The Michigan Telephone blog

MSNBC today asked the question, “Why raise prices when all you need is a fee?” (Subtitle: “Phone companies, unable to raise prices, find other ways to charge more.” Boy, do they ever!).

The article makes a couple of points that echo things I’ve been saying for quite some time now:

In just about every other industry but telecommunications, the advertised price of a good or service reflects the entire cost of that product except for taxes and, in cases such as a cab or restaurant, the tip. Sometimes, as with gasoline, the advertised price covers all applicable taxes.

Not so with phone service, where it’s become a widely accepted norm for companies to advertise rates that don’t come close to reflecting the final tab a customer will pay. Airlines have been treading this path also, advertising one rate, then adding on surcharges for rising fuel and security costs.

Actually, I would not have used the term “widely accepted” here. If you surveyed phone service customers, my bet is that at least 9 out of 10 would like to see all the hidden fees disclosed prominently in advertising (the tenth would likely be an employee of, or stockholder of one of the companies that engage in this practice). This is even becoming a problem among VoIP service providers – with some, the price they advertise is pretty much the price you pay (there may be local sales taxes if you live in the company’s home state, but that’s about it) whereas others tack on a “regulatory recovery fee”, or some other fee that’s not disclosed in the ads. Therefore, how can a potential customer make a valid price comparison?

Indeed, to use the term “widely accepted” here, you should put it in the proper context. Such as, “It’s widely accepted that when a gun-toting lunatic puts a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you should give it to him.” It’s probably in about the same spirit that these added fees are “widely accepted.”

The article further states:

Automakers don’t tack on a special fee for the costs of complying with factory safety laws. A supermarket doesn’t add a nickel surcharge for every quart of ice cream or milk to cover the store’s rising refrigeration costs. Those expenses are reflected in the price.

Methinks the author of this article might have read something I wrote, because I’ve used the “gallon of milk” analogy many times (usually when I use it, it’s along the lines of “How would you like it if the store advertised a gallon of milk at a really good price and then when you got to the cash register they tacked on a buck or so for the ‘mad cow testing fee’”?).

I think phone service ought to be sold like gasoline – they take all the fees and taxes and roll them into the advertised price. I notice a few VoIP providers have done this but the biggest ones *cough*Vonage*cough* still tack on added fees.

Technorati Tags: consumer, voip, telephone, telecommunications, consumer, MichiganTelephone

Just wanted to point out this item from Jeff Pulver’s blog:

“Son of a BITS III” – The House Energy and Commerce Committee Releases the text of the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act (COPE) of 2006:

As Congress now embarks on major efforts to rewrite the laws governing the future of communications and the Internet, I ask you all to consider joining the VON Coalition at this critical moment. This is the year that the policy debate will rage and shape how we communicate and what we might do to evolve the Internet.

Here is the most recent evidence (and please note that we have not had a chance to parse through the entirety of the draft legislation):

Republicans on the US House Energery and Commerce Committee have just released the attached Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act (COPE) of 2006 (aka “Son of a BITS III” or “Grandson of a BITS”) and scheduled a hearing on for Thurs. March 30, 10 a.m. in 2123 Rayburn.

There has been broad recent trade press coverage about a partisan breakdown on the bill. Nonetheless, the VON Coalitions efforts to ensure that the bill does not include broad new regulation of VoIP (as contemplated in the original draft) have been successful. The bill also recognizes that VoIP providers also need enabling tools like E911 and has included language (Title III). The bill also includes network neutrality language (Title II). …..

Read the rest of Jeff’s post here.
A lot of the news lately is hinting that Net Neutrality lergislation is going nowhere – I hope that Jeff’s Freedom-to-Connect Conference next week can help turn that around.

Technorati Tags: VoIP, Net Neutrality, legislation, regulation, MichiganTelephone

Earlier this month I set up a “Linkroll” on the side of this blog. I liked the concept, but unfortunately either the bookmarklet code used for posting is flaky, or maybe Firefox is. Either way, here’s what happened: After I made a few posts to the linkroll, my browser would suddenly not be able to get out to the Internet, just as if my ‘net connection had shut down. Except it wasn’t just Firefox – I could bring up Opera and it would not get out to the ‘net either (I don’t use that “Exploder” browser).
It almost seemed as though something was chewing up all the available HTTP connections and not releasing them, or something.

A smarter person than I might be able to figure out exactly what is happening, but after having to reboot my system twice within a couple of hours, I just gave up – it’s not worth it. I don’t blame the author for not being able to fix this, since I’m apparently in the minority of people having this problem and he probably can’t reproduce it on his system, but I simply cannot have my computer suddenly unable to go out to the web like that. If there were some alternate way to post items that didn’t make my system flake out I might use it (this is actually something that might deserve its own Firefox extension) but I’ve spent way too much time fighting this and getting stressed out because of it.

I’m not saying I would never try it again, but I’d have to have some assurance that whatever is causing the loss of connectivity has been corrected. Maybe if more people start using that service, someone else will experience the same problem and will figure out how to fix it.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, Firefox, MichiganTelephone

Every now and then, someone remarks to me about how few people they know that still use wireline phone service. It happens often enough that I’m beginning to wonder if the traditional phone companies might be inflating their subscriber counts (perhaps by still counting former customers that have only dropped their landline service in the past year or so) in order to maintain the appearance of having a healthy, viable wireline business for a while longer.

One of the common things I hear is that a lot of young people are using their cell phones exclusively. Of course, the fact that is implied by that statement is that a lot of older people don’t have cell phones, or at least, still retain their wireline phones. And I think there’s a reason for that, thought some of you may not agree with my reasoning.

You see, sad to say, I think that younger people have been conditioned to accept that fact that the big corporations are going to try to rip them off, and they should just accept the fact that it’s inevitable and pay the bill. Whereas, us older folks (never thought I’d use THAT phrase!) remember a time when even big corporations were supposed to conduct themselves in a somewhat honorable manner. Many corporations nowadays treat their customers with a thinly-veiled air of contempt, and older people are far more likely to say “to the hell with you!” and refuse to do business with that company ever again.

