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!