Skype has just fired up its new developer site and stocked it with plenty of goodies for anyone wanting to write apps that interact with Skype. The Skype API is completely free (as in beer) to use, and they’ve done a great job of documenting it thoroughly and providing lots of examples to help you get started. The new Skype Developer Zone also houses a development wiki, a blog, and support forums. Overall, it looks like a well thought-out resource to help enourage developers to build things that will add value to the Skype ecosystem.

I think making it as easy as possible for third-party developers to interact with its software via good APIs, a thorough online reference, technical support and community interaction tools, all for free, is one of the smartest things Skype can be doing now. The more hooks people create into Skype, the harder it will be for the recent spate of “Skype-killers” to knock it out.

This may be kind of silly, but I really liked this quote that Rich Tehrani blogged recently, which he attributed to Dr. Christian Stredicke, from the second day of the Voice Peering Forum Spring 2006 in Miami:

This is the year where a purchasing manager has to explain why they are buying TDM equipment. Prior to this time you had to explain why you were purchasing VoIP equipment.

I suspect it’s true, as TDM-based equipment and solutions do seem to be rapidly falling by the wayside. Yet another indication that this is truly the year that VoIP breaks through the remaining barriers to become a widely-used and mainstream technology.

I see that Syngress has just released a new title focused on VoIP security. Practical VoIP Security was written by a team that includes Thomas Porter, Larry Chaffin, Andy Zmolek, Choon Shim, and Jan Kanclirz, Jr. It sounds like a good read that covers a lot of ground and is based on the real-world experiences of the authors (something that can make or break a book in my opinion, I like my books with a healthy dose of practical information which is usually best gleaned from people actually working in the field). Another one to add to my must-read pile. From the press release:

This book was written for the thousands of IT professionals–from CIOs to circuit-switched telecom engineers–who are now responsible for deploying and maintaining secure VoIP networks. The impact of PSTN, SIP, H.323, firewalls, NAT, encryption, and the regulatory environment on your VoIP network is thoroughly explained. Coverage includes evaluation, design, integration, and management of VoIP networking components, including IP telephones, gateways, gatekeepers, registration servers, media servers, and proxy servers. Throughout the book, the authors rely on their extensive real-world experience to provide readers with practical applications and solutions.

Stuart Henshall over on the Skype Journal is looking to find and talk to the person who is the “Skype Buddies World Record Holder”. Stuart would like to talk to folks who have more than 1,000 entries in their Skype Buddies list. The Skype power-user elite, so to speak.

Why? I bet there are some good stories in it. Separately, I know that this is a core group of exceptional Skype users. The buddylist is long enough to test any new API or Wi-Fi phone that comes along. You have tested Skype in more ways than most people at Skype. I’m also interested in user profiles. I have a little hypothesis that says… Skypers are breaking the rules that existed on other buddylists (orginally most only allowed 100 buddies). There may be no correlation between number of buddies and usage. Still I’m interested to learn more about thresholds.

Calling Phillip Torrone…I have a hunch he’s looking for you!

Jeff Pulver has just posted some details of today’s decision by the Senate Commerce Committee to extend section 222 of the telecom act, which protects the privacy and security of customer records to IP-Enabled voice services. The FCC was given 180 days to enact new rules for VoIP providers to get them in line with what the telcos are mandated to protect. As usual, Jeff has an informative write-up on the day’s events on Capitol Hill, and I’d reccomend checking his blog for the latest comments and analysis.

We’ve posted a few times recently about the upcoming enhancements to EV-DO, affectionately called “Revision A”. (Could someone please come up with some better names here?) Today, Sprint announced that they plan to start rolling out EV-DO Rev. A across their network in the first quarter of 2007, and will be demo’ing the new EV-DO cards at the CTIA Wireless Show in Las Vegas, along with partners Nortel, Novatel Wireless and Sierra Wireless. Besides increased speeds (the download data rate increases from 2.0 to 3.1 Mbps and upload speed goes from 144 kbps to 1.8 Mbps), Sprint is also eager to deploy Rev. A for it’s VoIP QoS features, which according to Fierce Wireless Sprint wants so it can aggressively migrate iDEN push-to-talk users onto the CDMA network while also offering them more data-rich services.

Wireless start-up xG Technology has announced the first products based on its low-power xMax technology, which they claim will spur more inexpensive mobile VoIP deployments, according to this CNET article. xG will be producing enterprise-grade infrastructure VoIP products as well as a consumer VoIP handset this year that will support WiFi and wired ethernet connections.

xMax claimes its proprietary broadband wireless technology has especially low-power requirements for operation over long distances. The jury is still out though as the CNET article points out that public demonstrations have so far been limited to one-way, point-to-point data transmissions, and xG has even said that voice or multiuser tests have yet to be conducted internally.

In the “very questionable” news category we have Mobiledia reporting that Samsung has applied for a patent for a mobile phone with a perfume spraying apparatus. The perfume spraying cell phone is designed to release “smell tones” when incoming calls are received or certain buttons are pressed. It uses a pressurized heating chamber to store the scents and an ultrasonic controller to trigger the release of the perfume into the air. If they hadn’t included a link to the patent application at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office I don’t think I would have believed it.

But even the author of the patent application seems less-than-enthusiastic on the concept. From the Mobiledia article:

However practicality may hinder its integration and eventual product release. The spray unit adds considerable bulk, contrary to slimmer and smaller market trends. “It may be difficult to embed a perfume spraying apparatus in a small and lightweight mobile phone,” the application states. And more fundamentally, “the perfume may stain the mobile phone or the user’s clothes.”

The Daily Graze has an enthusiastic report on the demo of Vivox’s VoIP technology being integrated into Second Life at last week’s Game Developer’s Conference.

We’ve recently reported on the trend of adding VoIP calling features to some of the popular game consoles and systems (Xbox, PSP), but Second Life really represents a whole new world of opportunity. Described by its creators as “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents,” there are a lot of fascinating aspects to Second Life, not the least of which are the burgeoning economies and actual online businesses that are cropping up in this virtual world.

Vivox has developed both a phone booth and HUD versions of their VoIP phones that work in Second Life. Chris from the Daily Graze was quite impressed with the integration which included proximity-based voice chat for communication between Second Lifers as well as Second Life to Real Life (RL) phone calling. But that’s just the tip of the potential iceberg. As Chris notes:

Another interesting use of Vivox in SL will be as a branded VOIP portal. If a company buys 10,000 minutes of SL to RL calls and puts a branded phone booth on their island, they will draw both traffic and good will from residents who want to make free phone calls from SL. There are a lot of interesting possibilties here.

If like me you’re thinking “Lycos is still around??”, don’t feel bad. They haven’t done much of anything noteworthy in quite some time, and clearly the web search business they started out in has been dominated by other players. They’ve morphed into a portal-play, and today have released a beta version of their new softphone product called Lycos Phone.

The software for Lycos Phone was developed by India-based Global 7, and they have an exclusive 3-year deal so that the softphone software won’t be showing up anywhere else besides Lycos. The software does include a lot of bells and whistles beyond the standard phone features like Follow-Me service, faxes to email, voice mail to email, and a range of multimedia options, but probably the most interesting thing Lycos is offering is unlimited free incoming calls (along with a free phone number). There are also very inexpensive outbound calling plans, especially if you are willing to accept and view ads in the phone software.

