Google will be shutting down Grandcentral on 12/31/09.

Skype, with its spin-out from eBay (s EBAY) complete and its legal troubles with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis settled, is looking to the future, where it wants to become a ubiquitous real-time communications platform. And that means thinking about the next-generation Skype architecture and hiring a lot of smart people, CEO Josh Silverman said in a conversation earlier today. “We are looking to hire engineers,” he said. “Especially those who want to live in Estonia.” In addition, the company is planning to ramp up its Stockholm (Sweden) office. “We are going to be ramping our presence in the Bay Area as well,” Silverman said. Skype currently has 700 employees and wants to hire engineers and product managers to help it expand as it seeks to transform itself from just a voice-based service to a multi-feature real-time communications platform.

“While Europe is going to remain our base, California is going to be a big presence for us,” Silverman said. Skype recently added SIP Guru Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist, and he is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company had built up a substantial team in the Bay Area over the past few months as it was trying to build a route around the JoltID technology. With that need gone, the company now has enough engineering talent to start transforming itself into a platform.

“We want Skype to be embedded in more and more devices, and we want to offer our APIs for developers to embed into their applications,” Silverman said. That is going to be a tough sell considering the company’s history of throwing its developers under the bus, the most recent example being the Skype Extras disaster. Silverman was candid enough to admit that the Skype Extras program wasn’t working. “APIs were hard and the extras-software uptake was low, and it is important for us to have a great platform that is built for success,” he said. “So starting off a bad platform wasn’t a good idea.”

When I pressed Silverman on the embedded ambitions, he outlined a future where Skype would be embedded in connected game consoles, televisions and video phones. Skype could be embedded into different software offerings as well. The company wants to be a big player in the enterprise, but knows that it can’t do it all by itself. “We need to open up our platform in order to expand it,” he said, “Our aspiration is ubiquity.”

Silverman declined to offer any specific dates (and details) on when Skype will launch a platform for others to leverage. One thing is for sure, Skype can pose a serious challenge to some of the upstarts such as Ribbit, TringMe and Twilio that are all trying to make it easy for application developers to embed voice-related functionality into their offerings. Skype’s ubiquity — over 500 million subscribers — makes it a fearsome agent of change in the Internet-based communications arena. (Related post: “How Skype Can Quickly and Easily Become a Social Network (and Clean Facebook’s Clock))

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Silverman about the next generation of Skype architecture, and he said the company was working on it. “It will work with SIP; it will have P2P, but we won’t come to it with a religion,” he said. And that includes offering Skype via a browser and making it even more savvy about video conferencing.

Photo of Josh Silverman courtesy of Phil Wolf via Flickr. Skype desktop photo courtesy of IPVEO.

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Now thats it out of ebay,  skype seems set to really take on the telecoms world. skype is strongly positioned to make some serious noise in this market – so it will be interesting to see how this develops. below is a QA with marc andreessen from fortune

Andreessen on Skype

Few people are more delighted that Skype cofounders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis finally settled their lawsuit with eBay (EBAY) on November 6 than Marc Andreessen. The venture capital firm he cofounded last summer is one of a group of investment outfits that will now take control of the Internet communications company in a planned $2 billion deal. I caught up with him just after the settlement was announced to ask a few questions:

Q: What does this mean for the company?

A:  Everything is settled—all the lawsuit and intellectual property issues are resolved.  Skype now owns all the intellectual property. The deal continues to move forward as planned. The company is able to focus 100% on its opportunity, which we think is very large.

Skype added 40 million new registered users in the last three months. It has entered a whole new phase of growth. These things grow and grow for the first few years and then they punch through and become mainstream and everybody starts to use them—like Facebook a couple years ago. It’s happening at Skype right now.

Q: What’s the opportunity ahead?

A: We think Skype is one of the most important companies in the industry. A small number of companies are critical to how the Internet works and this is one of those. It has been extremely successful, but it still occupies only a small percentage of the global telecommunications market. It has the been the main way that people make use of video for communcation.

In the old days, the purpose of networks was to do voice. It’s why networks got built out. In the new world networks fundamentally do data. When you have highspeed data, it makes sense for voice and video to be a software application top of it. All kinds of things become possible because you have moved into software. As one example, you can do free calls all over the world.

Q: How involved will you be with the company?

A: As an investor I will be a board member. But I won’t be a manager.

Q: How will the Skype team build out the business?

A: Skype did $185 million in revenue last quarter. Right now, it charges to connect calls into and out of the phone system. The global market for international long distance is $40 billion right now and Skype has only a small percentage of that.

Skype is increasingly used in businesses so I think there is a real opportunity for business applications. Skype also has a new presence in mobile with the iPhone application.

Free World Dialup

Free World Dialup – http://www.freeworlddialup.com/
“Use FWD to make real, free phone calls using your favorite telephone, computer or PDA and any broadband connection. Call your neighbor or a relative, next door or in another country; all with the same ease, speed, and high quality.” Thanks to Jeff Pulver and his crew!

