By David Sims
[email protected]
Welcome to a special edition of First CoffeeSM,
seeing as how we missed a couple days last week lost in a hellacious odyssey
beginning with spending the night in the San Francisco Airport, pre-boarding
pass because a certain airline which we won’t mention (but whose name rhymes
with American Airlines) refused to let First CoffeeSM board the 10
p.m. flight to JFK airport WHICH WAS NOT FULL instead of the 7:45 a.m. next
morning flight, the result being spending the night in the San Francisco
airport’s unsecured area with shady, disreputable types slinking about,
suspicious characters eyeing my luggage hungrily, the sort of street life one
gets at an airport’s unsecured area at three in the morning, as well as some
people who weren’t journalists at Dreamforce ‘05, and then on the New York –
Istanbul leg stopping to deplane some ill woman at Shannon Airport (guess which
country that’s in? Finland? No, sorry, try again.).
Oh the deplaning took all of five minutes, but we were
sitting on the tarmac for a good two hours, presumably the pilot had always
wanted to see County Cork where his potato-eater ancestors came from, who the
hell knows? Fortunately First CoffeeSM was on Turkish Air by then, a civilized
airline where the stewardess lets you have two bottles of red wine with dinner
– still complementary, Turks have far too much class to ask customers to pay
$5.00 for a box with a couple cookies and chips – and another one if you tell
her you need it to sleep (not a complete lie), and another one just because you
asked and, well, there might have been a fifth one too or that might have been
when you realized they give away free Scotch too.
So it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, it could have
been an American airline where they come around and ask all passengers for $10
to help cover that day’s rise in fuel prices, but it still caused First CoffeeSM
to land at Ataturk Airport at 2:00 and miss his connection from Istanbul to
Antalya. The guy at the Turkish Air counter said no, sorry, the 2:20 flight to
Antalya’s full, but there’s one at 5:30. Fine, I’ll take that one. Right, here’s
your boarding pass sir, iyi yolculuklar. Yeah, same to you, buddy.
Get to the gate where they’re boarding the 2:20 flight, and
remember in a past First CoffeeSM column where it was imparted that
no sporting event is ever really sold out? There’s a corollary: When you feel
like you’ve been traveling since the first Clinton administration and you can’t
sleep on the road or in planes and you have no real solid idea what day it is,
no flight’s really full.
First try to board as if it’s your flight. Hey, worst they
can do it say no, sorry, sir, your flight’s the 5:30 one. Pretend chagrin, the
upside is you don’t have to fake the befuddled, haggard look, ask if there’s
any seat open on this flight? No sir, (like I know the guy at the counter told
you, I was practically reading his lips) it’s full. Oh really? Golly, whaddya
know? Well how about if I wait here to see if I can get a seat on this flight
which is the last one that’ll get me home in time to see my baby daughter
before she dies of pediatric renal failure?
Hang around by the gate, make your carry-on seem four times
heavier than it really is – it feels like it’s three times heavier by now
anyway, fake the last one-fourth – smile at the gate attendant, pull your baby
daughter’s picture out of your wallet and squeeze an onion under your eyes and
sure enough, the guy waves you into the Last Open Seat and you get home.
So, this special edition:
Sun has announced the first public
demonstration of its upcoming Netra advanced telecom computing architecture
blade server powered with the multi-core AMD Opteron processor-and running
Solaris 10 Operating System in Boston.
Sun’s ATCA blade platform will be able to support both SPARC
and AMD Opteron processor-based blades in the same chassis with choice of
operating systems, including the Solaris OS and MontaVista Linux.
The ATCA blade server with the SPARC processor is scheduled
for release at the end of 2005 with the AMD Opteron processor-based blade
scheduled for release at the end of the first quarter of 2006.
For those customers who require carrier grade Linux on Sun’s
ATCA blade platform, Sun is announcing support for MontaVista Carrier Grade
Edition (CGE). Monta Vista is currently working on an optimized port of its
Linux environment for Sun’s ATCA blade platform and multi-core AMD Opteron
processor-based blade server.
…
Kayote Networks, Inc., has announced the launch
of its flagship hosted VoIP traffic management solution, FronTier, designed to let
carriers and internet telephony service providers deploy VoIP networks. It will
be commercially available in Q4 2005.
Companies spend “small fortunes” setting up their own VoIP
operations “which require elaborate Session Border Controllers and routing
engine hardware, software licensing agreements, and expensive support contracts,”
a Kayote company spokesman said.
Kayote’s FronTier is being marketed to combine “the features
of an SBC and routing engine with robust management and reporting tools, all
within a secure environment.” It’s engineered to handle the technical
intricacies associated with VoIP networks, and according to a company spokesman
eliminate the need for carriers and ITSPs to train and maintain complete VoIP
network technical teams.
…
Empirix Inc., a vendor of testing,
monitoring and management products for VoIP, voice and Web, has announced the launch of a new version of
its Hammer XMS next-generation monitoring system for VoIP service
providers.
Hammer XMS 1.4 contains new features, including support for
new protocols including H.323, ISDN, TCAP; improvements to Hammer XMS’ media
analysis capabilities with new RTP statistics and improved diagnostics; new
Error by Type Report; and enhanced call correlation to better handle NATing in
Session Border Controllers.
…
Acme Packet has announced that Internet service
provider EarthLink has deployed Acme Packet’s Net-Net session border
controllers to support the delivery of EarthLink’s upcoming voice services.
These services include EarthLink trueVoice, the next
generation of its residential VoIP service, which enables consumers to make
local and long distance calls to regular phone numbers using a high-speed data
connection. Features included are call waiting, call blocking, call forwarding,
caller ID with name, voicemail, three-way calling, and low-priced international
rates.
Other services include EarthLink’s Vling, now in beta, the
next generation of EarthLink’s free online calling service that features
instant text instant messaging from buddy lists using a personal computer.
EarthLink will also roll out EarthLink Line Powered Voice,
which will begin market trials in San Francisco, Seattle and Dallas in late
2005.
...
LineSider Communications, an IP voice/data
management and converged communications vendor, has announced the availability of SecureVoIP, what company officials
are hailing as “the industry’s first policy-based VoIP security service.”
The SecureVoIP product is being marketed as providing the
enterprise customer with a policy-based security management and network control
capability to automatically provision, implement and manage VoIP
communications, to the device and user application level.
…
Juniper Networks,
Inc. has announced that Sterling Internet Solutions, an Internet
service provider for corporations and small businesses, has chosen the Juniper Networks integrated firewall and virtual private
network product as the backbone for its voice over Internet protocol
offering.
...
Ever been to Boston in the fall? Hear it’s nice.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