Two oppposing takes on the new service have been voiced today by Tom Keating, who likes the package, and Russell Shaw, who’ll take a pass on it. Actually, Tom has toned down his initial glowing review (Lycos Phone blows away Skype and Yahoo Messenger?) after he realized that they weren’t offering purely free outbound PSTN calling too, which was his intitial impression. I’m with Russell on this one though, I don’t want ads incorporated into my phone experience, especially streaming media distractions, and I’m willing to pay (a little anyway) for systems that don’t inflict that on me.

Andy Abramson broke a story yesterday about Skype SA, it’s founders, and a “slew of others” (including Kaaza) being served with a RICO suit filed by Streamcast Networks. The story hit Slashdot today too, but so far very few details are known. Streamcast made the Morpheus peer-to-peer software, which was a competitor to Kaaza. The RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) act was originally created to help prosecutors go after organized crime outfits. RICO allows private companies that feel they have been hurt by criminal enterprises to bring suit, and StreamCast is apparently claiming that Skype has been engaging in corrupt business practices.

As Andy rightly points out “anyone can sue anybody, and a lawsuit does not imply guilt,” but it will be interesting to watch this one unfold.

Update: Andy has now posted a scan of the full text of the complaint, and Alec Saunders does a great job of explaining the basis for this suit where Streamcast is claiming ownership of some core Kaaza/Skype technologies.

Second Update: It looks like Andy has had to remove the fax of the actual complaint from his site as the links are no longer there this morning. But for an excellent run-down on the history of the problems between Streamcast and Kaaza check out TechDirt’s post on the lawsuit.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed to and agreed with a post by Tom Evslin about the absurdly high rates AT&T was reportedly charging U.S. soldiers in Iraq to call home to the states. Both Tom’s and my post got a lot of attention and comments, and Tom is staying on the case and has posted an interesting update with detailed information provided by someone who sounds like they know the deal. After detailing the various calling options available for the more tech-savvy, a current soldier in Iraq comments:

So why does anyone use AT&T? Good question. My only guess is simply that people do it because the phone cards are sent by family and friends, or the soldier doesn’t know about the other, much, much cheaper options available to them.

It’s nice to hear that our military personnel do have other, cheaper options, like using VoIP, but I’m no less unhappy with AT&T’s role here. For a lot more details on what options they currently have, and to follow the comments and continuing reporting that Tom is doing, check out his most recent post about the issue.

A recent IGN article highlights some of the upcoming features for Sony’s popular PSP game player, and they include things like VoIP, the EyeToy interactive video camera technology, a GPS receiver, Flash and even RSS support. Sounds like my kid may have that fabled fullly-featured digital swiss-army knife device before I do!

Starting this fall, the PSP will receive some key new features. Video and voice-over-IP features will launch in October in “motion jpg” format, allowing PSP owners to use their PSPs as a virtual phone and even, with that new EyeToy, a portable video phone.

On the heels of learning that Microsoft is seeing 2-3 million daily VoIP calls being made by Xbox Live users to chat about the games they are playing, it’s looking like gaming could become quite a substantial application for VoIP. And while we’re talking about consumer gadgets getting voice capabilities, let’s not forget all those rumors, which are sounding pretty real these days, that Apple will add phone functionality to an iPod someday soon.

Our friends over at Makezine noticed that the new Sanyo MM-7500 and MM-9000 cell phones being sold by Sprint in the U.S. have the capability to add GPS coordinates to the EXIF metadata for photos taken with these phones. This would make these the first camera phones in this country with this functionality. Eric from PhoneScoop has the scoop on how to enable this feature on the Samsung phones, and notes that in Japan, where they’ve had this capability for awhile, there’s neat photo services that let you organize your photos by where you took them. I sense a moblogging/Google maps mash-up coming soon…

Yahoo! Messenger with Voice launched in beta yesterday adding PC-to-Phone capabilities.

If you live in France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, Spain or the United States you can signup to use the PC-to-Phone services. Any Yahoo! user can use the PC-to-PC services. One last caveat, for now it’s a Windows only application.

Currently, you can get a Phone In number for France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

As part of the team launching this I might be a bit biased but I’m really excited about the rates and sound quality. Give it a try!

Several sources are reporting that the Chinese government has decided to continue to disallow VoIP calls from computers to phones for at least the next two years. The Financial Times article on the issue states:

China will not allow paid-for calls between computers and conventional telephones for at least two years, according to the head of Tom Online, the Chinese internet portal which has a joint venture with Skype, the internet telephony company.

Cynthia Brumfield on IP Democracy suggests that the Chinese government’s reluctance to allow Skype to connect to the Chinese PSTN reflects the government’s concern over the damage that could be caused to the government-owned voice service providers if they become subjected to more inexpensive and efficient voice competition.

SourceForge, the famous free software repository, is accepting votes now through March 23 for awards for the best SourceForge projects. They offer 14 categories, ranging from common stuff to hot topics such as VoIP. The validity of the results will probably be no better than the notorious Slashdot polls, but the topics are important and your vote is worth taking seriously.

Road warriors will appreciate this week’s announcement from Sierra Wireless about their new faster EV-DO cards. Sierra Wireless announced the EV-DO Revision A capable AirCard 595 which will double download speeds to 3.1 Mbps and increase upload speeds to 1.8 Mbps. The new AirCard 595 is backwards compatible with EV-DO Rel. 0 and will start shipping in the third quarter.

Tim O’Reilly tipped me off to the fact that Jeff Pulver has now partnered with David Isenberg to put on the upcoming Freedom to Connect conference in Washington D.C. on April 3-4. This makes great sense, and not just because both Jeff and David are well-versed inb the style of Dr. Seuss.

Jeff has long been talking about issues around Network Neutrality and influencing policy in this arena, and his organization also knows how to put on a smooth conference. (At the recent Spring VON show I was impressed at how well the VON crew handled all the little details that can make or break a conference experience: clear signage, appropriate room sizing, enough staff in the right places, etc. ). And of course, David Isenberg has been one of the leading lights in analyzing telecom policy for years, and getting Isenberg and Pulver together with their various resources should ensure this will be a significant and important event.

I travel a lot, and am constantly battling connectivity issues on the road. I like wi-fi, and it works well for me where it is available, but it is often not an option, or often requires that I fork over $10 or $20 to a hotel.

The mobile operators are sitting on a gold mine, but as usual they plow money into things that they think customers want (like cellphone cable television) and ignore simple, practical solutions. I travel overseas a lot, and while I can roam with my T-Mobile GPRS service, at $15 per MB, it gets expensive.

Mobile operators could offer a killer service for people by taking 3G data service and price it like Wi-Fi hotspot service, except it would be a hotspot that went with you everywhere. You’d just go to, for example, megaspot.t-mobile.de, enter your mobile phone number and payment details, and you’re good to go for 24 hours. The mobile operators could charge $15 to $20 per day for a service like this, and still be competitive with wi-fi based service due to the increased mobility.

My bluetooth enabled phone works great as a modem, and so I’d happily plunk down $20 per day to use it on a high speed mobile network when roaming, especially if the connection were fast enough to run G.729 VoIP. It would save me money, and it would be extra business for the phone company that got my business as a roamer. I’d much rather use a service like this than fork money over to an airport wi-fi operator that I can only use in an airline lounge, for example.

This shouldn’t be hard to do, it’s not much different than prepaid wireless, but in my travels, I have yet to see this service advertised (though I am sure someone has thought of this somewhere).

