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SIPNOC 2012 Photos Now Available On Flickr
Continue Reading: SIPNOC 2012 Photos Now Available On FlickrAt this year’s SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) on June 25-27, 2012 in Reston, VA, I was shooting photos of the various presenters as well as trying to take some shots that captured the general feel of the excellent event. As with shooting any event, I find the actual taking photos to be the insanely easy part… it is the curation of the photos that takes the longest amount of time. Over the past bit, though, I finally was able to reduce the 500+ photos I shot down to a meaningful set and I’ve now posted the SIPNOC 2012 photos up to Flickr:A special thanks to Spencer Dawkins who took some shots of me speaking.
I’ve licensed them all under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license so that they can be used by others. If you’re in the photos and want an original, you can download them from Flickr… and you’re also welcome to contact me if you have any issues downloading a file.
SIPNOC 2012 was a great event and kudos to the SIP Forum for making the event happen! I’m looking forward to next year’s event!
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Video: An Excellent Tour Of Voxeo’s Awesome New Office!
Continue Reading: Video: An Excellent Tour Of Voxeo’s Awesome New Office!My friends and former colleagues at Voxeo have produced a truly outstanding video giving a tour of the incredible space they have created in Orlando, Florida:
Kudos to the Voxeo marketing team for creating this video! And congrats to Jonathan Taylor and the rest of the team for realizing his vision of creating a truly unique working space and corporate culture in Orlando.
I’d note that Voxeo is quite often hiring and truly is a great company to work for. If you’re looking for a job in the communications space with an excellent team of people, you should definitely check them out!
(Full disclosure: I worked for Voxeo from 2007-2011 and remain a shareholder.)
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Hiring! Looking For An IETFer To Join ISOC’s Deploy360 Programme
Continue Reading: Hiring! Looking For An IETFer To Join ISOC’s Deploy360 ProgrammeDo you want to help get open standards like IPv6 and DNSSEC more widely deployed? Would you like to see other technologies developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) more rapidly adopted by network operators?Are you passionate about the need to preserve the open nature of the Internet? Do you like to write, speak and create other forms of content? Would you like to be part of the Internet Society, the global nonprofit that serves as the organizational home of the IETF?
If so, the team I’m part of that is behind the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme is looking for YOU!
As we noted on the Deploy360 blog, we’re currently hiring a new position into the team specifically to interact with network operators and help accelerate the deployment of open Internet standards.
You can read read the job description for what is called the “Operational Engagement Programme Manager”. As noted in the document:
The Operational Engagement Programme Manager is a newly created position within the Internet Society. This position will report to the Director, Deployment and Operationalization. The primary focus areas of this position will be to: 1) develop and coordinate increased industry collaboration and conversations about the…
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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…
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Deutsche Telekom Partners With Tropo To Expose Developer APIs for Voice and SMS
Continue Reading: Deutsche Telekom Partners With Tropo To Expose Developer APIs for Voice and SMSIntriguing news out of the folks at Tropo today… Deutsche Telekom has made the Tropo APIs available as part of DT’s “Developer Garden” at:http://www.developergarden.com/apis/apis-sdks/telekom-tropo-api/
This is part of a broad range of APIs offered by Deutsche Telekom and basically gives developers using the DT network access to the full range of Tropo.com capabilities. As they note on the page, you can:
- Make & receive phone calls from within any web browser or application
- Run Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) applications with speech recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS)
- Send SMS out of CRM applications
- Create conference calls with up to 50 participants
Basically create any kind of “voice mashup” you can think of. I would also note that Tropo supports multiple languages for speech recognition and text-to-speech, a fact that may appeal to European developers.
Now why would a developer want to use “Telekom Tropo” versus just “regular” Tropo? The answer seems to be that DT takes care of all the billing integration and makes it easy for developers to charge for their services. From what I can see, all that billing integration is handled directly by Deutsche Telekom.
