O’Reilly author Russell Dyer (who has just finished the second edition of his MySQL in a Nutshell) writes about why selling the company to Sun was probably a tough decision–but the best one.

If you are not aware, Vodafone UK recently decided to remove the User-Agent field from the mobile browser headers. This means a web developer can’t tell if the user browsing to their mobile site is coming from a mobile device or from the PC. In my opinion, shared by many others, this will have many adverse effects on all companies that rely on delivering customized content to each user’s device.

Vodafone has done this to maintain the walled garden, essentially take control. They are maintaining a whitelist of partners where they will deliver the mobile optimized site; this means if you are not on the white-list, then your site will go through the Vodafone transcoder and likely render much uglier than your mobile optimized site.

However, Vodafone UK is allowing startups to apply to the whitelist program but this of course means that your service is subject to Vodafone, meaning an off-deck mobile content download site would probably be rejected.

I’m hoping this doesn’t perpetuate to other operators; this is the walled-garden at its worst.

While it takes Nokia’s marketing department to task, this rather off-color comparison of the E70 to the iPhone from maddox’s The Best Page in the Universe has to be causing some smiles back in Finland. I’m having trouble finding a suitable passage to quote here on our family-friendly site, but suffice to say he really doesn’t like the iPhone…

So over the past several months, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time following, reading and developing widgets for a variety of platforms. I’ve classified widgets into three platforms:

1. Web - These would be widgets you would embed or develop for portals such as Myspace, iGoogle, Netvibes or Facebook
2. Desktop - These tend to be more full-featured widgets since they operate on the desktop; examples include the Google sidebar, Yahoo Konfabulator or Vista widgets
3. Mobile - This would include a variety of mobile widget platforms including Nokia’s Widsets or ULocate’s Where.com

Anyways, in 9 months of widget development and exploration, this is what I’ve noticed:

1. When designing my widget, I need to optimize for different tiers. I design a medium-tier version for the web where I may not have a lot of CPU or access to certain functionality. I design and build a lower-end version for the mobile and a high-end version for the desktop.
2. For each platform (web, desktop, mobile), I’ve had to port across a variety of vendors - in some cases, this may take as long as a week.
3. More recently, some of my widgets were being denied submission for failing to meet certain style guidelines such as title color or font.
4. I signed agreements with some vendors to gain access to special functionality such as access to location information or file-system access on the computer.
5. Once I submitted my widget into the provider’s directory, promotion and discovery became another major hurdle

Startup Ooma will start selling a $400 box in September; after you’ve purchased the box, you’ve got free phone calls forever, according to press coverage.

Frankly, I don’t understand this hype. It sounds as if Ooma is selling “Skype in a box” — a hardware version of what Skype offers, a peer to peer network for telephony. True, it’s a standalone box, allows POTS backup, and allows connection to your standard phones, all of which is worth something.

But I fail to understand the business model. How will the sale of one box allow them to provide infinite free PSTN connectivity? Sure, they’ll charge for international calls, but something doesn’t sound right; outbound PSTN calls cost money, and the ability to accept inbound PSTN calls costs even more. That can’t be financed by a single sale of a single box.

So my best guess — since Ooma’s web site doesn’t say, and the mainstream press (non-technical, e.g., Mossberg et. al.) seem to be oblivious to VoIP-to-PSTN problem — is that Ooma is a hardware version of Skype. They’ll sell PSTN numbers to receive inbound calls. They’ll sell international LD minutes. And if they go under, that $400 box won’t be able to connect to the PSTN any longer.

Edit, 2007-08-02: I’ve just learned/re-learned that Jeff Peck (see his comment below) is the Principal Architect at ooma. Since I happen to know from personal experience that Jeff is (a) very, very smart and (b) very, very competent, I suspect I will have to re-think my opinion of ooma…

David Weinberger, in a recent essay, suggests that in order to preserve net neutrality we must “delaminate” the telco’s service from their infrastructure. We must fundamentally change the way that telcos do business:

“Delaminate the bastards. The only way to get Net Neutrality with teeth is by changing the business models of the businesses providing us with access. Peel apart the layers like a piece of rotting plywood.

The first layer will be for companies that want to provide access to the Internet. We’ll pay them to let us attach a computer, cell phone or any other device — even a Princess Phone, once we get it all VoIPed up — to the Internet and begin to send and receive bits. As many bits as we want. All bits treated equally. The companies can compete over price, bandwidth, uptime, and other properties of the network.

The upper layer will be for companies that want to provide content and services using the Internet.”

This is a very interesting idea that has been talked about by those of us at the ETel conferences, and I’m sure others, for the past few years. It is something that I have championed in my own fashion and career as well. This is a debate that will be fought for years in the halls of congress and in the marketplace.

I believe that the telcos should become pure infrastructure providers. They provide the wiring, fiber and core switching infrastructure while other companies rent space on that infrastructure to provide whatever services they want. This “upper layer”, as Weinberger calls it, includes voice, private data and Internet access right now, but might include other services down the line. The point of reducing the role of the telcos is to make a vendor neutral substrate (to borrow from the lumber analogy) that any service can be built on top of.

The telcos win because: they no longer have to deal directly with end customers, they can focus on pure networks that can expand and grow as their resellers see fit and they will have a more productive relationship with the regulatory agencies. The other players win because they know what they will be getting and how much it can be had for. As Weinberger says: “This is exactly the business architecture our economy, democracy and culture are thirsting for. We want to have companies competing to sell us more, better, faster access to the connected world. We want the services and the content — the things we can do, the ideas we can discuss — to grow like a crazy, bottom-up Renaissance.”

There is no reason that this model shouldn’t be put out to all of our utility companies such as wireless, power, radio, etc. The regulatory process already exists and would require few changes. The shareholders of the “line companies” would need to be convinced of the ultimate bottom-line profitability. None of these are obstacles that are difficult to overcome. I believe that the model would ultimately be more profitable for all parties involved.

We should all be having this discussion not only amongst ourselves, but with our congress people and our local utility commissions to bring about a new order in telecommunications. The US could be a model for deregulated markets in telecommunications, wireless and energy.

After some amount of pain I got my iPhone activated by a kind group of folks at AT&T who were assigned to “fix problems that people on the Internet were having”. A kind man named Thomas helped me through the process of converting my account from corporate to individual, getting a refund of a deposit and making things generally more smooth than anyone else at AT&T had even attempted to do. He got the right people on the phone, stayed with me for over an hour while we were both on hold with at least 3 other departments and was a generally nice fellow. The level of customer service to whiny bloggers seems to be higher than that of the general customer. This is absurd, but it is the state of the mobile industry as a whole.

When you reach close to 80% market penetration, it’s apparently difficult to justify hiring highly qualified individuals to help customers with their problems. This is a point of differentiation that I can’t see any of the US mobile carriers taking advantage of. It is a serious market opportunity that I suspect would pay good dividends if ever executed upon properly. After seeing multiple calls for class action lawsuits from disgruntled AT&T customers, I’m pondering whether or not it will take such a thing to be treated as a human again by mobile companies (IANAL, I have no idea how that would work or what you would sue for). I hope I can get some responses from my emails to the US providers about the state of their customer services. I look forward to doing a future article on this subject.

Now. To the toy. By now everyone has seen the numerous reviews of the device, so I’ll spare you another one. There are a couple of posts that piqued my interest over the past few days. My colleague over at O’Reilly Radar Marc Hedlund had some great criticism of the iPhone. While I disagree on some points (namely the one claiming AT&T is “on it“), I think his summary is fairly good. Also of interest is my friend James Duncan Davidson’s list of “unexpected goodies, nits, bugs and feature requests”. My own personal list includes the idiotic lack of any decent Bluetooth support for syncing or file tranfer, the lack of TCP-based syncing and some bugs with the phone app. Once I get my Nokia N95 back, I’ll post a feature-for-feature comparison just for fun.

There’s no doubt it’s a revolutionary device. I look forward to seeing what people do with it over the coming months. The hackers are already working on things and have posted various tools to activate the device, etc. This will be interesting to watch as well.

A gorgeous phone…That i can’t use.

I had hope that Apple’s integration of the usually complicated and obtuse world of mobile phone activation into iTunes would actually make things easier for the user. Unfortunately we have been given a nasty glimpse into the even MORE complicated and obtuse world of the mobile phone billing system.

I sat in line this afternoon with anticipation of getting an iPhone to review in our typical fashion for our readers. I happily forked over my $600 to have a chance to play with the latest wonder of the Apple universe. I came home, updated iTunes to version 7.3, removed the device from its lovely package and sat down for what promised to be a great end to a great week. Then I actually tried to activate the thing.

Apple normally puts a lot of thought into the wording of its error messages and exerts an inordinate amount of control over their presentation. In this case, after filling out the Activation Form I was presented with a very atypical error page that read:

We’re sorry, AT&T has determined that your current account cannot be used with the iPhone.

It proceeded to give me a link to a most unusual FAQ Page at AT&T’s site with strange acronyms like CRU, IRU and FAN. I don’t pretend to understand these things. I don’t really care. The question that it purports to answer is “Business customers: Problems activating your iPhone?”. Well I suppose I have a business account as I currently enjoy the benefits (?) of AT&T’s Developer Program due to an accounting snafu at a former client. [Update: This sentence is irrelevent; I have a business account and that’s all that matters for this issue] However, I am the only user and I have 2 lines. I would hardly call myself a corporation and I am certainly an individual, but I have no idea how I am classified in the arcane world of AT&T billing.

So I proceed to read on and find that there is a document called the Pre-Purchase Understanding that I have never seen or heard of, much less “understood”. There is a sentence down at the bottom of the flyer that says “Available only to consumer accounts. iPhone and associated wireless service are not eligible for corporate discounts.” It would have been a bit better of AT&T to actually mention this more fully in their literature and to better prepare their employees for the inevitable “CRU” or “IRU” to walk in the door requesting kit that they can’t use.

After attempting to understand this crazy FAQ Page and having little patience for it (I was in the “it just works, it’s Apple” state of mind). I decided to call our friends at customer care to see if they could help. Our friends being no doubt inundated with calls from people in similar situations I was happy to oblige the 5 minute hold time. The obviously flustered representative proceeded to inform me that because I had a business account I had to call some other number called “NBO” and have them convert it to an individual account before I could activate it, then convert it back to a corporate account so that my other phone would work properly. She then said that there was a number (buried on the bottom of that FAQ page as well) that was run by Apple, but that it was down right now so I should keep trying. I tried. It was indeed down.

This post might seem uncharacteristically rant-y, but I feel like something should be said in public about this gross oversight. As a user and a customer, I should never be exposed to the intricacies of your internal billing system. Apple should have pushed AT&T more for the availability of this device to corporate accounts, discounts or no, knowing that they would be desired on day one.

This the first of what I’m sure will be many holes poked in the veil that is iPhone. I’m sure it’s a fabulous device, but I didn’t pay $600 to have it sit on my shelf all weekend. At the very least AT&T could have extended the “NBO” line’s hours to accomodate the influx of calls related to iPhone on its inaugural weekend. I will bet that Apple will be quite unhappy with the state of PR affairs if enough people talk about the fact that “Just Works” and AT&T don’t really belong in the same sentence.

[Update]After reading some of the (less) constructive comments here, it would seem that most people see this as a bashing of the device itself. It is by far not a criticism of the iPhone, since I’ve not been able to actually use it. I have absolutely zero impression of the device other than it’s got a pretty screen.

[Update]It seems that AT&T has gotten the better of me. After waiting on hold for almost 2 hours I got to a set of folks at AT&T who were supposedly able to help me. They told me that they had to convert my existing corporate account into an individual account. Ok. I gave them a bunch of personal info and then they said that I’d have to pay a $150 deposit on top of the $250 deposit I gave them 2 months ago to open the account in the first place.

I asked about getting the original deposit back and they told me that since there was another line on the account that I wouldn’t get it back for a year, but I was free to convert the second line at the same time for an additional $150 deposit. Then I could get the whole $500 deposit back as a check within the following 6 weeks after I contacted another department.

The second line would have to have its own separate plan and couldn’t share minutes with the iPhone. This would have changed my monthly bill from $170 for 2100 minutes with unlimited BlackBerry service (and an 80MB plan on my 2nd line) to almost $250 for similar service.

I have no issue with converting my account to an individual status. Once again, I don’t care about AT&T’s billing system. The fact that I pay $600 for a device and then am asked to pay additional deposits and jump through arcane hoops in order to activate it. I opened the original account on my own personal credit and wasn’t informed of its Corporate status until this whole fiasco. They have my money. They don’t need more for me to prove that I am worthy of an account that I already have with them.

This is an unprecedented grab of power by a carrier over its customers. This is the height of mediocrity and poor management. The representatives who I spoke to were not empowered to actually fix things in any way. They were slaves to the system. The people whom I purchased the phone from at the AT&T store were very aware that I had a corporate account, but failed to inform me that I wasn’t going to be able to actually use the phone I was about to purchase.

AT&T is obviously unprepared for such a device launch. They did not train their personnel properly and did not empower them to fix the inevitable problems that would crop up. They also failed to properly staff the call centers to react to high call volume.

Steve Jobs was quoted in the Wall Street Journal talking about how great this will be for corporate users. Steve, you missed the fact that corporate users can’t even use the device. There are far more corporate users in the world of AT&T than there are individual users. You might want to review your numbers.

I have no choice but to return the device and fight for a full refund. Shame on AT&T and Apple for providing me with a poor experience. Shame on AT&T for exerting more control over your customer in an era where being more open will get you a lot farther. Shame on Apple for caving to obviously bizarre requirements imposed by AT&T for your device.

The iPhone may well be the most innovative mobile communication product since the Blackberry, but as with nearly every product, the carriers will do anything they can to kill it. Apple’s Achilles’ Heel in this case, brain damaged pricing from AT&T Wireless.

Word is out that for $60/month, you’ll get 450 minutes of talk time, and for $100/month, you’ll get only 1350 minutes. The iPhone is an expensive device compared to most mobile phones. While there are a lot of people who will pay a premium for Apple products, it is hard to see where many people will jump at rate plans like these, especially since the people most likely to buy an iPhone use the phone a _lot_.

