The Pebble and the Avalanche

CCXML Workshop Part Two Now Online

The second part of the two-part presentation on the CCXML programming language is now online.

Technical note: If you have trouble playing this on your system, please let me know. The file plays correctly on a Mac, and the basic file plays correctly using the totem player on Linux, but I'm not certain how well it works on other systems.

EDITED: Well, it seems that blip.tv isn't as friendly a hosting site as I originally thought. The link now downloads the file to your computer, where you can play it using Quicktime or Totem. I will find a different hosting site shortly.

Topics:  · announcements · telecommunications

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CCXML Workshop Online

I gave a three-hour workshop at SpeechTek in August, 2007 on the topic of CCXML applications. You can view slides and hear the audio of Part One by downloading it to your computer and playing it using Quicktime or Totem.

Topics:  · telecommunications

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Where Are They Now? Up To the Same Dirty Tricks 10,000 Miles Away

I ran across an interesting article in The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, 15 March (and yes, I was in Sydney when I read it). Australia made the same mistake the US did: Instead of disaggregating local fixed-line telecommunications service into separate businesses to allow true competition, they left the national monopoly that provided local land-line communications intact and mandated by law that the monopoly, Telstra, allow competitors to lease Telstra's lines.

If you read the book, you know what happened next — Australia's monopoly is following the Baby Bell playbook.

In fact, they've got Baby Bell players running the show. Sol Trujillo and Phil Burgess, formerly of US West, are now 10,000 miles away and working for Telstra. They've brought the old US Baby Bell tricks with them to Australia. When a competitor attempts to lease a line, their local monopoly Telstra attempts to charge a huge fee; the local regulators side with the competitor; Telstra heads off to court and issues florid press releases about reasonable rates, competition, rates of return, and similar bilge. At present Telstra has forty-seven legal actions pending against the regulators.

Although Telstra recently lost its biggest case in Australia's highest court, the legal actions continue. Each one, even when it's lost, costs the competitors time and money and helps discourage other competitors from even trying. And just as in the US, the political pressure campaign from Telstra is slowly modifying the views of the regulators.

Different conditions, different country, same results: the failure to disaggregate spelled the failure of the project.

Topics:  · business · telecommunications · where+are+they+now

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Verizon Notifies You (and Criminals) When You Call 911

When you dial 911, your Verizon phone emits a tone that can be heard several feet away. I know that I'd like to be able to dial the police without alerting everyone in the vicinity.

Topics:  · government · telecommunications

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Google's Gold

People continue to speculate on just how Google will provide telecommunications service if they win the auction for a portion of the wireless spectrum. Typically, an analyst will point out that Google has no core expertise in wireless networks and — here's the assumption — therefore Google must have a wireless provider partner. The usual suspect is Sprint.

Expanding into a unrelated area is the typical hubris that infects large corporations. Remember AT&T's disastrous excursions into computers, on the rationale that since AT&T used computers, they must therefore be experts in how to build and sell them? AT&T's purchase of NCR probably helped destroy AT&T.

But so far, Google has been very, very smart; at the same time, Google has pursued old businesses in new ways. If I had to guess, I would say that Google has something entirely different up their sleeves if they win the wireless spectrum. After all, Google has plenty of experience running wireless Internet networks, and as a condition of purchase of the wireless spectrum, access to the spectrum must be relatively open. What if Google purchases the spectrum and creates a wireless, VoIP network instead of a traditional cellular network? What if they simply sell Internet minutes instead of cellular service minutes? What if they simply sell unlimited wireless Internet access and forgoe the pain and suffering (and hideous cost) of billing cellular service on a per-minute basis?

Topics:  · internet · telecommunications

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Some iPhone Customers More Equal than Others

Sometimes it's good to have a loud voice. My colleague over at O'Reilly relates that AT&T spent an hour with him on the phone, getting all the problems with his iPhone straightened out. But as he also mentions, this help isn't available to just anyone. It's designed to "fix problems that people on the Internet were having," i.e., bloggers.

Personally, I won't touch the iPhone. I'd rather have the OpenMoko phone, which uses open source — that is to say, infinitely clever — software and isn't locked to AT&T's network.

