Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

March 2008

You are browsing the archive for March 2008.

Bandwidth Pricing

March 25, 2008

One thing many companies complain about is the price of bandwidth. The fact is price varies - greatly. Telegeography has a sampling of how much prices fluctuate. Why do they fluctuate?

Lobbying and FISA

March 25, 2008

There's a crowd in the SMB Space

March 25, 2008

Microsoft is now ready to jump into VoIP for the SMB space with VoIP trunking and the Response Point phone system. Microsft joins Cisco, Linksys, a multitude of Hosted PBX players, Mitel, ShoreTel, and the rest of the hardware clans in competing in the SMB space.

My question is what space do they mean? Medium business of 500 to 1000 users?

Buzzed WiMax

March 25, 2008

Secret Portals

March 25, 2008

You'll notice that Web 2.0 apps like to open to private beta. (I think Google started this with Gmail but don't quote me). Lately, the requests for an invite to GrandCentral (voice management portal acquired by Google last year) have piled in. It's the new viral marketing.

Muni Wi-Fi is Dead!

March 24, 2008

Media outlets are puking with the story that Muni Wi-Fi is dead. From the get go there were factions that wanted this to fail. (ILEC/cellcos and MSO's being just 2 parties)>

But there were groups that needed this to work: Intel, MOTO, Tropos, the Wi-fi Alliance, CityNet, MetroFi. and EarthLink. Unfortunately, too many government officials thought this would be some kind of windfall.

Sprint is Done

March 17, 2008

This is the tale of one guy trying to activate one handset on Sprint. My current cell phone is on Nextel. My EVDO card bills on SPrintPCS. They have not been combined in 2 years.

No Privacy Anymore

March 17, 2008

Amidst the FISA bills in Congress, rumor has it that cellular companies gave open access to the US government for wiretaps, just like the little room at AT&T's San Fran CO. That's swell.

According to this article, the list of folks listening to your VoIP calls, reading your email, tracking your location, tailing your web usage, tapping your cell and landline calls, and other nefarious acts is long. It includes Ma Ball, VZW, law enforcement (LEA), governments around the globe, your boss, and criminals.

Voice2Text

March 17, 2008

How far has Speech Recognition software come since Dragon Speak? Voice to text is picking up some momentum. Rich Tehrani writes about Visual Voicemail with SpinVox, SimulScribe and GotVoice as ways to get voicemail as an email.

I would think that mobile people would rather have voicemail as an MP3 or WAV file.

Podcasting

March 17, 2008

Podcasting is all the rage right now. I use Power MP3 Recorder on my laptop with a Y-connector to my phone to record. While I thought the recording was the challenge. It's not.

Back from Vegas

March 13, 2008

What a whirlwind week in telecom. Just back from the Agent Expo in Vegas. It started Monday with the surprise announcement that Level3 had fired its President, Kevin O'Hara. O'Hara was Pres and COO and co-founder. But Integration has been a Nightmare.

Office 2.0

March 9, 2008

I am off to Vegas to moderate a panel discussion on Virtual Office. Unfortunately, the discussion will really be about Hosted VoIP, not Office 2.0. Office 2.0 is the concept of the Virtual Office. At IT Redux, they have pushed the concept to the edge.

Social Networking is the Craze

March 9, 2008

I don't know about you but I get a decent amount of email from LinkedIn and other networking sites. It seems like a new one pops up every day. (Thanks to sites like Ning which make it easy to build one coupled with the gold rush mentality of the web entrepreneur, its no wonder).

MySpace and Facebook still get the most traffic according to Compete.com.

Converged Savings

March 7, 2008

On LinkedIn, one of the LinkedIn Answers (actually a question) from Steve Griffin at T-Systems was: Will data / voice convergence be a main IT cost saving driver in 2008?

While writing my answer, I figured I would share it with you:

I think the market is tired of hearing how they can save money in telecom. Internet pipe, voice costs, and now mobile expenses have driven up the telecom budget line items.

Verizon, Fairpoint Finance Dance

March 7, 2008

Verizon (VZ) has been given approval by the FCC and the state PUC in VT, ME, and NH to sell its landline business in New England to Fairpoint. The sticking point is that Fairpoint is a company too small to acquire VZ's assets -- a company that is 5x the size and scope. Plus as Alltel/Windstream discovered in Eastern KY, most assets in this region have been neglected.

So how does a smaller fish buy a bigger fish AND expand the broadband network in that area?

Microsoft and SAAS

March 5, 2008

The big news in SAAS is that Google has released Google Sites, which is a collaboration tool similar in function to what Sharepoint does. This is a good piece of glue to add to Google Apps. To counter that Microsoft announced that it will be offering Hosted Office Live Workspace, namely Office, Exchange and Sharepoint. I have 2 points to make here.

One is the software itself.

Is Telecom Broken?

March 5, 2008

From an agent side of telecom, I do think it is broken. So many carriers have merged for survival that the integration was a disaster. The blunder poster child would obviously be Sprint as it wrote off $29.5B on the Nextel merger. Sprint can't get out of its own way.

Web Apps - IP and Privacy

March 3, 2008

At FOWA, the speakers talked about Ruby on Rails; inter-op; open social; cloud computing; Google Gears and Amazon S3. They emphasized API's and keeping it simple. Leah Culver spoke about API's consuming data and API's to view the mashed up data. But the one thing missing in all this, was the IP.

FOWA wrap-up

March 3, 2008

FOWA ended on Saturday, but I skipped the Beach Day events to start the 6 hour drive home. Our last taste of FOWA was the party at Nikki's Beach Club. Scrapblog's sponsorship was noon-intrusive. Signage plus a flash presentation on a screen. Lots of networking.

Featured Events