Seven Generational Ruminations

Whoop, I'd missed this news earlier .. and as a Vonage customer this has me a bit worried. Fortunately nobody knows my Vonage number, so if I'd made Vonage my primary telephone provider this would be a major problem. So, what's the problem?

In AT&T chief, FCC chair clarify on Net neutrality a C|NET News report offers a confused picture from the AT&T CEO. At issue are statements by several telephone company CEO's saying they need to charge large bandwidth users for access to their networks. That is, there are several bandwidth-hungry large and popular Internet services which represent a large amount of the Internet traffic. For example:

This is an issue I've been tracking, namely how well do the VOIP providers provide emergency dialing service. The VOIP providers want to replace the normal telephone companies, so the VOIP providers had better be able to provide all those services. But as I've noted in previous postings, some of the VOIP providers are dragging their feet.

The VOIP providers have seemingly been worrying the telephone companies. According to Skype and Vonage: thank you, and goodnight, VOIP competition forced the telephone companies to increase services over broadband connections such as adding VOIP service. That's not quite accurate since I recall AT&T offering local "phone" service over cable TV back when they owned the cable network that is now Comcast (@HOME).

Okay! Vonage files for IPO I guess it's a sign of maturity for some technology when the startups that implemented the technology become "Public Companies". Here we go with VOIP, first it was Skype being bought by eBay, now it's Vonage filing for an IPO.

The article discusses how Vonage is still in the "losing money" stage of startup-hood. Of course a company that's eternally losing money is not a stable company.

Over the last few months the VOIP providers have been facing a requirement to provide emergency dialing. In the U.S. this is '911' but in other countries a different phone number is used. There have been a few cases where people buy VOIP service, cut off their regular telephone service, then end up having an emergency and then they died because the VOIP service routed them to a non-emergency phone.

The VOIP providers have been required by the FCC to provide correctly functioning "911" emergency dialing services. In some cases the VOIP providers have been kicking up a fuss, claiming they shouldn't be required to bear this burden. What I've been saying is that if they want to replace the regular telephone system, then they should be providing the same functionality as the regular telephone system. In particular 911 emergency dialing is a vital part of society, widely known, and widely expected to be part of telephone service.

Last week I posted a note about Skype announcements at CES. An interesting thing was a "Skype Speakerphone" called the Xing. Today I see announcements of a few more Speakerphone devices you can use with Skype.

The Consumer Electronics show is happening this week. No doubt there are thousands of interesting announcements to mull over, but I'm interested in Skypes.

Panasonic And Skype Collaborate on new family of Internet calling products: An announcement that Panasonic will be selling Skype compatible cordless telephones. They'll be able to do skype-skype, skypein and skypeout calls.

Linksys to launch VoIP handset for Skype: The model name will be "Linksys CIT200" and is described as being a portable phone. It will be launched in Brazil (?other areas later?). I find this interesting because Vonage uses Linksys equipment as well. Their deal with Vonage obviously is not exclusive.