Ted Wallingford and Andy Abramson tipped me off to this cool new Web-based embedded recorder feature that ODEO has just launched. The basic idea seems to be that you can use this recorder feature on your ODEO page, or just grab the code and embed it onto any web page. Andy’s got an example of it in action, where you can click on a button on his blog and get to a simple flash-based ODEO recording interface to record a voice message for him. Neat! I think ODEO is aiming for the MySpace crowd with this feature (the message you get when you’ve successfully recorded and sent a voice message says “That Totally Worked!”, but I can envision a lot of serious applications beyond socializing for this feature as well. (Hi Tony!)

I spent last Thursday at the Spring VON conference at the San Jose Convention Center, and as many others have reported it was quite a happening event this year. This was my first VON, though the show has a celebrated history of being one of the VoIP industry’s first and foremost conferences and is now in it’s 10th year.

My overall impression was that this was a conference for an industry that is definitely in a growth mode. There was a large, active exhibit hall (over 300 booths); people seemed happy and excited about the various things they were selling, buying, and learning about; and there were a lot of serious hallway conversations and meetings going on. I’ve long felt that the quality of a conference can be measured as much by the quality of these hallway meetings as anything else, and I observed many good ad-hoc discussions taking place and saw lots of signs of deals being made. The exhibitors seemed busy, the attendees seemed serious, and there was a lot of money being spent on various promotions and marketing efforts. (Another widely used informal metric to measure an industry’s health is the quality of the schwag being given away at conferences, and VON passed that one with flying colors too - there was a lot more than free pens being handed out). I heard several seasoned VON veterans claim that this was the biggest and best VON show so far. So overall it felt like a very upbeat gathering for an industry that is prospering.

While I didn’t see any new technology that blew me away, there were still plenty of new products and services to learn about and some very thought-provoking speakers. One of the sessions I attended was a Hot New Apps panel that featured demos from iotum, Versatel Networks, and SightSpeed. I also made time to listen to the Industry Perspecitve talks from Verizon Business President John Killian, Microsoft Corporate VP of MSN Blake Irving, and Digium’s Mark Spencer (the creator of Asterisk).

I’ve written about iotum before, and they continue to impress me. Their technology really is “bringing relevance to communication” as they try to solve the problem of having your phone only ring for calls that are important to you at that time. They’ve certainly gotten much closer to this holy grail than anything else I’ve seen. Setting up the iotum system is incredibly easy and they’ve recently added a neat conferencing feature that just makes a ton of sense and can greatly simplify the task of getting people together on a conference call.

Versatel Networks has developed a platform that includes a media gateway, a media server, and all the necessary software on a single card. They see growth in applications like vanity numbers and instant collaboration “IQPods” and customizable ringback tones. I’m a little skeptical that any of these apps will be big revenue generators in the U.S., but according to Versatel’s Rich Birckbichler ringback tones are already generating a lot of cash in Asian markets.

SightSpeed provided a great live demo of their video-calling system, which impressed everyone I talked to about it. Using the network from the show floor, which naturally tended to get pretty busy and sluggish at times, SightSpeed president Scott Lomond demo’d a live video call to Chicago that worked flawlessly. Like iotum, setup of their system is about as simple as one could hope for, and it was nice to hear that they now support PC and Mac platforms. I very much agree with Andy Abramson’s observation that the SightSpeed demo was more impressive than a similar Microsoft video call demo, where they just talked to someone backstage at the conference.

John Killian’s keynote could pretty much be summarized by “the customer is always right.” Giving what I thought was a pretty lackluster talk that didn’t divulge anything of particular interest, the president of Verizon Business made obvious points like users won’t accept new technologies like VoIP if they experience any degradation in quality or service, and if something breaks customers expect it to get fixed quickly. Duh.

Microsoft’s Irving gave a more interesting talk and demo of Windows Live Voice and Video, and made a convincing case that voice is becoming an important element across all of Microsoft’s product line. For instance, I was surprised to learn that right now 2-3 million Xbox Live customers use VoIP daily to voice chat with other gamers. Irving showed off the Windows Live Mail Desktop beta, which he described as “Outlook with services.” You can easily do things like click on an address in an email message to make a call, send an IM, send an email, or start a video call with that person.

My favorite Industry Perspective talk was by Mark Spencer, a real hero to many in this field. His work leading the Asterisk effort is clearly one of the ground-breaking movements taking place in the world of Internet Telephony, and he comes across as an intelligent, insightful, and humble personality.

Spencer gave a fun talk based on a Letterman-style top 10 countdown of what he thinks are the most important transitions facing the industry this year. From “TDM to VoIP” to “Proprietary to open source” to “Audio to Rich Media,” Spencer captured many of the important technological movements in telecom in short, easy to grasp chunks. Also included were trends like “Centralized to Peer-to-Peer,” the “Commoditization of Voice,” and his list culmintated in the perhaps subtle, but important transition of “ITU to IETF”. Spencer noted that as the source of standardization for voice communications is changing, these crucual decisions are no longer being made solely by the old school telcos, and this is good for the industry.

Speaking of Asterisk, the Asterisk Pavillion was a very busy space in the exhibition hall. It was good to see players like LumenVox there partnering with Asterisk to provide affordable high-quality speech recognition technolgy to the Asterisk community. It was also good to meet Leif Madsen, a coauthor of O’Reilly’s Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and to see that his Asterisk-based training and consulting business is booming.

Because my schedule only allowed one day at VON this year, there were several keynoters I wish I could have seen but had to miss, inculding Lawrence Lessig and my boss, Tim O’Reilly. Like Jon Arnold, I think it’s a very positive thing to see Jeff and Tim’s worlds coming together. The VoIP folks can learn a lot from the Web 2.0 crowd and there’s no one better than Tim at bridging those kind of gaps. And I think the facts that you’re reading this blog on an O’Reilly site, we put on our first Emerging Telephony conference this year, and have recently released books on topics like Asterisk and Switching to VoIP make it clear that O’Reilly believes in and is investing in this technology space.

The folks at PhoneGnome have just released an XML-RPC API to their platform, so that others can work with and integrate PhoneGnome into their applications. Great idea! They’ve provided a lot of good hooks into the system, are encouraging and hosting a User-Contributed Library and a support forum. From David Beckemeyer’s post announcing the API release:

We haved opened up our simple XML-RPC API to the world.. This API provides a mechanism for other applicatiions to interact with a PhoneGnome. It would allow, for instance, developers of System Tray applications or other such PC-side “widgets” to initiate click-to-dial calls, query a user’s call-logs, and other such PC-Telephony Integration applicatons. It would also permit web-based applications to perform PhoneGnome integration functions.

I’ve got a demo PhoneGnome unit sitting over there on my “must find time to play with” shelf that I’m going to soon put through its paces. I’ll report back on my experiences.

Lawrence Lessig seems to have impressed the crowd at VON earlier this week. I’m sorry that I missed his keynote, but I have seen him talk a couple of times recently and know what an excellent speaker he is. Lessig is a perennial favorite at O’Reilly conferences and his ability to see and describe the big picture view and the impending challenges of technological progress is always educational and inspiring. I think Russell Shaw nails it by pointing out that Lessig takes on the large entrenched interests, like copyright absolutists and cable and telco monopolies, while constantly battling for innovation. I also couldn’t agree more with Dan York about Lessig’s compelling presentation style. He’s got the keynote slide show down to an art.

Not surprisingly, Lessig focused his talk at the VON Communications Policy Summit on issues around Network Neutrality. Responding to the recent surge in noise and efforts being made by the incumbent carriers, Lessig warns that we’ll pay an economic price if we allow network providers to charge extra carriage fees to large content providers.

