Is anyone surprised Fairpoint filed for bankruptcy? (How’s that landline biz in 2009?)

fairpoint.jpgFrom 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 I still think that today.

I mean… you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or industry analyst to figure out that landlines are a dying business. Here’s part of the overview from the most recent “Wireless Substitution” report from the US National Center for Health Statistics (my emphasis added):

More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008. This is the largest 6-month increase observed since NHIS began collecting data on wireless-only households in 2003. In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.5%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones, despite having a landline telephone in the home.

I personally expect that trend to continue and if anything to accelerate as we collectively continue to choose mobile devices – and also as the cable companies and other players out there continue to offer compelling alternatives to the traditional landline. (Hmmm… and gee, do you think the cable companies up here aren’t going to seize this opportunity to court Fairpoint customers?) And while I kept our landline for several reasons, I don’t necessarily expect that I’ll need it for a long time.

Sure… perhaps Fairpoint thought it could make money off the Internet access side of the house… I mean, buying your way into being the incumbent utility ought to be a good thing, right? But then again, the cable companies are right in there… as are the satellite folks and many others offering Internet access…

All I can say is kudos to whomever it was within Verizon that thought up this strategy of selling off their dying businesses to other companies… and let’s see if they succeed in doing it again with Frontier Communications.

In the meantime, we will see what kind of chaos this filing stirs up today up here in both terms of business and political maneuverings…

It’s also interesting to contemplate: what would happen if such a major utility like the “local phone company” were to completely fail?

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eComm Europe in Amsterdam this week (Oct 28-30) – THE show for communications disruption

Emerging Communications 2009For 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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Of Skype, SIP, P2P and P2PSIP…

skype_logo.pngOver on Voxeo’s Speaking of Standards blog, I put up a post today on:

Could Skype realistically replace its P2P algorithm with P2PSIP?

I decided to write it after reading the comments on Phil Wolff’s post last week over on Skype Journal… mostly to talk a bit more about what P2PSIP is and how it compares to what Skype is using now.

While it’s interesting to talk about on a technical level – and I admit to a complete fascination with the technology behind P2P networks – the reality is that none of us really know anything about what Skype is up to. 🙂

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Humorous video – in how many movies is the “No Signal” theme over-used?

It’s Friday, so here’s a bit of humor… I admit that I had not really paid attention to how incredibly over-used the “my cellphone has no signal” theme has been in recent movies until I saw this video. Keep watching, though, because after the “no signal” theme, it does go into other amusingly over-used themes like dropping mobile phones in water, ripping them apart, burning them, etc….

Kudos to someone named Rich Juzwiak for apparently editing together pieces of 66 movies!

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Skype takes a SIP of Cisco with UC500 Skype For SIP certification

skypeforsip.jpgIt’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 these announcements in the weeks and months ahead as Skype continues to aggressively court partners. The Skype For SIP offering does provide some useful functionality for on-premise IP-PBX systems:

  • Ability to receive inbound calls from Skype users
  • Ability to receive inbound calls from PSTN users through “online numbers” (formerly SkypeIn)
  • Ability to place outbound calls to PSTN users

The Online Number functionality is particularly interesting as you can easily set up any series of numbers in other parts of the world that ring back into your IP-PBX. Sure, you can do that with any other SIP trunking provider, too, but Skype makes it incredibly easy to provision those numbers – and for a very low annual cost, too. Making your IP-PBX accessible to all the Skype users, too, is quite powerful.

Now if only you could make outbound calls to Skype users… (NOT possible with Skype For SIP, but possible with Skype For Asterisk).

Anyway, congrats again to Skype and Cisco on this announcement.

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I’ll be at VON in Miami on Monday, Sept 21, 2009

von2009logo.jpg
If any of you will be down at VON next week in South Beach, Miami, FL, next week, I’ll be part of two presentations on Monday, September 21, 2009. The full abstracts are outlined on a Voxeo events page, but the titles are:

10 – 11:15am, Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX

11:30 – 12:30pm, The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World

The second one should be fun as it’s with my good friend Thomas Howe (who also has a spiffy new website). It’s just Thomas and I and a moderator, talking about developer ecosystems. Good stuff!