Quick summary:

1 – First, got to http://www.freeworlddialup.com and sign up to get your FWD # and password.
2 – Download http://brands.xten.net/x-litefwd/download/X-LiteFWD_Install.exe FWD/X-Lite (“self-configures”) program or go to http://www.myphonebooth.com/ to call any FWD # and U.S. toll free #s using Internet Explorer (Firefox not supported).

Quickstart Guide: http://www.freeworlddialup.com/support/quick_start_guide
FWD Xlite Configuration Guide: http://www.freeworlddialup.com/support/configuration_guide/configure_your_fwd_certified_phone/fwd_xlite/all
MS Windows Messenger Configuration Guide: http://pulver.com/fwd/fwd30news.html#messenger (FWD supports Windows Messenger 4.6/4.7 but not MSN Messenger 5.x.)

3 – To call a U.S. landline/cell #, dial *+arecode+7digit#. (This FWD feature is not listed on their website, but has been working for several months now.)

4 – To call a FWD # from a PSTN (your regular phone), click
http://www.dslreports.com/r0/download/476274~3ccc4c9edbe2a596714a4fd9da897204/fwdaccessnumbers.zip or after you’ve signed up go to FWD web page, click on “Features”, “Access #s” for a list of FWD access numbers in your area. Available in several states in the U.S., UK, NL and DE at this time.

Packet8:
– To call a P8 phone # from a FWD phone: Dial **898 + 1 + P8 number to be routed to P8 service.
– To call a FWD # from a P8 phone:
*If the FWD # you are calling contains 5 digits, start to dial with the prefix 0351. For example: 035112345
*If the FWD # you are calling contains 6 digits, start to dial with the prefix 0451.

Call UK:
Get a UK telephone # that will call you on your FWD #. Register http://fwd.calluk.com.

FWD Features: Some features like Voice email needs to be activated at http://www.fwdnet.net

Internet Calling
Call Waiting
CallerID
Missed Call notification
Call Forwarding
Call Transfer
Three Way Calling
Voice email
SoftPhone, IP Phones & *Web-based
Aliases
Whitepages directory
ENUM Entry
eDial SOAP
Conferencing
Instant Messaging
Web Calling/FWD-Talk
Corporate Cisco Call Manager Connection
Calling to Toll Free Numbers in the UK, US, NL, JP and FR TellMe Service (411).
– NL Dial *31(800)… to reach Netherlands toll free #s.
– UK Dial *44(800)… or *44(808)… or *44 (500) to reach UK toll free #s.
– US Dial *1(8xx) xxx xxxx to reach United States toll free #s.
– JP Dial *81 0120… to reach Japan toll free #s.

Frequently used numbers
613 Echo test
55555 Volunteer Welcome Line
514 FWD Coffee House
612 Time
411 TellMe Information
611 Part Time Technical support
511 FWD Conference Bridge

At the moment, I think this is way better than Skype, Yahoo IM voice chat, etc…I’ve been using FWD for over a year with my cable broadband service and didn’t have to set up any port forwarding on my broadband router. Obviously you’ld need a mic/speakers connected to your PC.

You can also use your regular telephone via an adapter http://voipstore.pulver.com/product_info.php?products_id=32 and IP phone http://voipstore.pulver.com/product_info.php?products_id=33. Adapters and IP phones from different vendors like Cisco are available.

* Broadbandreports.com VoIP forum (formerly known as DSLReports.com)
– If you have any questions or just curious about VoIP, visit the VoIP forum http://www.dslreports.com/forum/voip at DSLReports.com.

Considering the importance of codecs in voice transfer, we take a look at well known codecs here :

A codec (coder/decoder) codes analog voice signals into digital signals and decoded the digital signals back to voice signals. Common codecs are : G.711 – G.723.1 – G.726 – G.729 and I write a bit about G.711 and G.729.

G.711 : is a Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) waveform codec. PCM measures analog signal amplitudes at regular time intervals (sampling) and converts them into digital bits (quantization). Quantization reads the analog signal and then writes it to the nearest digital value. For this reason, a digital sample is usually slightly different from its analog original (this difference is known as “quantization noise” ). G711 provide very good sound quality but requires 64kbps of bandwidth.

G.729 : is an Analysis-by-Synthesis (AbS) hybrid waveform codec. It uses a filter based on information about how the human vocal tract produces sounds. The codec analyzes the incoming voice signal and attempts synthesize it using its list of voice elements. It test the synthesized against its original and, if it is acceptable, transmits details of the voice elements it used to make the synthesis. Because the codec at the receiving end has the same list, it can exactly recreate the synthesized audio signal. G729 provides good sound quality and reduces the required bandwidth to 8kbps. G729 is now the default codec is most cases.

We all know that g711 (alaw / ulaw) is meant to sound the best. It’s uncompressed and equivalent quality to ISDN, which most businesses are used to with their traditional PABX System.

However, it comes at a price, 64kbps + overheads means around 111kbps when you factor in everything else over an ADSL PPPoA / PPPoE connection.

