Category: Telecom Industry
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Is anyone surprised Fairpoint filed for bankruptcy? (How’s that landline biz in 2009?)
Continue Reading: Is anyone surprised Fairpoint filed for bankruptcy? (How’s that landline biz in 2009?)From the “Duh! What were they thinking?” desk, the big news up there in the northeastern part of the US is that our major local landline provider, Fairpoint Communications, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today. Last year, Fairpoint paid $2.4 billion for Verizon’s landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and formally took over the network earlier this year, with all sorts of ensuing service challenges which have been well-documented.As FierceTelecom points out, this bankruptcy has been expected for quite some time now. Last week there was much publicity up in these parts about Fairpoint working with its unions and banks to try to avoid the formal filing… but obviously today’s filing indicates that they couldn’t pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. This morning, Fairpoint issued a news release and set up a web site about their restructuring:
http://www.fprestructuring.com/
Now, I should mention that I am a Fairpoint customer and do have a landline from them – I’ve also not personally had any customer service issues with their service. I am also not at all surprised.
I thought Fairpoint’s acquisition of Verizon’s landline business last year was an exceedingly dumb idea then – and…
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eComm Europe in Amsterdam this week (Oct 28-30) – THE show for communications disruption
Continue Reading: eComm Europe in Amsterdam this week (Oct 28-30) – THE show for communications disruptionFor those out there interested in how telephony – and all communications – is being disrupted, the place to be this week is very definitely eComm Europe in Amsterdam. It’s definitely a gathering of the “tribe” of people who are on out there defining the bleeding edge of the communications space. Great speakers, great schedule… it should be a great event!Sadly, a schedule conflict prevented my attendance, but as I wrote about on the Voxeo Talks blog, Voxeo will have a presence there in the form of multiple speakers as well as a booth. More info can be found on the Voxeo event page at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/ecomm-europe/
If you are at eComm Europe, please do say hello to RJ Auburn or Jay Phillips… or stop by our booth. Also, look for the fun giveaway in the eComm bag. 😉
And if, like me, you can’t get there… you can follow along in the eComm tweet stream and see info posted up on the eComm blog. It should be a great show, so I’m definitely looking forward to hearing and reading more about what goes on there.
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Skype takes a SIP of Cisco with UC500 Skype For SIP certification
Continue Reading: Skype takes a SIP of Cisco with UC500 Skype For SIP certificationIt’s been a busy month for the folks in the Skype For SIP project. First, back on September 9, Skype announced ShoreTel interoperability. Then last week on September 17, Skype announced interop with the open source SIPFoundry sipXecs product.Today, though, is Skype’s biggest announcement yet – they are announcing the certification of Cisco’s Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business as interoperable with Skype For SIP.
Beyond simply the interop, what’s perhaps more interesting is to note the direct Cisco involvement with this news release (through a quote). Looking at the overall industry, it’s interesting to see Cisco and Skype connecting. I admit that I haven’t studied Cisco’s UC500 product much at all, although per the news release it sounds like they are doing some interesting things with it:
The Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series platform is part of Cisco’s Smart Business Communications System which continues to expand having just added a new set of IP phones with high definition audio, a unified threat management device as well as support for third party application integration, including products from healthcare, automotive and insurance industries.
Congrats to both Skype and Cisco on this announcement. I expect we’ll be seeing more of…
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Silicon Alley Insider: How Comcast Ate Vonage’s Lunch
Continue Reading: Silicon Alley Insider: How Comcast Ate Vonage’s LunchFascinating chart out of Silicon Alley Insider today showing the incredible growth Comcast has had in terms of IP phone subscribers versus that of Vonage:I doubt the chart is a huge surprise for anyone following the industry, but it still does make for an interesting graphic. Despite all the advertising money that Vonage can throw out there, Comcast and the other cable providers have the inherent advantage that they can easily offer powerful “triple-play bundles” of cable TV, Internet access and phone service.
Comcast is no longer my provider (Time-Warner services Keene, NH, where I live.), but when I lived in Burlington, VT, we had Comcast for Internet access and Verizon for phone (and we didn’t have anyone for TV, since we don’t watch it). The offers that Comcast kept sending us, though, encouraging us to switch, were quite compelling. The amount I paid for Internet access would have been lower if I had either phone or TV with Comcast, and even lower if I had all three.