One thing I personally really hate is being billed for a charge that I didn’t agree to pay. I don’t care if it’s large or small, my opinion of a company that engages in such billing practices is that “they’re a bunch of thieves.” Now I say all that because I read somewhere a while back that the cell phone companies are trying to get more customers, and since nearly every teenager in America now has a cell phone, they’re starting to focus on older Americans. It’s sort of a marketing challenge for them because older folks tend to have different wants than younger folks. The younger folks tend to be “gadget freaks” whereas, once you get to a certain age (I’d say somewhere between 40 and 60) the appeal of gadgetry starts to fade, and you start looking more at things like user-friendliness and reliability – and maybe bigger buttons so you can see what you’re dialing.

But also, I think that at some point in your lifetime you start to think, “I’m not a naive teenager anymore, if these companies are somehow managing to stick me with charges I didn’t agree to pay, maybe it’s because they’re trying to rip people off, not because I didn’t try to understand what I was buying.” In other words, you become less accepting of businesses that show contempt toward customers (and the older you get, I think the less accepting you become).

And I say all that to point out that there’s a pretty large market of senior citizens and “upper-middle aged” people out there that the wireless companies are never going to get if they keep generating bad publicity for themselves, as in this story that’s running today in some Gannett News Service papers:

Chuck Torrie cringed every time he opened his dead wife’s cell phone bills.

Month after month, the bills continued to arrive, piling on service charges and late fees to a bill for a phone that hadn’t been flipped on since she died.

The Black Canyon City, Ariz., man tried unsuccessfully for months to fight the charges. He eventually negotiated a deal to pay nearly $1,100 in charges in exchange for the carrier’s agreement to knock off $450.

“They said, ‘Send us the death certificate and we’ll zero out the account,’” says Torrie, a retired Arizona Highway Patrol sergeant. “I paid the balance by phone, but I continued to get the bills. It eventually went to credit.”

Read the rest of the article here.
This is a nightmare scenario of many senior citizens – a big corporation acting like a bully and continuing to send bills to their relatives after they’re dead. I can just imagine that a lot of seniors will read this article (or hear about this in some way) and will say to themselves, “Well, that just caps it, I’ll never get one of those doggone cell phones!”

The above-mentioned article goes on to give other examples of the disconnect between cell phone companies and customers/potential customers. If the cell companies keep up these abusive tactics, not only to they run the risk of losing customers, but sooner or later they will invite government regulation. One of these days they will try to rip off the wrong person – an influential senator’s parent or other close relative, perhaps – and that will be the beginning of the end of their unregulated freedom. But in the meantime, the bad publicity will likely cost them perhaps hundreds of thousands of customers.

But you know what? I doubt that they care. They’re corporations. That means that no one individual needs to feel responsible when they screw up. Everyone is “just doing their job”, “just following corporate policy.” Corporations, particularly large ones, have no soul, and the entire corporate structure is designed to keep lowly customers from talking to anyone who might a) care and b) have the authority to make changes in “corporate policy”, or even bend it in an individual case. Mr. Torrie may eventually get a refund because the newspaper article will be read by those in the corporate offices, but how many other customers are in similar situations and are not able to get any action because they can’t get past first-level call takers?

Technorati Tags: cellular, regulation, telecommunications, telephone, consumer, MichiganTelephone

Blogger Ted Wallingford says he noticed something peculiar, and new, about his Comcast Internet service today. He writes:

My wife called me from the road on her cell phone to ask if I could look up a phone number on the Internet. As i was calling up web pages while speaking with her on our Packet8 service, I noticed that the web page loads slowed almost completely to a halt. Meanwhile, our call continued, crystal clear. When I hung up the call, my web page loads zoomed back to the normal, swift speed.

Thinking it was just odd timing or a typical Internet hiccup, I called her back and ran the experiment again. Same result. During the call, page loads were slow. After the call was over, page loads were fast.

Read Ted’s complete article here.

In case you didn’t bother to follow the link above, Ted wonders if Comcast is trying out some sort of packet queuing or Quality of Service. But even if they are trying something like that, it seems to me that if there’s a noticeable slowdown of web browsing while one is on a VoIP call, then Comcast isn’t doing whatever they’re trying to do very well, because there should be more than ample bandwidth for both the call and the browsing to take place simultaneously. Ted notes that in the past, even with heavy Internet activity his call quality has nearly always been fine. Unfortunately, that’s not been true for every Comcast customer recently.

What Ted doesn’t suggest, but I will, is that perhaps this is part of Comcast’s attempt to fix the problems that have plagued Comcast users that also have VoIP (particularly Vonage) service recently. People have been suspicious that Comcast was deliberately blocking packets (and I’m certainly not discounting that possibility) but if it really wasn’t deliberate, as Comcast has claimed, then I would imagine that for the past few weeks they’ve been trying to find out just why VoIP customers in certain areas are having problems.

Maybe what Ted experienced was the result of a partially botched attempt by Comcast to fix those original problems. I tend to think that Comcast may be looking down the barrel of a gun (in the form of possible FCC fines) if they don’t get the problems fixed real soon, so maybe their idea now is to get something going that will insure that VoIP packets get through, then come back and optimize it later, or something like that. Of course the more sinister theory is that they will set up a nice QoS scheme, then demand that VoIP providers pay them extortion money to use it (otherwise the VoIP packets of those companies will be among the packets that get noticeably delayed). I’m hoping it’s that Comcast really wants to make sure that all VoIP users get quality service, but even so, there’s really no good reason there should be a noticeable slowdown for other types of Internet usage. Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board, so to speak…

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, VoIP, Comcast, telephone, telecommunications, MichiganTelephone

The phone companies have lately figured out some things about Americans – many of us love a sale, and hate the nuisance of paying bills, and especially writing checks. So their solution is one-stop shopping – all your communications needs from a single company. The problem, though, is that the actual cost of all those services often turns out to be higher than expected. The Washington Post tells the story of the Dorman family, which signed up for a Verizon bundle that included Fios TV back in Novermber:

The Dormans signed up for a phone line, another Internet phone, high-speed Internet, and television service, and they say they were told they could cancel services they didn’t want after the introductory period.