This is why I had hoped the iPhone would have been launched on T-Mobile. T-Mobile understands the youth market much better, and has way better pricing. I pay about $120 per month for several thousand minutes per month _and_ unlimited data _and_ wifi hotspots. The plans AT&T is promoting don’t even come close.

I’ll be interested to see how things pan out. It’s possible that Apple’s brand will trump AT&T’s lame offer, but I would not be surprised if the iPhone is stillborn in the US market because consumers don’t want to sign up to pay AT&T $1,000 plus in extra airtime (over a two year contract) compared to buying a less expensive device and plan over at a competing carrier.

It’s a shame AT&T was not as innnovative as Apple. As it is now, they’re offering the same rate plans, except with unlimited (slow) data. The device is cool, but the network it’s hooked up to just doesn’t seem all that compelling.

Hopefully Apple has terms in their contract that if sales don’t meet a certain threshold they can turn around and start selling through other carriers like T-Mobile.

Here is some food for thought:

1. In 2001, it was a lot easier to publish your mobile content such as a ringtone or wallpaper or your WAP application onto a carrier catalog. Today, only if your brand is Tier 1 such as Disney or you work through a publisher, will you even have a chance of being considered for a carrier catalog.

2. Only as far back as a year ago, when you were on a data plan, you could browse wherever you want. Today, more and more, you are seeing unlimited data plans required for full internet browsing and even then, there is still no guarantee you will be able to stream your mobile video - port blocking madness…

3. EU carriers are wondering why the US is beginning or has surpassed EU in mobile content revenue such as games or even ringbacks. EU has always been the more “open” market with off-deck content generating a majority of the revenue. Well maybe, now they are kicking themselves, realizing that to maximize carrier revenue, they need to move more people onto subscriptions and off of pre-paid and distribute the content on-deck maintaining absolute control.

4. In the last year, we’ve heard about 1800Free411 getting blocked and then Truphone for VoIP calls getting blocked. Since when has a voice call been regulated and doesn’t unlimited data mean unlimited data?

The conclusion is the carriers have learned. Over the past 7 years selling and delivering mobile content, they know what works, they know what sells and they especially know what is profitable and what is not. For example, there is no arguing that video is by far less profitable than SMS for a carrier - $1.99 for a video ringtone, 15 cents for an SMS - 300K versus 1K in size, there is no comparison.

To be seen…

So a colleague recently put together this graph.

It’s using data from the published numbers available in the Verizon and Cingular financial reports; you can look up these numbers yourself. There is no doubt that MMS is finally taking off but the real question for me is MMS to a service taking off. What this graph doesn’t show is the break-out between MMS phone-to-phone versus MMS to an email address; I’m going to assume that 99% of it is phone-to-phone.

One of the issues we’ve been experiencing at Veeker, is teaching users how to send MMS to an email address. Often when we tell users to send a photo or video from their phone to an email address, they immediately assume “email” and not MMS. Phones are not optimized for this behavior, usually placing you in T9 numeric mode when entering in the recipient (phone-to-phone).

The US consumer learned about SMS from American Idol but the difference there is SMS is being sent to a shortcode (a 5 digit number). MMS to a shortcode is still a ways out - only time will tell as to what will be the US campaign to teach the US consumer how to send an MMS to an email or maybe it won’t happen until MMS to a shortcode is available but I definitely wouldn’t say MMS has failed as many express - the hockey stick has just started.

The publicity around municipal wireless networks has been horrendous recently. Internet access by city governments–cable, fiber, or wireless–evolved from a utopian vision nurtured by community activists with a technological bent in the early 1990s to a mass movement spawning major policy debates in many states within the last few years. Then, during the past year it all seemed to fall apart.

Only over the past few weeks have I noticed the municipalities and community advocates putting together the shards of their business plans and coming up with credible models for building municipal networks again. And these models, not surprisingly, revive the solid understandings of past builders.

I spent the day at the MuniWireless New England conference, a show devoted to showing municipalities the latest models, technologies, and strategies for developing municipal networks. This is not a technology show, but a place to ask questions such as, “Whom do I get involved in planning for building a network?” and “What kinds of surveying should I do in order to lay out wireless sites effectively?” But I waited to get home before posting my blog, because the wireless access at the show was kind of slow.

The bankruptcy filing by US MVNO Amp’d over the weekend was very high profile, sad and, to many of us who cover the industry, not all that surprising. Amp’d had amassed a reported 200,000 subscribers and burned through hundreds of millions of dollars to build a broad-market MVNO. It hasn’t worked very well and it appears that Amp’d has found it time to pay the piper.

According to this post on mocoNews the bankruptcy filing lists over $100 million in debt owed and less than that in assets. Amp’d is the classic story of overreaching in a nascent market. They made a big bet and lost. In their press release they state that they plan to continue operating while restructuring their debt. I assume that they will emerge a smarter company for it.

This is a very high profile failure, to be certain, but it is not the end-all and be-all of the US MVNO marketplace. In fact many US MVNOs are doing quite well on a small subscriber base with well targeted marketing plans. The fact that Amp’d overreached was its downfall, not the fact that it was an MVNO in a market that doesn’t understand or want them as many in the blogosphere have commented in the past few days.

MVNO success appears to not come from spending millions of dollars on high-profile ad campaigns targeting huge audiences and acquiring “premium” content. It comes from careful investment, market research and targeted marketing. The most successful MVNOs have been based on these principles.

For example, Virgin Mobile USA has almost 5 million subscribers and revenues of over $1 billion dollars anually. They do very targeted marketing (most of it in store, very little on TV or Radio) and have grown phenomenally. They have been losing money on a planned basis in order to grow to this size, but they are sustainable and plan an IPO in the near future.

There are more success stories than failures in the US MVNO market. The failures to date have mostly been by prominent companies (ESPN Mobile most notably) who have spent money without good planning. The MVNO game is pure arbitrage of wholesale minutes at this point. MVNOs are not allowed to innovate with new network-layer services, so they are stuck with handset development. The market is vital and continues to grow. We just never seem to notice.

So I’ve been browsing the mobile web from when I was working on it in 1999. Early on, I’d primarily use it for casual browsing such as playing a WAP game or perusing through the news. In the last few yrs, I’ve been using it for local searches, email, weather etc. One of the issues with mobile browsing has always been trying to navigate to websites that are not optimized for the phone. The pages would either not render or crash the browser in many instances.

To solve this a number of companies emerged and are still emerging offering clever solutions that would essentially “mobilize” your site known as transcoding. New browsers also emerged which could render a whole website on a phone as popularly demo’ed by Steve Jobs with the iPhone. These intelligent browsers and transcoders proved very useful when you want to browse to a random website that would take you off the main WAP portal.

Over time, as more mobile browsing behavior data was collected, it became evident that when browsing on the go, you are either browsing for a specific piece of information such as a football score or you are casually browsing such as reading the news. This is versus the web where you have another level in casual browsing, what I’ll call “discovery” browsing where you discover new websites through search results or ads. Services like StumbleUpon thrive on linking users to interesting websites based on their interests. Would StumbleUpon be interesting in mobile browsing?

The mobile search engines recognized these browsing behaviors and have over the past few years improved their search alogorithms to provide more “relevant” results. As an example, a search for “Orlando” through Yahoo’s WAP site yields results describing Orlando’s restraunts, bars, maps, weather and local news verus providing a list of links like an equivalent web search would render; Yahoo calls this OneSearch.

I was deaf and now I can hear! I can now actually make mobile calls without sounding like I’m inside an electrical storm!

During my previous six years at France Telecom I was issued with company-provided Orange handsets and tariffs. Unfortunately, free telephony is no substitute for crummy reception - despite Orange’s coverage maps showing that I lived in a ‘high coverage 3G zone’, I had appalling quality of service.

In shopping for a repalcement plan over the last few weeks, all UK networks showed my location to be in an area with ‘great reception’. The websites of operators tend to show coverage as a series of crude heatmaps, however UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom, operates a slightly more useful service, called Sitefinder - a database of cell base stations across the country. Using Sitefinder, I was able to figure out that the network with the shortest line of sight to my home was operated by O2; boom! my new O2-powered N95 gives me great reception.

Sitefinder is clunky (it was designed in response to cell tower health concerns), but useful…however it only provides locations, with no indicators of quality. Perhaps it’s time for a network-agnostic, user-created coverage map. Now, if Ofcom were smarter, they could act as a interesting broker between cellcos and users. Think about this…

• Ofcom launches an open map service that can be annotated for coverage quality by end users.
• User’s annotate maps with their experience of reception for particular networks in various locations
• Cellcos use the data to improve and monitor service quality, compensating users with freebies for their service plan
• Handset manufacturers offer cellphones that report their location’s signal quality periodically to the coverage map service.

With people increasingly displacing their landlines with cellphones in the home, it becomes increasingly important, as a consumer, to understand the quality of indoor and outdoor coverage and indeed the quality of coverage in all the places you live your life.

So I hereby assert the Open Coverage Map as my first Lazyweb request. If Ofcom were smart enough to build this, they might’ve used Google Maps rather than whatever antiquated futz is in place…so its left to YOU to make this happen :)

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about Hillary Clinton’s decision to use text messaging as part of her campaign. (It’s part of the fawning media coverage of Clinton — even though Obama and Edwards already made the decision to use text messaging, the Clinton move “signals” how “widespread” text messaging has become.) Forgive me, but my first reaction is “what comes next — the use of quill pens?”

Once again, the US has made some small steps to catching up with the rest of the world, which far outstrips the US in telephony innovation. The Philippines, for example, used text messaging not just in a political campaign but to run their entire revolution. By way of contrast, the Edwards campaign has been fiddling around with text messaging for months but has just 6,000 subscribers.

The US is a major innovator in many areas of technology and telecommunications, but cellular services still run far behind.

MIT spin-out Meraki Networks has made a huge impact on the wireless community networking space through their bargain-basement open source-based wireless mesh network products. An out-growth of MIT’s Roofnet project, which provided wireless access to over 1.5 square miles of Cambridge in 2004 and 2005, Meraki’s network covering 1.5 square miles in San Francisco’s Mission District is now San Francisco’s best chance at getting a city-wide network in the face of recent political challenges.

The network will cost only about $15,000 and relies on the grassroots volunteerism that have made both MIT Roofnet and Meraki such successes. Over 300 people have already volunteered to host nodes as part of the “Free the Net” campaign, many of whom are also volunteering their DSL connections or allowing Meraki to install DSL connections. Some CLECs, such as Speakeasy and Sonic.net, have SLAs that allow subscribers to provide free or resold Internet access, which enables Meraki to use advertising to support the network’s operating costs.

Check out their progress at sf.meraki.net. A recent one-month pilot using three Meraki nodes in Cambridge’s Harvard Square netted over 700 unique users, and the San Francisco network already has over 2,000 unique users despite being only about half completed. The Free the Net project questions the current paradigm of big telco buildouts using enterprise-grade equipment promoted by industry giants such as Earthlink and AT&T. Given Earthlink’s recently announced first quarter financial losses, questioning the current models for city-wide wireless Internet seems like a good idea, although the jury’s still out on whether this new model will succeed.

One of the key insights I picked up from the inaugural ETel conference was the increasing importance of signaling in modern communication…and not simply the technical protocols, but the subtle, ambiguous social signalling that takes place in all human communication.

Yesterday’s Register alluded to this topic in an article entitled From information overload to communication overload (Who needs nine ways to be put on hold?).

On any given day I typically receive 20-30 emails, 100s of tweets, 500 or so RSS items, 5-6 phone calls; a subset of these inbound communications are more important to me than others, some are transformed and republished into other media…blog posts, bookmarks, emails, calls and the like.

Companies such as GrandCentral and Equals are looking to address some of this complexity - but is seems to me they’re still approaching this through telephony metaphors.

When media, communications and entertainment are intertwined, do we need to develop new, richer signalling metaphors that can reduce a noisy stream of autistic notifications to an elegant, humming flow? I think so…I don’t know what these metaphors may be, but perhaps a good starting point is a single mechanism to quantify the volume and nature of what’s thrown at us?

More broadly - should Emerging Telephony really be more about Emerging Communication?

We’ve talked about the controversies surrounding IMS here on ETel before (see Lee Dryburgh’s The IMS Debate for one interesting perspective). Brough Turner, one of the really smart guys out there in this field, has written up the notes from his recent talk about what he learned in porting his MyCaller ringback tones application from the Intelligent Network (IN) implementation to an “IMS” version. You may be surprised at what he found.

In Lessons Learned Implementing IMS, Brough really breaks down the details of where IMS is today, what it can offer, and some of the problems people will face in moving towards IMS. He presents a short and sweet executive summary of his findings, but the entire article is well worth a read.

For the impatient, here are the takeaways.

1. It’s very early days for IMS. Today’s “IMS” networks are combinations of SIP infrastructure with 3GPP Release 4 softswitch-controlled voice service.
2. IMS is about connection control, only. Only part of your application has to change. For MyCaller, ~90 percent of the software remains the same.
3. IMS enables multimedia ringback, i.e. video! So there is significant new functionality, versus today’s audio-only ringback.
4. Parallels with Intelligent Network are striking!
5. Most application–specific data remains outside of IMS. In particular, operators do not want to add data fields to their Home Subscriber Server (HSS).
6. Application–specific MRFs make sense. Operators tend to avoid sharing resources between diverse applications. And, for rich media, application–specific MRFs can be more cost-effective.
7. Operators await 3GPP Release 7. At least anecdotally, several operators have suggested that 3GPP Release 7 is the first complete, stable, and consistent version they will fully deploy.

And for more good analysis of the state of IMS and a deeper look at the R4 vs. R7 issue, check out Dean Bubbley’s response post, When is an IMS not an IMS?.

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I was shocked to learn today that my alma mater, Virginia Tech, is now known as the site of the worst mass murder in US history. Tech is a great school, but will be forever marked because of this evil coward, whoever he is. I don’t know what else to say.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we identify ourselves in virtualspace quite a bit lately. Specifically, where things intersect in interesting ways. Where do those intersections cause conflicts and how can they be resolved using emerging telephony platforms?

