FreeNum Links Phone Numbers to the Internet
I loved John Todd's ETel presentation (podcast) on FreeNum, a scheme for bringing phone numbers to the Internet. Of course, I love identifiers and addresses and all that they enable, so it was a natural. Suppose you were a university campus and when you looked at your phone bill, you noticed that a lot of calls were to other universities. You've got a VoIP telephone system; they've all got VoIP telephone systems. You might wonder "isn't there some way to route these calls over the Internet and save some serious money?" The answer, of course is "yes" but making
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Why You Should Love CALEA
I published a show from Emerging Telephony on IT Conversations that consisted of three lightening talks by Bill Weinberg, Brad Templeton, and Johannes Ernst. Bill gave a good talk about open phones and why we don't have one yet. Open phones are a subject I care about, so I enjoyed that. Johannes gave one of the best short presentations I've heard on the multiple identifier problem. But Brad really entertained with his talk on why you should love CALEA. Brad's talk starts about 15 minutes in. Actually, I should clarify. Brad didn't really give the presentation, rather it was
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Action Needed: Contact Your Legislator on VoIP Taxation
Tomorrow the Utah House will start debating a bill to add the E911 tax to VoIP in Utah. I wrote about the bill earlier and why I think it's a bad idea. If you live in Utah, contact your legislator by email as soon as possible and tell them that infeasible to tax VoIP and that you're opposed to it.
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Can You Regulate VoIP?
House Bill 119 (First Substitute) would tax VoIP service for E911 service: 3 (a) Except as provided in Subsection (3)(b) and subject to the other provisions of this Subsection (3) a county, city, or town within which 911 emergency telephone service is provided may levy monthly an emergency services telephone charge on: ... (iii) any other service, including voice over Internet protocol, provided to a user within the boundaries of the county, city, or town that allows the user to make calls to and receive calls from the public switched telephone network, including commercial mobile radio service networks. Of
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DHCP Wars
Here's a little gem for you: Vonage sends out the Linksys RTP300 analog telephone adapter (ATA) with DHCP enabled by default. That's handy when it's the only router you've got, but when you plug it into your network and it starts fighting with your other DHCP server, life gets interesting.
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CTO Breakfast Report for September
Carl Youngblood told us of his experience as the sole technical person in a small construction loan wholesaling company. He's building a Rails application to automate the process and using an Indian outsourcing company to do much of the work under his direction. I was fascinated to hear how he had managed to set up an outsourcing contract and managed the work as a small shop. I mentioned that Yukihiro Matsumoto, or Matz, the creator or Ruby will be giving the colloquium in the BYU CS Department on Oct 19th. Eric Smith gave us a run down of Control4,
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Controlling Vonage from Your Desktop
This morning, while I was listening to Ajay Madhok on IT Conversations, I was thinking it would be cool if I could manage what number my Vonage number forwarded to using an API. Then I could use the presence information in my IM application to drive where that one number sent my calls. Sometimes I want them to ring through to the handset, sometimes I want them to go to my cell and often I want them to go straight to voicemail (I hate telephones). Well, Vonage doesn't have an API, but they do have a very cool RESTful
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Will Vonage Die?
This analysis from Art Reisman says that Vonage is going to die. Art's claim is that once the incumbent players decide that VoIP is a real challenge there's nothing to keep them from offering the service more efficiently at the same price-points. I don't disagree with this view to a degree. I've looked at VoIP as a business in some depth on some prior business deals I was considering and there's nothing about what Vonage is doing from a technology or business standpoint that offers significant competitive advantage. What's more, this is a business where margins are thin and
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Switching to Vonage
Home patch panel(click to enlarge) Today was the day I finally made the break with Qwest. I've been paying twice what I would for Vonage's best service and not getting as many features. I've had Vonage as my business line for a few years now and have been happy with it so I decided I'd transfer the main number to Vonage as well and say goodbye to my ILEC. I get my broadband access from Comcast and it's been pretty reliable. The few problems I've had have been DNS and that doesn't affect VoIP--it kept right on working. The other
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Asterisk Users Group in Utah
There's a new Asterisk user's group forming Utah and their first meeting is tonight. If you're not familiar with Asterisk, it's an open source PBX that is extremely capable. Update: The formatting bug in the hCalendar that Jon mentions has been fixed. The formatting kept the "download" link from appearing. I also changed the spelling. :-)
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