Category: Telecom Industry
-
/
Last Day To Submit Speaking Proposals for SIPNOC2013
Continue Reading: Last Day To Submit Speaking Proposals for SIPNOC2013Got a great idea for a talk to give to an excellent gathering of SIP/VoIP network operators? Have a new way of handling security? Have a case study you’d like to present for how you solved an operational issue?The SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) is an outstanding event happening in Herndon, Virginia, USA, from April 22-25. It brings together network operators working with SIP / VoIP networks for several days of talks, networking (of the human kind) and education. I’ve gone the past two years, speaking about IPv6, and they are truly excellent conferences. Not too big, not too small… and with an extremely high quality of people both attending and speaking.
If you think you’d like to present, TODAY, January 25, 2013, is the end of the call for presentations for SIPNOC 2013. They are seeking presentations on topics such as (see the CFP for more detail):
- Peering
- SIP Trunking
- Congestion Control
- Applications/content Development
- Interoperability
- Call Routing
- Security
- Monitoring/Troubleshoooting and Operational Issues
- Testing Considerations and Tools
- Availability/Disaster-Recovery
- WebRTC and SIP
- SIP-Network Operations Center Best Practices
- Standardization Issues and Progress
- FoIP/T.38 Deployment
- User-Agent Configuration
- IPv6 Deployment Challenges
- Emergency Services
- Scaling and Capacity Issues
- HD-Voice Deployment Challenges
- Video Interop Issues
They…
-
/
T-Mobile Rolling Out HD Voice (Wideband) In US Mobile Network
Continue Reading: T-Mobile Rolling Out HD Voice (Wideband) In US Mobile NetworkMarking a huge step toward moving beyond the limitations of the legacy phone networks, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week in Las Vegas T-Mobile announced that HD Voice is now available nationwide on its US network. This will give people the richer, fuller voice experience similar to what many of us have gotten used to experiencing while making Skype calls.There is, of course, the caveat that HD voice (also called “wideband audio”) is only available using specific smartphones:
To experience HD Voice, both parties on the call must use capable T-Mobile 4G smartphones such as the HTC One™ S, Nokia Astound and Samsung Galaxy S® III
TheNextWeb also suggests that the iPhone 5 should support HD Voice when T-Mobile makes it available on their network sometime this year.
Over on AnandTech, Brian Klug dives into a bit more detail about T-Mobile’s HD Voice, specifically naming the AMR-WB codec, and relays some of his own testing that confirmed that it is live now.
This is an excellent step forward, even with the caveat that it only works on T-Mobile’s 4G network and only with specific smartphones. As more and more people get used to the richer and better…
-
/
World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) Starts Today in Dubai
Continue Reading: World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) Starts Today in DubaiToday is the start of the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai. The aim of the conference is to update the “International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs)“, a treaty between nations that establishes rules for interoperability and interconnection for telecom between countries.These ITRs were last updated in 1988… and the world of telecom has changed just a wee bit since then! 🙂
Unless you’ve been asleep or offline for the past few months, you’ll know that some of the countries out there are seeking to use this WCIT conference as a way to expand the ITRs to cover the Internet – and to thereby control the Internet more or to impose other business models on the Internet. Obviously a lot of people (myself included) are opposed to the expansion of the ITRs to include more of the Internet and believe that the ITRs should remain focused on the telecommunications interconnection related to the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
This all will play out over the next two weeks in the meetings happening in Dubai that will culminate with a series of votes by the member states. The ITU is a United Nations (UN)…
-
/
Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And Services
Continue Reading: Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And ServicesImagine you are driving fast along a major highway in traffic and you receive a call from a critical customer. She wants to know immediately when you can meet tomorrow with her team to go over the final proposal and sign the deal. There’s no way for you to pull over and look at your calendar on your phone or computer… and it’s really not safe in the high-speed traffic for you to be flipping through your calendar while you talk. What do you do?Do you tell her you’ll give her a call back when you get to a safe place? Or do you do the unsafe action of looking at your calendar on your phone?
What if there was a different way?
What if you could say something like “Let me check my calendar for tomorrow at 3pm” and then suddenly have a voice whisper back to you – on your call, but only heard by you – “your calendar is free at 3pm. You have meetings at 2 and 5.”
You could then reply to your customer after just this brief pause letting her know that you could meet with her.
Sound like science fiction?
Perhaps… but…
-
/
Hypervoice – The Fundamental Flaw In The Proposal
Continue Reading: Hypervoice – The Fundamental Flaw In The ProposalI am a huge fan of Martin Geddes, but he and I disagree fundamentally on one key part of what he is now calling “hypervoice”. NOTE: Today’s VUC call at 12noon US Eastern will be with Martin discussing his ideas. If you’d like to weigh in on the issue, please join the call. (Unfortunately, I’ll be waiting to board a plane home from Mumbai and can’t make it… hence this blog post.)To back up a bit, Martin has always been one of the “big thinkers” in realm of VoIP and telephony/telecom. Way back in mid-2000s when a number of us all started writing about VoIP, Martin’s Telepocalypse blog was brilliant. He was always thinking about the “big picture” and drawing connections where they were not already apparent. His work with “Telco 2.0” was excellent and it was no surprise when he went to work for BT looking at their strategy. Now that he is back out on his own as a consultant, I’m a subscriber to his “Future of Communications” email newsletter (subscribe on the sidebar to his site) and enjoy reading his frequent issues.