Now that’s a LOT when you think about it, considering on a standard ADSL2+ line you’re going to max out at around 5-7 SIP lines, especially if it’s a shared connection. This is where a compressed codec such as (My personal favorite) iLBC, or g729, can be incredibly cost effective, as you can load up around 15-20 on the same sort of bandwidth. When you’re a small business, that means with the right kind of QoS, you can share your ADSL Broadband connection and still have 5-10 concurrent phone calls, all happily living together.

So do away with expensive BRI interfaces and monthly charges, and go SIP!

We’re going to look at a few things very briefly:

1) MOS – What is it and why do I care?

2) Which codec is right for me?

3) g729 – Installation

4) iLBC – Installation

5) Trunk and Extension setup

6) Testing the codecs

1) MOS – What is it and why do I care?

MOS stands for “Mean Opinion Score“, and in a nutshell it’s a way of determining out of 5 how good a particular codec (Read: Phone call) will sound. The Wikipedia article is a good overview of MOS, each codecs ratings, and some phrases you can use to test the compression yourself and see if words become difficult to understand.

Now, we all want a nice good MOS, because at the end of the day if you’re using a PBX system, there’s nothing worse than it sounding like a VoIPBuster call to some exotic island. Personally I aim for higher quality, this is why iLBC stands out well for me. That said, the choice is yours, try a few out and see what sound you personally (And quite possibly the person who writes your paycheck) are happy with.

2) Which codec is right for me?

Well that is a very good question, and that’s something that you’re going to have to answer for yourself. Lets look at some of the benefits of each:

It’s not difficult to see there could be benefits for either. If you’re looking for low-cost deployment, or over a shaky ADSL connection you can’t seem to QoS well (Or perhaps Wireless?) then iLBC is probably the way to go. If you’re doing a larger installation, or an installation for a customer then it’s worth investigating g729, especially if you’re running underpowered hardware or have a large number of Exts or lots of expected concurrent calls.

Please keep in mind that you do not have to stick with just one codec, feel free to mix and match box on a per-customer level, or on a per-machine level also.

3) g729 – Installation

OK so I’m going to cheat here and direct you to Digium. Yes, there are “free” binaries out there, but at the price of $10 per-channel surely it’s not that expensive if you’re going to add it to your PBX’s you deploy.

Anyway if you’re downloading a “free” version, simply pop it in /usr/lib/asterisk/modules and chmod 755 the file. 64-bit versions go in /usr/lib64/asterisk/modules

Other than that, follow Digiums excellent instructions here, it should take you less than 5 minutes: http://kb.digium.com/entry/5/

4) iLBC – Installation

We’re going to be compiling this from source. Lucky for us Elastix makes this nice and easy! We won’t be installing a complete asterisk system, we don’t want to break the RPM’s because, let’s face it, it’s the easiest way to keep a system updated / secure.

First off, download Asterisk from here: http://www.asterisk.org/downloads

Get it to your elastix box any way you want (SCP / SSH / local terminal) and pop it in /usr/src

Now, run:

tar xvzf asterisk-1.4.*.tar.gz

change in to the newly created “asterisk” directory and run:

./contrib/scripts/get_ilbc_source.sh

Press “Enter” after it displays the warning presuming you’ve read the documentation (Which I’m also going to assume you’ve done) and shortly after you’ll get a lovely message telling you “The iLBC source code download is complete.”

Now, run:

./configure

That should run through without any issues, so now we’re going to tell Asterisk that we only want to build a very basic system (for the sake of time) and we want the iLBC codec. To enable the iLBC Codec you need to ensure in “4. Codec Translators” that “codec_ilbc” is checked.

Note: When you press “Esc” to quit “make menuconfig”, make sure you press S to save changes.

Now, just type “make” and watch the system build! As soon as you see codec_ilbc you can press Ctrl + C to stop it building. You’ll notice codec_ilbc being built just after all the app_ files, so it’s safest to stop the build process when you see the format_ files being built. Either that or let it run right the way through.

Almost done now, you just need to copy ./codecs/codec_ilbc.so to /usr/lib/asterisk/modules (or /usr/lib64/asterisk/modules on a 64-bit system) and chmod 755 /usr/lib/asterisk/modules/codec_ilbc.so

5) Trunk and Extension setup

Now depending on if you want your Ext or SIP Trunk to use the codec, it may be desirable to “force” the system to only use that codec.

To setup a Trunk: Open the SIP / IAX2 Trunk that you wish to limit in Elastix to the particular codec. In the PEER Details add an additional two lines:

disallow=all
allow=g729&ilbc

You may want to opt for something such as “allow=g729&g711″ or perhaps “allow=ilbc&alaw” for example. Review your needs and act appropriately. Save and submit the changes.

To setup an Ext: Open the Ext that you wish to limit the particular codec on. Scroll down to “disallow” and enter in “all”. Next in the “allow” field enter in something such as “g729″ or “ilbc”, or perhaps “ilbc&alaw” as above with the Trunk. Save and submit the changes when done.

