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December 2006 Archives
I'd like to start this blog entry off by saying Happy New Year
and wishing all my readers a tremendous 2007. I hope you are healthy and happy and that your family and all loved ones are as well. Having said that, I cover lots of topics on my blog and many times I focus on telecom and sometimes I get to cover weird stories that are hard to believe
and wishing all my readers a tremendous 2007. I hope you are healthy and happy and that your family and all loved ones are as well. Having said that, I cover lots of topics on my blog and many times I focus on telecom and sometimes I get to cover weird stories that are hard to believeOther times I tie a story into a trade show like the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (ITEXPO) taking place in 24 days -- January 23-26 at the Ft. Lauderdale Convention Center.
Many times when I write about the show I like to have a hook. For example one lucky attendee will walk away with a Harley Davidson Motorcycle and/or a Toyota FJ Cruiser (you must be present to win either. This photo idoes not represent the Harley model you could win -- but it sure looks great). I really like the design of the FJ Cruiser and when I saw one on the highway today I tried to take a photo with my phone to show you. That would have been a great show hook I thought.It turns out I almost caused an accident and furthermore my camera phone has a delay of about a ½ second so I have a nice picture of my dashboard instead.
So much for that idea.
So much for that idea.Well, I figured there will be no show hook story today. That was until I learned about a car jacking in Boca Raton, Florida. Normally a car jacking is something you don't want to highlight when you are bringing thousands of attendees from around the globe to south Florida.
But this story has a hook and was weird and located in south Florida as the car jacker stole a car, had two accidents and then got so lost he called 911 and had the police come to his location. He actually called the 911 call center and said he committed a crime and had no idea where he was.So on that note, come to south Florida in January and know full well there will be one less car jacker in the area. Most importantly book your flights and hotel rooms asap as rates are going up quickly and the hotels are selling out.
Oh and one last point -- bring a map -- and your own car.
Yesterday I wrote about ensuring net neutrality and just to show you how fluid the telecom market is, today AT&T may have ensured net neutrality for all of us last night. Well at least for 24 months. The company made a number of concessions to the FCC in order to complete their merger with BellSouth. Some of the concessions have to do with freezing prices on enterprise broadband services and giving up wireless spectrum. Other concessions are more important – selling high-speed internet service without the need to buy phone service. This is often called naked DSL.
AT&T has also agreed to provide net neutrality for a period of two years. Congress may weigh in on this issue before that time period expires however.
The interesting thing is that Comptel is an association devoted to fighting LECs for the benefit of CLECs. Unfortunately During the last few years this has been a losing battle as the FCC has more or less repealed the telecom act of 1996 which was meant to ensure CLECs could compete in the first place.
Many people have questioned the need for Comptel as they just haven’t been able to fight the RBOCs in a meaningful way. Their intentions are fantastic but the RBOCs present such a massive lobbying force, it is virtually impossible to stop them. In addition with AT&T’s lobbyists now working for the RBOCs in the old-new Ma Bell, Comptel has an even more formidable opponent.
The latest FCC commissioner, Robert McDowell most recently represented Comptel as an attorney. He decided not to vote on this merger because of his conflict of interest relating to his Comptel days. He realized that without his vote the commission would be deadlocked. So by recusing himself, McDowell all but ensured AT&T had to promise net neutrality to get this deal done.
If you remember, Ed Whitacre, now CEO of AT&T said two Halloweens ago that the pipes are his and he has the right to charge people for the pipes.
Now because of Comptel and McDowell doing what is best for consumers, the average US citizen has won out and VoIP and video companies are now in the position to compete effectively without the fear of getting wiped out by AT&T who could have imposed toll charges on their pipes.
Russell Shaw’s take.
Sylantro has recently inked deals with China’s Huawei and Microsoft and is making a play to become more entrenched in the IMS space. They have also hired a new CEO Marco Limena and I thought this would be a great time to see what Marco is thinking about the future of Sylantro and of IMS. One trend Marco sees is real-time group media communication and I won’t steal the thunder anymore so feel free to read this interview to get the details.
