Disruptive Telephony

Today, December 14, 2011, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding the second of two workshops on the transition of the PSTN to new technologies, as I described last week. The workshop will be streamed live today starting at 9:30am US Eastern at:

http://www.fcc.gov/live

The FCC's note about the workshops mentions that people watching live can send in questions to panelists using either of two methods:

• by e-mailing [email protected]
• tweeting on Twitter using the hashtag #FCCLIVE

Today's sessions look to be quite interesting and contain quite a range of participants. The full schedule and list of participants is available on the FCC's web site (click on "Expand" in the lower right corner of the page), but here is the brief list:

---

9:30 a.m. – 9:40 a.m.
Welcome Remarks
by Zachary Katz, Chief Counsel and Senior Legal Advisor, Office of the Chairman, FCC

9:40 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.
Impact of the Transition on the Technology and Economics of the PSTN
Participants include: University of Colorado, Carnegie Mellon, George Washington University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Gillan Associates, SIP Forum

10:45 a.m. – 11:45 p.m.
Policies of the PSTN (e.g., accessibility, reliability, affordability, and public safety)
Participants include: Tufts University, Consumer Federation of America, University of Wisconsin, Neustar

1:00 p.m. – 2:10 p.m.
Implementing the Transition to New Networks
Participants include: Verizon, Comcast, Carnegie Mellon, National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA), XO Communications

2:10 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.
Syncing Expectations, Emerging Technologies and the Public Good
Participants include: Georgetown University, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania – Wharton, Acme Packet, Panasonic Systems Networks

3:20 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Economic Rationales for PSTN Transition
Participants include: Queens College, Indiana University, Syracuse University, Sanford Bernstein, University of Auckland, NZ

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• adding me to a circle on Google+;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

What is the future of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)? As we transition away from traditional telecom technologies to a world based on IP communications, what are the policy, technical and economic implications?

As I recently wrote over on CircleID, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding two workshops on this topic of what comes next for the PSTN.

The first workshop, tomorrow, December 6, 2012, will cover "what obstacles and opportunities the transition may create regarding public safety, accessibility, and ubiquitous service".

The second workshop on December 14, 2012, will cover "a wide array of economic, technological, and policy issues that need to be addressed as consumers choose to subscribe to, and rely on, new technologies and services."

The FCC's Public Notice about these PSTN Transition Workshops contains information about how to attend, both in person and via the FCC's live stream at http://www.fcc.gov/live.

The meeting tomorrow will begin at 9:00 am US Eastern time.

If you are in the Washington, DC, area and able to get to these workshops, it may be a great opportunity to join with others in expressing to the FCC a vision for what we want for the post-PSTN communications infrastructure.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• adding me to a circle on Google+;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Kudos to my friend Eric Krapf and his whole team for the redesign of one of my favorite sites for VoIP and Unified Communications news:

http://www.nojitter.com/

Way back in late 2007, Eric started as the "lead blogger" for NoJitter as the long-standing Business Communications Review (BCR) magazine shut down its print operation and decided to forge a new direction in the online world.

It's been great to see the growth of NoJitter over these past four years, and it's been great to see so many of my friends within the industry writing there.

With this new redesign, Eric mentions many of the new features, but the one I look forward to seeing most is the better commenting system. That was one major drawback of the previous site... hopefully this one works much better.

All in all I quite like the new look and congratulate Eric and the whole team there on the re-launch!

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• adding me to a circle on Google+;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Want to learn more about the Adhearsion framework that lets you easily create telephony and other communication apps using the Ruby language? On tomorrow's VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call at 12 noon US Eastern, Ben Klang from the Adhearsion project will be talking about all that's new in Adhearsion-land, including the upcoming AdhearsionConf 2011 in October in San Francisco.

I've written about Adhearsion before and while I don't do much with Ruby myself, the power of Adhearsion to create powerful telephony apps in a few lines of code is pretty amazing.

If you'd like to join the VUC call live tomorrow, the info is:

• SIP: [email protected] (works with wideband!)
• Skype: vuc.me
• Regular old PSTN phone: +15672522286

There's also a very active IRC backchannel (#vuc on free node) that provides another way to communicate during the call.

Fascinating news out of the Google Chrome team yesterday: the latest developer build of Google Chrome now supports audio signal processing directly in JavaScript!