Take, for instance, the humble telephone number. It is a tried and true method of identifying an individual or organization in multiple circumstances. It is also portable amongst different forms of communication…I can move my mobile phone number in the US to any other carrier (mobile or otherwise) by signing a form and waiting. The problem comes when I want to transfer my mobile number to a service like GrandCentral, but I still want to have SMS messages forwarded as well.

You simply can’t currently do that. If I move my mobile number to GrandCentral so that I am no longer dependent on any one phone or plan or anything (something I am doing in my new role covering Mobile issues for ETel), then I am completely up the tree when it comes to receiving SMS messages. I have to relay a new identification token to those that I wish to communicate with. Additionally, I have very little control over the phone number relayed out by my mobile phone, so I implicitly share the temporary phone number that I’m using at any given time.

I have had my phone number, email address and various other identifiers for well over 5 years (some over 10!). Do any of these hold up for my whole lifetime? As fellow ETel blogger Imran Ali mentioned to me, millions of people are approaching the 2-decade mark on some of their identifiers. Is changing the identification mechanism even possible at this point? If so, who owns it?

I find solutions like OpenIDand XRI promising in this area, but they are a ways out and have some user experience issues before they are adopted in any large way by carriers. Certain products are on the horizon that may fit the bill, Equals is meant to help solve that problem, but it too is difficult to use and requires a large “bootstrap” of people for it to be useful.

What do you, humble readers, think of my dilemma and what do you see that might help me, and others in my situation, to fix this issue? What do you need in this collision area between phone identifiers? Can business do this on its own, or do we need some external body to maintain these sorts of identifiers?

I love a good prank, especially at a time and place when it’s not expected, and especially if they draw in people who you’d think had better radar. I don’t have a good one this year, but here’s a pointer to a hoax I was involved in a few years ago. We staged a fake right wing, pro-war rally in Berkeley’s People’s Park. One observer remarked that he hadn’t seen that kind of chaos since Michael Moore sent cheerleaders to an execution (I took that as a compliment). Watching the protestors slowly realize they were being pranked was priceless.

Another fun one I was involved in was organizing a St Patricks Day parade two weeks early in Chinatown. Nobody knew what to do with that.

Happy April Fool’s Day. If you’re in San Francisco, be sure to check out the St Stupid’s Day Parade.

The stock rundown this past week for every major cell provider has finally been explained. First thought to be caused by weakening nerves of stock buyers based on the high debt incurred by AT&T gobbling half the cell accounts in the country at high debt value and customer acquisition cost, cell execs discovered the truth today: Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

Widely quoted in the supermarket tabloids the past two weeks, Paris and Lindsay started another of their famous feuds designed to increase sales rates of tabloids and promote full employment for E! TV reporters. This time, however, the battle focused on which “star” hated her cell phone the most.

Paris Hilton, through her spokesdog riding in her handbag, declared, “talking on a cell and texting is, like, so over.” Not to be outdone, Lindsay sent a message through her current celebrity overdose d’jour rehabilitation center saying, “If you want to tell me something, say it writing with a fountain pen on nice paper.” Teenage girls by the millions followed their advice, putting down their cells and picking up fountain pens.

Norman Haase, owner of HisNibs fountain pen e-commerce Web site, said, “I can’t keep pens in stock, especially the ones with glitter and rhinestones. I also had to order 200 drums of purple ink.”

Cell execs, desperate to revive their traffic, are gathering Oscar-quality gift baskets for Paris and Lindsay. Celebrity “expert consultants” promise both young “women” fall into the Low Talent, No Shame, Open Checkbook school of modern celebrity. Market watchers expect cell and texting traffic to rebound during the next celebrity “news” crises.

If you’ve been snapping up every news item you can find on the Verizon/Vonage patent fight, as I have, and you’ve been wondering why nobody actually talks about the patents themselves, telephony tech expert Fred Goldstein may have an explanation in this posting. The validty of the patents weren’t an issue in the recent case, but they will become an issue on appeal. From Fred’s posting you can see what he thinks of them.

I’ve got my Nokia E61, and after a lot of fiddling with it I’ve decided to keep it. I think I can make it work, but the darn thing still feels like a beta release to me. I thought Microsoft was the King of the “let’s release this beta to the customers and see what happens” school of product development; but Nokia certainly knows how to take the shine off a new toy.

Here’s a list of gripes. I would definitely love to see some suggested solutions, by the way, so feel free to chime in with comments.

• Wireless access. The E61 has a wireless network — but not all applications they’ve shipped have a clue on how to access it. The built-in web browser, for example, doesn’t seem to be smart enough to use the phones “access point groups,” the set of pre-defined wireless access points that I know about and have passwords for. In other words, even though I’ve entered this info, the web browser doesn’t bother to use it. Other applications seem to have the same issue.
  
  
  Oh, and wireless access seems to come with some undocumented feature called “Easy WLAN,” which I may have accidentally turned off and can no longer find. Never could figure out how it worked, as it was always asking me the same questions over and again.
• Speaking of questions over and again, each time I accessed my email through TLS and the email client hit my non-standard TLS ceritificate, it asked me again if it were acceptable. No memory, and no option to save the certificate as trusted.
• And speaking of non-standard, there’s a so-called “IM” client that uses SMS to send and receive “chat” messages. In other words, nothing to use WiFi networking for IM, and nothing that does Jabber protocol. Very mysterious — one of the biggest reasons to get WiFi is free chat, and no free chat client is included.
• Speaking of mysterious, I can’t get my VoIP service to register from the phone. I use ViaTalk. I can get Gizmo to register; I can get pbxes.com to register ViaTalk, and I can register my phone as a pbxes.com extension and make calls outbound from ViaTalk (although dropping the European-style “+” from my phone numbers is a bit tricky), and my local softphone doesn’t have problems registering itself as a ViaTalk phone. ViaTalk won’t register from the E61, and I can’t find any way to get any information out of the phone as to why it won’t register.
  
  
  Admittedly, with pbxes.com working, it’s hardly necessary to have a dual-use system where I use the E61 or the ATA/deskphone combination alternatively — but I’m still somewhat attached to my desk phone, for sentimental reasons. And besides, darn it, the E61 should register. (And ViaTalk’s just isn’t interested, and sent me off to Nokia.)
  
  Registration troubles took quite a lot of time to sort out.
• Speaking of registration troubles, if I want to use this phone to talk to a service that doesn’t need to register — e.g., to my Prophecy VoiceXML/CCXML/SIP server — I can’t do it. The E61 insists that you register. There’s no way I can find that lets me use the phone without registering; e.g., enter in the phone’s SIP ID as “moshe@${LOCALHOST}” as my current name for the purposes of VoIP telephony and let the system sort out what my current IP address is. If I’m not registered I can’t call out. Huh? Behind the firewall, I often make calls without any proxies or registration.

So, to summarize, this phone has some interesting potential. I can sort of get it to work; I managed to figure out how to turn on SMS with T-Mobile; I deleted T-Mobile’s annoying t-zones service that attempts to hijack my connections. But the most important thing, the ability to connect to ViaTalk via WiFi, isn’t happening, and other things that do happen, happen in a half-baked way.

Well, I’m running version 3.x of the software. Maybe next year they’ll get it right. In the meantime I’ll probably keep the phone… if I can persuade it to talk to my Prophecy server.

Pockets of lousy cell phone reception are a fixture of modern life–reflected in thousands of television commercials telling you that phone companies have solved the problem. Ortiva Wireless recently announced a content shaping system they claim dramatically improves the user experience with audio, video, and high-bandwidth web sites.

I think the ETel 2007 conference generated more post-conference work than any I’ve been at in years. I gave out all my business cards by the end of the conference — I think I had two left by the time I returned to Disaggreate HQ here in Chicago — and I received quite a handful in return.

Unlike other conferences, just about each and every card I received is from someone I’d like to keep in touch with. It’s going to take weeks to sort it all out, get the names into my database, and send out the emails. But then again, it’s wonderful to have that sort of problem.

While you might be tempted to think that I am going to write more about anger, I think that a more appropriate term would be passion. FreeSwitch was created for the same reasons that so many other open-source projects happen; a passion for a particular problem space that was not going to be addressed any other way.

Part of FreeSwitch’s methodology has been to embrace existing technologies as much as possible. Often, existing libraries are integrated into the product, rather than new modules being written. FreeSwitch can do this because it is written under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and thus enjoys more freedom than GPL stuff does (with apologies to Richard Stallman ;-)

FreeSwitch is a fairly new open-source telecom application. While this means that it is arguably not as mature as something like Asterisk, it also means that it can incorporate newer ways of thinking about software development, and benefit from lessons learned along the way. Many of the FreeSwitch team earned their stripes with the Asterisk project.

FreeSwitch is something to keep your eyes on.

Jeff Bonforte of Yahoo! wants us to look for angry people.

The premise of his highly-entertaining talk centered around the concept of getting products to market by finding the frustrated people; the folks who have pain. These are people who will pay to solve that pain.

That’s why so many of us are excited about Emerging Telecom. There sure is a lot of anger and pain. If you are sadistic, masochistic, or ideally both, Telecom is for you!

Benoit Schillings says open source is coming to a mobile handset near you. The Qtopia Greenphone by Trolltech brings the freedom of Linux to the cell phone. Fully open and customizable, the folks at Trolltech want to provide the environment and hardware, and allow the community to figure out what applications are relevant.

The big guys are thinking this way too. Both Motorola and Nokia have open source websites (http://opensource.motorola.com and http://opensource.nokia.com/).

The people that are building the hardware are giving us the tools to create and deliver applications to mobile devices.

Now, we just need to convince the carriers to allow us to deliver these ideas on their closed, locked-down, expensive networks. Not sure when that’s going to happen. Must be why everybody wants their cell phone to do WiFi (yeah, I’m going to get a Nokia E61 as well).

Ah well, we’re heading in the right direction . . . aren’t we?

I’m suffering from a severe case of device envy.

Right now Tero Ojanpera of Nokia is speaking about the new Nokia devices; the N800 wireless Linux tablet looks very nice, and clearly I need one of those. Many of my colleagues are carrying N61’s, and clearly I need one of those. And the Neo/OpenMoko open-source phone looks terrific, and clearly I need one of those as well.

Tero just stated that given GPS, cameras, and orienation sensors, and presence notification of your friends, you should be able to (or currently can?) use the camera to pick friends out of a crowd by having an overlay appear over a photo of their location. Clearly I need one of those devices, too.

I often go to my tailor to customize my new clothes with extra pockets and zippers, but I think I may need a wear a harness to carry all the gear that I now “need.” This conference is going to cost me a lot more than I originally thought!

I’m a systems integrator by trade, not a programmer, but I like to think that in a different life I might have made a good one. The last language I learned really well was REXX (even did socket and serial port programming with it [shudder]).

In any case, the urge to learn a programming language causes me angst every now and then, and Ruby has been stirring up . . . feelings in me.

Having just experienced Jay Phillips’ introduction to Adhearsion, the urges are getting stronger. Every time I hear Ruby proponents talk, they seem barely able to contain tears of joy. Observe Ruby programmers when they talk to each other: They always look at each other with a twinkle in their eyes: a gaze that suggests that they share in some marvelous secret. This seems to be a universal phenomenon.

Even folks that are not proponents seem to have a hard time finding bad things to say. The worst that I hear is something along the lines of “um . . . it’s pretty good” (and that is an attempt at criticism!).

Time to start reading . . .

Lee’s debate at the Etel conference moved me from indifference over the telco’s IMS initiative to outright fear. IMS is more than a transport layer; it’s more than another effort to introduce a “Service Creation Environment” into the legacy telco networks. If it were just those two I could ignore IMS, because telcos have been attempting to introduce flexibile service creation environments for decades.

But IMS invites invasion of privacy and data mining. IMS, according to the telcos, will manage your address book, your “friends” list, your social networking contacts, and perhaps what you have for breakfast tommorow morning. By opening your data, your network browsing, and your calling history to other telcos and — perhaps, but almost certainly — to marketing organizations, your entire life becomes available to anyone with a checkbook.

On the bright side, the telcos intend to control which third-party applications run on IMS. Since it’s unimaginable that any imaginative new technology — such as blogging, YouTube, MySpace, Second Life, or even Google — would ever be allowed to see the light of day on the staid telco networks, nothing worthwhile (aside from stodgy or clueless institutions) will use IMS. I hope…

We’ve recently seen the tiny and the titanic begin moves to support the sublime OpenID; in the last few weeks, AOL and Microsoft announced their OpenID plans and yesterday, Digg also signalled its intent.

Microsoft and AOL represent hundreds of millions of IDs, available on many platforms…so where are the telcos? Could a combination of OpenID, .name and ENUM finally uncouple your telephony identity from your telco?

I’ve used imran@ali.name and imran.ali.name as my personal email and web addresses since 2002, now I can use them to sign-in to web services…it’s only small step to map my cell number onto those IDs…

I left Orange in December and crossed into civilian life as a mobile customer for the first time in my life - I now know the pain of selecting a tariff and handset when you’re on the outside, I’ve spend 4 hours on various support lines today arguing swearing, sweet-talking and finally plotting murder. Let me tell you my story…

Think how WiFi has changed our ways of interacting. Many of us take it for granted that we can run chat sessions and check our email while sitting in a conference or waiting for our train. Hotels and cafes in many areas don’t dare to open without wireless Internet.

But WiFi has 1990s bandwidth; you’ll be frustrated trying to download your daughter’s video. WiMAX can break the bandwidth barrier, but it’s a costly, centralized technology that has to be rolled out by large institutions. Fiber is even more of a long-range investment, and requires labor-intensive installation.

The promise of Ronja is mesh technology that can deliver 10 Mbps and can be built by an amateur in his or her own home for $100 per unit. The specs are all open-source. Where costs or regulations delay the stringing of cable or fiber, this technology could quickly bring neighborhoods into the twenty-first century in terms of bandwidth and universal service. Applications such as interactive video teleconferencing and remote application access with large remote data storage become immediate possibilities.

Anything that threatens the sacred cow of metered business, whether it’s minutes or bits you’re metering, is something that needs to be blocked at all costs by the telcos. Fortunately, the structure of the American mobile telephone industry gives them a solid way to play defense. Carriers buy the phones and sell them on to the end users, which handily makes them the major buyers of handsets, and the de facto arbiters of taste and consumer preference. (”Nice VoIP client in the handset. We’ll take…zero. If you’d stop dabbling in VoIP, though, we’ll take several million.”)

