-about-SS7 engineer will sit down and design their version of the hot-or-not site one day, and use a whole bunch of crazy APIs to put together the application.  Then, they will go have a beer, come back, and say "You know, it would be really cool if you could just call the person you want to hook up with.  Is there an API for that?"  They won't even consider for a minute the words "termination", "LATA" or "CALEA".  They're just writing an application.  They need an API for some function, and it will take a few minutes to integrate it into their application.  And, there are many, many more of these guys than all the telecom engineers that have ever, and will ever, exist.

<snip>

Well, said, Thomas! (Read his original post for the full text.) And to copy a former US President:  "It's the API's, stupid!"

Technorati tags: telephony, ip telephony, voip, programming, apis, mashups, thomas howe

ProgrammableWeb.com launches "telephony mashup" category

It's very cool to see that one of the leading web sites about "mashups", ProgrammableWeb.com, has announced the launch of a new section focused on "Mobile/Telephony" mashups.  They actually call it a "Market", and there are two others launched today: Mapping and Shopping. 

The obvious focus for this blog, though, is the "Mobile/Telephony" market. The announcement notes that there are currently over 25 different APIs under "Telephony" or "Messaging" and in the actual lists of mashups, 104 are tagged "mobile" and 113 tagged "messaging".  The announcement also notes that Thomas Howe will be assisting with the content of this new section. (Congrats to Thomas!)

The list of telephony APIs (only 11, the other 14+ must be "messaging) is available and several names are probably quite familiar.  Thomas Howe also wrote a piece to explain the different types of APIs and provide a bit of background:  "Telephony & Mobile APIs and Mashups, the Big Picture".

I did find it a bit puzzling that the list of telephony APIs didn't include Skype, given that Skype has a whole developer website set up to support its APIs.  Likewise no mention of Asterisk even though the entire thing is really one big set of APIs.  But hey, the section is only a day old, so we'll have to give them a bit to see how it develops.

The fun thing about the state of VoIP/IP telephony right now is that it really is becoming all about APIs and mashups...  voice is truly just another form of data on the network... and once it is just a bunch of packets you can do really fun stuff with it!  Kudos to the ProgrammeableWeb team and Thomas Howe for helping point the way to some of the interesting stuff people are doing in this area.

Definitely do check out their telephony mashup site.

Technorati tags: mashups, telephony, programming, programmable web, thomas howe, apis, voip, ip telephony

UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more...

Back at our Mitel Forum event in late June, analyst Blair Pleasant from Unified Communications Strategies recorded a couple of podcasts[1] with Mitel executives and I've been meaning to write about them here. (Full Disclosure: While Mitel has no direct connection to this blog, I do work for Mitel.)

First up, Blair interviewed Mitel CEO Don Smith.  They discussed Mitel's view of unified communications, business process improvement, the use of SIP and XML interfaces and much more. Don discussed the importance of presence and availability, the need for "in the moment" communication and the importance of "presence everywhere". He also offers his view of the greatest challenges facing Mitel and the industry in the time ahead and his view of where Mitel is heading.

Second, Blair interviewed Stephen Beamish, Mitel VP of Business Development and Strategic Alliances about the partnerships Mitel has with Microsoft, HP and Sun. Given the announcement before Mitel Forum of the partnership with Sun, this interview gives one of the first views into the Mitel-Sun relationship.  Blair and Stephen also, of course, discuss Mitel's relationship with Microsoft, especially in light of the Microsoft-Nortel relationship as well as Microsoft's other partners.  Stephen also talks about the HP relationship and Mitel's participation in HP Procurve's upcoming "Taking It To The Edge" Seminar Series. Finally, he discusses some of the environmental benefits of using Mitel products in terms of power savings.

For those interested in where Mitel is heading and Mitel's views of unified communications, both podcasts are highly recommended. Each podcast runs around 16 minutes.

[1] And yes, as a podcaster I had serious geek envy of the Sony PCM-D1 recorder that Blair was using  courtesy of her colleague Jim Burton.  Very nice piece of hardware! (And also just a wee bit outside of my personal price range!)

Technorati tags: mitel, unified communications, blair pleasant, don smith, stephen beamish, uc strategies, microsoft, sun microsystems, hp

Blogging... disrupted....

