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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…
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Facebook Rolls Out Free Voice Calls In The US On iOS – A Quick Walkthrough And A Big, Huge Caveat
Continue Reading: Facebook Rolls Out Free Voice Calls In The US On iOS – A Quick Walkthrough And A Big, Huge CaveatFacebook today rolled out it’s free voice calling in the US via its Messenger app for iOS (iPhone/iPad). The Verge was the first I saw with the news and a great number of sites are now following.Voice calling through Facebook has the potential to be hugely disruptive… rather than calling on your phone over your regular phone connection – or even rather than using Skype, you can just call from directly within Facebook. This is the kind of “Over-The-Top (OTT)” app that gives telco operators a fit… goodbye, telco voice minutes!
Plus, it’s using some HD voice codec so the sound quality is outstanding.
And since the folks at Facebook want you to live your life inside of their very pretty walls, this just provides yet one more reason for you to stay within those walls.
BUT… there’s a big huge caveat that I’ll get to in a moment.
A Quick Walkthrough
First, though, let’s look at how it works. When you go into the Messenger app and open a chat with a friend (in this case, Jim Courtney), all you have to do is click the “i” button in the upper right:
After you do that…
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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…
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Facebook Rolls Out VoIP In Canada on iOS!
Continue Reading: Facebook Rolls Out VoIP In Canada on iOS!Today, Facebook apparently began testing of true voice-over-IP (VoIP) calling from its iOS app for all Facebook users in Canada. If you have an iPhone and are in Canada, you can update to the latest version of the Facebook Messenger app and start making free phone calls to your friends on Facebook. Two articles have more details:- The Verge: Facebook tests free voice calling in Messenger app
- iPhone Hacks: Facebook Testing Messenger-Based VoIP in Canada (And it’s Amazing)
I was alerted to this by (appropriately) a Facebook post from Tris Hussey, author of the iPhone Hacks article.
Since I’m not in Canada, I can’t test it myself… an update to the Messenger app for me will only get me the ability to leave “voice notes”. But I’m looking forward to learning more from my friends in Canada.
If this rolls out to users outside of Canada, this has the potential to be huge and a major disruption to telecom. Yes, there is Skype on mobile phones, and a dozen other apps like Viber and Voxer, but…
… Facebook has the directory and the eyeballs!
You have your friend connections already in Facebook. Plus, people are already spending a significant amount…
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Live Webcast at 8:30am: WCIT Post Mortem with ISOC DC Chapter
Continue Reading: Live Webcast at 8:30am: WCIT Post Mortem with ISOC DC ChapterWhat happened with the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) last week in Dubai? In about 25 minutes, at 8:30 US Eastern time, the Internet Society DC Chapter will be hosting a panel discussion doing a “post mortem” on the WCIT event. Details are here:http://isoc-ny.org/p2/4609
And you can tune in to the livestream here:http://livestream.com/internetsocietychapters
The session will be archived for those who can’t attend. It should be a very interesting discussion!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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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)…
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Skype 4.2.1 for iPad/iPhone Brings Microsoft Integration, Chat Interop, Better IM Features
Continue Reading: Skype 4.2.1 for iPad/iPhone Brings Microsoft Integration, Chat Interop, Better IM FeaturesSkype today brought its increased integration with Microsoft services to the iPhone and iPad with the new release 4.2.1 available in the iOS AppStore. As you can already do in the Windows, Mac and Android versions of Skype, the big feature is that you can now sign in with your “Microsoft account” and merge our Skype contacts with those from Windows Live Messenger (WLM) and Outlook.com. You will now be able to chat back and forth with your WLM contacts directly from within Skype.
This is very cool from the point-of-view that Skype has always been a “walled garden” of instant messaging (IM) that did not interoperate with any other service. Many of us long ago wound up having to use two IM clients on our system: 1) Skype; and 2) a multi-service client (like Adium or Pidgin) for all the other IM networks. This doesn’t quite solve that problem because it is now really just expanding the Skype client to work with two IM networks, but it is at least a step toward greater interop.
In a post on Skype’s “Garage” blog, Beom Soo Park indicates these new features:
- Sign in with your Microsoft Account to merge your Windows Live…
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The Fascinating Interest in Using Google Voice With SIP Addresses
Continue Reading: The Fascinating Interest in Using Google Voice With SIP AddressesWhy are so many people interested in using Google Voice with SIP? Is this a sign that people really want to use SIP-based services for VoIP? Is this all hobbyists or people looking to play around with Google Voice? Or is it people trying to solve real interconnection issues? What are people trying to do with Google Voice and SIP?All these questions came to my mind today when I dipped into Google Analytics and noticed that for the month to date in November 2012, my old (March 2011) post about Google Voice and SIP addresses continues to receive a large amount of traffic:
Slightly over 3,000 pageviews in the first 13 days of November – and if I go back a bit I see over 71,000 pageviews since January 1, 2012. In fact, it’s had about 232K pageviews since I wrote it over 1.5 years ago, and has accounted for almost 25% of all traffic to this site in that time.
And this particular article was just one in a series of articles I wound up writing about Google Voice and SIP as we all collectively tried to figure out what was going on.
Digging into the traffic sources…
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Oops – Post Published On Wrong Site
Continue Reading: Oops – Post Published On Wrong SiteOops… this post was published on the wrong site – please see the article over on my Disruptive Conversations site at:When Facebook Starts To Become More Useless – Irrelevant In-Feed Ads
Thank you!
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…