The “control your customers and force feed them” model cuts against my entire experience, which is based on open systems and architectures. In theory, an upstart could design a cool GSM phone and sell it directly to end users, bypassing the control-freak middlemen telcos. I had hoped that Apple would do just that. They are the one company that could build a phone that they could sell directly to hordes of consumers without help from the carrier.

Instead, it appears that Apple is building a traditional phone, with all of the carrier lock-in. There’s a big step forward in voice mail usability in the iPhone, and obviously a big short-term benefit to apple in working with the Cingular sales channel. In the long term, there is a much more diffuse long-term benefit of breaking the innovation choke-hold, though it is questionable as to how much of a changed market Apple could capture. Now that Steve Jobs has decided that DRM is evil, I’d like to see him come to a similar conclusion about the mobile phone business.

Until he does, at least I have a true open mobile phone platform on the way, even if it is slightly delayed.

This beats a high ranking on Google searches. The value of my writing could not possible be affirmed more triumphantly than by the spam that two of my authors have received with the following subject line:

Subject: Andy Oram has made great efforts at transforming my early ramblings into something actually worth printing.

The subject line is unfortunately untrue, because I would have had a serious talk with a spammer before allowing him to publish a document as disjointed as the following:

shows all major networks Outta Lynwood is an extremely guiltyand you’ll discover that this man isn’t just a smart-ass, but one really smart guy.I’d love to be involved, but I just find it hard to be motivated to do another screenplay right nowIn its entirety, Straight downloads now in Y! Music’s TV Wants You. that was the best career choice for me.Reality Train cars derail, catch fire…

This is not to say that I’ve never received a manuscript in as sorry a state as that excerpt, but I put it through several filters before releasing it. I certainly counsel my authors to indicate much earlier the point of their submission, which in the case of this email is a recommended stock pick.

At yesterday’s Mobile Persuasion conference discussions turned off topic for a bit. Many in attendance voiced their frustration with the way the mobile network operators disallow the phones they sell, and the services they offer, from being more readily hacked on.

So some of the Internet’s leading lights, David Farber and Robert Kahn, are warning us not to support network neutrality because we’d stifle innovation by local telephone companies.

I am open to such arguments. As soon as the telephone companies announced their “two-tier Internet” and the network neutrality debate began, I published an article that criticized the telcos but showed that the issue was much too complex to be solved by a simple regulatory “No.” Later I dissected the various legal approaches that were on the table and found them all problematic.

But all this is a joke, and you’re laughing by now if you understand the background: the local telephone companies don’t do innovation. To be more accurate, they’re good at the incremental innovation that leads to more robust and efficient voice networks, but they have few clues how to sprout the disruptive innovation made famous by Clayton Christensen.

Rather, telephone companies have historically reacted in copy-cat fashion to competition. Currently they are resurrecting the old model, shrouded in the raiment of interactivity, of shoving Hollywood entertainment at passive viewers. The things we associate with Internet innovation–search, multimedia sites, social networking, Web 2.0–all originated outside the telcos.

I’ve just received spam from AT&T. I have automatic billing on my home telephone number, and they’ve decided to ignore my preferences and send me email to remind me about their “eBill” option. They have my email address because I used it once when I needed my phone repaired; I expect they decided to vacuum their database and start spewing “helpful” reminders.

AT&T rejects complaints to Spamcop, which is simple arrogance.

Clearly, if AT&T can’t be trusted to abide by my explicit preferences about receiving email, they can’t be trusted with automatic payments, so I guess it’s back to manual, paper-based billing for them — until I find a suitable alternate provider, and then it’s good-bye forever to AT&T.

Given the changes in communication preferences it’s interesting that the Voicemail services that I use at home/work aren’t significantly different from the first microcassete based answering machines my parents had when I was growing up. Good design is good design, and I’m all for not messing with something that works, but I find that the prominent consumer based Voicemail services don’t work for me.

Tired of endless news reports about Super Bowl football? Take a moment to view some really hot stats! The recent 2006 IPv4 Address Use Report, besides featuring a nice cover of O’Reilly’s BGP book, details the trend in giving out IP addresses.

The bottom line is that the world has used up about two-thirds of the available IPv4 addresses, with about 1.3 billion addresses left. This suggests that we have not hit a crisis yet and are still not impelled to adopt IPv6. But there are some interesting details.

It’s been really interesting to watch all the discussion around the iPhone in both of the topic areas I cover for O’Reilly (ETel and Mac Development). There was a very pronounced dip in enthusiasm among the blogs I read in both of these spaces, that started just about 24 hours after the announcement, when you could almost tangibly feel the glow starting to fade. I was at the Macworld keynote where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, and there is certainly no disputing that he is one heck of a charismatic speaker and can do a great demo, but I don’t think we should discount that fact that a big part of the “wow” factor that spread so fast across the Internet was in large part due to the advances it looks like Apple has achieved with this product. And I’m mostly talking about interface advances.

The Mac developer crowd pretty quickly started realizing and anguishing over the closed nature of the device, which Apple has said we should think of more like an iPod than a computer. They have made it clear they want to completely control the interface, and are not particularly interested in third-party development. You’re probably not going to be seeing much iPhone coverage on our Mac DevCenter.

The telecom development folks are also upset that the device will not be open to customization and third-party apps, but they are also pretty upset about the Cingular lock-in and are let down by the apparently completely non-revolutionary aspects on the carrier side of things. Steve talks a big talk and he likes to use words like “revolutionary”, but I have to agree that what we know so far sounds like business as usual from the telecom/network side. And while that is disappointing, I think it was pretty unrealistic to expect Apple to chart new ground there, at least right out of the gate. They’ve got their hands full just getting into this ultra-competitive market, and the tides of telecom carriers are not something easily changed.

But what I remain excited about is the interface. Ted Wallingford sums up many of my opinions well in this post (which is a response to Ken Camp’s less-than-enthusiastic take on the iPhone).

I agree that the iPhone is NOT categorically revolutionary. But it does represent a number of firsts. The UI with multi-touch is obscenely cool, no question. And the graphical feedback on the phone I saw demonstrated by Jobs makes Nokia’s gear look antiquated. These may not be revolutionary, but I’ll take positive steps. The worst part of a cell phone has always, always, always been the UI. So I welcome these evolutions.

We like open things here at O’Reilly, and a big part of ETel is about open platforms and open standards and how they can help transform our traditional telecom landscape, and the iPhone is not likely going to be an interesting factor for us there either. But I’m with Ted in welcoming significant interface improvements, and I couldn’t agree more that the worst part of cell phones is their UI. I’ve never owned a cell phone that had an interface I didn’t hate (I’m right there with you, Nat), and I’m ready for a device that improves upon that. Om Malik agrees that it is the interface improvements here that are important, and has some interesting thoughts on Apple’s use of fluid interfaces in general.

Now here’s a cool event, created for high school students who can’t get enough of txt messaging… the Cingular and West Orange High School TXT Bee Event.

Everyone dreads signing on the dotted line and locking into a carrier for one, two, or even three years. There’s a new solution available that may help you avaiod this hassle. Enter the cell swapper!

I see that my fellow bloggers here on this page are searching for the correct term to use for highly-restrictive business models built into several pieces of new technology, such as the iPhone and IMS.

People usually borrow the term “walled garden,” which implies that wonderful things grow inside while keeping baneful influences on the outside.

I propose we borrow a different term: “prison farm.” Yes, you can grow things on the inside; and yes, they will work and keep you alive. But guards with legal sanctions keep you locked up inside, and all the good things in life are happening someplace else.

I’ve just been playing around with Geni, a lovely genealogy service that’s just been TechCrunch’d.

Now how about this - a mobile service that populates my handset’s address book with family members drawn from a Geni API, does some kinda magic PeopleRank to construct a social filter that blocks out the relatives I don’t wanna talk to, gives priorityup to those I speak with frequently and reminds me to talk to those in the same place as me, a little more often :)

Yesterday I received yet another phone call from Chase Bank’s collections department. The call wasn’t for me; it was for a relative who experienced fraud on their card. But the collections department continues to call me instead of calling the overseas direct contact number I gave them, and since apparently the fraud department and the collections department aren’t on speaking terms these harassing phone calls continue. I remain caught in the cross-fire of interdeparmental warfare.

I spoke to Matt, a supervisor in the collections department, and I explained at length and with some vehemence that this harassment had to stop or I’d file with the FCC. Matt explained that his department, as a matter of policy, only makes calls to the numbers pre-programmed into their autodialing system at the pre-programmed intervals, and even though I’d given them the correct contact number they’d continue to call me. He offered to further explain bank policy, but I wasn’t interested: I don’t care about their policies. I care about the effect of those policies, which is harassment.

After hanging up on Chase Bank, I realized how much the bank and other clueless companies depend on dumb phone systems. My home number is dumb; I don’t even have caller ID, because it rankles to pay for a service that ought to be free. My cell phone is smarter, with caller ID built in. My office number is on the brink of brilliance: I’m part way through the process of switching to VoIP. As a matter of course — it’s built into ViaTalk’s basic VoIP service — if I were to convert my home number to VoIP, I could automatically route all calls from Chase Bank’s collection department to a busy signal. No muss, no fuss, and no harassment.

What this means is that VoIP implies challenges not only to classical telephone companies and telemarketing scum but to established companies as well. Chase Bank’s dimwitted policies and inefficient, ineffective procedures may work when their victims have no choice; but once everyone has a smart phone system, how can a dumb company alienate its customers and still survive? If Chase Bank can’t figure out how to place or even how to receive an overseas telephone call, how can they expect to cope when telecommunications become truly borderless?

I’ve been trying not to get too sucked into all of the latest hype about an Apple phone, I’ve been there before. But nothing can get the rumor vines really cranking like a highly-anticipated Steve Jobs Macworld keynote, and now on the eve of Steve’s big show we’ve even got the Wall St. Journal reporting an imminent Apple/Cingular phone announcement.

Russell Shaw wonders if the new device will cannibalize iPod sales, which I think it could if it’s good. As CNN Money rightly points out, if this new phone device is a real iPod, people will love it, but if it’s not, well we’ve been there before too. I’m pretty sure Apple isn’t going to throw another ROKR at us this time, so I’m betting that they get it right. I know I like the interface on my iPod far better than the interface on any cell phone I’ve ever owned, so I must confess that I’m secretly hoping all that hype does pan out and we see a new take on a portable music player and phone device tomorrow that has me reaching for my credit card.

So much for not getting sucked in.

I love this time of year… the year is ending and everyone and their dogs are coming out with their year in review best of and TOP picks and predictions for 2007.

Besides blogging (I know I’ve been away from this blog for some time now) I’m also an online technology news editor and writer (ie. at symbianone.com, gisuser.com, and lbszone.com). This time of year I like to remind marketing folks on some of the netiquette that I appreciate and I’m sure others will as well. Thus, here’s my 10 things to consider list… enjoy.

I’ve just purchased a new car, and since this happened while I was deeply immersed in all things telephony the car-buying process came as quite a cultural shock. Automobile purchases remain profoundly different than the purchase of a cellular phone; as a public service to our readers who might encounter this amazing process, here’s a brief guide.

I’ve been testing the Nokia N80i (Internet Edition) for the past month or so. As I write this, I am at cafe in Buenos Aires. I have been trying to come up with a shorthand way to describe making a VoIP call from a wifi hotspot.

Voice over WiFi is too long, and too techy. So what about Spot Dialing? What do you think? If you like, pass it along.

According to a post on TechCrunch Azureus is announcing their Zudeo beta on Monday. It certainly appears that they are trying to take a stab at The Venice Project before it launches (rumored to be in early January).

If the post is accurate by claiming partnerships with over a dozen major TV and film studios to provide free programs, Azureus is very likely hinting at the coming Venice Project BizDev strategy: partner with the major video content holders, legitimately distribute ad supported long format High Resolution content using P2P mechanisms, and focus less on user generated content (which can be better handled by sites like YouTube anyways). Granted, there’s still a strong social network aspect to Zudeo but that’s more than likely to try to build a viral network than to focus on user generated content.

In a hypothetical world where the next generation of video distribution was really just between these two players I’d place my bets on TVP. The reason being if only because having eBay in your corner (even if that relationship is unclear) means there’s a deep pocket looking to own a piece of a new important marketplace. All eyes will be on Niklas and his latest venture. Points to Azureus for showing us some biz strategy evolution in this space.

Those of us following major issues in the VoIP space can read between the lines here and predict that there will be some upcoming issues in this space involving network neutrality. Legal issues only get thornier if either of these projects gain traction. The fat pipes of the internet (which happen to provide video content too) will not be so happy with P2P traffic eating through their bandwidth and competing uber-aggressively on price for services they offer too.

Buried in David Isenberg’s superb post on Breaching the Cellcos’ Garden Wall is a PDF link to a Sean Moss-Pultz overview of the OpenMoko cellphone platform. Apologies if ETel readers have seen this before, but it’s so good I had to post it again :)

Also, I have to point out my good friend Ian Hay’s posts on the Ten Things I Want From You (the telco) and the amazing responses, particularly from our fellow writers over at O’Reilly Radar…

- Ten Things I Want From You
- Ten Things I Want From My Phone
- Ten Things Follow Up

Finally, the upcoming issue of Wired is profiling the Tuxphone, from our very own conference chair, Surj Patel.

Many bloggers are speculating today that the rumored iPhone from Apple will be unlocked and take SIM cards. I pretty much assumed this since hearing about the device. Here’s why:

First, any carrier relationship deals would most certainly require a revenue share cutting into sales of Apple iTunes store content. It’s hard to imagine Apple being ok sharing unnecessary additional revenue after investing in developing a new platform that they obviously hope will sell more media content for them. Also, I don’t seem them being open to paying carriers a royalty no matter how you slice it. And, if they do I trust they will try to do it on their terms only when necessary.

Second, carriers like to control everything on their devices and they make a lot of money from selling places on the deck. Wouldn’t Apple want to control the entire experience like they do everywhere else?