Topics:  · apple · telecommunications

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AT&T and the iPhone

I'm perfectly happy with my current cell phone, a Nokia E61 that does everything a phone should do. But if I were thinking of an iPhone, this article would cure me. For that matter, just using an iPhone will be unnecessarily expensive.

I suppose it's comforting to know that some things never change; even under new management, even working with Apple, and even when they have a pretty phone, AT&T will always be arrogant and expensive, the snooty bad restaurant of the telecommunications industry.

Topics:  · business · telecommunications

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Odd Twist Continues: Free International Telephone Calls

Joining the plethora of services that offer free conference calls and free fax calls, Yak4Ever allows callers free international telephone calls. To get free calls, you register up to 10 numbers, dial an in-country telephone number, and choose which of the ten numbers you'd like to call. The international leg of the long-distance call is free. (I can't comment about the quality of the calls as the service isn't working for me just yet.)

Yak4Ever isn't based on altruism or on advertising revenues. Instead, like similar services, Yak4Ever is based on a quirk in US telecommunications law, which allows them to charge your local telephone company substantial fees for the inbound leg of the call. This fee allows Yak4Ever to turn a profit without charging the caller.

Is this financial model viable? Clearly the carriers who terminate the calls don't care for it; instead of subsidizing telecommunications development for local residents in rural towns, they're subsidizing free conference calls, faxes, and international calls from people who are certainly in a position to pay for them. The US Federal government took notice and recently considered an "emergency" order to ban such services.

Topics:  · business · government · telecommunications

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"Emergency" Order to Take Effect in Six Months

A while back I wrote about the business model of used by free conference and free fax services; these services are located in places such as rural Iowa to take advantage of government-mandated pricing. I strongly suspect that ipkall, which hands out free phone numbers in Washington, operates on a similar business model, which hasn't stopped me from using ipkall to grab a phone number or two.

There seems to have been a bit of a revolt at the Federal level. The board that oversees the Universal Service Fund decided to impose an "emergency" cap on payments due to the explosive growth in outlays; considering that they've been looking at the issue for three years, that's quite some definition of "emergency." The current recipients of subsidies, as might be imagined, aren't happy with this decision.

The major protests I've seen are from cellular service providers, but they of course they have a better case to make as they provide local service in those rural areas. I suspect that this order will also affect the free conference and free fax services, which will be an interesting change; expect to see more conference calls move to a purely IP-based solution, such as Skype.

Topics:  · business · government · telecommunications

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Parasite or Englightened Consumer: Morals and Your Telephone Service

I admit it: I don't bother keeping a fax line in my office. There's no point, really; most people have figured out how to send email, and if they need to send a scan of a document they send the scan via email. For the technically-challenged, I use a service located in Iowa that receives the fax for me and forwards it via email. And I frankly don't know how I'd send a fax if I had to send one this morning; I'd probably have to head down to the storage room and dig out a fax machine.

This might make me an enlightened consumer, but according to this article I might be a parasite, since I'm not paying anything for the incoming fax number. Worse yet, I'm participating in a "scam" since my service provider is taking advantage of odd telecommunications regulations to extract hefty payments from AT&T and other service providers. The very popular "Freeconference.com" service was recently blocked by Cingular and Qwest; what seemed at first glance to be an anti-competitive move by two giant service providers might actually have some moral justification as can be seen by the quote from the providers. Given the arrogant history of the past incarnations of AT&T, I have to admit that it sounds to me as if AT&T's real complaint is that AT&T feels these particular calls aren't as profitable as they'd like.

In some sense this is all re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; just like email, telephone calls are destined to be free. On the other hand, the legacy telcos are attempting to do everything they can to strangle the competition, as seen by Verizon's attempt to destroy Internet pioneer Vonage. If they can cut the oxygen off for long enough, they can do the same thing they did with DSL-based Internet service: destroy the pioneers and steal their turf, and then create regulatory barriers to new entrants. This would allow the legacy carriers an opportunity to extend their current business model — government-mandated monopoly — to the realm of Internet telephony. Using their monopoly power to prevent traffic they don't like over their telephone networks helps establish a precedent to seize control of other traffic they don't like — such as Internet traffic.

Topics:  · business · government · telecommunications

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