My blogging here (and across my other blogs) has been a wee bit light of late, largely because I began having technical issues with my laptop last week that ultimately culminated in its complete failure on Thursday. It had to be sent back to Ottawa for what I understand was a complete system board replacement. In theory I should get it back tomorrow and start being able to get back into my normal work flow.  Fun, fun, fun... (well, not really!)

Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?

If any of you reading this will be attending VoiceCon out in San Francisco, August 20-23, please do drop me a note. I'll be there from August 20-22 and am looking forward to connecting with a range of people from around the industry.

FYI, if you are a Facebook user and are attending, there is a Facebook event for VoiceCon to which you can add yourself to facilitate networking with other FB users at the show.

Technorati tags: voicecon, voip

Mashable: "Instant Messaging Toolbox: 90+ IM Tools"

Okay, so how many IM clients are you now running? Looking down at my laptop, I see 5 at the moment: MSN/WLM, Skype, GoogleTalk, Psi(Jabber) plus Mitel's own product.  I also sometimes have Gizmo and FWD running and use Miranda from time to time as well.  I do have Yahoo!Messenger and AIM accounts, although I don't honestly use them all that often. On my Blackberry I have IM+ and iSkoot...  let's call it 11or 12 of the consumer products that I normally have available.  Per the list of 90+ IM tools out from Mashable yesterday, that still leaves me with around 80 or so to try. :-)

What's your count?

Technorati tags: IM

Skype Journal: "Security, Skype and the Blackberry"

 Since I have written here about the new Skype clients for the Blackberry, such as iSkoot and IM+, and questioned the security of those clients, I feel compelled to note that Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal, who also writes a good bit about Blackberries as well as Skype, has posted his response to the issue on Friday:  "Security, Skype and the Blackberry".

I still suffer a lingering uncertainty, but I'll admit that Jim's digging does seem rather persuasive.

Technorati tags: skype, skype journal, jim courtney, blackberry, rim

CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)

Is "the coming VoIP war" to be fought out between Microsoft and Cisco?  So asks a column "The Coming VoIP War" by Larry Hooper in today's issue of CRN.  On one level, the debate isn't as interesting to me as the venue... "CRN" is "Computer Reseller News" and has been around the industry for many years.[1]  At various times I've personally had a subscription to the print version or at least had it around the office to read.[2] Supported by advertising and theoretically sent to a targeted profile of subscribers, I've always seen it as one of the more "established' newsmagazines of the information technology space... and one obviously targeted at resellers of such technology. So to me it is interesting that the question is being discussed within CRN's print and web pages.

As to the larger question of whether "the coming VoIP war" will be between Microsoft and Cisco, one can't ignore that these two companies are giants in the overall IT industry with extremely significant resources and yes, the point is valid that as the interests of the two companies have converged in this merger of communication that many call "unified communications", they are now definitely going to be competing head-to-head.  All I can say is that the time ahead in this industry shall very definitely be quite an interesting one!

P.S. In full disclosure, my employer, Mitel, has had a partnership with Microsoft for several years now. A lot of Mitel equipment also gets deployed on a Cisco infrastructure and I communicate with a number of Cisco folks on standards issues.

[1] I would love to find out when CRN started, but the CRN.com site seems to have no info about its history and there's no Wikipedia article on it yet.
[2] At the current time, I do have a subscription to CRN.  Sometimes my subscription has lapsed when I've forgotten to annually fill out their subscription form.

Technorati tags: microsoft, cisco, voip, unified communications

Tom Keating loves Asterisk...

Being a long-time fan of Tom Keating's great "VoIP and Gadget Blog", I had to smile when my day started off this morning scanning feeds and encountering Tom's post on Friday "Top 10 Reasons Why I love Asterisk".  Tom first takes us (by way of a link) back down memory lane a bit with a piece he wrote in November 2001 called "In Search of a Linux-based PBX" that outlines many of the folks involved then with "open source telephony" and makes for interesting reading (his picture also looks a wee bit younger! ;-).  His piece on Friday revisits that list a bit and talks about Asterisk and how it has risen to be clearly the leader of open source telephony solutions.

It also clearly shows Tom's passion, and that is to me one of the fun and wonderful things about this thing we call the blogosphere.... writers do show more of their passion and we very often do get to learn more about the people behind the names.... and that makes it a whole lot more interesting than just dry and blase "factual" articles.