Finally, branching off on the second point I’ve assumed that Dashcode will help make it possible to develop simple Widgets that will ultimately be able to run on iPods and iPhone’s (in addition to the OS X desktop). This is totally speculation on my part but it makes sense to me that they would pursue distribution models that gives them the control they are used to.

Simply put, a carrier partnership is probably more painful to Apple’s standard way of operating. I wouldn’t be suprised to see Google take a similar approach.

My toothbrush is one of the most “identity-locked” objects I own — no one uses my toothbrush except me. You can borrow my sweater, my car, or the shirt off my back, but not my toothbrush.

While disposable to a great degree, mobile phones have a similar aura of personal identity about them. Like many people I carry my cell phone at all times, an indispensable bit of personal property, almost more crucial than my wallet. Many people personalize their phones with special covers, carrying cases, and with ringtones. Ringtones, amazingly, have come an expression of your personality; you not only play them for yourself but for everyone around you, and a ringtone is part of your public persona just like your clothing and hairstyle.

I just saw a mention in a colleague’s blog about a scheme by AT&T to modify ringtones — to put advertising in ringtones. No comment necessary about that idea…

Cross-posted from The Pebble and the Avalanche

Last month Wired ran a humourously observed and thought provoking article on the frustrations of user’s cellphone experience - Cell Phones? Hell Phones!

Our cellphones carry our schedules, social networks and locations yet make no intelligent assertions or useful analysis of such immensely valuable information. The writer’s litany of irritations is actually a great basis to begin speculating about handsets that are much more subtle, intuitive extensions of their owner’s context.

How about…

• Constantly cross-referencing call history with your schedule and contacts to remind you that you haven’t been in touch with your family, closest friends or checked in with your boss in the last few days…a little like a textual version of Steven Blyth’s Social Fabric…my phone should text me with reminders of people I should talk to.
• Attentuating your attention by displacing chirupping ringtones and jarring vibrations with tactile, haptic surfaces that subtely alert you to various developments. ‘Touchtones’, along the lines of Oren Horav’s Shapeshifters could playfully tickle you from inside your pocket…a gentle stroke from a potential nearby date and an angry pinch from the wife!
• Scanning your immediate location for events, people and places that might be of interest. Kinda like Victor Szilagyi’s HereScan…but driven by the data on your handset as much as nearby locative data. ‘Imran, y’know there’s someone on this bus who’s also a BSG fan! Wanna text em?’. Now isn’t that a great way to introduce yourself? ‘Hey, my phone told me I should talk to you!’
• Moving from modes to moods - simple, subltle and maybe playful indicators of what you need. Rather than Flight, Meeting or Silent, how about Hooking Up, Stealthy , Shopping or In Prayer (for Muslims like myself!). In the same way that people buy customs covers and ringtones, there may be a market for installable moods - essentially groups of phone settings, created by similar users. IM status could be a useful analogy in designing appropriate ‘moods’ and status settings.
• Health warnings from my handset - ‘hey imran, u knw uv been on da fone 8 hrs this week, time to stop frazzlin dat brain?’. Mobile Clickstop Computing :)
• Fluid schedules that suit people’s continuous partial organisation habits (thanks Rael!). A bunch of friends may have pencilled in next Tuesday evening to meet for a meal…the closer the event gets, our phones should encourage us to organise times, locations and preferences for the evening. I think the Fluidtime project attempted to tackle this kind of usage.

Wired’s original article and the ideas above all underline the shift in value for telephony from connectivity to signalling. Our mobiles are increasingly used as social signalling tools, yet they’re still primarily designed and marketed for connectivity (talktime, tariffs etc.) forcing the user to adapt their usage to autistic user experiences.

Sadly, the closed ecospheres of mobile carriers and handset manufacturers means that we don’t see much experimentation in this area. It may be left to the emerging open source telephony community to open up innovation and experiment with creating the ‘Wellphone’.

–

Incidentally, Fluidtime, Herescan, Shapeshifters and Social Fabric are all projects of the sublimely wonderful Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan.

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I find it that our mobile, telecom, and data networks just can’t seem to integrate with each other. On the one hand I understand that the incumbents don’t want to upset the status quo, but is this really the best we can do?

I find myself spending more and more time using a headset on my computer for voice communications, and I’m growing tired of the poor audio quality I’m getting with the standard fare of headsets on the market. I’ve been through a few popular models in the $30 - $60 range, and they all seem to sound and transmit audio at about the same lousy level of quality. I do realize that with many things in life you get what you pay for, and I suspect that it’s my price range that needs to change here before I’ll find a computer headset that works for me. I’m ready to pay more in this area for better quality, but before I drop some more serious coin on a new headset I’d like to hear what’s been working well for others.

Any recommendations? I know some of our ETel readers are power users of softphone and VoIP applications and I’m sure some of you have grappled with this same question. Please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions, and I’ll report back here on what I find.

Yesterday, I checked my mail to discover that I had gotten dinged with a $400 overage charge by T-Mobile, which up until that moment and a subsequent ‘customer care’ experience, had been my favorite carrier. What was a simple, easily avoided, and easily fixed situation turned into one of those experiences that turns a loyal customer into someone who will switch providers at the first opportunity.

Months ago, I was planning to commission Surj to bring his vision of an open source mobile handset to us at Orange. One of the capabilities we thought might yield some interesting applications was a bunch of onboard sensors that could aggregate various metrics for use by service providers. Essentially, transforming each handset into a spime.

Imagine…
- Hyper-accurate, block-by-block weather reports generated by polling temperature, moisture and pressure readings from every mobile device in a given region.
- Public transport services that route buses to locations where multiple passengers need pickups.
- News services that ask users near a newsworthy event to snap cameraphone images.

Last week, TomTom and Vodafone announced a partnership that takes the first steps in using mobile handsets in a distributed sensor network. Initially, TomTom is planning to utilise the locations of Vodafone handsets to feed traffic information to its customer’s GPS units. That’s a great idea, though as The Register points out, ‘Just pray you don’t get caught among motorists on their way to an O2 convention’.

Though the terms of the TomTom-Vodafone deal haven’t bene made public, this kind of ‘Crowdsensing’ could prove to be a lucrative platform business for mobile operators. I’ll watch the TomTom experiment with interest, but it’ll be exciting to hear the opinions of the ETel community on the usefulness and feasibility of such infrastructures as well as their ideas for innovative business models and services.

UPDATE: Wired’s Tagging Phones to Track Traffic covered IntelliOne and AirSage’s mobile traffic sensing services. IntelliOne are using GPS data and, interestingly, selling to media outlets, but profit-sharing with carriers - a potentially lucrative platform business? AirSage, on the other hand, are looking to service government agencies with traffic data.

As the number of Apple Dashboard Widgets, Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, and Yahoo Widgets being created grows I hope that emerging telephony hardware device manufacturers are comparing and contrasting what it currently takes a developer to make one of these apps vs developing a full-blown mobile application. Frankly, it’s just too hard to develop on mobile and combined with the poor carrier distribution options it can be pointless for many to waste cycles innovating here unless they are seriously funded.

So, what about developer simplification?

The companies mentioned above could start encouraging hardware developers to support (and soon help roll out) portable devices that run all the necessary local software sandboxes and free things like Gadgets/Widgets from the PC desktop and extend them onto portable mobile devices. Even better, if mobile devices ran something like the traditional LAMP architecture many developers could migrate their projects right over. Granted, there are some heavy browser, CPU, memory and HD requirements in my proposal but it feels like things are heading in this direction anyways.

While this only solves a part of the problem it immediately increases the size of the telephony application developer base (which I think is a good thing for everyone.) If a web developer can start creating mobile apps imagine the opportunities for cool new services, especially if hardware dependent telephony and GEO APIs are easily exposed?

Flash Lite, Mobile Processing, Python for S60 and Motorola’s Open Source Initiative are standout leaders making development easier but I’m still left hoping for mobile sandboxes that look and act like my webservice developer environments. If they initially look a lot like the widget engines out there, that’s good step in the right direction.

CNET’s News.com recently conducted an ‘in-world’ interview with Philip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden Lab, operators of Second Life.

Buried within the interview are some interesting comments on the application of voice in Second Life…

Let’s talk about voice support in “Second Life.” Vivox is now doing a push for its third-party VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) client/phone booth in-world. What should “Second Life” residents expect when it comes to voice support from Linden Lab?

Rosedale: OK. First, we clearly agree that voice can be very powerful in “Second Life” for many things. There is a critical feature–the ability to properly 3D-spatialize multiple people speaking in a room, that is going to allow meetings in “Second Life” between many people to blow away conference calls. This is a very powerful thing, and we want to get it working.

When?

Rosedale: I have seen demos where three or four people could talk at the same time and I could understand them perfectly. So that is a huge potential feature. But not everyone wants voice all the time. And text (communication) is very, very powerful. For example, I can use (a translation tool) I am fond of, but that only works when, socially, we are using text and are therefore tolerant of a slight delay. So ideally, the implementation shouldn’t push one over the other, or have everyone with voice “forcing” those without it or not wanting it to use it. So we are going to be careful with any built in capability, to make that work

We’ve already seen voice becoming an intrinsic part of virtual worlds in Xbox Live; as press bureaus and businesses begin to establish themselves in Second Life, it’ll be interesting to see how telephony, presence, voice and conferencing evolve. Will telephony become an irresistible development for residents? Given the growth of the service, Second Life could become both a significant platform for telephony and a valuable audience for telephony providers.

Hmmm… GTalk+ Google Earth + Second Life = ?

Now it’s official–or at least one more step toward being official. California has indicted five former HP managers for trying to get private email and phone records of board members. Officially, of course, the indicted managers are innocent until proven guilty. And finding them guilty of law-breaking will be hard, because one has to interpret existing laws broadly to cover pretexting and other shuffling through electronic records. But the ethics–or lack thereof–displayed should make all of us who work in large organizations worry.

Let’s recap:
Back in 2001 Woz joins the Board of Directors at Danger.

A few years pass.

Meanwhile, a socialite’s Sidekick gets hacked, a search entity becomes a giant, and a computer maker reinvents itself in the consumer electronics business.

The post browser wars bring us Firefox and Safari with its integrated Google search.

It starts to get interesting when Google brings over key members of the Danger team who happened to be responsible for the Sidekick. By the way, what was that Android team working on?

iChat starts supporting Jabber, a few random widgets arrive, and some Mac engineering jobs at Google start opening up.

Then, Google’s CEO joins Apple’s board. Rumors of an Apple phone start emerging everywhere.

And now this Maps thingy. Where would that GPS data come from via an Apple Hardware input device?

Do Apple and Google have some cool stuff in store?

Don’t be surprised if Dodgeball and Orkut play a part of the rollout. I was salivating for the N95 dropping in January but now I’m gonna wait to see if something better gets announced. Where do I pre-order?

I’ve gotten a little behind in my RSS feeds the past couple of days, and am just now getting to the very interesting discussion that has been happening across many VoIP-related blogs about a few new ventures that are currently making headlines (Rebtel, Jahjah, Grand Central) and in some cases attracting attention at this year’s prestigious DEMO show. In general, I tend to agree with what I think Luca, Ken, Phoneboy, and Ted are saying about the value proposition that is being offered up by these new companies - none of them seem very compelling to me. (To be fair, some people who I respect a lot like Andy Abramson and Alec Saunders are much more bullish on some of these ventures, so there may be more to them than first meets the eye. And I understand how Jahjah’s Mobile service could save Alec some serious coin, but I don’t think Alec’s calling patterns are very representative of most cell users.)

But rather that add more to the pile-on, I would rather just call attention to Ted’s especially excellent post that gets to what I think is the root of what many of us are looking for in the new generation of telecom applications, (Voice 2.0 if we must.) Here is a potent passage from Ted’s post ,but I highly recommend clicking over and reading the whole thing. (I notice that Luca feels much the same as I do about this one).

We need to focus on increasing ACTUAL functionality and lose the obsession with placing band-aids on the infrastructure of yesterday in order to save a half-cent a minute, which is the basis of these firms’ business models. When clients ask me about VoIP, they always bring up carrier cost savings. That may’ve been the case in 2001, but it’s getting tougher and tougher to make that case. So I switch them off of cost savings and turn them on to new ways of thinking about communications.

2.0, baby.

We need to think 2.0. We need to worry about freeing the potential uses of the global network for effective human interaction, not inserting ourselves into the domain of carriers whose days we already know are numbered, by nature of their insensitivity to consumers and their inability to deliver the applications people want.

We have software now. The IP world is a world of software. We can do whatever we want with global telecom by virtue of the software nature of this convergence movement we’re all so excited about. So why are we using software to least-cost-route cellular minutes, seriously? What’s the point in trying to sell to a mass-market solutions that (a) require aquiescence to the existing walled-garden of the cell phone business and (b) cater to only the smallest percentage of cell-phone device users–those that frequently roam internationally and those that happen to own one of the phones supported by these band aid solutions. Aren’t today’s consumers smarter than this? Tomorrow’s consumers certainly will be.

I checked out the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this week, talking mostly to vendors whom conference organizers had highlighted in what they call the Disruption Zone. Both the companies and the presentations at the show were too varied for easy classification; I’ll present a few here.

Voice over IP suddenly had to mature and take on responsibilities over the past few months, as the FCC decided suddenly to impose a host of regulations on it. Governments (urged on by traditional phone companies) have been talking for years about making VoIP obey the same rules as the public switched telephone network (PSTN). When I attended the Voice Over Network conference in Boston last Fall, such discussions were still in the exploratory and “What if…” stage. FCC chair Michael Powell’s enthusiasm for the disruptive potention of VoIP seemed to keep such regulations at bay. But Powell resigned in January 2005.

Over the past year, the FCC has quickly ruled that any VoIP calls attached to the PSTN have to:

• Allow wiretapping on their systems
• Support emergency 911 calls
• Pay hefty fees into the Universal Service Fund to support poor and rural areas

These requirements don’t apply to pure VoIP, computer-to-computer calls, which stay off the PSTN. But most companies still depend on the PSTN, partly because most phones are still traditional ones, and partly because two VoIP phones may not be able to find each other on the Internet.