Notes: Try and avoid transcoding where possible. It’s nice that asterisk does it so well, however it does add marginal delay to your calls, not to mention CPU overheads etc.

Also keep in mind that if you limit the codecs, say to just g729, and a particular device is unable to use g729, the call will simply fail.

6) Testing the codecs

The best part, testing! Hopefully everything has gone according to plan thus far. You’ve got one or two new codecs setup and you’re dying to test them out (In a development / testing environment naturally and not on your companies production PBX). Now you need to ssh in to your asterisk system and run:

asterisk -r

This brings up the asterisk console. Now, make a call on one of your new Ext’s that should be using iLBC / g729, or over the trunk that should be compressed.

While that call is active, rush back over to your ssh session and in the asterisk console type:

sip show channels

You should see something like this:

x.x.x.x   09xxxxxxx   2408517b625  00101/00102  0x400 (ilbc)     No       Rx: ACK

If you’re making a pure SIP call, you’ll see one line for the Ext -> Asterisk, and one line from Asterisk -> your SIP Provider.

Success!

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions please feel free to leave comments or post in the Elastix forums.

Please also keep in mind that whilst g729 / iLBC are not the only codecs, almost every device that supports compression is likely to support one of them, or if not it will support GSM.

Hopefully as you’re reading this you’re happily making calls via iLBC or g729. Enjoy!

SIP combined with Elastix is nothing short of amazing.

Cost savings, flexibility, functionality, and I’ll say it again: Cost savings!

When deploying Elastix to use SIP over ADSL (for example), many find their existing Broadband connection does not quite provide satisfactory call quality, usually due to sharing the connection with other traffic.

We will follow this post up later with another on Diagnosing connectivity / quality issues.

NOTE: This is not the only way to do QoS, but after having struggled with the likes of pfsense, the budget / useless junk that many routers build in, and a host of other software / hardware solutions, I found Tomato did it the easiest, the best, and the most reliably! It’s a breeze to setup, and you’ll be kicking yourself for not having set something like this up earlier.

Requirements:

• Administrative access to the ADSL Router
• The Router must either do DMZ or (most ideally) Half-bridging. The Linksys AM300 is recommended
• A Linksys WRT54GL or Asus WL-52oGU — The WRT54GL was easiest to flash, but the WL-520GU is un-brickable
• The Tomato Firmware, available from polarcloud.com/tomato
• A quiet afternoon in the office, where nobody will jump up and down too much if you take down the internet for a little bit.

NOTE: I would *strongly* recommend you get permission to take and test this out on your home connection prior to trying to deploy it in a production environment. I promise you will suffer much less heartbreak compared to tearing down a corporate network and finding you cannot easily repair it to its original state.

Step 1) Selecting the Hardware

I’ll be honest, the Linksys WRT54GL is probably the easiest, and at around NZD$100 it’s a bargain price! See xe.com/ucc to convert that price to your currency, or check out the price at Newegg.com

Make sure its the GL model, the L standing for Linux, as some of the non-L models aren’t compatible, namely the WRT54G v5.

You also need a router that will hand the IP address / port-forwarding over to it, so you’re going to want something such as the Linksys AM300, it’s cheap, reliable and known to work well. Just make sure it has Firmware 1.19.04 or half-bridge won’t work. Other products such as the NetComm NB6PLUS4Wn will suffice if you put the Tomato in a DMZ, but half-bridging is a nicer solution than a DMZ, due to the Tomato router thinking it’s pretty much *the* connection to the Internet. I’ll leave the getting-connected-to-the-internet part to your imagination.

Step 2) Flashing Tomato

If you have the WRT54GL then this is dead easy. If you’ve previously used it, then reset it back to factory defaults. Connect via a cable (safer than wireless, even though technically speaking WiFi does work for upgrades), go into the Admin settings, select the firmware: WRT54G_WRT54GL.bin

Hit Upgrade, sit back, wait 2-3 minutes and then try re-logging in to the Web Interface.

devices such as the Asus WL-520GU also work well in my experience, though the WRT54GL is definitely the easiest.

Now there is a ton of features that we could go into which you may find useful, but now’s not really the time to go into all those. With that in mind we’re going to dive straight into the deep end. Fire up the WebGUI, Login with the default username:password of admin:admin and click on QoS –> Basic Settings on the left-hand side.

Step 3) Determining your speeds

This may sound like a silly thing for me to mention, but you absolutely must get this right. First stop: Speedtest.net !

Run a speedtest and see what speeds you get. Also if you check the sync speeds in your router, they’ll give you a rough indication of what speeds you’ll be getting.

Now, you’re not going to want to set your Max InboundBandwidth & Max Outbound Bandwidth in Tomato to your actual line max. For example if your DSL connection is sync’ing at 4.8m/bit down and 950kbps upload and you specify those values in Tomato, not only will you never actually attain those speeds, but if you re-sync at a slightly lower speed, it’ll throw things even more. Speedtest for me shows I’m getting around 4300kbps down and 890kbps upload, so we’re going to round things right down to 3500kbps download and 800kbps upload. Seriously, I can pretty much promise that none of your staff will notice the difference between the internet speeds downloading at 4300kbps vs 3500kbps so don’t feel as though you’re going to be slowing down their internet. You won’t! If anything, they’ll “feel” like it’s going faster by the time we’re done.