So kudos to Tom for telling us why he loves Asterisk...

Technorati tags: tom keating, asterisk, open source

The other story about the recording of the Telecom Junkies podcast: Interview with a VoIP Hacker - a.k.a. why my voice levels are so different

Why does my voice change in audio quality about half-way through the new Telecom Junkies podcast?  Here's the story.

A few minutes ago I posted to both the Voice of VoIPSA weblog and also the Blue Box podcast site a note about the new Telecom Junkies podcast that features an interview with Robert Moore, one of the two people involved with the large VoIP fraud cast last year.  About mid-way through my connection dies and you hear Jason saying "Oh, we lost Dan!" and then I'm back, but with a much softer voice.

Since it says something about telephony - and since I'm also interested in relaying lessons for podcasting - here's what happened.

In the hotel I was staying at in Florida, I was getting pretty poor connections using my AT&T GSM phone (the replacement Blackberry had not yet arrived).  I'd noticed that when calling people from my room, even if I went out onto the balcony, calls would still drop out sometimes - even when I was sitting still.  Now I don't know if this was because I was on the 20th floor (room 2048, what a great geek number!) or because I was at just a particular angle for the GSM towers or what.  The phone seemed to indicate that I had great connection strength.  All I knew was that connections were dropping. 

Needless to say, I was a bit concerned going into the Telecom Junkies podcast recording.  Jason Huffman records his shows by having everyone call into a hosted conference service.  When the recording is done, he gets an email with a WAV file, slaps on the musical intro/outro, potentially does some minimal editing and posts the show to their website.  As Blue Box listeners know, I'm always looking to get the best audio quality possible so I was a bit concerned.

Given that cell phone coverage was problematic, I decided to try using a softphone over the hotel Internet.  Unfortunately, I am on a trial system for Mitel's softphone (using the latest development versions) and I had received the notice that I need to upgrade to a new trial load to keep using it - and hadn't yet downloaded the new version.  So I thought I'd use Skype instead.  However, I also had the dilemma (for either softphone) that because of space considerations I had left my nice new USB headset at home.  Given that I've had reasonable success with Skype's new 3.5 and no headset, I figured I would give it a try anyway.

So I actually first called into the conf bridge using Skype/SkypeOut and spoke with Jason briefly to ask about the sound quality.  He said I sounded a bit quiet and rough (keep in mind that I'm talking to the mic on my Dell laptop), so I called back in on my cell phone.  However, I didn't disconnect the Skype connection, but instead muted the microphone and plugged in a set of headphones so I didn't hear it.

Mid-way through the call, my cell-phone connection did die.  What I did next was put the PC headphones on and un-mute the Skype microphone... ta da... I was back in the conf call, albeit at a lower volume level.  So when you listen to the recording, the first part is via cell phone (and includes an audio cut-out or two) and the second part is via Skype without a headset microphone.

I thought there were a couple of interesting points here:

1. I have got to find a really small headset that I can carry with me when traveling.
2. VoIP can beat cell phones in availability (not that any of us in North America will even remotely dispute this!)
3. It's good to have backups when doing interviews remotely.
4. It never even occurred to me to use the hotel landline!

Let's think about that last point for a minute.  I had, sitting right there on my desk next to my computer, a perfectly functional phone tied into the hotel's PBX.  And yet, it never even remotely occurred to me to use it!  In fact, outside of calling within a hotel I can't think of the last time that I've actually ever used a hotel phone for an external call.  It's been probably... years!  I guess I've gotten too used to the typically-extortionist rates charged by hotels for phone usage that I just don't even consider it.  (Well, and every other time my cell phone has worked well!)

In any event... that's the story behind the story...  :-)

Technorati tags: podcasting, skype, wireless

Blackberry 8830's GSM - it only works *outside* of North America!

Replying to my last post about the new Blackberry 8830, Jim Courtney of Skype Journal left a comment clueing me into one minor little detail about the 8830's GSM support - it only works outside of North America!

Indeed, the GSM side of the 8830 operates at 900 and 1800 MHz which are used for GSM throughout the rest of the world, but it does not work at 850 and 1900 MHz, which are the frequencies used by GSM in North America.  The disappointment for me is that when I drive to Ottawa, there are patches of road in Ontario where there just isn't all that great CDMA... and it would be great if the 8830 would flip over to GSM to get the stronger signal.  However, that doesn't look like it will happen.