The Internet produced by end-to-end applications is more valuable to the economy than the network that gets produced under AT&T ownership.

Like Jeff Pulver, I’m thrilled to see that the Network Neutrality debate is front and center at VON. This is an issue that people need to be more aware of and I think the more public discourse we can get on it, the better off we’ll be. Responding to Qwest CEO Richard Notebaert’s statements at VON about wanting to charge content providers more for premium arrangements, Preston Gralla over on Networking Pipeline lays down why many in and out of the industry feel a need to insure a neutral network:

This is just plain wrong. The Internet unleashed the biggest burst of innovation in history because deals like this were prohibited. Let telcos start charging extortion fees like this, and that innovation will be in danger.

My favorite post about Lessig’s speech was Russell Shaw’s In a perfect world, Larry Lessig would be on the FCC. I can’t see it happening, but I sure wish it would. Heck, my vote is for the Supreme Court.

Related link: http://www.computeroutlook.com/

Himanshu and I will be interviewed tonight on Computer Outlook by the host, John Iasiuolo, an Internet radio show about new technology. The show will stream live tonight at 5:00pm Pacific time and should be available as a podcast and mp3 download by Sunday. Tune in and see if I get stage fright or if my inner ham will save me. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Did you catch the show? Did you have any questions or comments from the discussion?

As expected, there’s been a rash of news items coming out this week from Internet Telephony vendors at the VON conference. None of these announcements have really blown me away (with the exception of the Philip Zimmerman’s Zfone which I previously posted), but as I was going through them all trying to decide which ones to highlight here on ETel it occurred to me that for every one that I thought was a yawner there’s probably someone in our audience who would have the opposite reaction. So in the interest of covering all bases, I opted for a big list of one-liners and links for you all of the VON news that made its way to my inbox. Enjoy.

• Excel Switching and Brooktrout Technology announced their new company name—Cantata Technology - press release
• SightSpeed is now Mac-comaptible - press release
• SightSpeed and Roxio agree to multi-channel distribution - press release
• Digium and Zimbra bring Asterisk VoIP to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite - press release
• Tellme enables SIP VoIP connectivity to Tellme Studio - press release
• D-Link and TelTel release first flip-style Wi-Fi phone - press release
• VOCAL announced new iPBX (3×2 inches) and PBXtender (1×2 inches) solutions (no press release online)
• Trolltech announced that its Qtopia software was the application development platform for Leadtek’s award winning IP broadband videophone, XTP 8830 - press release
• Keynote announces Voice Perspective subscription service for monitoring VoIP service quality - press release
• Adax debuts Signaling Controller for ATM to IP Interworking - press release
• Sentito Networks has partnered with Qualmax to deliver VoIP services - press release
• TalkSwitch and Apparent Networks announce Diagnostic Software for TalkSwitch VAR Channel - press release
• SJ Labs and PortaOne partner to offer on-demand “Media-Over-IP” software suite - press release
• HBF integrates Session Control from Sansay into E911 solutions - press release
• Natural Convergence announced the 2.0 release of Silhouette - press release
• Intoto demonstrates Secure VoIP XML (VXML) Gateway Technology - press release
• SPIRIT DSP announced TeamSpirit 2.0 Multi-point voice conferencing engine - press release
• RADCOM announced an OEM partnership with Viola - press release
• Transaction Network Services announced the acquisition of InfiniRoute Networks - press release
• Transaction Network Services partners with BroadSoft to deliver enhanced Calling Name Functionality via SIP - press release
• GlobalTouch Telecom supports 911 emergency calls via SIPTalk residential VoIP service (no press release online)
• TeleData Technology announced Voice Biometrics capabilities for secured voice application transactions - press release
• Personeta announced successful interoperability testing with Veraz Networks - press release
• EQO Communications announced Mobile Instant Messaging for Skype - press release
• Emergent Network Solutions announced ENTICE 2.4 - press release
• Integra5 and MetaSwitch partner to deliver Multimedia-Enhanced IMS Applications (no press release online)
• Broadcom announced a TA router chip and low-cost IP phone chip - press release

If you’re such a VoIP news-junkie that this only whet your appetitie, a much more comprehensive list of news, annoucements, and articles can be found in the VON Press room. I was only able to spend one day at VON this year, but I found plenty to chew on there. I’ll post a write-up of my impressions of the show shortly.

OK, this is my last Skype-related post for the day, I promise. Skype has really been getting in the holiday spirit lately, and seems to come up with a new promotion or discount every time a holiday rolls around. From the latest Skype press release:

On St. Patrick’s Day (tomorrow, March 17) there will be a reduced SkypeOut rate of US$0.01 per minute for calls to Irish landlines!

Om Malik posted yesterday that Yahoo will release a new version of its Messenger IM program next week that will now support calling out to the PSTN. The pricing structure hasn’t been revealed yet, but according to Om Yahoo is looking to rain on Skype’s parade:

The pricing for the callout numbers is not certain as yet, though the current generation communicator allows unlimited incoming calls for $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The new offering, according to those in the know is likely to put Yahoo on an equal footing with Skype. Yahoo, clearly has designs on stealing market share from Skype.

Over on the Makezine forums Ablaka has written a HOWTO on how to run Skype from your iPod.

There are a number of reasons for not wanting to install a particular piece of software directly onto your computer’s hard disk (be it privacy, portability etc), but instead carry it around with you wherever you go and have it ready when you need it. Enter the “Skyppod” (sort of).

Last summer, I wrote that reliability should not always be a goal in network design, especially with applications like VoIP. “Better late than never” is true for a stream of bits you need to reproduce perfectly, but it’s not the case for a stream of bits you’re trying to deliver in less than 200 milliseconds. If something is late, it’s better to forget it and move on.

Well, as the saying goes, the difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory. The always-interesting Joel Snyder recently tested VoIP call quality through a variety of VPNs for Network World. From the pure theoretical perspective, going through a VPN technology that ensures in-order delivery should offer no help to call quality, and would be expected to cause some problems, especially on low-reliability networks that have frequent loss and retransmission.

That’s not what he found. After finding that call quality improved when using SSL, he used a network analyzer to find out what was going on:

In every case, adding an SSL VPN to a VoIP call over a good broadband network improved call quality. So in effect, wrapping a VoIP call in SSL gives it more structure, kind of like the rind of good Brie. What we had not counted on was the huge difference between what VoIP requires (64Kbps) and a typical broadband connection of 500Kbps or more. Because the broadband connection was so fast, TCP was able to repair the impairments without reducing voice quality.

(I’ll disagree with Joel on the cheese analogy, because I hate Brie. Rind or not, I find it disgusting.)

To see the improvements, check out the pop-up graph about half-way through the article. It’s a graph that compares the mean opinion score (MOS), a measure of call quality, to an unencrypted reference for four test scenarios. Data points farther to the right are better.

The biggest surprise came from the test on the “bad” network (the orange data points in the picture). SSL VPNs delivered a signifcant performance improvement. On the graph, you can see that the orange data points are far to the right of the unencrypted reference line, and offer the widest gap between the reference line and the measured SSL-protected quality.

The best news of all our testing came when we set up the bad network, representing the lower end of quality of the broadband services. In this test, TCP and a high-speed network again came to the rescue. All but three of our SSL VPN vendors also improved the unacceptable call but took call quality up enough for the call to be considered acceptable. In these tests, we saw as much as a 45% to 50% improvement in call quality.