So, enter in those values of yours in the Max Bandwidth for inbound & outbound. Up the top we’re going to set:

• Enable QOS
• Prioritize small packets with these control flags: ACK
• Prioritize ICMP
• Reset class when changing settings
• Default Class: C

Your Default Class can change, I’ve set it to C for un(C)lassified. Honestly it made sense when I first setup the router…

Now, we’re going to set the Outbound values, these are the most essential. Here’s a bit of an example of how mine looks:

• Highest / 80% / 90%
• High / 20% / 80%
• Medium / 5% / 70%
• Low / 3% / 60%
• Lowest / 2% / 20%
• Class A / 90% / 100%
• Class B / 1% / 5%
• Class C / 1% / 10%
• Class D / 1% / 5%
• Class E / 10% / 20%

Now I’ll explain my madness here. Class C is the default, so if it’s uncategorized it’s because it’s not important enough for me to spend the time writing rules for it, so you don’t want to give it much. Class B & D don’t get used by me, so again I leave them very low, as nothing should be using them. Class A is going to be my VoIP so I want it to always get priority.

Here’s a summary of my understanding of how the QoS works. It could be totally wrong, however it’s done me well thus far:

You’ve got a limited amount of outgoing bandwidth, lets say for arguments sake its 100kbps.
Now lets pretend you’re saturating that with a variety of traffic, including VoIP, sending email attachments through Gmail (http traffic) and FTP uploading (website changes?). So, VoIP is only going to use a tiny little bit, if you’re using iLBC then it’ll be 13.3kbps + overheads = 44kbps (See here). If you’ve classified VoIP to Class A, it’s going to try and reserve 90% at least. You only need 44kbps so that’s still leaving 66kbps for HTTP & FTP. Now, if HTTP is Highest, then it’s going to try and reserve 80% of the 100kbps for it, essentially leaving FTP with nothing. For this reason you’d set HTTP to High perhaps, and FTP to Medium. Both have a “max” of 80% & 70% respectively, so it’ll do it’s best to share the remainder after VoIP between the two of them, at all times giving HTTP a minimum of 20% and FTP at least 5%.

In a nutshell, set the minimum amount to be reserved on the left, and the max that it should be allowed on the right. Assume worst-case scenario that your line is going to be 100% full all the time, and try and give each a bit of “wiggle room”

Next we setup Inbound also:

• Highest / 90%
• High / 80%
• Medium / 70%
• Low / 60%
• Lowest / 20%
• Class A / 100%
• Class B / 5%
• Class C / 10%
• Class D / 5%
• Class E / 5%

You can turn on TCP Vegas if you want, I choose not to, you can read more about it and what it does on Wikipedia. Scroll down and hit Save.

Now on to the next part:

Step 4) Classification of Traffic types

On the left-hand side we’re now in QoS –> Classification

We need to classify the types of traffic that fall in to each of the classes we setup just earlier. We’re going to start by going through and clearing out all the standard rules and we’ll put in a few of our own:

• UDP / Src or Dst / 5060 / Class A / SIP
• UDP / Src or Dst / 10000-20000 / Class A / RTP
• TCP or UDP / Dst Port / 53 / Highest / DNS
• TCP / Dst Port / 80,443 / High / HTTP & HTTPS
• TCP / Src or Dst / 25,110,143 / Medium / Email (SMTP POP3 IMAP)
• TCP or UDP / Src or Dst / Class C Bulk Traffic
• GRE / Src or Dst / Class E / PPTP VPN (GRE)

Why? We prioritize VoIP first of all, at all times we want our voice to be perfect. Next we do DNS so that pages “feel” like they’re loading quickly (Especially with OpenDNS). We want HTTP & HTTPS in their own little queue, followed by Email.
Im also putting PPTP VPN into a class of it’s own, as I use that a bit myself for a variety of things.
Finally, we’re already technically classifying anything that isnt classified as Bulk Traffic / Class C, but this rule just re-affirms it.

Scroll down, hit Save, then make a call to a local freephone number out your local SIP connection to see if this is working.

Step 5) Confirmation and Corrections

Now comes the testing part. You should be able to click on QoS –> View Graphs, and while you’re on a call you’ll see Class A has a bit of traffic in it. If you click on the Class A title it will take you to a screen where you can now also see the IP that the traffic is going to. With a bit of luck, this should be your Elastix box (If you’ve got a remote extension) or your ITSP (If your Elastix box is local).

From here, it’s a matter of keeping an eye on the graphs over the next few days / weeks and seeing what really goes on through your Internet Connection. You may be quite surprised at what you see.

If you run into any troubles, feel free to post on the Elastix Forums and either myself or one of the many other helpful regulars will be able to assist.