Ensuring Net Neutrality
Net neutrality advocates are scared senseless that carriers will start charging companies like Google in order for the search giant and others to have access to service provider customers. These phone companies argue they have to charge Internet companies because the increased volume of traffic generated by such organizations requires service providers to upgrade their networks at a faster clip than they normally would. Many in the Internet community fear service providers could charge certain content providers for riding their networks and not others. Providers could effectively favor their own services and moreover act as censors of the Internet.Service providers who are looking to charge companies like Google for riding on their networks may find they aren’t able to accomplish this goal as carrier hotels act as an alternate way for content providers to get to customers.
Now I don't mean to trivialize the situation as there are levels of complexity I won't touch on in this article. Simply stated however, the carrier hotel is the best champion of net neutrality. You see these buildings act as massive interconnection facilities for carriers around the world to interconnect with one another and peer traffic.
I recently had a chance to tour the CRG West One Wilshire building in downtown Los Angeles, California and it was a fantastic experience as this is a carrier hotel I have been meaning to visit for many years. The building is 30 floors in size and 24 of those are devoted to telecom. Other floors contain law offices and other businesses. Telecom demand is tremendous so according to John Savageau the SVP of Operations we can expect to see more floors converted to telecom space soon.
I did see some of the things you would expect to see in such a building such as multiple power sources and redundancy everywhere. I saw numerous UPS units five times the size of a kitchen refrigerator as well as a Caterpillar generator that looked like it could power a city.
I started my tour on the nineteenth floor and worked my way down. I saw virtually every carrier I have ever heard of in the world. There are hundreds of these providers in the building. If you take the tour you will see major telecom companies from virtually every country as well as all the VoIP providers you have heard of and many you haven’t. Unfortunately I am not allowed to share any names with you which is pretty frustrating.
What is exciting to me is the amount of VoIP traffic coming into the building. Many service providers have ripped out massive and aging Nortel DMS and Alcatel DSC switches and put in softswitches from the likes of Sonus.
This is the sort of moment which makes me proud to have decided to launch Internet Telephony Magazine back in 1997 -- back before it was evident the IP communications market would be exploding with growth. We are truly seeing the wholesale replacement of circuit switching in favor of packet switching in carrier hotels.
The number of manufacturers and familiar logos was staggering. Some of the companies that stood out were Juniper, Cisco, Tekelec, Sansay, NACT, Sun, Dell and I even got to see a pre-Orca Nuera frame relay box. Once complaint I heard lodged by the facility was against Dell servers -- which were very common in the building by the way. The problem? The massive heat generation of their power supplies which is much higher than from companies like HP and Lenovo. Obviously One Wilshire is responsible for cooling all this equipment so thousands of Dell Servers means lots of heat that needs to be dissipated via increased cooling.
A point I found interesting is how many service providers get around VoIP regulations in their country -- such as India and Australia -- by bringing calls into this facility and connecting them so they aren’t officially a VoIP provider in their home country.
As LA has seen more than an earthquake or two in its past the current regulations require reinforced cages that are resistant to such disaster scenarios. These units are bolted directly to the floor in accordance with regulations. I am told unreinforced cages crumble like Coke cans in an earthquake.
Perhaps the highlight of the building is the meet me room on the fourth floor which has 230 companies represented in it. This is the most densely connected room in the world and the bewildering array of cables is enough to make your head spin. Thankfully the facility has a sophisticated database system to keep track of the cables and equipment throughout he building.
The demand for space in the room is great as you can imagine and in many cases where you might expect a coax connection from point A to point B the coax cables are multiplexed onto fiber and then converted near their destination. This is done to save space and also to reduce the DB loss over the distance the cables have to traverse throughout the building.
While on tour I noticed some cables that were cut and labeled down one of the rows of equipment. I was told that when a cable is no longer needed it is marked and discarded. The building throws away one ton of such cables per month which I thought might qualify for some sort of Guinness Book world record.
Interconnecting is a simple matter for CRG West as they just need to cross connect fiber on demand. Depending on the location of a service providers connecting them could take as little as a few minutes to actually complete. What this means in reality is by simply connecting two different service providers you can immediately connect two continents together allowing them to rapidly communicate. To me, the concept of immediate global interconnectivity embodied by two disparate pieces of fiber coming together is what the internet is all about. These carrier hotels are where much of the exciting interconnecting takes place.