Initially, the service worked well; a third month went by before they received a bill. But when it arrived, it totaled $305 — loaded with fees and services they weren’t expecting. Some premium services they had canceled were still on the bill, and the Dormans were paying $1.71 a minute for long-distance calls, which they thought should have been more like 10 cents a minute.

“The only reason I did it was to save money, and it doesn’t,” said Vicky Dorman, who got so angry looking at the bill that she turned to her husband, Jeff, and said, “You deal with it.”

Read the complete article here.

Consumers really don’t want bundles, per se. If you think about it, there are really only two reasons people sign up for service bundles: They’re trying to save money, or they’re trying to cut the number of bills they have to pay (I realize that there’s sometimes a third reason – the customer was “sold” on the bundle – but most people have to perceive that there’s either a financial savings or a convenience factor in getting the bundle). And I’d guess that for most subscribers, it’s all about the money.

So when the bills come in and they are far higher than expected, people can get sour on service bundles pretty fast. That is good news for independent providers, of course. I’ve actually heard people postulate that independent VoIP companies can’t survive when everyone can buy a bundle that includes VoIP or some equivalent service. I think that’s nonsense – just because there are two or three big providers of a service doesn’t mean everyone wants to deal with one of those companies.

Mark my words, one of these days (sooner or later) some smart company will start advertising “you don’t have to buy a bundle of services to get our best prices.” And I would not be surprised if that’s the company that winds up doing much better than anyone expected!

Technorati Tags: telecommunications, broadband, telephone, consumer, VoIP, MichiganTelephone

From IP Democracy comes this item: “In a move no doubt engineered by the cable industry, two leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus have registered their objections to the phone companies’ seeming success in gaining favorable franchising rights in upcoming House telecom reform legislation.”

The article concludes this way:

Cable’s representatives are calling this letter a “big blow” to the telcos’ efforts to gain the right to hand-pick only the best communities for video deployments. Although that spin overstates the case, it does seem that the telcos are now on the defensive and will probably have to justify their right to hand-pick service areas…justification that will be hard to sell given that there’s no denying that most of the areas that phone companies wish to service with video are upper-income and non-minority.

Now I will grant that the cable industry probably had something to do with this, but then it’s not as though the big phone companies have never used “astroturf” organizations or “sock puppets” in this same way. And in this case, I don’t think their distorting the reality much.

The basic problem is, when a cable company takes out a local franchise with a city, unless the city leaders are dumber than a box of rocks, they will usually extract some sort of promise, in writing, from the cable company that most or all of the city will have cable service within a certain time. And usually, the cable companies keep their promises (note I said usually, not always) or at most there’s a little “time slippage” that takes place, so the promises aren’t met within the promised timeframe but maybe later they are.

Compare this to the phone companies, that basically think they can give legislators and regulators any old type of snow job and yet in the back of their minds are thinking that the only way they will eer keep any of their promises is if it’s convenient for them to do so, and has a positive impact on their bottom line (see the link at the right to the 200 Billion Broadband Scandal if you need examples of this). In other words, at least in my perception, cable companies keep their promises to a much better degree than phone companies.

Now if you are a company that doesn’t keep your promises, you would much rather deal with a state legislature than a bunch of individual city councils. Forget the higher costs of dealing with individual cities for a moment – the real problem for phone companies is that if the promise to offer reliable broadband or video to the entire city via fiber (I’ll bet many cities would insist they put up fiber) and they don’t do it, the city councils will start imposing fines and calling their local representative on the carpet, maybe publicly shaming them on their own local-access channels!

Having good cable service matters at the city level. The state, for the most part, usually considers themselves above such matters. Who cares if people in some small suburb don’t have quality video and broadband service? Most state officials could care less, and the federal government might not be able to find the place on a map!. But the city officials are much more likely to be concerned and take whatever action they can to get the provider to live up to their agreement. Phone companies just aren’t used to being held accountable in that way.

And of course, no city is going to agree to let a phone company serve only the middle to high income areas of the city, while skipping around the lower income areas. Oh, they might allow them to do the higher income areas first, but if they want to get re-elected they know that they had better get a promise out of the phone company to wire the whole city within a reasonable timeframe.

So while I don’t like the way corporations co-opt civic groups (and similar groups) to do their talking for them, at least in this case I think they have a point. Any state that really wants to be in the telephone franchise business definitely ought to at the very least get some strong anti-redlining language into their legislation, with severe penalties for non-compliance.

Technorati Tags: legislation, broadband, internet, cable, dsl, telecommuincations, MichiganTelephone

A very interesting story in New Telephony talks about how New Orleans officials were able to maintain communications in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

When New Orleans was flooded after Hurricane Katrina, one of the few locations that still had power was the Hyatt hotel downtown, where the mayor and his staff holed up, including Meffert. Meffert discovered an RJ-45 ethernet jack in the hotel that somehow still had connectivity –courtesy of Telcove Inc., a provider of fiber and broadband for businesses.

Meffert and an associate raided an Office Depot store for routers and Vonage terminal adaptors, and set up Internet phone service for the staff at the hotel. When president Bush called New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, they spoke over that VoIP line.

The story also talks about how Bell South is trying to get the city’s municipal wi-fi network shut down:

Although the Wi-Fi network today is critical for the city’s functioning, and Meffert is looking for sponsors, such as Google Inc., to expand it to 100 percent of the city, he reports that BellSouth has opposed the city’s development of the network.

“They say I’m going to compete with them, that government shouldn’t compete with the private sector and that we will be using federal funds,” said Meffert. “We will not go above 512k, which is not a huge network pipe. We are not going into the cable business and the network business, not competing with any of that, and they think we are. They told me that to my face.”

This is a perfect example of why I say that large corporations have no soul. New Orleans has taken such an economic hit, you would think that BellSouth would back off for a while and let them do whatever works, just to get the city back to some semblance of normalcy. But my guess is, all BellSouth sees is packets flowing over a network that they aren’t able to control or charge for, and that is something they cannot abide, even when simple human decency would suggest that this is not the time to give the city any more problems than it already has.