One wonders why not.  When RIM was creating the 8830, why didn't they include support for all 4 bands?  Is it perhaps because Verizon and other North American CDMA carriers want to keep people on CDMA in North America?  (You could see the case where in a particular NA city the GSM signal might be stronger in an area.  If the phone switches to that stronger GSM signal instead of staying on the weaker CDMA signal, the CDMA carrier would need to pay the GSM carrier.)

As a customer, I would really like the phone to switch to the strongest signal, regardless of whose network that is.

Jim Courtney offered his own view back in April: "Shouldn't Blackberry's Pure GSM Phones be the Real 'World Edition'?"

Technorati tags: blackberrry, rim, 8830, jim courtney, wireless

TMC.net interviews me: "Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems"

Just out yesterday, TMC.Net published an interview with me titled, "Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems", by Mae Kowalke, where I talk about general VoIP security issues and then get into specifics about Mitel solutions.  Given that the author nicely gave me the chance to review the text and offer feedback before she published it, I have to say I'm pleased with how it came out. :-)

(And yes, I normally blog about VoIP security over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, but I just field weird about posting something like this over on that site.)

Technorati tags: mitel, security, voip security, voipsecurity, dan york

Blackberry "8830 World Edition": some initial impressions of the CDMA/GSM phone

Today I received my new Blackberry "8830 World Edition" and I thought I'd record some initial reactions.  As past readers know, I live in Vermont where we don't really have decent GSM coverage (and can't get the iPhone) and are, in fact, likely to have even less GSM coverage now that Verizon will be purchasing GSM provider Unicel and, per Engadget and others, will be converting all GSM users over to CDMA.

This is obviously not a good thing for those of us who need to travel outside of North America. 

My previous CDMA-only Blackberry 7290 became essentially an extremely expensive paperweight the moment I left these shores.  Because I do travel, I have had a "backup phone" that is a Cingular GSM phone (with a New York number) that I used when outside of NA.  However, it's rather a pain because: 1) it's a different phone interface than I'm used to; 2) it's a different number than people know and I have to get into forwarding; 3) it doesn't always seem to work abroad; 4) Mitel has been paying two separate monthly fees for me;  and perhaps most importantly to me 5) I don't get my email on the phone!

A few weeks ago I saw that Verizon would be offering this new "8830" Blackberry that claimed to work anywhere in the world and so I dropped a note to our Corporate IT group to see if this would solve my two phone issue and let me get my email wherever I travel. They were looking into it and, in light of my recent brilliant move, decided to go ahead with it.  It arrived today and after the brief activation process with both Verizon and Mitel's Blackberry Enterprise Server, I was up and running again.

Some initial thoughts (note that I am comparing the 8830 to an older 7290 - if you have a newer Blackberry, you may already have some of these changes):

• The 8830 is a nice, sleek, sharp-looking unit. Smaller and thinner than the 7290 but seems to have a higher screen resolution and brighter screen.
• The thumbwheel on the side is gone and instead there's a trackball in the center.  This will undoubtedly take some getting used to after so much use of the thumbwheel.  You push in the trackball just as you did the thumbwheel to execute a command or make a choice.  As a bonus, the trackball lights up, too.
• The keys are closer together, but yet they have ridges/indentations on them that seem, so far, to make it as easy to "thumb-type" on them as the previous keys.  (Hmmm... in fact, because the keys are closer together will there be less thumb fatigue?)
• Two more keys were added in the keypad.  The "0" key is now on its own key to the left of the spacebar and there is a separate Shift key.  On the right-side of the spacebar there is a "Sym" key that brings up various symbols.
• Next to the trackball, on the outside, Rim added the green and red "call" and "end" buttons that are common on most all cell phones these days. This is different from the 7290 where this was all done with the thumbwheel.
• Immediately adjacent to the trackball are two keys: "Menu" on the left and "Esc" on the right.  The Esc keys does what the button on the side of the 7290 below the thumbwheel did, which is that it cancels whatever you are doing and takes you "back" to a previous screen.  The "Menu" button pops up whatever menu is appropriate in the context. 
• An intere