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January 24, 2005

The Tipping Point for VOIP?

The Times On Line reports that Google will offer voice over internet protocol or VOIP in England. If so it represents a major milestone in VOIP's history. This may be when we can say that VOIP has gone mainstream.

The Times on Line (external link) reports

Google gears up for a free-phone challenge to BT

By Elizabeth Judge, Telecoms Correspondent

"GOOGLE revolutionised the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with our phones."

"The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer."

"The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it."

"BT, which connects seven out of ten British households, has developed its own internet-telephone service. However, the telephone giant, which has the most to lose if the new technology takes off, has been reluctant to promote it heavily . . ."

There's a nice article here (external link to SF Gate)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/02/09/BUGMD4R8I81.DTL

on current experiences with voice over internet protocol or VOIP. Audio quality varies tremendously, between that of a shortwave radio transmission to a fairly good cell phone call. It's all about moving bits; as such I've written around VOIP's edges quite a bit, all of these are internal links: bits, packets and switching, TC/IP, and digital principles.

January 23, 2005

I've been sick all weekend but I have been contemplating how better to explain the electromagnetic spectrum (external link) was <http://www.jsc.mil/images/speccht.jpg> I thought at first one could compare it to a rainbow, with the colors representing bands of frequencies. But that gets too confusing, since radio waves aren't visible, and thus without color. Why suggest something in the visible light band to represent something invisible? And then I thought of different laser light colors used in fiber optics. There are red lights and green and so on. When I investigated further, however, it turns out visible light component of a laser isn't really related to the frequencies it carries. Most often, in the case of fiber optic transmission, the infrared region is used. These are wavelengths longer than visible light, above that band, typically around 850, 1300 and 1550 nanometers. Hmm. I blame my confusion on my fever.

January 20, 2005

Q. Why don't you write about telecom history after 1984? (internal link)

A. It's too big a subject for the time I have to write about it. After the Bell System breakup in 1984 companies and competition flourished, hundreds and then thousands of new suppliers entered the market. In 1985 the first American commercial cellular networks were started, recreating wireless as an industry. Pre-paid phone cards and alternative long distance companies enjoyed success, creating business where none existed before. I could cite a dozen more examples of telecoms' Competition era, which I date from 1984 to 1996. We're now nine years on to something else, which continues to quicken the pace and broaden the scope of everything communications. I call this era The Rise of IP Networking.

In 1996 the commercial internet began developing in earnest. It's based on what's known as the internet protocol or IP (internal link). For many reasons nearly all telecom companies are moving to IP and replacing their old circuit switched technology with packet switching (internal link). Once every company and individual uses IP, everyone and every network can provide or use a service on cable, telephone, broadband wireless, cellular radio (perhaps), power line, or satellite links. The transmission media may differ but the content carried may be the same or close to it.

January 19, 2005

Continuing gloom this week over the central valley of California. High fog and low clouds. I went up to the Auburn area to hike and prospect in the sun. At a thousand feet the city was still somewhat decked in gray. Along the trail I noticed two California Poppies struggling to bloom. A good sign of warmer weather. I must be optimistic, in only three weeks almond trees and mustard will be blooming and spring will have begun.

Telephone History Circa 1952

From Don Kimberlin: (internal link)

I finally got around to reading that 1952 file, Tom, and it was fun -- kinda like some hot chocolate and cookies. While the content was stuff I had learned being "on the inside," I can guess that in 1952 it was, as it was even decades later, a "great revelation" to outsiders.

http://www.ndu.edu/library/ic2/L52-107.pdf (external link, 3.8 megs!)

The vast majority of the public has never been invited to peer behind the Oz-like veil to the inside of the telephone plant, so when they are given a snatch of information, they are thoroughly impressed. I got tickled at all the pages of stats marked "Restricted," since they were simply stats from the FCC reports common carriers had to make every year. The maps of plant routes are simply a few that someone inside the company passed out to placate an influential inquisitor.

I was able to recall that in 1962 and into the 1970s, AT&T had only 5 high-capacity routes, some microwave and some cable, crossing the Rocky Mountains. In 1990, that's all they still had, although some of the routes now had fiber optic cable on them. And, now, going back to that 1951 document, we can see they only had 3 routes back then. Other than some points like that, AT&T is and was not about to bother itself with drawing tidy maps of where every telephone cable was in every city, nor where every radio circuit went. They had all this in documentary records of connectivity, but not those neat maps for the public.

Speaking of that, I must tell you about the really great security system they had for government secret private line circuits. They were, of course, inside the relatively secure offices of The Phone Company, but they were simply there, intermingled with all the other stuff from Muzak and radio broadcast loops to burglar alarm circuits and press wires, to foreign exchange phone lines and bank or brokerage data circuits, so when one went pawing through tens of thousands of record cards, one wouldn't even know what he was handling, unless he knew what he was looking for and what The Phone Company called it. So, if I, as an AT&T plant employee, made a deal with the Russians, which I could have done, I could have made photocopies of circuit cards (we all did that quiite a lot), taken them home and sold them, with interpretive info, so the Russians could have bombed Uncle's strategic telecoms heavily. But who would think of doing that?

http://www.ndu.edu/library/ic2/L52-107.pdf (external link, 3.8 megs!)

Princess

My virtual sister Sharon chided me for not writing about her birthday in these daily notes. So this mention will have to make up for it. Happy Birthday, Princess! Life has not been the same without you.

January 18, 2005

4:00 p.m. P.S.T. Yes, there was an e-mail problem with Yahoo. They have now delivered three days of mail into my inbox. Will go through it tonight.

Resend your e-mail today if I don't reply in a day or two. My mail traffic has suddenly dropped by at least two-thirds. I suspect Yahoo.com has put in more aggressive junk mail filters so they may be trashing your e-mail at the same time.

Want a fun site? Old Bell System ads by the dozen are here: http://www.bambootrading.com/paper/telephone_ads.asp (external link)

January 17, 2005

Dealing with customer service

Q. I'm having a terrible time dealing with Verizon's customer service. This is about *288. Any advice?

A. From J.R. Snyder Jr.:

Option 1 usually programs the phone with a changed telephone number.

Option 2 updates the PRL. As Mark van der Hoek has said previously, *228 updates the mobile's PRL, the Preferred Roaming List. That's a list of what channels and what operators the phone can use, and affects your ability to roam. If the PRL isn't right, you can have problems. Telling a customer to do a *228 has become a shortcut way for customer service to get you off the line.

It would be fair to say that most Customer Service Reps are pretty clueless. These are the people who answer the phone on Verizon's 611 or 800 numbers. They are not Tier 1 anything, not Technical Support anyway. Their objective is to get you off the line so they can sell, sell, sell. . ." continues here ---> (internal link)

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