Technorati Tags: voip, wireless, broadband, Internet, BellSouth, New Orleans, municipal wi-fi, MichiganTelephone

Just noticed a new addition in the Asterisk@Home Handbook Wiki Chapter 4, in fact it’s so new that as I write this it looks like it isn’t finished yet, but here’s the introduction:

4.9 “Extension Mobility” “Phone Sharing” or “Disconnecting the extension from the phone”.

This little AMP custimization allows the administrator to disconnect the extension from the phone. In other words, users can now “Log Into” a phone will all the associated benefits. A good example when this would be great would be when there is a day and night shift using the same phones. The night shift comes in and logs into the same phone that a day shift person had just used. Another example would be a user that skips around your compan’s remote sites. They won’t have to lug the hard phone with them if all they need to do is log into the nearest hard phone to gain access to their extension.

Another benefit to this custimization is if you have 1 hard phone at work and 1 soft phone on your laptop with the same extension (example x1234). Usually, when the hard phone registers with the asterisk server, the registration would be “stolen” away by the soft phone when the soft phone is started. All incoming calls would go straight to the soft phone. The only way to get around this OTHER than this customization would be to assign your hard phone an extension (example: x12341) and your soft phone an extesion (x12342) and then tie them together with ring group with the extension that you want (x1234). This way both phones will ring if x1234 is called.

AMP fuses the user and the device into an object called an extension. We are going to un-fuse it.

The basic idea is, you go into the /etc/amportal.conf file and change AMPEXTENSIONS=extensions to AMPEXTENSIONS=deviceanduser (then at the command prompt type amportal restart). This presents you with a different view of extensions – and that’s where the Wiki entry ends as I type this, but if you poke around you may be able to figure out what has changed and what to do (and by the time you read this, maybe the Wiki will be updated).

Just thought some Asterisk@Home users might find this useful!

Technorati Tags: Asterisk@Home, Asterisk, tutorial, PBX, VoiP, telephone, telephony, HowTo, MichiganTelephone

I spotted this item in Ken Camp’s weblog:

While I believe this may be a better resource for consumers and small businesses that for the larger enterprise who typically partner with vendors and resellers, I was looking around VoIPSupply.com this morning and found a pretty interesting mix of products. I can’t vouch for pricing and I have no affiliation with these folks at all. They just caught my eye as a resource that I bookmarked.

I took a look at the site and the prices seem pretty reasonable, but like Ken, I know nothing about this company. If any customer of this company would like to leave a comment, it might be helpful for those in the market for VoIP-related goods.

Technorati Tags: voip, telephone, telecommunications, MichiganTelephone

It’s funny how the sides are lining up on this. There is something that has never made sense to me all my life, and that is why the Disney empire has grown so big. I am old enough to remember when Walt Disney was still alive, and yes, he was a personable fellow. But even as a kid, there were things about Disney’s popularity that I never understood. For example, I’d be at the movies and a Donald Duck cartoon would come on, and all the kids would cheer as though someone had just told them they’d be getting free candy. And I’d be sitting there thinking, “I hate Donald Duck cartoons – you can’t understand a single word he says!”

And then there are those Disney amusement parks. People in Michigan will drive or fly down to Florida, then come back and complain about the long lines and the high prices. I’ve observed that they seem to have more real fun when they go to a more nearby place, like Six Flags or Cedar Point or Michigan’s Adventure, but it’s almost as though people have been programmed to think that they must make a pilgrimage to Disney at least once, and preferably several times during their lifetimes (think maybe they might have been putting hypnotic suggestions in those Donald Duck cartoons? Maybe that’s what Donald was really saying – visit Disneyland or you’ll DIE!).

For whatever reason, Disney has managed to build up this gigantic empire, and like any big corporation, they never appear to be satisfied with the amount of money they are making, and constantly want more. So, blogger Preston Gralla’s report this morning didn’t surprise me much:

Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger made it clear yesterday that he sides with AT&T, Verizon, and other big telcos when it comes to allowing them to charge web sites fees for adequate bandwidth. He told the TelecomNext show in Los Vegas: “We do not support any [network neutrality] legislation at this time.”
…..
Iger is smart enough to know that AT&T and others have been making these threats. So why is he playing such Mickey Mouse games with the issue?

It’s because Disney has everything to gain, and nothing to lose, if telcos put the muscle on Google and other sites. First of all, as Paul Kapustka notes in his report about Iger’s speech, Disney “is already participating in partnerships with access providers like Verizon and distributors like Apple’s iTunes store for its branded content.” So Disney wants to help its business partners.

There are other reasons as well. Telcos pay Disney for content, and they’ll stream that content at high speeds. If no laws are passed, telcos can make sure that competitors to Disney get their content streamed at lower speeds.

Read the full blog entry here.

And that, folks, is the danger of the non-neutral net. Perhaps if you want to watch old Donald Duck cartoons, you’ll be able to get them streamed to you at near-HDTV quality (after you pay a nominal fee, of course). Want to watch an old episode of Bugs Bunny or Animaniacs? Sure, you can do that too, after your six-hour download to get a highly-compressed, low quality file completes…

(Speaking of Animaniacs, which I was exposed to far too much of when my kids were of the cartoon-watching age, don’t some of these phone company CEO’s kind of remind you of the Brain in “Pinky and the Brain”? Not that they’re necessarily that intelligent, but they do seem to want to take over the world!).

Anyway, if you read my previous entry, where I said that I’d once made a mental note never to join the AARP but was now rethinking that – I’ve just decided to replace that mental note with another one: This new one is: Never go to Disneyland or Disney World. Not that I ever had any real desire to in the first place, but today I have an even lower opinion of the Disney empire, if that is possible.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, Disney, broadband, telecommunications, Internet, MichiganTelephone

Several years ago I was sitting in a waiting room somewhere (a dental office, I think) and happened to pick up a copy of Readers Digest and found an article about the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) which was, shall we say, not too complementary. As I recall, the gist of the article was that AARP was losing members because of their advocacy for liberal causes that had nothing to do with issues relating to aging Americans. Conservative commentators had begun to take notice and had (quite properly, I think) called out the AARP on their political efforts.