Now, obviously, this only works on the DT network, but that network…
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June 23 Deadline For Submissions to Invite-Only WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control Workshop
Continue Reading: June 23 Deadline For Submissions to Invite-Only WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control WorkshopHow do we manage network congestion as we move real-time voice, video, chat and data communication into web browsers? How do we make sure browser-based voice/video doesn’t overwhelm the local network?If you’ve been following the excellent work of the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative you’ll know that developers are already using developer builds of browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to move real-time communications (RTC) directly into web browsers – without using Flash or Java plugins.
It’s a powerful step to bake real-time communications into the very fabric of the Web. It stands to open up a zillion new opportunities for innovative uses of voice and video… and can fundamentally disrupt so many aspects of today’s telecommunications.
It also stands a chance of completely swamping today’s networks with RTC traffic!
So what do we do? How do make sure that browser-based RTC plays nice with other traffic? How do we help it succeed?
Those are the type of topics to be discussed and debated in a “Workshop on Congestion Control for Interactive Real-Time Communication” taking place on Saturday, July 28, 2012, in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the weekend before the start of the week-long IETF 84 standards meeting.…
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How Well Will Microsoft Surface Tablets Work With Skype?
Continue Reading: How Well Will Microsoft Surface Tablets Work With Skype?Over the past 24 hours there has been a huge amount of attention in the tech media sphere about Microsoft’s announcement of its “Surface” line of tablets. The media frenzy continues today with even more analysis and coverage. It is, of course, a huge step for Microsoft to copy the Apple model and come out with their own hardware, which has to create challenges with all of the other hardware vendors who normally use Microsoft software.My own immediate question, though, was more mundane:
How well will these Surface tablets work with Skype?
Given that Skype is now part of Microsoft, and that Skype CEO Tony Bates has said the company is focusing on Windows 8, you’d hope it would work well. Throughout all the media frenzy, though, I’ve seen very little on that… until I scrolled down the “About” page and found this bit (along with the image I’m including in this post):
Surface has not just one, but two cameras. Use the front LifeCam to chat with the people that you care about. The rear-facing LifeCam is angled to 22 degrees so you can flip out the Kickstand and record meetings and events hands-free. Stereo speakers and dual…
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Why World IPv6 Launch Is Critical To Preserve The Open Internet
Continue Reading: Why World IPv6 Launch Is Critical To Preserve The Open InternetWith yesterday’s World IPv6 Launch bringing about the permanent enablement of IPv6 access on thousands of websites around the world (including this one), I recorded a video for the Internet Society’s stream of videos about why I see IPv6 as critical to preserve the “open” nature of the Internet.As I say in the video (below), my big fear is that IPv4 address exhaustion will create a situation where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will use what is called “carrier-grade NAT (CGN)” or “large-scale NAT (LSN)” to put all their subscribers behind a single public IPv4 address.
The ISPs then become the gatekeepers. They can determine what you will view – or what you will pay to view certain types of content. They could also potentially restrict customer’s access to the next great new service… the next Twitter or Facebook, for instance… until that service pays the ISP for access to customers.
It can completely flip the Internet around from one that thrives on “permission-less innovation” where anyone can create any service and make it available to all… to an Internet that is “permission-based” with gatekeepers controlling access at key points.
The migration to IPv6 does not, of course, remove…
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IPv6
Continue Reading: IPv6To be ready for World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, this Disruptive Telephony site uses the CloudFlare Content Distribution Network (CDN) and their IPv6 Automatic Gateway. Basically, CloudFlare copies all my content into their CDN and makes it available through their various edge servers. Given that all of those edge servers are dual-stacked to support both IPv4 and IPv6, my content is available immediately over both IPv4 and IPv6.
For free – without me having to do anything beyond signing up (for free) for CloudFlare and setting the DNS namesevers for my domain to point to CloudFlare.
Simple. Easy. IPv6.
If you’d like to set your website up with IPv6 in the same way, visit CloudFlare’s site and sign up for free.
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…