I came to VON this year to find out how companies are reacting to the new regulatory requirements, as well as what they’re doing to grow up in other ways: offer better security, allow vendors to measure performance and quality, and so on. VON is an increasingly popular show, expecting between 9,000 and 10,000 attendees this year. There was plenty for them to look at.

Tim O’Reilly has just written an intriguing post over on the O’Reilly Radar about the metaphor of dial tone in the Web publishing space.

Tim relays how a recent conversation he had with O’Reilly’s new head of online publishing about building our web publishing tools around the model of delivering dial tone got him thinking about this metaphor in terms of other technology, like what we’ve been calling Web 2.0. As Tim points out, the original concept of dial tone was essentially to do away with the need for an army of telephone exchange operators to connect calls.

The principle of dial tone is to create a situation where users can do something for themselves that once required the intervention of an operator.

This applies nicely to one aspect of Web 2.0 that Tim has written about before in The Architecture of Participation, namely the power of harnessing user-created data. Or as Tim notes, this could also be described as the “design of systems that leverage customer self-service.”

Once you frame the problem in this way, you understand that one of the challenges for IT departments and companies used to the IT mindset is to get the operators out of the way, and to build new processes that let users do the work for themselves. You also can ask yourself, where is dial tone going next?

I’ll stop paraphrasing and quoting Tim’s post now, but I highly recommend clicking over to Radar and giving it a read - as usual, there’s lots of good food for thought there.

Robert Cooper responded to O’Reilly editor Chris Adamson’s mini-rant about the problems he was experiencing trying to use Google Maps Mobile on his cell phone and makes a connection to the crippled phones U.S. carriers provide and the current net neutrality debate. I think Robert makes a good point that if we’re not careful we could see more walled gardens and crippling technology along the lines of what the cell phone industry is famous for.

If you buy a V300 or RAZR or whatever from any major carrier, it comes crippled. They only want you to use ringtones, wallpaper and -god forbid- applications that they sell you. Lots of phones in the carrier specific versions are crippled beyond belief. I don’t think the fault is J2ME’s so much as the way we use cell phone networks.

I hate to bring the whole political aspect into this, but this is directly on point with the network neutrality debate and the Trusted Computing/Paladium issue: the hardware and the network should be there for what you want to use them for, not some highly managed, highly structured regime. One of the reasons I, personally, consider the NetNeutral intitiative important is I don’t want my Cable Modem service to end up looking like the cell phone networks.

It looks like TellMe is trying to re-brand itself as a Product company with various Voice Search driven offerings geared towards: Business, Information, and People.

MSFT announced recently that they’ll be a year late (sound familiar) shipping their Speech server and now plans to roll it out with Exchange sometime in 2007!

Many are expecting to see the Voice search space start to heat up and I anticipate some partnerships.

This brings up an interesting opportunity for TellMe and MSFT to buy some time working together to form a Voice search partnership.

My guess: expect some sort of trial run 800-CALL-MSN Yellow Page services coming soon (powered by TellMe.)

After three days of hard conferencing, all of it spent tired and only part of it spent sober, I got an insight into where the computer field is heading. In his keynote on the last day of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention one of the developers of the IBM PC, Dave Bradley, showed a photo of an IBM machine from the 1970s. This state-of-the-art system offered, as a user interface, a five-inch screen next to a removable disk drive. And I realized at that moment how far our computer use has advanced beyond our terminology.

The early screens, keyboards, disk drives, and other devices were truly computer interfaces. They were a shared ground where the human being and the raw computational power of the machine met. While programmers still have to develop interfaces (there’s no way around it) we now have to reach toward the much more difficult goal of providing a meeting ground for human being. The computer has to get out of the way as much as possible.

The most talked-about technology at the conference–the new ways of programming the Web introduced by Ajax–give us an opening toward that goal. Ajax is based on a small enhancement to HTTP, even smaller than the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) that led to dynamic websites and the whole dot-com revolution of online ordering. In Ajax’s turn, it combines the quick feedback and rich interactions of desktop applications with direct lines to the data being thrust out by servers and by other people throughout the Internet.One could argue that Ajax wasn’t necessary (and I’ll explore that later in the article), but at this moment in computing history, it’s driving the recognition that people are here to interact with each other, not with computers.

A few weeks ago I got a call from Gina Blaber, the head of OReilly conferences telling me, ahem, instructing me, that the time had come to start the truffle hunt for speakers and ideas for the next ETel. So I poured a cup of tea and started to scribble the napkin sketches of topics and workshops that will make up ETel 07. I still have scribbles but shortly structure will emerge one hopes.

A good place to start I’ve always found is to look back at some of what we did last year and find what has happened since.

One of the big bang events that helped to kick off the conference was the huge success of and the immense community behind Asterisk. Without a doubt Asterisk has been one of the greatest things to happen to telephony ever. An open source PBX that made phone calls and call routing accessible to external program control. And it will run on cheap PC hardware with a telephony card. What happened next was that the lower cost first helped those who were excluded from having a PBX phone system and saved money for those who were looking to upgrade their current setup. All low hanging easy fruit. What was more exciting was seeing startups like free 411 companies, social entrepreneurs like Tad Hirsch do challenging, wild and clever things (Speakeasy) with something as normally mundane and established as a phone line. They saw that Asterisk allowed them to use calls and telephony as a program controllable channel just as email is. I met someone at Cluecon last year who had built a training system for Army sergeants using Asterisk that connected 300 lines in a matrix. The aim was to teach them “speaking skills and pleasantries” apparently. Other applications have ranged from least cost routing (sort of like ja-jah and iskoot) to combining Ruby on Rails with Asterisk to create a fast way to make applications. The variety is great.

Now Asterisk is doing really well and the hardware companies that support it like Sangoma and Digium flourish with it.

Undoubtedly Asterisk is king, but I do want to throw some of my support behind Freeswitch http://www.freeswitch.org/. Think of it as Asterisk++. For any gene pool to succeed you need variety and competition and Freeswitch , whilst still getting there, is a lean mean and Olympian competitor to Asterisk. last year at Etel we saw the glimmer of code and some very enthusiastic hackers.Note, thatI didn’t say better(yet), just one to watch. I haven’t got the performance specs to hand but its apparently kicking ass while still in its nappy. It’s a non monolithic code base as well so it supports modules and plugins that don’t have to be worked in with the main program code. Not as mature or as big a developer base as Asterisk but its pedigree is solid with Brian West and Tony Minnesale developing it.

It’s that spirit of disruptive innovation that makes Etel what it is. People and projects re-thinking telephony as being open, refreshing and inventive.

From now till ETel I’ll be your chef and next week I will dig up another truffle and prepare it for your delight.

Oh yes - the ETel Team has posted a Request for speakers and Papers here - http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etel2007/ - please do take a look and submit a proposal or encourage someone with a hot project to do so.

I just published a long article in a newspaper with a general readership, American Reporter, on the technology, economics, and politics behind the network neutrality debate.

Most young people nowadays can’t afford their own apartments, even if they have jobs. Roommates are the order of the day in all the major cities I know about. But be careful–if you “once shared a phone number or residence with a known terrorist,” according to the most recent InformationWeek (June 5, 2006, p. 26) you could become a target for a government investigation.

InformationWeek is reporting here on a data mining system offered by Systems Research Development, which was partly funded by the CIA, was recently acquired by IBM, and is used by unmentioned government agencies. The features discussed in the short article look like pretty simple database matches.

Given that many people arrested for terrorism are later released, it’s unclear how dangerous any one “known terrorist” really is. And if the police don’t know, you certainly won’t know when you shack up with one. I wonder whether the SRD system also checks for a shared IP address–you’d better look into who’s sharing your connection point to you Internet Service Provider!

Usenix, the classic conference of Unix research and practice, pulled off a satisfying event in Boston this year. Turn-out was modest (about 700 people registered, and the show never seemed crowded except when food was served), but the number of famous and significant leaders in the Unix and free software world I saw walking the hallways was impressive, and the line-up on the podiums was even more so.

In this blog I’ll talk about movements toward–and barriers to–openness, a few technical discussions, and one project that’s really hot.

Everyone’s been speculating about the rumored Apple iPhone, whether it exists and what it will be. This is my hunch as to what they are working on.

Try holding a Nano as if you were talking on a handset. It’s just about the perfect size and form factor to double as a nice phone, without any major modifications to the case, except maybe to add a dialpad for numeric dialing and texting. Other than that, it got everything that’s already needed.

The problem is that it will be difficult to cram all of the cellular electronics and extra battery into this case, so if they decide to make an all-in-one device, they’ll need to make the device bigger and clunkier, more like a Treo or Nokia phone, and less like an iPod. They’ll also need to deal with different mobile networks (different device product lines), and with the mobile operators. The handset business is pretty brutal, and while if anybody has a shot at breaking into it, it’s Apple, I am not sure that’s a business they really want to be in.

On the other hand, you could just add a Bluetooth/WiFi chipset to the device, pair it with whatever carrier issued phone you carry around. Use the iPod as a Bluetooth handset/headset. Use the phone as a fast wireless modem. Done. With one device you can then link to any network via a Bluetooth enabled phone, which most are. Apple would still need to work with carriers, to make sure they do not cripple the use of the Bluetooth modem interface, but this is a vastly simpler task for them than building, certifying and shipping their own phones via hundreds of different operators worldwide. With this approach they can make one device, and then publish a list of phones that it is known to work with.

Who knows what they are actually working on, but I hope that if there is an iPhone in the works, it’s something like this.

I’ve been traveling internationally for many years, and in the past year or so, have noticed a marked upward trend in hotel broadband internet service charges. It used to be that hotels gave the service away for free, or at most $10 per day as a way to differentiate themselves. On recent trips, I have been forced to cough up $20, sometimes $30 for Internet service.

It is a rip off, but relative to placing a call via the in room phone or mobile roaming charges, it’s not an obscene rip off. So I wonder if the hotels have already gotten the message that business travelers are starting to use VoIP to make roaming calls when possible, and are seeing this in their financial reports. If so, it might explain the increasing prices, as they try to recoup money that they are no longer making from their PBXs. I rarely, if ever, place a call through a hotel switchboard.

Anyway, I wonder if the loss of voice revenue is one of the things behind otherwise inexplicably high Internet charges (not that I expect hotels to give anything away as they are, as an industry, professional theives).

I’ve recently read two books that deal with the corner we’ve painted ourselves into in the United States, so far as spreading Internet access goes. Michael Bookey’s America at the Internet Crossroads lays out a strategy for going forward by treating the Internet as a public good, while Fred Goldstein’s The Great Telecom Meltdown fills in a technical, economic, and legal history that can bolster the arguments of those who want to be part of the policy debate.

We often hear that technological upgrades in the health care industry could prevent errors, save money, and bring health care to more people. But did you know there’s an organized international movement to make this happen? Last night I got to hear from a key leader in the movement.

Donald M. Berwick has been coordinating radical health care changes for fifteen years through his Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). He was feted last night at a dinner by the Jewish Alliance for Law & Social Action, where it seemed like the entire leadership of the formidable Boston-area medical industry turned out to honor him: Harvard and Tufts medical schools, Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and many, many others.

Telepocalypse pointed me to this fascinating rant on the meaning and usage of QoS in today’s IP communications, posted anonymously to the TelephonyDiscussion forum. Wow. I’m not sure what to say about the many points the veiled author makes on how and why QoS is the encumbent telcos attempt to co-opt the Internet, but if you have the interest (and time!) I’d reccomend clicking through to the article.

The IP packet technology driven services situation today is painfully obvious to the Telephony cartel. The Internet has hugely succeeded and IS our future in spite of the fact that no one in the telephony world, for decades, believed in its connectionless packet based protocols and technology. An open Internet giving each end user freedom to access the services he wants and the huge constantly expanding value delivered by the Internet have backed the telephony crowd into a corner and now they are desperately trying to CLOSE the Internet and turn it into something they can control! QoS is a lynch pin of that strategy.

Recent telephony cartel activities focused on rolling back time to the circuit world of yesterday (prior the popularity of Internet) are rooted in the 3G and IMS standards that are part of the general ITU, and now ETSI, reaction to inspect, control, inhibit and charge for all data traffic, and therefore “own” the Internet. The clear telephony cartel direction is to create a walled garden environment for application development and combine that with levying toll charges, via QoS, for end users to get outside the walled garden. This one two punch is expected to fend off future as well as existing Internet based threats such as Yahoo, Google, Skype and others.

Back when the first NSA/Bush scandal broke in January, I pointed out that the concentration of the telephone industry into a few players made it easier for the administration to carry off its illegal, undercover operation. The same reasoning applies to the current revelations over NSA tracking of American telephone habits, as well as the current debate over the two-tier Internet (contrasted with what opponents call “network neutrality”).

Virtual sirens have gone off around the country, and the digital ramparts are swarming with thousands of new recruits protesting plans by the telephone industry to levy new fees on Internet sites. The industry wants to charge extra for preferential treatment, so that sites that stream audio and video have more chance of giving their users a pleasing experience. The debate has excited public fury way more than any issue I’ve seen during the fifteen years I’ve been following the telecom industry.

Telephone companies are trying to hold off government regulation by invoking the perennial American worship of innovation. But if there’s anything the industry hates more than government regulation, it’s government investment. Surely–say the CEOs, along with a battery of academic economists wielding standard financial models–government moves too slow and has too many vested interests to pick the right technologies. In a fast-moving culture of technology, innovation would be crushed.

And the industry pulls out the same mantra in attacking municipalities who invest in copper, fiber, and wireless networks. Government investment? Must be inimical to innovation.

But my analysis suggests just the opposite. Government investment in networks will promote innovation. It’s time to smash the idols. This article explains why.

Several rumors have been circulating that claim an esoteric prescience concerning Sun’s intentions toward Java and the free software community. Like shoots of hope that spring from the coldest ground, open source proponents were reported floating the idea that Sun might finally, this time, yes really, make Java open-source.

More credibly, CNET suggests that Sun will alter its licensing on its Java Runtime Environment so that Linux distributions can include it. Currently, a typical Linux user (unless he buys a packaged distribution that has gone through the trouble and expense of getting a JRE license, as Sun’s own Java Desktop System did) has to download and install a JRE himself, should he want Java for use in applets in his web browser or for other purposes. Clearly, it would much more convenient for users (and provide more certainty for developers) if Linux distributions could come with Java built in.