Recently he gave a closing keynote presentation at the Metaswitch Forum titled “A presentation…
-
/
Slides: How The Hidden Secret of TCP/IP Affects Real-time Communications
Continue Reading: Slides: How The Hidden Secret of TCP/IP Affects Real-time CommunicationsRecently at Voip2day + ElastixWorld in Madrid 2012, Olle E Johansson gave a great presentation outlining where we are at with telecom and VoIP in 2012 – and where we need to go! Olle is a long-time, passionate and tireless advocate for the open Internet, IPv6, SIP and standards and interoperability. I’ve known Olle for years via Asterisk-related issues, via the VUC calls and via work on SIP over IPv6.This presentation (slides available) really hits a number of key points about where we are at now:
The secret of TCP/IP and how it affects your PBX from Olle E Johansson
In particular I was struck by his slides 24-28 that strike the same theme I’ve been writing about across multiple blogs, namely the way we are reversing the “open Internet” trend and retreating back inside walled gardens of messaging:
He goes on to walk through what happened with SIP and how the protocol evolved – and evolved away from interoperability. His conclusion is that we as customers need to take back control, avoid vendor lock-in and demand interoperability.
He also points people over to his “SIP…
-
/
How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (And Change The Internet)
Continue Reading: How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (And Change The Internet)If we step back to before 1993, publishing and finding content on the Internet was a somewhat obscure, geeky thing that a very few people cared about and very few knew how to do. It involved gopher servers, ftp sites, archie, veronica, WAIS, USENET newsgroups, etc., and this "World-Wide Web" service primarily demonstrated via the server at info.cern.ch. It was an amazing period of time for those of us who were there, but the number of users was quite small.
Then NCSA released Mosaic in 1993 … and suddenly everything changed.
Anyone could create a web page that "regular" people could see on their computers. Anyone could download Mosaic and use it. Anyone could share their sites with the installation of server software.
The Web was truly born into public consciousness… the creation of Web-based content was democratized so that anyone could do it… the creativity of developers was unleashed… a zillion new business models were thought of… and the Internet fundamentally changed.
Fast-forward to today…
… and the "Web" is still predominantly a document-based system. You make HTTP queries to retrieve pages and send HTML and XML documents back and forth between web…
-
/
What is an Over-The-Top (OTT) Application or Service? – A Brief Explanation
Continue Reading: What is an Over-The-Top (OTT) Application or Service? – A Brief ExplanationWhat is an "over-the-top" or "OTT" application or service? How does an OTT telecommunications or media app/service differ from a "regular" application?
The answer depends upon your perspective.
For a regular user of the Internet, an "OTT app or service" is something like:
- YouTube, Hulu, Netflix or Apple TV for streaming video
- Skype or Facetime for voice/video calls
- WhatsApp or iMessage for messages on a mobile device
- Xbox 360 or World of Warcraft for gaming
Basically, any service you are receiving over the Internet that is NOT provided directly by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Of course, for an ISP / telecommunication provider, the critical point about an OTT app/service is the part I emphasized – it is NOT a service you are paying them for.
And they are not happy about this.
It's not clear to me when precisely we in the industry started talking about "over-the-top" applications and services, but I first saw OTT mentioned back in 2008 or 2009 when the term was primarily applied to video services such as those coming from Netflix or Hulu. At the time, major US service providers such as Comcast and AT&T were rolling out their video-on-demand services and were being…
-
/
SegTEL/TVC Stringing Fiber Through Keene, NH – A New Internet Choice?
Continue Reading: SegTEL/TVC Stringing Fiber Through Keene, NH – A New Internet Choice?When I look out my office window and see a bucket truck driving by with a guy up in the bucket attaching what looks like fiber optic cable to the polls, my reaction as a networking geek was naturally:- who is stringing new fiber?
Followed, of course, by “that’s kind of a cool way to ride around town” (probably literally cool, today).
My initial thought was that it was upgraded wiring from either Fair Point Communications, our local phone company (who bought out Verizon’s landline business up “he-ah”), or Time Warner Cable, who owns the cable franchise for Keene, NH.
It turned out to be neither, but rather someone new.
I walked out and met the crew up the street when they happened to be reloading connectors into the bucket. One of them said this was new service for “SegTEL”. He said SegTel was a private company who had been recently bought out by someone and was planning to provide high-speed Internet access to businesses.
As I walked back to my house, my immediate reactions were:
- Cool! Will there be a plan I can afford as an individual?
- Will they offer IPv6?
To my surprise, SegTEL appears to have…