Interestingly, the call improvement is specific to SSL. Juniper’s product offers two operational modes, SSL (which is based on TCP, and therefore does re-order packets) and IPsec ESP (which is an IP datagram service, and does not). The SSL mode resulted in significantly better call quality as long as the network was providing decent service. In the last test, with a very poor quality network, the datagram services provided the best call quality, but it was still so bad as to be unusable.

I only have one minor technical nit to pick with the article. It states that a phone call requires 64 kbps. It requires 64 kbps of data payload throughput, but adding on the encapsulation headers for UDP and RTP pushes the required throughput to 80 kbps. (See Table 1 at the bottom of the first page in my VoIP capacity analysis for more codec details.) As the test shows, 100 kbps is not enough to sustain an 80 kbps stream with any kind of quality because it has no headroom.

The moral of the story is that quality of service through overprovisioning is not such a bad idea after all. The key appears to be having enough burst headroom to recover from the impairment and fill in the gap. When an error occurs, you need to be able to detect it and retransmit enough data quickly to fill in the gap and move on. At six times the required data rate (500 kbps), that’s easy. At 25% higher than the required data rate (100 kbps), it just isn’t possible.

To confirm that the headroom capacity is what matters, a great follow-up test would replace the 80 kbps G.711 codec with, say G.729, which only requires 24 kbps. At that point, the network would have four times the necessary capacity to transmit a voice call, so there is significant excess capacity that can be used to retransmit error recovery packets.

In what is sure to be a flood of new product announcements coming out of VON this week (I’ll summarize a bunch of those later), here’s one that should bubble up above the rest: Philip Zimmerman has just released the public beta of his Zfone secure VoIP program. If this does anything like what Philip did for email communications when he developed PGP, Zfone will be a major security enhancement in IP communications.

Philip explains the concept behind Zfone on his website:

I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another Zfone client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.

The Zfone public beta was released today for Mac OS X and Linux, and a Windows XP version should be available in mid-April. Philip has been a shining light in the computer security world, and his work is a constant reminder to us that privacy and security are important issues that shouldn’t be taken for granted in the digital age. As Philip eloquently states on the project web site, “Zfone lets you whisper in someone’s ear, even if their ear is a thousand miles away.”

It may not be the easiest product name to pronounce, but Phlink has some pretty cool features and as Gordon Meyer notes is getting better with each release. Ovolab’s Phlink 3.0 is out now, and if you’re a Mac user you should take a look at this software that promises to turn your Mac into a full-featured message center, offering multiple mailbox voice mail, converting voice messages into email, and serving up IVR-style options for callers. The new 3.0 version adds features like call snooping and intelligent international dialing. I especially like how Phlink integrates with the OS X address book, if it detects an incoming call with Caller ID that matches a number in the address book, it can pop open a customizable dialog box with all the info you have stored on that person and any scripts you’d like run for that caller.

Ars Technica has posted an excellent introduction to IPTV. If you’ve been looking for a big-picture overview of this technology, this is a good place to start.

IPTV describes a system capable of receiving and displaying a video stream encoded as a series of Internet Protocol packets. If you’ve ever watched a video clip on your computer, you’ve used an IPTV system in its broadest sense. When most people discuss IPTV, though, they’re talking about watching traditional channels on your television, where people demand a smooth, high-resolution, lag-free picture, and it’s the telcos that are jumping headfirst into this market.

Sounds kind of like a low-budget horror flick, doesn’t it? Many have pointed out that with AT&T acquiring BellSouth, the days of the large telco are really returning. But today Om Malik is citing a study by TNS Telecom that reveals just how large we’re talking here. According to the study, once the acquisition goes through AT&T will control 22% of all consumer dollars and 34% of all business dollars spent on telecom services. And if you add Verizon and Comcast to the mix, we’re looking at 3 companies controlling 49% of the total consumer market. Hold on to your seats, this could be a spooky ride.

Asterisk@Home version 2.7 is out and as usual the good folks over at Nerd Vittles have the low-down on all the installation and upgrade issues. If, like me, you’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a home Asterisk system, the Newbie’s Guide to Asterisk@Home 2.7: Unabridged Installation and Upgrade Guide might be just the motivation you’ve been looking for. Ted Wallingford points out that for the cost of a $200 used PC configured with the free Asterisk software you can have “more signaling power than your typical $60,000 SS7 switch.” Not to mention cool features like email delivery of voice messages.

Alec Saunders points out that Inveneo has just made a few annoucements, including the release of a solar powered, Asterisk-based VoIP solution for communities where there is little to no access to electricity and communications infrastructure. They’re also teaming up with Wyse to take advantage of its thin client technology and have added telecom veteran Dominic Orr to their board.

From Inveneo’s mission statement:

Inveneo is a non-profit social enterprise whose mission is to empower people in remote and underserved communities and the organizations who serve them through access to computing and communications.

Realizing that there are over 2.5 billion people in the world today who live in rural and remote areas and who have little to no access to Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Inveneo is out there doing the good work necessary to help these communities. Access to ICT can be a life or death issue, can help with education and economic development, and can greatly aid in the dispatch of humanitarian and emergency aid in times of need.

Inveneo uses open source software in their projects as much as possible and has developed products like a 10 watt PC with 10 watt LCD display, a stationary bicycle stand and power generator, and a Linux-based WiFi access terminal. You know a group that lists Uganda, Hurricane Katrina, and Rwanda for its three completed deployments is doing important work.

This is kind of old news now, but it’s such an important development in the VoIP industry that it clearly deserves a mention here on ETel. Earlier this month Cisco announced its new Unifed Communications System which included the news that for the first time Cisco VoIP products will support the widely popular SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) protocol. Besides introducing a new SIP-compliant version of CallManager, they also announced SIP capabilities for Cisco IP phones, presence-awareness software, and multimedia communications software.

This means that for the first time ever customers will have the ability to use non-Cisco phones with the Cisco Call Manager soft PBX product. Tom Keating had early and in-depth coverage of Cisco’s announcements along with an interview with Barry O’Sullivan, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s IP Communications Business Unit. Ted Wallingford echoed the feeling of many in the industry, saying simply “It’s about time.” And Andy Abramson had the best headline on the news (”CallManager 5.0 Shows That Cisco Really Gives A SIP”) and also points out that Cisco has owned SIP technology ever since they bought Linksys, almost 3 years ago now.

I was noticing that the group of VoiP blogs I monitor daily seemed kind of quiet this morning, and I also realized that the steady stream of press briefing email requests I’ve been getting the past few weeks has (finally) slowed down to a trickle. And then I realized the probable reason, it’s a travel day for many in the telcom industry as people make their way out to San Jose for this week’s Spring VON conference. (If the number of briefing requests can be seen as in indication of the size of an event, this one is going to be massive!)

For those attendees looking for some cold weather relief in our supposedly sunny California this week, don’t count on it. It’s been unseasonably cold here in northern California recently, and San Jose is no exception, where they’ll be lucky to break 60 degrees this week, and the lows will be in the low 40s. Brrrr.

I expect this really is a calm before the storm as I know many vendors plan to make announcements at VON this week, and I think we’ll see the VoIP news cycle really kick into high gear in the next couple of days. I’ll be making my way down to the show later this week and will report back on the most innovating and interesting developments I find there.

Ted Wallingford posted recently about the possibility that Blizzard Entertainment will be porting WoW over to the Xbox 360 and adding a VoIP feature to the game so that players can easily communicate with each other. The rumor Ted noticed claims the player-to-player VoIP communication features will be implemented first on the Xbox version, but Ted also notes that so far Blizzard is currently denying any plans to port the PC-based game to the Xbox console at all.