This page lists the best of the pictures that I and my author/friend Bruno Gomes Pessanha took during my trip to Brazil in April 2006 for the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (international free software forum).

When you go to any hotbed of free software development in Latin America, such as the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (international free software forum) I attended this week in Brazil, it’s clear that Richard Stallman is the hero and the flagship personality. Quotes from his speeches turn up first on every web site discussing the conference, stereotyped likenesses of his signature hair style appear on posters, and supporters line up to pay five reais–a bargain compared to what he charges in Europe!–to get their photo taken with the real article. (The money all goes directly to the Free Software Foundation, so the charge is meant as a fund-raiser, and also–I suspect–to cut down on tiresome time-wasting.)

I noticed the same reverence for Stallman about five years ago when I attended FOSDEM, the impressive free software conference in Brussels. Such popularity outside North America (and in some quarters within North America) seems strange to many other people in the free software community who decry Stallman’s insistence on strong positions and his seemingly obsessive attention to language. He is criticized as uncompromising, which is not really fair because he compromises quite often on strategic grounds.

Many other people doing free software wish secretly or openly that Stallman would cede his public position and let others represent the movement. Not likely! And from what I saw at Fosdem and FISL, not necessarily beneficial to building the movement either.

I came to Brazil to deliver a presentation on documentation. But I quickly realized, after the organizers accepted my proposal, that I would come here to learn as much as to teach. I am concerned broadly with the information needs of Brazilian computer users, administrators, and programmers–and I want to understand deeply what the needs and opportunities for documentation here are. In short, I’ve come for information about information about information technology.

As it turns out, education is also the goal of the One Laptop Per Child project, which had a strong presence here. (Project Athena and X Window System pioneer Jim Gettys came to promote it–just one of the many luminaries from North American who made the long journey down to show up at this conference.)

Yesterday I arrived in Porto Alegre, in the South of Brazil, and introduced my readers to the Fórum Internacional Software Livre. At that time I had met some of the animals but had not yet attended the circus. Today I experienced the full excitement of being with thousands of people with many different interests: free software developers, students, government leaders, and more. I estimated a full two thousand people in today’s keynote presentation, which featured a range of government leaders and a little video in which the Brazilian national anthem was played by a variety of musicians from different regions and ethnic backgrounds.

I attended a few talks in English–which were quite good–but mostly got taken around by colleagues to meet interesting folks in the Brazilian free software community. I also learned more about the state of documentation and the need for new models here.

Brazil, when it comes to IT development, suffers more than nearly any other country from a gap between aspiration and capability. A huge number of talented developers want to contribute to the world’s software, and to their own country’s development, but they’re hampered by difficulties of obtaining hardware, software, and (of particular interest to me as an editor) documentation.

I’m here in Brazil right now–the relatively affluent town and tourist mecca of Porto Alegre, to be precise–for a software conference expected to draw six thousand attendees. It’s the seventh free software forum, an event supported by a lot of companies and several key government ministries in Brazil. A full-time staff person organizes the conference for the NGO that started it, and a lot of people I respect in the free software field come to it regularly from around the world.

An evergrowing list of “take me with you VoIP services” are becoming available to mobile device users. EQO just announced Mac OS X support (in addition to their already long list of devices.) iSkoot also has a number of clients available. Looks like VoIP is turning up wherever you can dial and is becoming client, device, platform and even initiation/termination agnostic. VoIP (as a middleman) is turning up some interesting services which are offering consumers valuable telecom alternatives.

And the results aren’t pretty for the U.S. Consumerist just posted a great letter from his mother, who after using a simple pay-as-you-go Vodaphone cell phone plan in Ireland tried to find a similar arrangement in the U.S. and was floored by our complex and unfriendly plans. I had the same experience after spending time in New Zealand in 2000, using a dead-simple pay-as-you-go plan, and then being surprised that there was no comparable service in the states when I returned. It doesn’t sound like much has changed in six years.

Yesterday, I trotted off to the Mall to “buy” a USA cell phone. My son had told me the closest I would find to Vodaphone was either T-Mobile, or Virgin mobile. There were at least 2 kiosk for every vendor, and that didn’t count the sections at Best Buy, Walmart, and Targets. I took a brief glance at Cingular, but minute charges, daily access fees, unlimited calls to other cingular mobiles, I was confused before I even talked to someone. Verizon was even worse, although affiliated with Vodaphone, the plans, and charges were nothing like what I had experienced in Ireland, and having worked for multiple incarnations of this company for 30 years I was not about to additionally line their pockets when they were delining mine with raised retiree copays, and decreased benefits.

I came across Ted Wallingford’s “mini-white paper” on ten things the industry should work on to overcome the cultural challenges to the VoIP revolution as I was making my rounds today, and as usual Ted offers up his insightful and practical take on things. From improving the communications about features and requirements, to coming together on E911, to making VoIP systems and devices more interoperable, all of these suggestions are good ones. And Ted isn’t afraid to point out something that I think is obvious to most in the industry, but rarely discussed, that there are genuine quality of service issues for today’s residential VoIP users in the U.S. (At least I know my Vonage connection over Comcast isn’t always up to snuff.) System designers can create enterprise VoIP systems that really shine with regards to voice quality, but the fact is that many U.S. home users cannot today consistently experience the higher quality that VoIP is capable of.

The looming threat of spam invading IP Communications systems is getting a lot of hype lately in the business press, but many experts in the field are questioning whether this typically doom-and-gloom reporting about SPIT (for Spam over Internet Telephony) is justified. Ken Camp has a great post on the subject today over on Realtime-VoIP, taking issue with a recent Red Herring article on SPIT. As Ken points out, while lots of people like to talk about SPIT, the reality doesn’t seem to be so dire and current VoIP systems do not appear to have experienced any serious troubles along these lines. Dan York and Jonathan Zar also discussed this issue on a recent episode of their Blue Box Voip Security podcast along with commentray on the topic by Rick Robinson, and came to similar conclusions.

While no one likes telemarketing calls (and just like regular spam it seems a little mind-boggling that it’s an effective strategy to sell much of anything), it’s unclear why current VoIP systems would be any more susceptible to such tactics than the PSTN. I’ve worked as a telecom manager for a large university and I can tell you that telemarketers have had the capability to identify and auto-dial large groups of consecutive DID numbers in non-VoIP settings for many years, it was a constant irritant. It’s true that as we move to using IP-based communications systems, tighter computer integration becomes easier which may simplfy some telemarketing tactics, but in the end I think the result is the same. Unwanted marketing calls feel the same to VoIP or non-VoIP users. And I have to admit that although I was very skeptical of how effective it would be, here in California I’ve actually been pretty impressed with how well our Do Not Call list system has been working. Since getting on it I’ve seen my telemarketing calls reduced to practically none.

I’ll admit that someone came up with a sexy acronymn here, and certainly IP-based networks have a host of security-related issues, but for the most part these issues are well-known and defensible, and aren’t about spam.

Lots of buzz about a new service called Jajah riding the VoIP PR wave. They offer a way for people without a broadband connection to use VoIP, which is clever. You go to their Web site, put in your phone number, the number you want to call, and both ring and you can talk while paying “sensationally low rates.” However, the rates aren’t listed anywhere until you plug in both numbers, with international area codes. When found, the rates seem good, but I’m not sure if they’re worth the hassle over a good discount phone card.

Anybody using this and thrilled? Let us know.

James

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).

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.

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?

Hey folks, listen to the big news! A scheming monopoly protected by a lax regulator hurts consumers and holds back progress in areas of commerce! Ah shucks, I thought I was on to something new…

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.

A new policy announced by America Online and Yahoo! will let email senders pay extra to bypass mail filters. This should not be compared to the much more serious issue of network neutrality, as critics charge.

The Vonage company offered me a free account for use during the production and marketing of my book Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones. Since the book’s long finished and the radio interviews have pretty well stopped, I decided to get my own account and transfer my home office line from SBC/AT&T to Vonage.

Switching your number from one of the traditional telephone companies can almost always (about 99% success rate) be done, but I caution everyone to expect the switch to take at least two weeks. Readers tell me they’ve waited as long as a month for their switch.

My number transferred over within a week. In fact, I hadn’t even hooked up my new Vonage router in place of my old Vonage router when the switch occurred.

I did all that this morning. The Quick Start Guide did a good job showing how to use the Vonage router (a special Linksys model customized with phone plugs) by itself as your sole network router, and how to plug it into an existing router you planned to keep. Plugs and cables are color coded, making the process about as simple as plugging in a few cables and calling a Vonage 800 number to verify service activation.

If broadband phones don’t make huge jumps in market share, it won’t be because the degree of difficulty remains high. The Vonage installation experience was about as difficult as plugging a USB device into a modern computer: not difficult at all.

As I write this, I am in my hotel lobby in Oslo making Broadvoice calls using my Power Book. It works “ok”, but I have been so spoiled by other Apple products that I can’t help but wonder when they’ll embed a SIP phone in iChat. It just seems like such an obvious extension.

They already have a solid platform. It makes hooking up to virtually any network a no-brainer. It has Bluetooth. It has a solid underlying OS. It would be nice to click on a phone icon in my Phone Book and have that trigger a SIP call in iChat or iPhone or whatever they decide to call it.

If they were smart about it Apple could do for VoIP hardware and networking what Skype did for software, by turning every Mac into a ready-made VoIP terminal with minimal extra effort. If it’s there, people will use it, especially if its standards compliant and people can take their pick of inbound/outbound VoIP providers.

Adding a SIP phone to the package would be pretty easy to do, so I am kind of surprised that Apple hasn’t done this already. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that this is one of the “exciting” new products that they’ve been making noise about.

Cable giant Comcast promises to add 1 million new phone subscribers, in this story. How will they do this?

Comcast and other cable carriers will take over the lead in consumer VoIP in the US because they are aggressively bundling their new phone services to upsell existing customers of TV and Internet access services. Although cable company broadband phone pricing is always higher than competitors like Vonage ($35-$40 pre month versus $20-$25), they offer bundled convenience with discounts bringing down the phone costs to about the same level as Vonage.

Statistics show bundled customers stay put, reducing customer churn by amazing amounts. As the current administration continues to support big business over consumers, regulations will continue to wither and choice will continue to disappear.

Amazingly, short-sighted investors on Wall Street cut Comcast’s stock price because they’ll spend money getting 1 million new phone subscribers this year. Does market share mean nothing anymore?

After meeting multiple Vonage employees during my research for my consumer VoIP book, I feel I have a decent grasp on the company culture. That culture strongly echoes Jeffrey Citron, the now ex-CEO and new Chairman and Chief Strategist. Make no mistake – Citron is a sales guy, a high-end sales guy who collects large sums of money wherever he goes. The move from CEO was a bone thrown to the SEC for restrictions placed on Citron from an earlier company (Citron paid a $22.5 million dollar fine but admitted no wrong doing). Call him by whatever title you want, but he will continue to be a sales guy.

I expected Vonage to be sold or go public this year, because they’ve already burned through $600 million in venture capital funding, and investors want some return. Frankly, I expected someone to buy Vonage, but I bet the growth in phone service from cable companies scared off buyers. Read about the IPO here.

Leading the market now with about 1.4 million subscribers, Vonage faces strong growth pressure from cable companies bundling phone service with TV and Internet access. There’s always a chance the FCC will allow cable companies to “shape traffic” to support their own services, which will degrade the service of companies like Vonage that don’t have their own networks. Look for more lawyers to start making even more money, much of it from lobbyists, over the next two years.

Vonage proved the market for telephone-centric consumer VoIP existed, and they retain leadership of that market. But Super Bowl ads are an expensive way to get new customers, and the IPO will supposedly go mostly to marketing. So it appears Vonage has not changed their tactics over the past few years. This means the changing market may cause them more trouble than they expect.

Voice over IP has been hyped as a breakthrough technology for at least ten years now. According to the hype, VoIP will make the telephone network obsolete, and that soon, every telephone call will be free. People were saying the same things ten years ago. This utopian world where every call is free is an alluring idea, but it will never happen. Here’s why…

Flat rate “unlimited” pricing is now a standard offering among VoIP providers. However, in most cases, “unlimited” really means “unlimited, except when we say it isn’t”. It is common practice for VoIP providers to kneecap customers for going over unpublished limits. For example, my Broadvoice account was recently suspended after I racked up about 1200 minutes, including a lot of international calls. My account was “rerated” and they attempted to upsell me to a “business class” unlimited package. They backed off after I pointed out that “unlimited” means just that.

I sympathize with service providers, because they are catering to two very different customers, and have no way of telling them apart at the time of sale. One type of account is a personal use account, where one person is accessing the service via one terminal device. The other type of account is a group use account, where multiple users share a VoIP line. Small businesses do this all the time by wiring a VoIP terminal adapter up to their intercom system and using that line for long distance calls. Many people share the line, and not surprising, consume much more airtime. If they don’t tell the service provider what they are doing, they don’t have an easy way to find out, except to look for “heavy” use and kneecap offending accounts.

Consumers seem to care more about flat rate pricing, so they know what their monthly outlay is going to be, regardless of how they use the service. Nobody watches TV by the minute, and the days of metered telephone service, even cellular, are clearly nearing an end. What customers want is a fair deal, which means knowing up front what you will get for a given price.

That’s the problem with the “unlimited” plans on the market. Service providers bury fine print in their terms of service that gives them the right to redefine accounts at a whim, and to penalize customers for going over some unspecified threshold on a supposedly unlimited plan.

The service providers have to do this. Most of them pay metered rates on outbound traffic, albeit at perhaps a fraction of a cent per minute. But when you’re talking about millions of minutes, half cents add up. They take a calculated risk that if you spend $20/month for unlimited service, you probably won’t use more than 2,000 minutes. Averaged across a large user population, they assume most people will consume less than they think they do (when they could actually save money by going with a standard pay by the minute plan). This would alll work out fine, were it not for freeloaders who share a VoIP line with multiple users, typically by putting the VoIP adapter in front of an intercom or PBX system. A user like this can easily consume 5,000 to 10,000 minutes per line if it is in heavy use, in a call center for example. So to prevent freeloaders from helping themselves at the trough, they have to impose some sort of limit, which leads to disgruntled customers.