My belief is that a non-profit organization ought to be very up-front with at least its members and supporters, and to the public in general (which, after all, is where new members and supporters will come from) about what it’s doing with the money it receives. I don’t care if it’s secretly funding liberal causes, or conservative causes, or libertarian causes, or whatever, it’s the “secretly” part that bothers me. If you support an organization and then you find out they’re spending money to advocate for things that you personally oppose, you might feel disgusted, both with the organization and with yourself (for being hoodwinked into supporting them).

So when I read that article, I made a mental note and filed it away in the back of my mind somewhere: Never join the AARP. And when I turned 50 and that first invitation arrived, it went right into the trash.

I may need to rethink my position on that. No, I probably won’t rush to their web site and sign up, but I do get the feeling that they’ve cleaned up their act a bit. And now comes this, from News.com (excerpt):

The American Association of Retired Persons, better known as the AARP, may be more famous for its lobbying muscle on pension plans and Medicare, but now it’s taking up a new platform: keeping the Internet free and open for the age 50-plus set.

The 35 million member group is among a growing list of companies and organizations that signed a new letter Thursday urging senators to require Net neutrality principles by law. Also called network neutrality, it’s the idea that the companies that own the broadband pipes should not be able to configure their networks in a way that plays favorites–allowing them, for example, to transmit their own services at faster speeds, or to charge Net content and application companies a fee for similar fast delivery.

“We’re not traditionally someone who would be involved in technology legislation and things of that nature, but this has a direct impact on our members and their lifestyles,” said AARP spokesman Mark Kitchens.

Read the rest of the article here.

Having the AARP support net neutrality is no small thing – they are one of the more influential lobbying groups in Washington. So if you are preparing a speech or presentation on net neutrality, don’t forget to mention that the AARP has come out in favor of it, particularly if there are any politicians in the audience.

Next time a solicitation from AARP comes in the mail, maybe I’ll actually open it up and take a look!

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, AARP, broadband, telecommunications, Internet, MichiganTelephone

I helped my son upgrade his Asterisk@Home system yesterday. It turns out that the only real upgrade path is to wipe away your previous configuration and start from scratch. Literally – it even wipes the entire hard drive and starts over.

I didn’t really mind that because the first time around we really didn’t know what we were doing and therefore installed a lot of crap that we didn’t need. I don’t feel like an expert by any means but there is one thing I have discovered that may help some Asterisk@Home users save a little money. Or at least it would, if it were a bit simpler to implement.

That something is ENUM. The idea is, if you have an Asterisk box and you are calling someone who has an Asterisk box (or is otherwise a VoIP user), why on earth would you want to route your call out through the PSTN, or even through an ITSP? Just send the call direct to their box or device! This is the basic idea behind the PhoneGnome appliance, which allows a customer to use the Internet for ENUM calls and calls to other PhoneGnome users. The idea, when making a call, you first check the ENUM database to see if there’s a direct route, and if there isn’t, only then do you send the call out to the PSTN or via some other, less direct route.

Asterisk@Home has support for ENUM built in BUT it is not turned on by default. So in this article I’m going to tell you how to enable it, and how to test it to make sure it’s working.

EDIT: This works with the version of AMP (the Asterisk Management Portal) that comes with Asterisk@Home 2.7. If you upgrade AMP to the latest version of FreePBX (the new name for Asterisk Management Portal) the following may not work, or may break if you’ve already done this. I found this out the hard way after we upgraded to FreePBX 2.0.1, and I have since heard from the author of the routine that handles the lookups (he sent me an e-mail and posted a comment on this blog). The problem is that this enum lookup only looks at e164.org, whereas the old routine either looked at both that and e164.arpa, or at least at e164.arpa (the test number mentioned below is an e164.arpa number). He says that in the next version of FreePBX, there’ll be a way of configuring which e164 domains to use. If you need to use e164.arpa, see his comment on this post for the lines to change in extensions.conf.

In the Asterisk Management Portal (or if you’ve just upgraded, FreePBX) go to Setup, then click on Trunks (in the left menu column). You should then be on the “Add a Trunk” screen; if not, click “Add Trunk.” Make sure you don’t have an existing ENUM trunk (listed in the column on the right), then click “Add ENUM Trunk.”

If you are in North America, you only need to add these three lines to the dial rules:

011|.
1aaa+NXXXXXX
1+NXXNXXXXXX

If your system doesn’t support seven digit dialing of numbers in your home area code, omit the second line, otherwise change aaa to your three digit area code. If your system doesn’t permit ten digit dialing (that is, you require callers to dial a “1″ before all out of area calls), you can omit the third line.

For most users, that is ALL you have to do in this screen. Click “Submit Changes” and you are done here. But there are a couple more steps.

The first is to go to each of your routes that allow outbound dialing – click “Outbound Routing” (in the left menu column) and then look at your existing routes (in the right menu column). You will want to change any that make calls to PSTN-like numbers, except perhaps for any “private” routes to other known Asterisk users you may have set up. Let’s say you have a route for Toll Free calls (if you don’t have those broken out into a separate route, you probably should), another for USA calls, and another for Canada calls. You may not have all of those, you may have the USA and Canada combined, or whatever, but my point is that you want to look for any routes capable of going out to the PSTN (directly or through your ITSP).

Click on each of those routes in turn and when the screen comes up for that route, drop to the bottom of the screen and you should see the Trunk Sequence. The lowest dropdown field will probably be blank – use that field and select the ENUM/ trunk. Click “Submit Changes” but don’t leave this screen yet. Now go back down to where you just added the ENUM/ trunk and look next to it, there should be a trashcan icon and an upward-pointing arrow. Click the up-arrow to move the ENUM/ trunk up. Continue doing that until ENUM/ is the topmost item in the trunk sequence. This is very important, if your system doesn’t check ENUM first, most of the time it will never check it at all. If there’s no ENUM route the call will then “fall though” to the next trunk in the sequence. So when you are done, your ENUM/ trunk should be in position “0″ (the topmost one). Don’t forget to click “Submit Changes”, then go to the next applicable route and make the same change.

Obviously you should NOT change the trunks for routes to NON-PSTN type numbers (for example, if you have a Free World Dialup route, don’t change that).