Unified Technologies is growing and we’re looking for VoIP/PBX Technicians, Low Voltage/Network Installers, and Sales Professionals.

Unified Technologies delivers exceptional service through its dedicated, skilled group of employees with over 400 years experience, and we’re looking to expand our team with qualified customer-focused individuals.

For more info, click here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8k52UQzQNw

E’ giunta nelle scorse ore la notizia del completamento del già preannunciato acquisto di Skype da parte di una cordata di investitori privati (Silver Lake Partners, Index Venture e al board di Canada Pension Plan Investment). E’ quindi durato tre anni il matrimonio di interesse con eBay che, per l’operazione, intascherà circa 1,9 miliardi di dollari cash, più un credito di circa 125 milioni di dollari, mantenendo una quota azionaria del 30%.

Just heard on KFI AM 640: the Los Angeles Police Department will soon join the ranks of law enforcement agencies using Next-Generation 911 (Next Gen 911 or NG 911) systems. Here’s an example of Florida County implementing NG911.

According to KFI, people in Los Angeles will soon be able to call 911 and if appropriate the LAPD will direct them to send images, texts, and video to the LAPD CAD (computer-aided dispatch) system. CAD can then send the information to patrol units to assist in their law enforcement efforts.

Hey, maybe they can transmit it to other agencies as well (hint, hint)!

Kudos to the LAPD for integrating available Web 2.0 and communications technologies into CAD operations and maximizing the increasing potential to fight crime.

Diese Kombination hatten wir meines Wissens noch nicht: Ein VoIP-Telefon, das auch als Kartenleser dient.

Und damit nicht genug: Wer will, kann das Gerät auch noch als externen Lautsprecher für den PC verwenden.

Das Telefon hängt an einem einen Meter langen USB-Kabel, läuft unter Windows und liest SD- Und MMC-Karten. Selbst beim Preis kommt Anbieter Uxsight nicht auf dumme Ideen: Die 12,69 Dollar, die für das Gerät aufgerufen werden, lassen eher vermutungen aufkommen, dass das mit der “kristallklaren” Sprachkommunikation, die versprochen wird, doch eher eine relative Sache ist. [dieter]

[via Red Ferret]

Today, VOIP is increasing rapidly. VOIP is mainly important in businesses with massive outbound phone calls for long distance and international calls. However, small and medium businesses with limited long distance requirements will have more trouble justifying the VOIP transition.

Those of you who’ve read this blog for a long time know that I’m no fan of the “Universal Service Fund”, a charge added to phone bills that in theory is supposed to support provision of phone service in rural and underserved areas.  I’ve called it “Bizarro Robin Hood” because it takes from the poor (telephone customers) and gives to the rich (large corporations). I also think it’s been one reason that people are dropping their landlines – it’s one of those extra fees that are tacked on to phone bills (generally to traditional long distance charges), above and beyond the advertised price. And I think the USF is a defacto “hidden tax” (because the government determines how it gets redistributed, much as with other taxes), yet you don’t get to deduct it from your gross income (unless it’s a business expense), so it’s in fact double taxation.

Well, since so many people are dropping their landlines and/or moving to flat-rate, any-distance plans, the number of payers into the USF is shrinking.  And guess what, rather than saying maybe it was a bad idea in the first place, your government (or should I say, the government of, by, and for the large corporations) is looking to actually expand the USF program! And guess which industry is in the crosshairs:

Congress targets VoIP again in USF bill (source: Fierce VoIP)

On Tuesday of this week, the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held hearings on a “discussion draft” of the proposed Universal Service Reform Act of 2009. You can read about the proposed legislation, including the position papers from the various parties that participated in the hearings on this page. But, who represented communications service customers? Some may think that role fell to “Gregory Rosston, Deputy Director, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research” (read his testimony here), but is he really playing the role of consumer advocate?  I didn’t really get that sense from reading his testimony, although he does make some points that aren’t parroting the large corporations. Instead, I got the impression he was playing the role of “neutral commentator”, while all the other parties were openly advocating their positions.  It would have been nice if someone there had been openly advocating for consumers of these services (of course, one of the big companies would likely have tried to put their own “sock puppet” in that role).

And, there’s one other thing: They want to start using the USF to expand broadband to unserved areas. Well, that’s just great — not only are we not going to axe this form of corporate welfare, we’re going to expand it to include more companies. BIG companies — companies that, for the most part, don’t need any more of our money (Charter being a possible exception, but they could help themselves by reducing their CEO’s salary to something much more reasonable). But I’d be willing to make a bargain with them: I’d let them have their USF subsidies, provided they would agree to two things — to never again oppose network neutrality, and to never abandon the flat monthly charging model (just say NO to metered billing)! Note I am not suggesting they need to offer a wide open pipe for a single flat monthly rate — they can still offer various speed tiers as they do now, and they can still temporarily throttle speed (without discrimination against particular services) to relieve actual congestion, as long as they remove the throttle when the congestion dissipates. But I don’t want them blocking access to services that might compete with services they offer (e.g. online video or VoIP services), and I definitely don’t want any surprise charges on users’ monthly bills because someone supposedly used “too much Internet” (based on a meter that the customer cannot see, or have checked for accuracy).