I am floating the idea of a fairer pricing scheme that protects consumers and service providers by combining flat rate pricing with a faily usage cap. A provider might offer a set of packages like:

– $9.95 flat rate calling, up to 90 minutes of weekday calling per day, unlimited evenings and weekends
– $19.95 flat rate callling, up to 180 minutes of weekday calling per day, unlimited evenings and weekends
– $49.95 flat rate, unlimited calling, no strings attached

This approach allows consumers and service providers to meet half way. Consumers get a fair deal, and if they consume more than their daily quota, they get a busy message, and can either delay calls until tomorrow, or upgrade to a higher limit plan. Service providers can offer even more attractively priced deals to consumers who do not live on their telephones, without exposing themselves to losses due to freeloaders. The people whose intent is to hook a VoIP line up to a PBX for 24×7 use will have to pay the actual cost of a leased line, where consumers are, in actuality, sharing a leased line for all practical purposes.

Now some people will complain that $19.95/month for flat-rate pricing with a 3 hour per weekday cap is miserly, but let’s do some quick math to put this in perspective. That works out to 60 hours of weekday use per month. Let’s assume the user wants to place all calls during the capped weekday period. That’s still up to 3600 minutes per month, or about 0.5 cents per minute, about 50 times cheaper than long distance calls were about ten years ago, and 100 to 200 times cheaper than most international calls once were.

Of course, this is not really a new idea, since many providers are, in effect, already doing this, except they are doing it in a very ham-handed way, by suspending or terminating accounts and forcing customers to complain, rather than by telling customers up front that if they go over their limit, they’ll get a busy signal for a few hours. If they know to expect this, they’ll pay attention to their usage, or pay a little bit extra.

The cellular companies sort of do this by selling bundles of minutes, except they hit you with a userous overage charge when you exceed your allotment, and do not do you the courtesy of telling you when you’ve done so. They assume you’ll be too lazy to check, as most people are, and then stick you with a bill twice as large as you expected.

Since VoIP providers base their service on a low fixed price, standardizing around this pricing model will be an easy way for them to cater to both casual users and businesses without penalizing their own customers. We’ll see if this idea sticks. They are phone companies, after all, and even among most VoIP providers, my experience has been that while prices are lower, the attitude toward customer service is not much better. In other words, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

2005 will be remembered as the year that VoIP really (finally) took off. The combination of better VoIP software, simpler configuration procedures and a bewildering array of VoIP ready devices made VoIP a mass market service.

The problem with VoIP is that most networks are closed systems. If you’re a Skype user, you can call other Skype users for free, but if you want to call people on other VoIP networks or the PSTN, you have to pay. True, you pay much less than you would for a conventional PSTN call, but if you spend several thousand minutes per month on your phone (if you run a business, you probably do), you can still rack up some pretty big bills, even at a few cents per minute.

The solution to this problem is VoIP peering. The idea behind VoIP peering is to map calls to and from “area codes” that belong to a particular service provider. SipPhone is doing this in the Gizmo Project. So let’s say you want to call someone on Iaxtel. You just dial 1-700-xxx-xxxx. If you want to call someone on Blueface in Ireland, you just dial *353-xxxxxx. So calling people on other VoIP networks is as simple as making a phone call. This is one reason I predict that open systems like Gizmo will win in the long term.

As a user, I shouldn’t have to care which network someone is using. I don’t have to worry about it when I call a public telephone number. The person I am calling could be on a GSM cell phone, a PBX connected to a T1 line, or a old analog rotary phone. The type of connection doesn’t matter. The public telephone network is built upon the concept of peering, and wouldn’t exist in its present form without it.

VoIP peering is easy to implement with services that support SIP or IAX2 protocols. These peering arrangements are currently managed on an ad hoc basis between service providers. There are efforts underway to create a centrally managed numbering plan (such as E164.info), similar to the North American numbering plan, that will make this process easier to manage. For now, peering arrangements are done informally, with providers on each end routing calls for each other using a mutually agreed upon area or country code. The economics of VoIP peering are compelling. Routing calls from end to end entirely via TCP/IP reduces the need for expensive public telephone network interconnections, and enables completely toll-free calling between endpoints. Watch for peering between VoIP services to take off in 2006. Gizmo is especially well-positioned to benefit from this trend.

VoIP peering will also work the other way. Once there is a uniform numbering plan (area codes for VoIP service providers), conventional fixed-line and mobile operators will be able to route calls from the PSTN to these networks. Want to call an IAXtel user on your cell phone? Just dial +1-700-nnn-nnnn and the cellular network would take care of routing the call via VoIP once it hits the terrestrial network.

Fixed line companies, already hurting from losses to cellular and VoIP providers, will probably shun such relationships. Mobile operators could make a ton of money by embracing VoIP peering. Cellular carriers make money selling airtime, which retails for roughly ten times the per-minute cost of calls placed over fixed-line networks. It will cost them virtually nothing to route calls to VoIP networks. They make their money on the short hop from the handset to antenna. A cellular operator that provides direct calling to VoIP networks will be very popular indeed.

Mobile to Voip (M2V) peering will be a great deal for consumers, and a huge market for carriers that will otherwise lose traffic to end-to-end VoIP calls. It will also make VoIP accessible to any mobile phone, not just high end devices that are capable of running a SIP client. As far as the phone knows, it’s just dialing an ordinary telephone number, as the call rides on the voice side of the network from the handset to the base station.

Will customers pay for the convenience? This, I think, is a no-brainer. People already are paying several times more to place mobile calls instead of via cheap fixed line phones. They value convenience more than absolute cost. If they can call friends in far flung places for the cost of a local mobile call, they’ll make calls via cellular that they’d otherwise make from another phone. I don’t expect Verizon to start offering this service any time soon. VoIP companies will be way ahead of the curve in embracing peering, but sooner or later the telcos will pay attention, and the smart ones will be laughing all the way to the bank.

There’s been speculation for some time that a WiFi-based triangulation scheme could be the solution to the VoIP E911 quagmire, but O’Reilly author and fellow VoIP blogger Ted Wallingford isn’t buying it. He outlines a pretty convincing five-point argument as to why WiFi triangulation isn’t going to be the E911 savior some are hoping for.

The problem is, WiFiTri, while possibly helpful and certainly scientifically valid, can never be reliable enough, inexpensive enough, or accurate enough to be considered a pragmatic idea.

I have reported in detail, in a companion blog, about an historic public forum on NSA wiretapping. Here I’ll report on one technology-related aspect of particular interest to me: the collusion of the telephone companies, which has not been played up in the press.

All the warrantless wiretapping we’ve recently heard about required help from the telephone companies and Internet service providers. These companies knew they were not only aiding the government in breaking the law, but were themselves violating terms of service for their customers–and in the case of telephone companies, also breaking the law. One law mentioned at the public form (and submitted years ago by the forum’s moderator, Congressman Ed Markey) forbids cell phone companies from revealing the location of cell phone users–except with a court warrant.

In fact, the NSA wiretapping scandal represents one of the largest conspiracies in recent years: a conspiracy between telephone companies and the government to defraud Americans out of our Fourth Amendment rights.

Pertaining to this is the issue of industry concentration–the death of small phone companies and the mergers of larger ones into behemoths–which was also one of the goals of the Bush administration, pursued with determination by Michael Powell as FCC chair. Provisions for competition set up in the Telecom Act of 1996, and enforced by relatively even-handed regulations passed by earlier FCCs, were systematically weakened and discarded under Bush. (For some history, see an earlier blog of mine.)

Admittedly, it’s hard for any company to buck a demand from law enforcement. The PATRIOT Act’s secrecy provisions (when the FBI approaches you, you can’t even publicize the very fact that they have done so) leaves the impression that you’ll be prosecuted for going public with government misbehavior, and thus contributes to the growing unaccountability of government. A few Internet service providers have done challenged illegal wiretaps, but not enough to establish the pattern we now see in the wiretap scandal. Overwhelmingly, the phone companies and ISPs just went along.

One might argue that the pressure would have been even stronger if ISPs and phone companies were smaller, but size obviously hasn’t helped them put up any resistance. Believe me, if we had an industry of scrappy Mom-and-Pop providers like in the 80s and 90s, word about this civil liberties horror would have come out sooner.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about creating a tiered or metered Internet, which is being pushed for by the telcos and cable providers. The access providers want the ability to segment and prioritize Internet traffic so they can both give higer priority to their own services and charge others for a higher class of service. Everyone seems to think this is a pretty bad idea except the telco and cable execs, and now possibly the FCC Chairman. The big online content and application providers are pushing instead for a formal recoginition of Net Neutrality, which would forbid these kind of tiering practices.

The Washington Post reported back in the beginning of December that BellSouth CTO William L. Smith told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be, for example, able to charge Yahoo for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than Google. Smith made comparisons to first class vs. coach airline tickets and ground vs. express package delivery, and wondered why he shouldn’t be able to offer similar tiered service options.

Now the Boston Globe weighs in with a report that AT&T and BellSouth are agressively lobbying congress for just this sort of plan to be included in next year’s telecom legislation overhaul, and the issue is largely about the telcos being able to gurantee a quality of service sufficient for IPTV. Their own IPTV anyway, as the skeptics see a scenario unfolding where the access providers don’t allow other content providers to have the same level of quality as their own offerings.

The Age is also covering the issue, noting that to some companies the telcos use of terms like “priotization” and “quality of service” suggest more sinister intentions. “If a company talks about quality of service, it could be code for discrimination among sources of content,” said Paul Misener, vice president of public policy for Amazon.com.

This is shaping up as a battle between the Internet service providers and the large content and application providers. But it’s not just Google, Yahoo, Skype and their brethren that are concerned about having to pay a toll to the carriers to guarantee a high quality of service, the little guys should be worried too. It’s hard to imagine that any kind of tiered or metered net traffic plan could be good for innovation, but it’s easy to imagine how such a plan could give additional advantage to the large entrenched players. At least one influential congressman is skeptical of the telco plan though, as the Globe reports that Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., the ranking member on the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, stated ‘’I don’t understand why we would tinker with the model that has been so wildly successful.”

I think the battle is just beginning and it’s not just about IPTV. VoIP is a key factor here, the telcos see their business models being shattered and they’d love nothing more than the chance to “prioritize” some of these services out of existence. And they very well may have the upper hand at this point, as recent comments by FCC Chairman Martin about taxing VoIP and not seeing a need for net neutrality rules certainly make it sound like he’s already in their pocket. Another disturbing factor pointed out by Catherine Yang in BusinessWeek is that the telcos have vastly more experience lobbying in D.C. and wielding influence than the relatively new Internet companies, after all they’ve been buying favors and politicians for decades. Compare that to the fact that Google has a single lobbyist on the payroll, and he was just hired this year.

Clay Shirky sums up the telco perspecitve in his inimitable way over on boingboing:

“We like everything about the internet, except the way it keeps us from locking out the competition, so we want something just like the net, except less useful to the user, but with more pricing power for us.”

I just finished doing a fascinating interview with Norman Lewis, the Director of Technology Research for France Telecom’s ISP, Wanadoo, and a keynote speaker at our upcoming Emerging Telephony conference. I’ve been impressed with what I’ve learned of Norman’s work, and it sounds like France Telecom is a telco that really “gets” all this emerging telephony stuff. I’ll be publishing the full interview in the next day or two, but I wanted to give you a taste now…

Stewart: Who thinks they own this space: the Telco’s, the ISP’s, or the Google/Yahoo/EBay trinity?

Lewis: Actually no-one but the customer ‘owns this space’. If there’s anything we should learn from history is that user behaviour and social forces will determine the shape of this space in the future. Just remember the first predictions on telephony itself!

But there is a sea change taking place. Telcos have begun to understand that voice is simply another data service over wireless or wired networks and that this migration of voice into the application layer opens voice to competition from other application-level players, such as portals. Though it appears GTalk, Y! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger and eBay’s Skype could commoditise Telcos as simple pipe-providers, it should be remembered that Telco expertise in identity and authentication, quality of service, convergence, billing and customer care, places them in a strong and potentially dominant position. This space will become hotly contested: Telcos believe they can maintain their positions while ISPs, MNOs, portals and others believe they too can occupy this space and thus overturn old hegemonies.

‘Telcos’ in the traditional sense of the term will not occupy this space. VOIP is destroying existing business models and they will be disintermediated. But in the words of Lawrence of Arabia, ‘nothing is written’ – yesterday’s Telcos can transform themselves if they recognize this threat and become 21st Century converged communication platforms.

I know I’m a little late to this party, but like all good VoIP bloggers I should point to and comment on Jeff Pulver’s annual predictions for the IP communications industry. (You can’t really run an “Emerging Telephony” site without paying attention to what Jeff is up to.) One thing I appreciate is that he doesn’t shy away from his previous guesses, he’s also written a follow-up on his 2005 predictions that takes a frank look at how well he did. Pretty good actually.

Some of Jeff’s predictions this year seem obvious and right on: broadband penetration will continue to grow in the U.S. but not fast enough to raise our global standing in this area, lobbyists and policy-makers will continue to try and hamper new technologies with outdated rules and regulations, and the major Internet players will increase their efforts to influence communications policy. The most intersting prediction to me on his list this year, and the one I’m least in agreement with, is that filmakers will start going “direct to the Net” in 2006 and we’ll start seeing TV shows and movies debuting on the Internet first. I agree this will happen, but I’m skeptical that we’ll see it really take off next year. I think there’s still significant user-experience improvements that will need to be realized before the film and TV industries embrace the net in this way.

In additon to his yearly industry predictions, Jeff also recently publishes an annual list of what he considers the top VoIP blogs. One of my goals is to make sure Emerging Telephony is on that list next year!

I always enjoy O’Reilly editor Andy Oram’s take on things, he’s not afraid to express an opinion or delve into the social, cultural, and political aspects of the technologies he’s watching. His latest article is no exception and his wide-ranging report from this year’s VON conference covers a lot of ground as he analyzes the latest trends and issues in the VoIP industry. From new products to security issues to what the politicos are (and aren’t) saying about the future of VoIP, there’s something for everyone. Andy notices that the enterprise is still where the action is in North America in VoIP is All Business at VON.