Now at this point it should work, but it probably won’t, (Edit: Unless you’ve upgraded to FreePBX – the latest version has fixed this bug)! The reason is that there is a bug in the extensions.conf file! So break out your text editor (either nano, or the editor accessed by clicking on “Edit” in Midnight Commander will work) and edit /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf – you want to change the following line:

exten = s,9,EnumLookup(${DIAL_NUMBER})

The enum lookups now require a + (plus sign) at the start of all lookup strings, so add one just before the $, as shown below:

exten = s,9,EnumLookup(+${DIAL_NUMBER})

(If you’re having trouble finding this code snippet, it’s in the [macro-dialout-enum] section, just a bit less than halfway down the page.)

I should probably mention one other file you will want to check – /etc/asterisk/enum.conf – make sure it has these two lines under [general]:

search => e164.arpa
search => e164.org

Some people suggest reversing the order of these two lines (placing e164.org first) but it shouldn’t matter because in theory both are checked. In theory.

NOW it should all work. In AMP/FreePBX, you may want to go to “Maintenance”, then “Config Edit”, then click on “Re-Read Configs” just to make sure that Asterisk picks up the change you just made in extensions.conf

Now you are ready to make a test call. Go to this page of ENUM test numbers and dial the first the way you would any international call (you did remember to change the trunks in whichever route handles international calls, right?). For example, in North America you’d dial 011 43 720 0101011 and after a few seconds you should hear a voice say “ENUM”, followed by some music.

If this works, what this means is that every time you make a call, your system will do a quick dip from the ENUM database to see if the call can be routed direct through the Internet. If it cannot, then it goes out the usual way. One interesting thing you will find is that all U.S. toll-free numbers that don’t have a specific routing are by default routed to a FREE gateway that sends toll-free calls to the PSTN. So, if your ITSP is charging you for calls to toll-free numbers, that cost will go away!

There’s one other interesting use for ENUM – let’s say you have identified locations you really don’t want people calling due to the cost, but those numbers are within a more general block of numbers that you do want people to be able to call. For example, let’s say you don’t want people calling 1-900 or 976-prefix numbers. You might set up a route with a dial plan that looks something like this:

1900NXXXXXX
900NXXXXXX
1NXX976XXXX
NXX976XXXX
976XXXX

Now what you do is allow that route to access the ENUM/ trunk, and nothing else, and make sure that route is higher in the route list than any of your regular routes that might also apply to calls to these numbers. More than likely there will not be an ENUM route to that number, but even if there is, since you’re not accessing it through the PSTN they should not be able to charge you for the call (no guarantees that they won’t try, particularly if they capture your caller ID. I suppose you could always set up a second ENUM trunk with a phony CallerID string like “123″ specified, and use that trunk for these routes, but that might not be legal and they might still be able to identify which system connected to them. More than likely, though, they’d just reject the call).

Caution: if, after adding routes, you have more than nine routes (that is, if you have a route numbered 9 or higher in AMP/FreePBX, which starts counting routes from zero), they will NOT be checked in the order shown in AMP/FreePBX (unless they have fixed this bug in later versions). To see the order the routes are actually being checked in, look in the [outbound-allroutes] section of /etc/asterisk/extensions_additional.conf – that is the order the routes are checked in, not the order shown in AMP/FreePBX.

Now of course, the real advantage comes when you and everyone else has your numbers listed in the ENUM database. Getting your number listed isn’t that hard; you can got to E164.org and click on signup. Unfortunately, at least when using the Firefox browser, I get a popup box that says “Website Certified by an Unknown Authority – Unable to verify the identity of *.e164.org as a trusted site.” I’m not really sure if that’s an issue or not, but I’ve sort of been waiting to see if they fix that (or at least say something about why that box is popping up)

To actually receive incoming calls may take a bit more effort. If your Asterisk system doesn’t discriminate on incoming calls (that is, all incoming calls are sent to the same place, regardless of origin or number actually dialed), you may not have any additional configuration to do. This page has some suggestions for handling incoming IAX calls, though I haven’t tried them (it also has links to dial plans you may be able to use with the ENUM trunk if you are outside North America).

One other thing that may help for incoming SIP calls, is to go into /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf and look for the [from-sip-external] section. If you find three lines that look like this:

exten => _.,1,AbsoluteTimeout(15)
exten => _.,2,Congestion
exten => _.,3,Hangup

Comment them out and add an uncommented line, as shown here:

[from-sip-external]

;exten => _.,1,AbsoluteTimeout(15)
;exten => _.,2,Congestion
;exten => _.,3,Hangup
exten => _X.,1,Goto(from-pstn,s,1)

This will allow all incoming SIP calls intended for any number on your system to go to the from-pstn context, if that is what you want. Bear in mind that this change doesn’t affect incoming IAX calls, and the changes you may make for IAX don’t affect incoming SIP calls – each is treated differently (well, at least in this situation, anyway).

This article is getting way too long already so I’ll stop here. If you are able to get ENUM working, why not leave a comment and let us know how it went for you.

Technorati Tags: Asterisk@home, Asterisk, tutorial, PBX, VoiP, telephone, telephony, ENUM, HowTo, MichiganTelephone

This item is from the Vonage VoIP Forum Digest – March 16, 2006:

VoIP Guru Pulver Criticizes Service Tiers

Jeff Pulver, founder and chairman of Pulvermedia, the host of the Spring 2006 VON Conference, said at the conference yesterday that large telcos who want to charge extra carrying fees for competing services and large content providers are in effect, asking for “payola.”

He told eWeek that paying for different Internet service levels would eventually cause the “Balkanization” of the Internet in which users would have limited access to different classes of content or quality of service based upon their ability or willingness to pay.

This would occur just as users are getting access to more sophisticated services, such as voice and video, he noted.

He added he didn’t believe that Internet users would accept any business policy or service-level agreements that limit their access to Internet content.

Edit: Only thing is, Jeff Pulver left a comment on this post, in which he says,

Just to be clear. during the press conference I did say “legalized extortion scheme” and not payola. Please my blog post about this: http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/004060.html

My comments below were written before I received Jeff’s comment:

Many people, myself included, have been equating the proposed telephone company charges with a mob-style “protection racket.” I actually think that description is more accurate than payola, because “payola” describes a practice that is only illegal if it’s undisclosed – in other words, a radio station is perfectly free to play records for money, as long as they announce that’s what they’re doing (whether the listening audience would accept this is another matter). I don’t really think the phone companies would have a problem with disclosing to their customers that they forced Google or Amazon to pay extra so that users could get to their sites; in fact I can think of a couple of phone executives that would probably be quite proud to announce that.