Jeff Pulver (pulver.com) and Tom and Mary Evslin (Fractals of Change) have filed a petition today with the FCC to try and improve the ability to reach and communicate with people during disasters that disrupt normal telecom systems.

After watching how difficult it was to locate and establish communications with the many thousands of displaced Katrina victims, and realizing how there are currently available technical solutions to these kind of problems, Pulver and the Evslins are asking the FCC to make sure this kind of widespread communications nightmare doesn’t happen again in this country.

Jeff Pulver summarizes the request:

We primarily ask for a mechanism to ensure that individuals are reachable after a public crisis that causes communications networks to go down. We propose a solution that we think could provide immediate relief before the next hurricane season and before more elaborate rules might feasibly be established. We ask simply that the FCC require any provider obligated to provide E911 services to establish an alternate communications service for affected customers via either: (1) activating for each customer a voicemail service that would be accessed by incoming callers dialing the customer’s phone number, or (2) providing expedited local number porting to an alternate service provider selected by the customer, including porting to a number outside of the geographic area and/or rate center. Either of these proposals would provide a technically feasible and reasonable means of ensuring that consumers remain connected during emergencies.

This seems like a very reasonable and sound idea. Many observers realized that during the chaos of Katrina those with cell phones or VoIP phones/services were much more easily reached then those without those kind of services as their phones could still work when they took them somewhere else and they had the ability to leave messages on the voice mail attached to their numbers to inform friends and families of their status and whereabouts. But unfortunately a large percentage of the victims of that disaster didn’t have these kind of services (as would likely be found in any disaster that effects a large low-income population), and the idea behind this petition is the local provider could easily attach voice mail to or provide call forwards for these numbers in a time of crisis, and that would greatly improve overall communications.

Reuters is reporting that both Cingular and T-Mobile have halted sales of the popular Motorola Razr cell phones because of a technical problem that is causing the phones to drop calls in mid-stream. Motorola has admitted to the defect, but maintains only a small number of the phones are affected by the problem. Representatives from both Motorola and T-Moble said they expect Razrs to be back on the shelves by early next week.

This week Skype announced its new Skype for Business services aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. On the surface this makes good sense, Skype believes up to 30% of it’s users are businesses already, but the news and details revealed so far does not seem to be blowing anyone’s socks off, despite positive coverage in both Business Week and the L.A. Times. Jeff Pulver summed up many of the analyst’s opinions with his quote in the Times:

“It’s great that they’re doing these things, but I don’t see any home runs here.”

Russell Shaw at ZDNet has a less sympathetic approach and takes Skype to task for seemingly announcing the new service before it’s ready to go, just so they can get into the CeBit news cycle. Russell’s Seven ways that Skype is fumbling their Skype for Business launch post is worth reading for anyone launching a new service, and his point about having your web site ready to go with all the new info when you announce something new is a good one.

Looking over the Skype for Business site, it’s hard not to agree with Russell. It’s not at all apparent what, if anything, has been changed from the current Skype 2.0 software to appeal to business users, and other than re-naming the Skype Groups Control Panel to Skype for Business Control Panel, it doesn’t seem that anything new has been added.

A more interesting Skype development was noted by Om Malik today, as he reports that eBay is beginning to integrate Skype into it’s auction pages in some European countries.

Tom Evslin’s Fractals of Change has posted an explosive piece about the way AT&T is handling their exclusive contract to install payphones in Iraq and how much they’re charging American soldiers to call home. Would you believe twenty one cents per minute??

As Tom points out with the going wholesale cost of voice minutes under a penny per minute, this seems very, very wrong. Tom also notes that the total amount of money we’re talking about here is a drop in the bucket for a company like AT&T. It’s mind-boggling to me that the execs at AT&T don’t realize that the poison PR they could suffer over this is not even close to being worth the cash they’re making. If the issue gets more mainstream coverage I wouldn’t even be surprised if it comes into play as regulators consider the BellSouth acquisition.

AT&T is also reportedly blocking access to 800 numbers of other carriers, which would be illegal in the U.S. Tom does mention that some other sources say AT&T isn’t blocking those numbers, but adding high surcharges to those calls. In either case, it’s shameful.

The Prepaid Press first reported the story back in January and has stayed on top of it, as the FCC and DoD dodged the issue, and now the American Legion is getting involved.

Related link: http://interop.com/lasvegas/exhibition/interoplabs/

Once again, I’m going to be volunteering at the Interop Labs. After three years working on wireless LAN security, I’ve moved over to work on the Voice over IP initiative. This year, one of the prime investigations that the group is going to conduct is on how well voice works on 802.11 networks. Therefore, I’m particularly interested in hearing about any advanced 802.11 phones, especially those that:

• Implement current QoS standards, whether the interim Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) or the fully-blown 802.11e standard.
• Use 802.11a. We expect that running VoIP on 802.11b/g on the Interop show floor will be a major challenge. I suspect it will be easier to get a demonstration running well on 802.11.
• Implement good security protocols. For too long, VoIP telephones have only been able to use manual WEP keys for security. Any phones that do WPA-PSK, or, better yet, 802.1X with dynamic WEP/TKIP/CCMP. (I’m not picky about the EAP method they use.)
• Fast handoff, such as 802.11i’s pre-master key caching. It will be interesting to look at how interoperable this is. Most 802.11 infrastructure vendors have had this feature for a while, but have lacked test clients.
• Anything else that’s “cool.” I’m sure that there’s interesting work going on that I’ve missed.

Don’t be afraid of bringing something that’s not quite released yet. Part of the point of the iLabs is to see what it’s like at the bleeding edge of the state-of-the-art. It’s also a great opportunity to test against a variety of expensive equipment in one place. One of the challenges that the iLabs has helped open source projects solve is access to equipment that usually requires payment of a kilo-dollar or twenty.

If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Here’s the call for participation that went out, just so you can see if you really want to sign up for this:

Greetings,

The is an invitation for you and your company to participate in
the InteropLabs (iLabs) VoIP: Security and Integration area at
Interop in Las Vegas.  The iLabs have been a hit with attendees
for many years.  Last year, among those participating in the VoIP
iLabs were 3Com, Avaya, Azatel, Check Point, Cisco, Digium,
Grandstream, InnoMedia, Intertex, ipDialog, iptel.org, Juniper
Networks, Leadtek Reseach, Multi-Tech, Nortel, Pangean
Technologies, Pingtel, Sipura, UTStarcom, Xten Zultys, and
ZyXEL. Many show attendees stopped by the iLabs during the
Interop conference, and over a thousand attendees participated in
educational sessions given by the iLabs teams.

You are receiving this invitation because:

    - You participated last year or a previous year, or
    - You discussed participation with us this year or last year, or
    - You asked to be invited this year

Following are some details about what is going on.
If you are already familiar with the iLabs, go to the end of this
message for a quick checklist of what you need to do with all the
important dates.

------------------------------------------------------------

For all the details on what is going on, go to:

    http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/exhibition/interoplabs/

The iLabs will be located on the exhibit floor at the
Interop show in Las Vegas on April 30 - May 5, 2006.
Interop will take place at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and
Convention Center.

All design and implementation of the iLabs takes place before the
Interop show, at a Hot Stage facility in Belmont, California
(near San Francisco), during the week of April 3rd.

