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2 Days Left To Comment to FCC About Ham Radio Usage In Emergency Communications
Continue Reading: 2 Days Left To Comment to FCC About Ham Radio Usage In Emergency CommunicationsTo all my friends and readers who use amateur (ham) radio, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is seeking comment on the use of Amateur Radio in emergency communications such as disaster response.THE DEADLINE FOR COMMENT IS TOMORROW – May 17, 2012.
As the FCC public notice states:
the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC or Commission) Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau seek comment on the uses and capabilities of Amateur Radio Service communications in emergencies and disaster relief. As set forth below, comment is sought on issues relating to the importance of emergency Amateur Radio Service communications and on impediments to enhanced Amateur Radio Service communications. Stakeholder entities and organizations, including the Amateur Radio, emergency response, and disaster communications communities, are particularly encouraged to submit comments.
The public notice goes on to pose a series of questions around the importance of amateur radio in emergency communications – and a series of questions around the impediments to enhanced amateur radio communications.
Later in the document it explains the filing process, including the manner in which comments can be filed electronically over the Internet.
I’m not a ham radio user myself, although I’ve always had an interest…
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The WebRTC/RTCWEB Initiative
Continue Reading: The WebRTC/RTCWEB InitiativeThe “WebRTC / RTCWEB initiative” is an extremely exciting industry initiative that will allow “real-time communications” (ex. voice, video, chat) between web browsers without requiring Flash or Java browser plugins.
Essentially, the initiative is all about baking real-time communications into the fabric of the Web!
Imagine just going to a web browser on a desktop or mobile device and clicking a link in a web browser to start speaking and communicating with people. Using HTML5 and new VoIP technologies being standardized in the W3C and the IETF, this effort has the potential to be extremely disruptive and open up all sorts of innovation from developers and organizations.
To understand more, you may want to start with my article, How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (and Change The Internet).
If you have 48 minutes, this April 2012 interview of Cullen Jennings, chair of the IETF RTCWEB working group, provides an excellent background into what is going on. Erik Lagerway, the interview host, provided a list of the type of questions covered in the interview:
Cullen also prepared a focused presentation that steps through WebRTC/RTCWEB that comes in at 39 minutes:
If you don’t have that time, or just want to…
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Video: What is the role of the IETF? How does it help the Internet and open standards?
Continue Reading: Video: What is the role of the IETF? How does it help the Internet and open standards?What does the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) do? What role does it play in setting Internet standards?As readers are probably aware, I’ve been a long-time supporter and advocate of the IETF’s work on open standards, writing about it both here on Disruptive Telephony and previously quite extensively over on Voxeo’s Speaking of Standards blog. In my new role with the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme, of course, I’m even more directly involved and am now regularly attending IETF meetings.
For those who aren’t familiar with the IETF, I recently came across this great video that explains the basics of what the IETF does:
The IETF is a great organization that is truly open to anyone to get involved. All you need to do is sign up for one of the mailing lists for one of the working groups and start reading and then participating. You can also attend one of the face-to-face IETF meetings to get even more involved.
Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the IETF, do check out this video as it is a great intro!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Today’s VUC Call All About The “FreeSWITCH Cookbook” – Noon US Eastern
Continue Reading: Today’s VUC Call All About The “FreeSWITCH Cookbook” – Noon US EasternToday at noon US Eastern on the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) Call for Friday, April 27th, the group will discuss the brand new “FreeSWITCH Cookbook“[1] published by PACKT Publishing. The four authors of the book, who are also leaders of the FreeSWITCH project, will apparently be joining the call.
While Asterisk generally gets most of the “open source VoIP” buzz, the folks at the FreeSWITCH project have been working away on their own solution. As they will say, FreeSWITCH performs a different role than Asterisk and is used in different contexts.
FreeSWITCH has become quite a powerful platform and I’m looking forward to learning more about what is going on with the project right now.
You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.
As noted on the VUC page for today’s call, the show will also be simulcast in video using Google+ video and YouTube. If you are interested in joining the video side of the call, please follow the instructions on…
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Internet Society Launches “Internet Hall of Fame” Celebrating Early Pioneers
Continue Reading: Internet Society Launches “Internet Hall of Fame” Celebrating Early PioneersOne of the very cool announcements coming out of the Internet Society’s Global INET event in Geneva this week was the creation of an “Internet Hall of Fame” that recognizes many of the pioneers who started this amazing journey we’ve been on. The full site is available at:internethalloffame.org
Wired also had a great writeup:The Internet Gets a Hall of Fame (Including Al Gore!)