Of course, that’s the type of proposal a consumer advocate might make, and I don’t see where any of those were invited to testify.

One other point: One of the proposals for applying the USF “tax” is on a per-phone-number basis. This is favored because it’s simple to understand, but of course what they are not telling you is that it will actually shift the burden much more toward the individual consumer than the large corporation.  If this goes through, you can bet your bottom dollar that many companies will go to having just a few “outside” numbers — maybe only ONE — and an IVR (Interactive Voice Response, meaning those automated voice menus you sometimes get when calling a company, that direct you to speak or press certain digits to further direct your call) to route incoming calls.  Prepare to be even more infuriated by IVR’s that don’t get you to the person you really need to speak to without you first tearing your hair out.

Meanwhile, how many families now have multiple phone numbers, because every family member has a cell phone, and maybe they also have a landline or VoIP line, or even a fax line? By the way, did you know that many phone companies actually assign a phone number (for billing purposes) to DSL service, even when the customer is paying for DSL only and not telco dial tone? Will that cause DSL customers to get hit with yet another USF charge?

Compare that to the past, when many businesses had multiple numbers from the phone company (if they had Centrex service, then every extension had an outside number) while most home users had only one line.  Isn’t it funny how the government always considers doing the thing that will shift more of the burden to you, rather than the large corporations?

As for VoIP users: Many VoIP companies have offered extra “virtual” numbers for a small monthly fee (or even free in some cases), so that if you had friends or relatives in another city you could give them a way to call you for free, if they still were hanging onto old-fashioned PSTN service.  Will you be charged an extra USF fee for each such “virtual” number?

It just makes my blood boil sometimes to see how our government colludes with large corporations to come up with new ways to pick our pockets.  The USF should be abolished, and if they just can’t bring themselves to do that, they should at least have the decency to call it a tax and to attach some serious, pro-consumer strings on the disbursement of these funds to those corporations that dip into this particular well of taxpayer money (again, starting with net neutrality and no “excessive use” charges, or in other words, no meters!). Is that really too much to ask?

There are places in the United States that have wonderful broadband connectivity, such as the fortunate residents of eastern states (and a few select places in former GTE areas) that receive FiOS (fiber to the home) service from Verizon.

There there are those places, including many in Michigan, where there is no broadband service at all.

But in many areas of Michigan, the situation has been happier. Many customers have a choice of service from two providers, the phone company and the cable company. Unfortunately, in many parts of the state, particularly in the less densely populated areas, there may be a real problem in the near future. Those areas are served by Charter Communications for their cable service, and Verizon (soon to be Frontier if the planned sale goes through) for their phone service. And areas served by those two companies may be in for a double whammy.

Rather than try to write my own explanation of why this is so, I’ll give you the headline and the links. For Charter, the headline comes from BroadbandReports.com:

Charter Eyeing ‘Consumption Based Billing’

This is not only bad, but unnecessary. Both BroadbandReports.com (a.k.a. DSLreports.com) and the appropriately-named Stop The Cap site regularly run articles explaining why this is so. In fact, the very next article on the BroadbandReports.com site is this one:

Again: Metered Billing Is Neither Necessary Nor Inevitable

Here’s Stop The Cap’s headline on Charter’s plans:

Charter Cable Wants To Emerge From Bankruptcy And Overcharge Customers: Rate Hikes & Limits Under Consideration

The problem is that almost nobody (other than certain backward-thinking broadband company executives) really wants a meter running on their broadband connection. Think back to the old days of long distance calling, when you paid by the minute for long distance – you rationed your usage because you didn’t want to run up a huge phone bill. Nowadays, about the only people who still used a landline and metered long distance to make long distance calls are those who don’t have a cell phone (with unlimited calling, or a generous bucket of minutes) or some form of VoIP service, both of which provide unmetered long distance. In fact, I have read that studies have shown that people will pay more for unlimited service even when their actual usage would allow them to save money by using a metered service, simply because they want the security of knowing exactly what their cost will be each month. I firmly believe this, because I feel exactly the same way.

Now, some are probably thinking that if Charter goes to metered billing, you’ll just switch to Verizon. But Verizon doesn’t love you anymore – they want to dump you off on a company called Frontier Communications. Want to know what that will likely be a very bad thing? Well, while Michigan’s been sleeping on this issue, the state of West Virginia (particularly the Consumer Advocate division of the state’s Public Service Commission) has not. They’ve been doing their homework, and the resulting headlines from the Stop The Cap site are these:

Frontier DSL: “Slow, Low Quality, and Priced Significantly Higher Than Verizon” Says Expert Hired By WV Consumer Advocate

Strong Opposition Erupts in West Virginia Opposing Frontier-Verizon Deal: “Too Many Risks” Says State’s Consumer Advocate

One thing to note is that Frontier reserves the right to charge customers extra if they use more than 5 GB in a month (that is a limit only a Scrooge would love – even Comcast allows 250 GB of usage per month before they raise an eyebrow) and their prices for comparable levels of DSL service are much higher than Verizon’s.