Our goal is to communicate with attendees through our
on-the-floor demonstrations, educational seminars, white papers,
and web presence the message that IP telephony is understandable,
flexible, secure, cost-effective, interoperable, and deployable
and gives the end user an experience as good as, or better than,
traditional telephony. Additionally, this year we'll look into
the cloud of issues surrounding combining VoIP with wireless
technology.

You can find details of our goals here:

http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/exhibition/interoplabs/#voip

Very briefly, we want to show interoperability of SIP servers,
wired and wireless phones, gateways, PSTN service providers,
security elements, and applications.  Of particular interest this
year would be WMM/802.11e capable wireless phones and SIP-aware
firewalls and Session Border Controllers. We never know the exact
configuration of the demonstrations until we actually design it
at Hot Stage with your help.

There is no charge to you to participate, and there are significant
benefits, which are detailed here:

http://www.networkops.net/shows/interop/InteropLabs/cfp2006/cfp_benefits

We would like to use your VoIP products in the iLabs this year.  To
participate, you would need to ship product to arrive in California at
Interop's Hot Stage facility before Monday, March 27, 2006.  (if your
product is not a standalone device, please let us know what you are
sending and what infrastructure we will need to support it, such as a
Windows or Linux server for a software tool).  We would also like you to
participate in the iLabs, both during Hot Stage and during the Interop
show itself, although this is not a requirement.  We find that
participation both helps us achieve a higher level of interoperability
and gives your engineering team greater experience in building and
configuring interoperable products.

Before Hot Stage begins, we will check in, unpack, tag, wire, and
install your equipment or software.  Starting on Monday, April 3rd,
2006, you are invited to send technical representatives to Hot Stage in
Belmont to help complete installation of your product, test
interoperability, and to help design the demonstrations and booth layout
to be used in Las Vegas at Interop.

Please plan to arrive between 9AM and noon on Monday, April 3rd.
Most vendors work with us for two days (Monday and Tuesday), although
the rest of the iLabs team will be working until Thursday, when we pack
everything up for shipment to Las Vegas.

We will pack and ship your equipment to Las Vegas.
You must leave your equipment with us and allow us to transport it to
the event in Las Vegas.

We will arrive in Las Vegas on Thursday April 27 and unpack and cable
your equipment.  We request that you arrive on Saturday April 29 or
Sunday April 30 to verify the operation of your equipment and perform final
testing.

The iLabs will be open to the public during exhibit hall hours, from
Tuesday May 2 through Thursday May 4.
We would welcome a representative
from your company in the iLabs during opening hours to help explain the
technology, the demonstrations, and answer questions on interoperability
issues from attendees.
At all times, iLabs are a vendor-neutral setting, so we welcome
technical individuals that will focus more on the technology and the
demonstration rather than individual companies or products.

We will ship your equipment from Las Vegas back to the Hot Stage
Facility after the show and then return it to you from there.

The location of the Hot Stage Facility (for sending equipment and
bodies):

     Interop Hot Stage Facility
     VoIP Lab
     330 Harbor Blvd., Bldg. E
     Belmont, CA 94002
     650.631.9543 (shipping & receiving desk)

For further instructions on how to sign up and how to participate,
please see

http://www.networkops.net/shows/interop/InteropLabs/cfp2006/cfp_overview

If you have questions about what equipment or software to send, or who
would be best to send, I can answer those questions.

The best way to contact me is via email as I read and reply to my email
quickly.

Other questions involving general program and marketing benefits are
best directed to

     Lora Pereira
     CMP Media
     InteropLabs Program Manager
     direct: 415.905.2367
     fax: 415.905.2615
     Email: LPereira@cmp.com

If in doubt, feel free to contact either or both of us.

Please be sure to fill out the application at:

http://www.networkops.net/vrms/cfp_submit

Time saving hint:  On the Proposal Details section, tell us what
products you want to contribute.  Ignore most of the questions in the
text box unless you find them particularly relevant to your product or
your participation.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For those of you that have done this before, here's the "short list":

What's the same as last year?

The show and educational content will be very similar to last year. The security
focus from last year will be expanded.

What's different?

We'll be concentrating much less on simple interoperability and much more on
integrating VoIP solutions into your enterprise environment. There's also much
more emphasis on VoIP over Wireless and the associated QoS and security issues.

What do you need to do?

1)  When?  Right Now
    What?  Send me an email RIGHT NOW to tell me that you are interested
           (or let me know you are not).
    Why?   I'll stop bugging you either way.

2)  When?  By March 17,2006
    What?  Submit a proposal:
            http://www.networkops.net/vrms/cfp_submit
    Why?   This gets the benefits started for you.

3)  When?  By March 27, 2006
    What?  Have your equipment delivered to Hotstage
    Why?   So we can unpack it and check it in

4)  When?  April 3, 2006 Between 9AM and Noon
    What?  Show up to hotstage to install your product
    Why?   So that your product is shown in the best way

5)  When?  April 29 or 30, 2006
    What?  Show up in Las Vegas, iLabs booth
    Why?   Confirm operation and final testing

That's All!  Let us know if you have any questions.

Cingular is announcing today a new service called Cingular Video which allows users to watch short clips from NBC, ESPN, HBO, the Cartoon Network, and other video outlets on their3G cell phones. The service will cost $19.99 per month and is available in Cingular’s 16 metropolitan 3G markets and only runs on the new LG CU320 and Samsung SGH-ZX10 phones.

Ever since the news that AT&T wants to buy BellSouth for $67 billion in stock hit the wires I’ve been trying to get my head around the ramifications of this move. It was just a few days ago that I noticed that my bill for my home landline phone from SBC was now coming from AT&T (wasn’t it SBC that bought AT&T, not the other way around?!), but AT&T is still an incredibly strong brand even considering it’s recent history so this name change makes some amount of sense. I expect a similar name change to show up on my cell phone bill, which not that long ago came from AT&T Wireless, and then became Cingular, but the pending acquisition of BellSouth will give AT&T total ownership of Cingular. And I never really liked that name anyway.

There’s plenty to think about with regards to this deal, including the 10,000 workers AT&T says it will lay off when it goes through and the obvious reassembling of the AT&T monopoly that was taken apart by the Justice Department in 1982. But rather than think too hard about it right now, I’ll point you to Jeff Pulver’s lyrical take on the deal, done in fine Dr. Seuss-style:

Ma Bell,
Break Bell,
Four Bells,
Remake Bell.
…

If that’s too light for you (it’s really not that light, Jeff packs some heavy stuff into his Seussian rhyme), here’s another point to consider. Cynthia Brumfield over on IP Democracy notes that Congress is already talking tough about whether to let this acquisition happen, but if it does go through one of the outcomes could be a renewed interest in working some network neutrality language into the rewrite of the Telecom Act.

I was talking with a colleague about metro wi-fi initiatives, and whether a better solution is to make it a no-brainer for residents and businesses to setup public wi-fi hotspots without opening themselves up to all sorts of freeloading and abuse.

One way to do this would be to design a dual SSID wireless access point. This device would have two wi-fi transceivers, one set up for public access with limited access rights, and one set up for private use with decent security settings by default. The public WAP would only allow access to the router on the local area network, and would throttle the connection to prevent freeloaders from hogging the entire connection.

It seems to me that this would be a good way to seed metropolitan areas with wi-fi hotspots while avoiding the problems associated with leaving an access point wide open. Does anybody know if this is an option in off-the-shelf wireless access points?