So, Jeff, I respect you and understand what you’re trying to say, but I do think “payola” is too mild a term to describe what the phone companies want to do. Personally, I’d characterize it as a protection racket, or even attempted extortion, because those things are just as odious whether or not they are openly disclosed. But, that’s just my opinion. Edit: And apparently it’s pretty close to Jeff’s also. I’m glad that he took the time to post a comment and clarify the situation.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, VON, voip, broadband, Internet, telecommunications, telephone, MichiganTelephone

We live in an age where it seems as though any type of electronic device will be made smaller, except of course for display units, which get larger. When I was a small child we had a TV with a small (by today’s standards) CRT, with about four or five times as much space occupied by the electronics used to drive the CRT (and the single-speaker audio, but back then they did give you a decent sized speaker!). Nowadays you get a TV with a massive display and an electronics package so small that you might not even be sure where it’s hidden. Oh, and teeny-tiny speakers, but I digress…

Anyway, when I first saw the Cisco ATA-186 it was kind of a marvel to me that they had packed all the functions of a standard phone exchange (granted, an exchange with only two lines, but still…) in such a small package. Of course, I should have know that such a device could be, and would be made even smaller given a little time, and of course it has been. But now, it seems there may be a race on to see who can build the smallest functional ATA, and for the moment, a company called Patton Electronics may be the current champion. Today (Thursday) they issued a press release touting their “Ultra-miniature VoIP adapter for analog phones.” And here it is (assuming they don’t move the image file on their web site):

Granted, this is a single line unit, so it’s probably not fair to compare it to a typical two-line ATA. And if I were signing up for a VoIP service, I would probably want a two line unit anyway, because I can always use the extra line for something. But then, not everyone is as technically inclined, and many customers who only want single-line service may not care that this is only a single-line unit.

My biggest concern with such a small unit is that it may not be able to put out enough power to drive a full complement of telephone ringers without getting really warm. But, the specifications claim 3REN (that is, it should be able to drive three of the standard, mechanical bell type phone ringers found in older phones) which is what many newer ATA type devices are rated for (sadly – the phone company standard is 5 REN, and many people do find that today’s crop of ATA’s will not ring all their phones).

This unit is apparently designed to be small and light, so that you can toss it in a suitcase or your pocket when you travel. Patton also likes to mention the fact that such a small, lightweight unit could save VoIP providers a buck or two on shipping (doubtless true, but then if the customer ever wants a second line provisioned, you have to ship them another ATA – and nowhere that I could find does it mention the price of this unit compared to similar devices, nor for that matter, the size of whatever power supply is used to run the unit).

Still, watching VoIP devices get smaller and smaller is a bit fascinating, kind of like watching limbo dancers (boy, am I dating myself with that reference), only instead of “how low can you go”, it’s “how small can you make it.” At some point it gets harder and harder to believe that the next entrant will be able to better the last one. But then, I would have never believed anyone could put a complete 56K modem on a card that slides into a laptop computer, so I guess I shouldn’t be too amazed if in a few months or years someone manages to come out with an ATA that’s even smaller than this one.

But honestly, ATA manufacturers, we probably don’t need smaller ATA’s as much as we need a higher REN value – at least let us ring five phones, like the phone company does – is that too much to ask?

Technorati Tags: voip, technology, telephone, telecommunications, MichiganTelephone

An article entitled “Cisco weighs in on net neutrality” in Telephony Online begins as follows:

Cisco Systems weighed in on the issue of network neutrality in a letter to Congress last week, affirming the importance of neutrality but urging lawmakers to refrain, for the time being, from enacting legislation on the subject.

“We strongly support the principle of an open Internet,” Cisco CEO John Chambers wrote in a letter to Congressman Joe Barton, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “We must, however, balance the fact that innovation inside the network is just as important as innovation in services and devices connected to the Internet. Broadband Internet access service providers should remain free to engage in pro-competitive network management techniques to alleviate congestion, ameliorate capacity constraints and enable new services.”

Huh? Let’s lay out what’s at issue here, since the executives at Cisco don’t seem to get it. Nobody is saying that an Internet provider can’t manage their network, as long as it’s done in a fair and equitable manner. What is NOT fair is to discriminate against some services, while giving preference to other, similar services.

Or to put it another way, lets say that there’s a lot of traffic on the network, and it appears to be divided between e-mail, web browsing, streaming audio, and VoIP (this is just a simplified example, so bear with me for a moment). Now, it doesn’t matter much if the e-mail is delayed a few seconds, especially since a good percentage of it is probably unwanted spam anyway, so it doesn’t hurt to give that a relatively low priority. With web browsing, you want snappy response, but customers are not really going to notice if packets are delayed maybe half a second, or even a second during high usage periods, so you can give that medium priority. With streaming audio, the main thing is that once the packets start flowing, they aren’t delayed by more than what the user’s audio buffer holds (typically 2-3 seconds of audio), so while speed of delivery isn’t that important, consistency is. And then we have interactive voice and video over the Internet, which needs both fast delivery and consistency.

Few would object to prioritizing traffic in this manner. Some things do benefit from faster delivery. But when a customer pays for broadband service, it could be argued that part of what they are paying for is for their provider to give them the best possible online experience. Customers don’t give their providers $40 a month or more just so the provider can buy more TV ads! Instead, they expect to receive something of value in return, and intelligent traffic management in a way that does not give the customer a bad online experience ought to be the desired goal. In fact, if that’s NOT the goal, why have traffic management at all? Just let the packets fall where they may. But of course, providers can’t do that because a fair percentage of customers might be unhappy enough to go back to dial-up, or seek some other broadband option.