If we actually watched TV and therefore wanted cable TV, the economics of the “triple-play” would be very hard to beat… so it’s no surprise at all to me to…
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Video: Sir Terry Matthews on startups, Canada, what’s exciting…
Continue Reading: Video: Sir Terry Matthews on startups, Canada, what’s exciting…By way of a tweet from Matt Roberts, a friend from my Mitel days, I learned of this video interview with Sir Terry Matthews on Canada’s Business News Network:Sir Terry Matthews speaks to BNN about the state of the industry in Canada, why he loves home-grown startups and what he sees as the next big thing in technology.
If you’ve not heard him before, the interview is a good view into the passion, enthusiasm and charisma that keeps him starting up companies all over the place. The report says he’s now up to 80 companies or so that he’s started up… and I’m not surprised.
His overall message, though, is what he has been consistent saying for many years now… we are in an age where incredible broadband capacity is coming online – as that happens, what will we do to make use of all that bandwidth?
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Technorati Tags: terry matthews, canada
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The Park Bench Manifesto – text coming soon, video and slides now up
Continue Reading: The Park Bench Manifesto – text coming soon, video and slides now upThis week out at the Emerging Communications Conference in San Francisco, I gave a 10-minute talk called “The Park Bench Manifesto: Why We Want To Kill Off The PSTN”. In the talk, I mentioned that the text would be available here soon… And it will be.
In the meantime though, I have put up both the video and the 54-slide deck over on <a href=”http://blogs.Voxeo.com/ett/”>blogs.voxeo.com/ett/</a>
More soon….. (need to fly home…)
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A belated congrats to Martin Geddes for joining BT…
Continue Reading: A belated congrats to Martin Geddes for joining BT…With a simple “I’ve changed jobs” blog post (way shorter than any blog post I’ve ever written), Martin Geddes let us all know that he was now joining BT. The post over on Telco 2.0 goes into more about Martin’s move and his reasons why he sees BT’s future as bright…Besides having one of the coolest blog names (“Telepocalypse“), Martin’s a great writer and thinking in our space. We’ve only met a couple of times, but I’ve always respected the work he’s done and enjoyed his writing. I wish him all the best at BT and look forward to what may evolve there!
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Technorati Tags: martingeddes, bt
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eComm Podcast: Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell Telephony
Continue Reading: eComm Podcast: Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell TelephonyOver on the eComm blog, Lee Dryburgh put up an interesting podcast on “Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell Telephony“. It’s well worth a listen for those of you interested in the larger picture of what we are building for a communications infrastructure…P.S. And if you are interested in that topic, you really should consider attending eComm March 3-5…
Technorati Tags: ecomm, communication, telephony, rebelvox, voip
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Define “VoIP” – and then we can debate whether it is dead!
Continue Reading: Define “VoIP” – and then we can debate whether it is dead!There is a fundamental problem with the “VoIP is dead” debate continuing to rage across the VoIP/communications part of the blogosphere (see Alec Saunders part 1 and part 2, Jon Arnold, Andy Abramson, Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver part 1 and part 2, Om Malik, Shidan Gouran, Ted Wallingford, Dameon Welch-Abernathy (PhoneBoy), Rich Tehrani and a zillion others…)Aswath Rao and Luca Filigheddu came closest to the mark in their posts. The fundamental problem with this entire debate is simply this:
Define “VoIP”?
As I discussed in an Emerging Tech Talk video podcast I put up this morning, there are a range of definitions you could give to “VoIP”, including, but not limited to, the following:
- The underlying infrastructure, a.k.a. the “plumbing” – the mechanisms, protocols, etc. that are used for the transport of voice/video/etc. over IP. Things like SIP, H.323, RTP, various codecs, etc.
- Consumer “PSTN line replacement” services – Offerings like those of Vonage and so many others where the basic idea is that you can get cheaper telephone charges by going over the Internet and getting rid of your local landline. Also called “pure play” VoIP by some or “VoIP arbitrage” by others.
- Computer-to-computer/softphone offerings, often coming from the…
- The underlying infrastructure, a.k.a. the “plumbing” – the mechanisms, protocols, etc. that are used for the transport of voice/video/etc. over IP. Things like SIP, H.323, RTP, various codecs, etc.