Legendary telecom hacker John T. Draper (aka Captain Crunch) has started a video podcast. It sounds like the topics will be mostly focused on computer security and spam, but as we all know in these days of Internet telephony computer security issues are very relevant to telecommunications. Crunchman, the monicker Draper is now going by, also offers up that listeners will be able to provide instant verbal feedback on his poidcasts via Voice Pod and talk to him via his customized Asterisk system. (The Voice Pod link on the CrunchTV site was however not working at the time of this post).

While the rest of the technology industry has marched along, fixed line and mobile operators have not updated their voice mail systems in well over a decade. These systems force you to call into an IVR system to listen to your messages in sequential order. A better way to do this is to push the voice message onto the destination device so the recipient does not need to phone in to fetch it.

A little known way to do this is MMS (multimedia messaging service), now widely supported on most carrier networks, especially GSM networks such as T-Mobile. If your device supports MMS, you can go to the messaging menu (sometimes the same menu as the SMS/text messages menu), create a SMS, and attach an audio clip. This is usually easier to do on smartphones such as Palm and Symbian devices.

When you send the message, the recipient’s phone will typically receive the message in its entirely and cache it for offline playback. This is a handy feature when you need to send a voice message to someone who you know uses text messaging a lot, or to someone who wanders in and out of coverage range. If you have a decent phone, it’s easy to use, and easier to deal with than typing. The phone manufacturers could do a little more work to make this a one-button operation, but this is already an improvement.

NOTE TO MOBILE OPERATORS: your IVR voice mail systems are very, very tired. You need to update these to push voice messages onto subscribers’ phones using MMS or email if they want this option. I know you want to capture another billable minute every time someone dials into the IVR, but it is a bad user experience, and besides you charge for MMS on a per message basis, so who cares what method the subscriber uses to fetch his or her voice messages.

There’s been plenty of people questioning Skype 2.0’s 10-way confererence calling feature that only works on systems powered by Intel dual-core processors, most notably AMD’s lawyers. (For more on the case read Russell Shaw’s interview with AMD’s lead attorney.)

But you don’t have to wait for a drawn out court battle to expand the current 5-caller limit on non-Intel processors. Makezine.com has posted a link to a hack that enables the 10-way conference calling on any system, courtesy of Maxuss of Mac OS X on Intel fame. I’m betting this is one hack that AMD’s legal department is very happy to see surface.

Well, it looks like it’s finally over. RIM and NTP have settled to the tune of $612.5 million. This is far more than the $400 million that they had tentatively agreed to back in 2004, but still shy of what many analysts had been expecting. It appeared that with the recent events that the settlement number would be closer to $1 billion.

Patent attorney Rod Thompson credits the judge with nudging things along:

“He basically questioned the sanity of RIM, and said it wasn’t acting very rationally,” said Rod Thompson, patent attorney at Farella, Braun and Martel in San Francisco. “His prodding of the parties worked.”

It seems like investors are relieved with the decision - the stock is up over 18% after hours, despite the fact that in the same breath RIM issued some disappointing results. You can hear the collective sigh of relief of investors, administrators, and addicts users alike.

Apparently not. Om Malik has posted a fascinating observation today about a large discrepancy between what mobile execs think their customers want and what they actually do want. RBC Capital Markets just ran two surveys, one of “mobility experts” who were attending its recent Mobility Evolution Conference, and one of mobile consumers, with alarming results. The “experts” clearly believed that consumers want video products for their mobile phones (63%), and overwhelmingly believed that consumers would tolerate advertising on their phones (72% ). Unfortunately, the same questions elicited quite different results from users, where only 23% expressed any interest in watching video on their mobile phones, and just 20% said they would tolerate cell phone advertising, and that’s only if it lowered their costs. The telecom industry has a long tradition of cluelessness with regard to what its customers really want (metered ISDN, WAP, walled garden portals…), so this really shouldn’t come as a big surprise.

Net neutrality advocates are pleased to see an actual bill emerging, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006 this week. As it’s becoming clear that there won’t be any net neutrality clauses included in the upcoming Telecom Act rewrite, neutrality proponents have pushed forward an independent bill addressing the issue. Russell Shaw has provided scans of the entire text of the bill, along with some comments that Wyden provided in a conference call with reporters. (The audio file of the conference call is also available on Senator Wyden’s web site).

As usual, IP Democracy has an astute summary of the bill and the challenges ahead for any kind of net neutrality legislation:

During the call, Wyden was a forceful defender of the open Internet but, like so many net neutrality advocates, didn’t handle well questions regarding what kinds of specific market-based transactions would run afoul of the proposed legislation.

Wyden said his bill is “designed to make sure our country doesn’t face an information superhighway that is strewn with discriminatory hurdles. Unless you treat equal content with equal treatment, it seems to me the genius of the Internet will be undermined.”

He tried to dispel a misconception about his legislation; namely that it would bar the sale of different tiers of broadband service. “My legislation is still going to allow consumers to purchase higher speeds,” he said.

Wyden was questioned by reporters on several variations of the following question: What would be wrong with allowing a content provider to pay the operator for some kind of enhanced delivery given that under this scenario, the cost burden would shift away from the consumer and toward the content provider?

No, it’s just a confirmation of an old principle–the current deal struck between ICANN, which the U.S. government gave control over policies concerning the Domain Name System, and VeriSign, the private corporation that manages the insanely popular and critical .com domain.

Take the price of a domain name, for just one example of where the deal goes wrong. The .com domain name market is already weighed down with price-gouging (after all, how much incremental cost is involved in entering an item in a database?), but the new contract allows VeriSign to raise prices 7% per year for four years, just because–well, just because. Like Aristotle said, it’s in the nature of some things to fall and some to rise, and VeriSign decided it’s in the nature of domain name prices to rise.

It’s not by any means the first portable solar charger we’ve seen, but I really like the add-on potential and ease-of-use of these Brunton SolarRolls. Just roll one out and plug your phone (or camera, or other energy-hungry gadget) right into the flexible panel. And you can simply daisy-chain the panels together to get more power to charge larger devices. They come in 4.5 watt, 9 watt, and 14 watt sizes, with the largest one being strong enough to charge up most laptops. But be prepared to pay for this convienence, the list prices range from $169 to $399.

So easy that there’s an article in USA Today this week about it that Slashdot picked up. As Internet-based telephony systems proliferate, so does the almost ridiculous ease they can proivide for spoofing the calling party’s number. In many VoIP systems the user can enter whatever number they want in a calling party field and that’s what gets sent out. The article also notes that web sites like Spoofcard.com and SpoofTel.com are popping up that provide easy and cheap spoofing services for those who aren’t using systems that they can confgure themselves. The main use of Caller ID spoofing so far has been by telemarketers, but you don’t have to think too hard to come up with plenty of nefarious possibilities.

Pay-per-call company Ingenio is gearing up to launch Ether, a new pay-pay-call service that creates a marketplace for services. Ether members decide when they can be reached by phone, and can set their rate. This will be a great tool for people who sell advice or expertise.

For years, I have maintained a telephony buyers guide (www.telephonydesign.com). The site never brought in any advertising revenue. I contribute to it mainly to provide a public service. With Ether, I’ll be able to charge a reasonable fee for telecom advice (I get a lot of inquiries from people who are researching business telephone systems and services). I could easily net a few hundred dollars per week with a service like this, which would make it possible for me to justify spending more time on the website.

This will be a great thing for people who publish specialized websites or have domain specific knowledge to sell. Pay-per-click advertising is a great source of revenue if you’re blogging celebrity nudes, but not if you’re writing about obscure telecom systems. It’ll be interesting to see how this service does in the marketplace. I’ll certainly be using it for my part-time telecom consulting business.