Anyway, here’s the problem I’m seeing. Michigan is already in an economic slump, and the thing we are trying to do is attract technology companies to replace those jobs lost because of the downsizing of Michigan’s automobile industry. But what company in their right mind would move to a broadband ghetto? If all you can get is costly, metered broadband service, wouldn’t you rather live someplace else?

There are large areas of Michigan where the phone company is Verizon and the cable company — assuming cable service is available at all — is Charter. Michigan should not just give rubber-stamp approval to the Verizon-Frontier deal, even though in the past they have pretty much given the phone companies whatever they wanted. And the state needs to do everything possible to make sure that as many residents as possible have alternatives other than Charter and Frontier for their broadband service. If that means encouraging cable companies to overbuild each other (that is, having more than one cable company serving the same area, which just about always results in lower prices and better service from both companies), so be it.

If you are reading this article, you need to realize something. This is a very small blog on a very big Internet. The people who might be able to make a difference on this issue are probably not going to read this unless you send it to them. I’m getting older, and my days of “fighting the powers-that-be” are drawing to a close. I VERY much appreciate the fact that guys like Phillip Dampier (of Stop The Cap) and Karl Bode (of BroadbandReports.com), as well as many others, are keeping this issue alive.  But they cannot do it alone.  If you have the ear of a policymaker, or a legislator, you need to address this issue with them, particularly if you care about Michigan’s future.  Places like Muskegon County (where the northern and eastern parts of the county are served by Charter,  and nearly the entire county will be served by Frontier if the sale goes through), along with several counties to the north and east of Muskegon County ought to be particularly concerned, because this is the sort of thing that could cripple their economic recovery.

At risk of this becoming too long, I’ll just add this: What are you getting your children or grandchildren for Christmas (or whatever December holiday you may celebrate)? Many of the newer gaming systems require a broadband connection, and guess what, those use bandwidth too.  Right now we have a problem with kids doing excessive texting, and although that’s a service that costs the phone companies next to nothing to provide, parents still get hit with huge bills because the kid didn’t realize he was texting too much, and the phone companies can charge absolutely outrageous rates for text messages.  Well, do you want to suddenly start getting huge bills because the cable company claims your kid, or someone in your family, used too much Internet? And that brings up the other point – how can you trust their meter? What’s to keep them from pulling an arbitrary usage figure out of their, er, hats, and billing you for it? At least 99.9% of customers would not have the foggiest clue how to verify that the cable company’s meter is accurate (given a choice, would you buy gasoline from a pump if you knew it was never inspected for accuracy?). Metered billing is a very, very bad thing.

EDIT: Of course, certain people in the broadband industry disagree, and keep coming up with outrageous and nonsensical arguments as to why they should be allowed to overcharge you, and why you should even welcome being overcharged. The BroadbandReports.com and Stop the Cap sites do a pretty good job of refuting those, but given our very broken system of government (which nearly always seems to favor the very large corporations over “we the people”, at least until a corporation does something so outrageous that it cannot be ignored), I wonder if anyone is listening.  I will warn anyone who will listen: If the broadband providers get their way on metered billing, there will be a very direct economic cost, because many people will drop their broadband service entirely, while others will self-limit their online activities so as not to incur “excessive use” charges.  If you do business on the Internet, that impacts YOU, right in the bank account. Here’s a link to the latest refutation of industry B.S., courtesy of Stop the Cap:

The Internet Overcharging Express: We Derail One Limited Service Logic Train-Wreck, They Railroad Us With Another

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The rumors have abounded for a few months now whether Google is making hardware and will be launching a smartphone in the near future; the head geeks at Google are supposedly running around their offices in Mountain View with beta devices attached to their belts.

What’s next?  YPhone?  MPhone?  (that’s Yahoo and Microsoft in case you wondered).  There are rumors that a sleek, slick, google-built smartphone will hit after the new year with a big marketing splash in January since they missed the holiday season.  Google’s Andy Rubin, head Droid-head, stated they aren’t building hardware and interested in competing with customers, but since most likely a Korean company is doing the manufacturing, google technically isn’t ‘building’ a smartphone.  Hmmm….what’s the diff, right?

The other slant on the GPhone rumors, is that it will be a data-only device using VoIP for voice calls and not using the carriers cellular networks.  This would allow them to ‘not compete’ with customers….can you say ‘Google Voice?’

Blah Blah Blah…..sounds like a politician being interviewed…..what’s the real story on this and what’s fact and what’s fiction?

This will certainly be a watched topic and with Android coming out in competition against Apple’s iPhone, plus Verizon taking shots at them as well with the ‘iDon’t’ commercials, could Google really be readying a 3rd salvo in the kick Apple where it hurts saga?  Sit back, grab some popcorn and let’s see how this sorts out.

A selection of Blabbeon logos in different formats, for your promotional needs.

Low-res (72 dpi):

Hi-res (300 dpi):