I’m only there at VON on Monday. That evening I’ll be driving up to Orlando where I’ll be spending Tuesday through Friday at Voxeo’s corporate office. But if you are down at VON, please do say hello.

P.S. And yes, this is the “new” VON put on by Virgo Publishing after they purchased the VON name and tradeshow from Pulvermedia. It will be interesting to see how it is as a show.

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Onward the disruption – Skype’s sale to private investors is a great step

skype_logo.pngBack on Tuesday, the online news and blogs sites were buzzing insanely with the word that eBay was selling Skype. Somewhat bizarrely, Skype was also issuing a news release the same day about Skype For Asterisk now being available to all. As if that even remotely had a chance of being written about…

In the midst of all that, I was in transit to ITEXPO in Los Angeles where I was speaking and had no time to add my own commentary. So let me just point to some others. First, the “official” statements:

There were obviously MANY blog posts written, but here were a few that caught my eye:

Phil also created a great chart based on Om’s data:

From my perspective, the sale is a great step forward for Skype. The acquisition by eBay always seemed a bit odd and never seemed to fit quite right. Returning to a private and focused ownership will hopefully give the company a chance to focus and grow.

Despite any criticism I may make of Skype (primarily around their fractured product strategy), I’m a huge fan of Skype, a HEAVY user of Skype on a daily basis, a paying Skype customer (for inbound numbers and calling credits) and yes, I do write about them a good bit. They are a fun company to have around the industry… they have definitely disrupted the industry in so many ways… and it’s definitely good to have them around to keep people thinking about what’s possible. Plus, the product’s just a great communication tool. So I am glad to see this news.

Now let’s see how this “New Chapter” really does begin…

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I’ll be out at ITEXPO this week in L.A.

itexpo-logo-1-1.jpgIf any of you are heading out to ITEXPO tomorrow through Thursday in Los Angeles, I’ll be there on Wednesday. As I note on a Voxeo events page, I’ll be speaking twice, pretty much back to back:

9:30 – 10:15am, Exploring Applications in the Cloud

11:00 – 11:45am, SIP Trunking and Security

The first is a panel discussion that should be quite interesting. The second is another version of the VOIP / SIP Security talk that I’ve been giving at Ingate’s SIP Trunking Seminars for the past few years (and that always seems to be popular). More details and session abstracts on the events page I set up.

I’m looking forward to catching up with many friends at the show, including Andy Abramson, who I haven’t seen for a while.

If you will be out there, please do say hello.

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After 2 years, Skype finally brings the Linux client closer to parity…

skype_logo.pngAfter pretty much giving the public view that the Linux version of Skype was basically dead for the last two years, Skype announced yesterday the first beta of a Linux version 2.1 client. The blog post notes that the Linux 2.1 client includes a number of features found in the clients on other operating systems, such as the SILK codec:

  • Skype’s SILK codec for outstanding quality with negligible bandwidth usage,
  • HQ video support,
  • PulseAudio support,
  • SMS send support (*Sending SMS requires available Skype Credit),
  • Contact groups,
  • Contact labels, or tags, for easier contact organization,
  • Chat window improvements (typing notification, message editing, s/geeky text/replacement/, new emoticons),
  • Nicer contact list with mood messages and video capability icons,
  • Nicer tray icon.

It’s good to see movement on the Linux client front, although it continues to be frustrating as a user of Skype to see Skype’s continued fragmented product strategy (which I’ve ranted about previously here and here). Still, at least this brings the Linux client closer to the others, and that is a good thing.

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Rich Tehrani interviews me about Voxeo’s SpeechTEK booth and the 2,000 node cluster built on netbooks

As I mentioned over on one of Voxeo’s blogs, Rich Tehrani pulled out his iPhone 3GS down at SpeechTEK last week in New York and shot a quick video of me talking about Voxeo’s booth and the 20 Acer netbooks we had there running a 2,000+ node telephony cluster. Rich blogged about the interview and posted it in a way that I can embed:

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