What people object to is the favoring of one equivalent experience over another. Let me give you a hypothetical example to help you visualize what the the phone and cable companies are wanting to do: Suppose that UPS had a monopoly on parcel delivery service in your area, and supposed that they were owned by Staples. As long as you ordered your office supplies from Staples, you’d get them promptly, but if you dared to order them from OfficeMax or Office Depot, they might arrive a week or two later, or they might not arrive at all. Were something like that to actually happen, you’d expect the Federal Trade Commission or Congress to step in and do something to insure that the other office supply places could get their packages delivered.

Well, that’s what’s being asked for here. The phone companies and cable companies want to be not only the transporter (and the monopoly, or one-half of a duopoly transporter in many areas) but also one of the users of their transport, and they want to show their own services favoritism. What we are talking about is unequal treatment of similar packets, based on who is paying “protection money” and who is not (except that, of course, the phone and cable companies don’t have to pay themselves for the preferential treatment, so in effect their own services get a free ride on their networks!).

It’s all well and good for the Cisco CEO to say that he supports the principle of an open Internet, and I for one am glad he does support it. But just saying you support something, with the absence of some affirmative action to make it happen, often results in the exact opposite of what you support. It’s like saying you support open roadways while you let trees grow up in the middle of the roads – sooner or later, the inaction results in the same effect as if you didn’t support it at all. Support “in principle” is often synonymous with “we’ll say we support it, but we don’t really care.” I don’t know if that’s the case here, but I sure would have liked to have seen a stronger show of support out of Cisco, not the wishy-washy statement contained in their letter to Congress.

Unfortunately, Congress may be listening – News.com reported today that Senator Ted Stevens is now saying that Net neutrality may not happen. It would be a real shame if Cisco’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for legislation was what killed the momentum, and results in a very non-neutral Internet.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, legislation, regulation, Cisco, MichiganTelephone

This is copied verbatim from David S. Isenberg’s blog:

An anonymous comment today points out that Vonage-Comcast complaints continue, dramatic data here. Paddy Link, the Comcast PR person who told me No, No, No, it is a Vonage Problem has not been back to me with any backup of that claim. She said that Vonage admitted it, but could point to NO VONAGE STATEMENTS to confirm her claim. She said she’d get specifics from Comcast, but nobody from Comcast has presented specifics to me to date.

In the absence of specific explanation to the contrary, it sure looks like Deliberate Discrimination to me.

David Weinberger points out that Shaw, a Canadian Cableco is purposely degrading Vonage packets too. Only Shaw has the stones to offer its readers un-degraded service for a $10/month de-degrading fee.

All I will say is, whether the problems are caused by deliberate action, or just plain neglect in not fixing the problems, Comcast will more than likely lose customers if they continue to play this game. I can envision some corporate executive rubbing his hands together and thinking, “Heh, heh, heh, we can force these suckers to buy cable TV, broadband service, AND telephone service from us.” But that is a dangerous assumption, because if customers get angry with Comcast, they may well not only take their broadband business elsewhere, but also their television business. And people who get satellite service rarely go back to cable, unless their “professional installer” did an exceptionally poor job (which, unfortunately, does happen).

Comcast has been running their “ditch the dish” ads, which seem to me to have become more and more shrill. So as a public service, let me explain some things about satellite viewing. The main reason people have trouble with their dishes is because they are improperly installed. A dish should NOT normally be mounted on a roof, because then all the things that are said about snow collecting in the dish are true – it happens, and it’s dangerous to climb up on the roof to clean the snow. There is such a thing as a heated satellite dish, but they are more expensive than regular dishes so they are rarely installed.

However, what people can’t seem to understand is that, unless you are trying to get a clear view over trees, there is NO advantage to mounting a dish high on a roof. Unlike a TV antenna, relative height does not influence signal strength (not to any measurable degree – think of the distance to the satellite, and realize that by going higher, all you’re doing is getting the dish an infinitesimal amount of distance closer). A much better location is any protected place where the dish has a clear view of the satellites – for many people that would be on the southernmost side of the house, perhaps a foot or two under the eaves. But for many others, the best place for the dish is on a metal pole (a 10 foot length of galvanized pipe of the proper diameter often works well) placed out in the yard somewhere. It’s definitely best to pour a bag or two of cement around the base of the pole (preferably after flattening the part that will be embedded in the cement slightly so it can’t turn – one or two solid whacks with a sledge hammer will usually deform it enough to prevent rotation. The advantage to having the dish on a pole, or on the side of the house is that if it gets full of snow, all you have to do is go out and give it a swipe or two with a broom (carefully, of course) and you are back in business.

But for some reason, many installers almost insist on putting the dish on the roof, which is a really bad idea unless you simply must put it there to clear the treeline (or a nearby building). Not only can the dish fill with snow, which you won’t be able to clean out easily, but the cable may be susceptible to damage from ice on the roof. Furthermore, trust me, unless you either a) know and trust the cable installer, or b) don’t really care if there are a few holes in your roof, you really don’t want a dish installer on your roof if you can possibly avoid it. Because, unfortunately, some installers do seem to take the attitude that “It’s not my house, I don’t have to live here, and by the time they discover that the holes are leaking I’ll probably be working someplace else.”

At least if they put the dish on the side of your house, you can inspect the workmanship, and the same is true if they put it on a pole. But professional installers hate the pole option because it generally involves at least two trips – one to dig the hole, set and level the pole, and pour the concrete, and another to install and aim the dish. Plus, they hate digging the trench to get the cable from the pole to the house. And one other thing is that if they happen to get the location of the pole wrong (where the view of one of the satellites is obstructed), then they have to dig up pole and concrete and try to move it to a better location.

So the trick is, if you ever get a dish installed, insist on an installer that will do a pole install. Make it clear to the scheduler that if the installer isn’t willing to do a pole install, you’ll send ‘em packing. There may be a slight additional charge for this, but you will be thankful on the (actually relatively rare) occasion that the dish fills with snow (usually only a certain kind of wet, sticky snow will actually stick).

Oh, and by the way, if you ever find yourself starting to believe the ads disparaging the dish, call up one of your friends that subscribes to cable and ask them if their cable ever goes out. The ads would have you believe that the dish is always going out while cable is ultra-reliable, but if you can find someone who has subscribed to both technologies, you may get a slightly different view, especially if they live any distance from the cable headend.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, michigantelephone