To say that more simply… right now to do good audio communication on the web, you have to use plugins built in Flash, QuickTime or Java. This Web Audio API aims to let you do much of that audio control via JavaScript and HTML5. From the specification intro:

Audio on the web has been fairly primitive up to this point and until very recently has had to be delivered through plugins such as Flash and QuickTime. The introduction of the audio element in HTML5 is very important, allowing for basic streaming audio playback. But, it is not powerful enough to handle more complex audio applications. For sophisticated web-based games or interactive applications, another solution is required. It is a goal of this specification to include the capabilities found in modern game audio engines as well as some of the mixing, processing, and filtering tasks that are found in modern desktop audio production applications.

The Web Audio API specification, which is a proposal for a standard being discussed in the W3C's Audio Working Group includes a set of example applications, including multi-player games like Quake, musical examples and more.

If you want to live on the edge with the "Beta Channel" of Google Chrome builds (I do), you can even go over to Google's page of Web Audio examples to try it out yourself.

It's great to see this support in Google Chrome as it can help us continue the move away from proprietary browser plugins to more standards-based solutions - and through that to a more open Internet. Kudos to the Google team for rolling out the support - I'm looking forward to seeing what people build with it!

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

As I posted over on the Voxeo Talks blog recently, über-geek Chris Pirillo recently interviewed VoIP industry veteran Jeff Pulver and Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor on the topic of the future of real-time communications. It was a wide ranging interview talking about the history of communication apps, how VoIP has evolved, the role of standards, issues around bandwidth caps, the role of individuals and so much more. Chris explained a bit more on his site.. The video is now available on YouTube:

As a producer of video interviews, I was personally intrigued by Chris' use of a Google+ "Hangout" to conduct the interview. I'm going to have to try it at some point.

Enjoy the video!

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• adding me to a circle on Google+;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Want to understand the history of Voice over IP (VoIP)? To learn about the various protocols and standards efforts that got us to where we are today?

Shawn Merdinger recently posted to the VOIPSEC mailing list the link to this Google Tech Talk back in August 2010 about the history of VoIP. The video runs close to 2 hours but provides a really good background in terms of the protocols and efforts starting with ARPA work back in the 1970's and moving up to today... well worth a viewing if you want to gain some historical context for where we are today.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

So which would you rather do? Watch the Royal Wedding? Or talk about all things XMPP with a bunch of VoIP and telephony geeks?

If you'd prefer the latter, then join the VUC conf call at 12 noon US Eastern on Friday, April 29, for a lengthy dive into all things XMPP. (XMPP being the "Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol" originally known as the Jabber protocol.)

As noted on the show page the session will feature Emil Ivov of Jitsi.org (formerly SIP Communicator) and Thiago Rocha Camargo (of Nimbuzz) and is going to cover a whole range of topics:

• What is XMPP/Jabber
• How does one do telephony with XMPP
• How does XMPP/Jingle compare to SIP and (why) is it better.
• Who supports it
• Facebook and their XMPP gateway
• Google Talk
• Nimbuzz – one of the biggest VoIP providers using XMPP as their primary protocol
• NAT traversal
• How does one do it with XMPP
• Again, how is this part different from what we have with SIP
• Media relaying with TURN and Jingle Nodes

I am a big fan of XMPP on the IM/messaging side so I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Today's VUC conf call at 12 noon US Eastern will feature guests from Inphonex speaking about their new "Televate" system. From the abstract:

InPhonex recently launched Televate, a cloud-based telephony system that combines the business-communications capabilities of a hosted PBX, hosted IVR and hosted CRM. Televate, to be sold through channel partners, is designed to help SMBs appear larger than they actually are and ramp up productivity to compete more effectively. The service works anywhere inside or outside the office, enabling SMBs to support global operations and customer bases.

I am not familiar with the product myself, so I'll be joining in to listen and learn.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• following me on Twitter;
• subscribing to my email newsletter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Hot on the heels of the new release of the PhonoSDK I wrote about last week, Dave Hoff over in Voxeo Labs came out with a new "Callme Button" demo that's very cool. As he describes in his blog post on the Phono blog, adding a "call me" button to a website is now as simple as adding this snippet of JavaScript to your web page:

$("body").append(
   $("<div/>")
    .css("width","210px")
    .callme({
      apiKey: "C17D167F-09C6-4E4C-A3DD-2025D48BA243",
      numberToDial: "8007773456",
      buttonTextReady: "1-800-777-FILM",
      slideOpen:true
    })
  )

There is a Callme "demo page" online at:

http://s.phono.com/releases/0.2/samples/callme/index.htm

That shows how you could create a button with or without a dialpad and in various themes:

The source code is naturally there for you to play with if you want to do so.

Cool stuff!

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---