So in the end carrier hotels around the nation and world help keep the Internet open and can provide protection against companies who may not believe in network neutrality. That is the good news. The bad news is there needs to be local carrier competition enabling some service providers to provide network neutrality and subsequently force the other providers to follow suit.
Tokyo is experimenting with sending highly tailored information to users based on location and interests. Users will get special offers, menus and coupons as they walk city streets. Shoppers can rent a prototype reader or get a limited service on their cell phones. The trial will run from January 21-March 10th of 2007.
This could be a huge opportunity for the mobile carrier as well as an enormous business opportunity for many. Expect the location based services market to be worth billions of dollars with targeted ads driving the market.
Imagine writing something that is so popular your nation’s post office has to make special plans to get hundreds of thousands of copies of it to anxiously awaiting fans. In the UK, the Royal Mail says it is beginning top plan a strategy for delivering an avalanche of Harry Potter books to fans. So far, Harry Potter books have sold over 300 million copies worldwide!
Here is a good article on protecting yourself from people who are trying to steal your identity or pretexting. One tip -- set up online accounts to make it more difficult for data thieves to get at your precious personal information.
You I don't mean to complain about the airlines and unless I have a terrible experience somewhere I hate to specify the company name in a derogatory fashion. So suffice it to say I am sitting here -- well actually standing since there are no seats, and 20 minutes before the flight is supposed to take off I find out the flight is delayed by an "estimated" 45 minutes.
Now I am not a flight or airline or airport expert but one would imagine if a flight is delayed 45 minutes the airline should know about this more than 20 minutes before takeoff.
In fact I am an advocate of some bold airline somewhere offering some money back if a flight is delayed within 3 hours of departure time.
I continually rush to get on flights -- because the airlines will give away my seats if I am not 15 or so minutes early! The airlines on the other hand are able to be as late as they like with zero accountability.
You see I get the feeling the airlines have to know in advance about many delays but in their eyes, their time is more important than the customer's time. In reality the airline's time is much much less important than mine. That is my feeling and there is no way to change it. I haven’t surveyed other passengers to get a consensus on this issue but the customer always comes first and most airlines just don't seem to see it that way.
It's times like this I wish I wasn't on the naughty list.
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I am back at the Eden Roc today but only because all other gyms in the area are closed. The bar at the hotel has Starbucks coffee and the best bar staff around. The gym staff is hit or miss. Today I will miss again.
The weather was much better than expected but very humid. The bar mitzvah was perhaps the most extravagant party I have ever seen. It was quite amazing.
Surprisingly virtually all the stores in Miami Beach are open today - just not the gyms.
The lobby of this hotel is really nice as you can see from the photo.
I am very surprised at how light my email volume has been. I am sure it will be in full swing again tomorrow.
I was down here for Thanksgiving and South Beach was dead. Today it was quite busy. I am looking forward to going back down there later tonight.
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My wife is from Argentina and so is Dulce de Leche. If you don't know what that is you are missing out. It is like caramel but much better. Yesterday we ate very large quantities of dulce de leche desserts.
Today I pay for it. The treadmill is extra painful for some reason. I am late for the Bar Mitzvah which will no doubt entail more eating.
Oh and by the way the Eden Roc hotel charges $37.50 to use the gym. It is a great gym but not at that price. I much prefer Crunch which is cheaper and better.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. And of course have an extraordinary Festivus.
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I just learned of a major management shakeup at testing leader Spirent. I rarely see something like this happen -- a wholesale replacement of so many managers and executives. The last year or so has been quiet for this company from a PR and marketing standpoint and many people were wondering what was going on with the company. It would seem now according to this article the company may be broken up into pieces. The testing market has a bright future but it seems this past quarter may have been underwhelming for a few players in the industry.
There is nothing like a late sushi lunch. I hope everyone is
enjoying a wonderful holiday season. Happy Hanukah and Merry Chistmas to all.
So far the weather has been great. Not too hot or cold. Just a few clouds. Weather.com seems to predict some weather nastiness soon. Hopefuly the site is wrong.
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