As is noted in the Wired article:The inductees fall into three categories: Pioneers who were key to the early design of the internet; Innovators who built on the net’s foundations with technical innovations and policy work; and Global Connectors who have helped expand the net’s growth and use around the world.
Both the site and the Wired article are well worth a read. It’s an amazing journey we’ve been on since those early days of the Internet… and it’s great to see folks like those listed here getting the recognition they justly deserve!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Civic.io – Mark Headd’s new site on Civic Hacking and Open Government
Continue Reading: Civic.io – Mark Headd’s new site on Civic Hacking and Open GovernmentMy friend Mark Headd passionately wants to open up government – and to do so through code. I’ve known him for years as the author of the VoiceInGov / Vox Populi blog where he has been writing about mashups and so many other ways to open up access to government information via telephony. Back in November 2010, Mark joined me and the others on the rocket ship known as Voxeo and did outstanding work for the Voxeo Labs and Tropo teams.
But just as my passions altered my career last fall, as of just a short time ago Mark is now the Director of Government Relations at Code for America and, with that, changing a bit about the way he is writing online.
His new site is
civic.io, where he will be writing on “civic hacking, civic startups and the future of open government“. He’s brought over to the site many of his relevant older posts, so he’s already got a solid amount of content.The work he and the others at projects like Code For America are doing is incredibly important to help with keeping our networks open. I’m looking forward to reading more…
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WebRTC (real-time VoIP in web browsers) On April 13th VUC Call – Join In!
Continue Reading: WebRTC (real-time VoIP in web browsers) On April 13th VUC Call – Join In!Want to learn about how voice and video calls will take place right in your web browser? WITHOUT a Flash or Java plugin?
The “WebRTC” initiative is making this a reality through efforts of the major browser vendors, VoIP industry companies and standards working groups within both the IETF and W3C. On the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) Call on Friday, April 13th, the group will have a discussion of what exactly is happening with WebRTC… and then some live demos from the Voxeo Labs and Phono teams who have been working on this topic for some time now.
This is, to me, an incredibly important area of work as we have the opportunity to really bake real-time communications (RTC) into the fabric of the tools we use every day to work with the Internet.
I’m looking forward to the VUC call (“tomorrow” as I write this, but probably “today” when most of you read it) and would encourage you to join in to listen and/or participate in the conversation.
You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call.…
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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…
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Skype Hits 40 Million Simultaneous Users!
Continue Reading: Skype Hits 40 Million Simultaneous Users!Congrats to the folks at Skype for hitting over 40 million concurrent users! Today at 2pm US Eastern when I typed “/users” in any Skype chat on my Mac, I got this great message (Windows users should see the count in the lower left corner of the Skype client):That’s a pretty amazing milestone, given that some of us can remember back to when the concurrent user count was in the upper 20s (early 2011) or even way back to the earlier days when it was down in the low millions (2007). This time of day has historically been one of the highest times, so I expect that we’ll see the count drop off for the remainder of the day and then hit this number again tomorrow around early afternoon US Eastern time.
Hudson Barton has an interesting trend chart showing the growth of Skype users over time:
The jump in the last quarter has been particularly dramatic – and probably has much to do with the expanded availability of Skype on smartphones and other devices.
Regardless of the reason, it’s a rather amazing milestone. Congrats to the folks at Skype!
P.S. Skype now…
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The Big Question On Avaya’s Acquisition of Radvision – What About The SIP and H.323 Stacks?
Continue Reading: The Big Question On Avaya’s Acquisition of Radvision – What About The SIP and H.323 Stacks?With today’s big news in the VoIP / Unified Communications (UC) / telecom space of Avaya’s acquisition of Radvision, pretty much all of the coverage has predictably focused on the video angle. While that’s certainly important, I have a far bigger question:What about Radvision’s SIP and H.323 stacks?
More specifically –
will Avaya continue to support and promote the strong usage of Radvision stacks by other vendors?
Of all the coverage I’ve seen so far, only Tom Keating touched on this in his brief post:
They also developed a H.323 stack used in hundreds of VoIP and videoconferencing products before SIP became the dominant VoIP protocol of choice.
Beyond the popular H.323 stack, Radvision’s SIP stack has also been used in a good number of products out there – and Radvision also developed stacks for RTP, MGCP and many other VoIP protocols. Just follow the links off of Radvision’s developer page at:
http://www.radvision.com/Products/Developer/
to see the wide range of developer solutions they have developed over the years.
For those not familiar with this topic, a “stack” in developer-speak is basically a set of libraries that you can incorporate into your products to enable those products…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…