The Michigan Telephone blog

Art Brodsky writes,

eBay CEO Meg Whitman could potentially be an influential voice in the Net Neutrality debate. In addition to heading one of the most prominent Internet companies, she also is a well-known Republican.

Read the full article here.

As MarketWatch reports, “The brief Spanish-American War ended more than a century ago, but not the federal tax assessed to fund the victory. Until now.”

Details here.

If you have Asterisk@Home and you upgraded to the latest version of FreePBX, you may have noticed that the extra ‘Maintenance’ link goes away. The page is still there, only the link is gone. In addition there are a few other “hidden” pages that may be useful, but you may not even know they are there.

Well, problem solved. Go to this thread on SourceForge and scroll down to a message by user Jason – gigabitfx, which shows how to re-enable the Asterisk@Home modules into FreePBX 2.1.0. But then continue scrolling to the very next message, and you’ll find that based on Jason’s work, user Samy Antoun – samyantoun created a bash script to do the job automatically.

Copy the script to a file on your Asterisk box (copy the text from the web site, then paste it into either nano or Midnight Commander’s editor, then save it, then make the file executable (I use Midnight Commander to do that). The go to the directory you saved the file in (I just put it in my /tmp directory because it only has to be run once) and execute it using ./whatever-you-named-it

After that, browse to Tools | Module Admin and scroll down to the bottom of the page – if the script worked (it runs silently unless it encounters errors), you’ll see several new modules that only need to be enabled. Once you enable them, go back to the Tools page and you should see them in the left-hand menu.

Thanks to Jason and Samy for making this available.

Now that Skype is offering free calls to the U.S. and Canada, some folks have asked if it’s possible to use Skype as an outgoing route for calls from Asterisk@Home. Unfortunately Skype’s proprietary protocol would make this difficult, but maybe not impossible. Turns out there is a piece of software called Uplink Skype to SIP Adapter that “connects SIP protocol VoIP calls to the proprietary Skype phone network. It works in both directions.” It’s free software, too (if you can get by with no personal technical support, otherwise you can pay varying amounts that get you increasing levels of technical support, depending on the amount paid).

Now, I haven’t tried to do it, but maybe you could set this up on a Windows box along with a compatible softphone and use that as an interface between Asterisk and Skype. If you figure out how to do it, please keep careful notes and let the rest of us know how to do it. Add your comments to this post, publish it in your own blog or whatever, but please let us know, because I’m sure this would interest a lot of folks.

I’ve personally never used Skype, so I’m afraid I can’t give you any hints on how to do this, but it looks like this free software would make it not such a difficult task.

Folks, I’m sorry to announce that until such time as I can figure out a way to make blog posts without it being a major undertaking, I’m going to discontinue regular posting to this blog. What I really need is a standalone blogging client that is free and that does NOT run in a web browser – no java, javascript, etc. It may seem strange to some but am actually MORE productive when I can divorce as many of my usual functions as possible from my web browser (I know the Web 2.0 people will hate to hear that, but it’s true, at least for me). One reason I have kept up the MI-Telecom email list for over 10 years is that my e-mail client is NOT part of my web browser.

There is one exception to this, though. One of these days soon, I hope to publish some scripts for Asterisk@Home and FreePBX users that will allow you to punch in an extension on your phone and listen to current news reports. What these really do is grab certain news podcasts (short ones that run about five minutes or less) “on the fly” and play them to you through your phone receiver. It’s a lot faster than browsing to them on the web. Of course you can probably only use these for your own personal use (I imagine that the suppliers of such feeds would have a real problem with you making theme available to anyone who calls in from the PSTN) but since it’s basically the same thing as downloading them to a podcast player and listening, I don’t THINK any of them should have a problem with you doing this for your own personal use – in effect you’re just turning your Asterisk@Home extension into a podcast player.

While you could do the same thing with longer podcasts, I don’t think anyone’s going to want to hold a phone receiver to their ear for more than about five minutes (nor tie up their phone that long). Anyway, that’s an upcoming post you can look for.

What I’m NOT going to do any longer is try and make this a news blog. There are far too many other blogs that do a much better job of it. I may still occasionally post commentary, but NOT about the things everyone else is blogging about. I don’t want this to be just a “me-too” blog – I’d rather let it sit for a month or two and then post something really useful.

For those who wish to keep up on current events, there are two main news sources I would recommend you visit daily. One is the DSLReports.com news summary page and the other is the IP&Democracy site. I also like all the blogs I list in the right-hand column; many of these offer far better commentary on news and current events than I could.

Part of my reason for doing this is due to issues of personal health and well-being. I just have too many things in my life that are causing me to spend far too much time in front of the computer, and something’s gotta go. This blog, such as it was in February or March when I was doing my peak postings, can’t continue.

The funny thing is, I find that I personally most appreciate some of the blogs that have the fewest posts. For example, I look forward in anticipation to new posts at the Nerd Vittles site, and Ward Mundy only posts there about once a week on average – yet his blog gets far more reader comments and is much more well-received than some other blogs that are much more prolific. That observation isn’t lost on me. It defies “conventional wisdom” about blogging, but maybe nowadays, “less is more” in blogging, and the blog community hasn’t caught onto that yet. Of course there are blogs where that is NOT the case (particularly those that can offer breaking news and such) but I can think of other blogs where I wish the blog authors would post fewer, but more relevant comments (I won’t name any because it’s just my personal opinion).

I remember a little poem that appeared many years ago in an article about the demise of the “Burma Shave” signs that used to line the American roadways, back before the days of freeways. Maybe it also applies to the Information Superhighway, and some of the smaller blogs that have come and gone alone the wayside:

SUPER HIGHWAYS
SUPER SPEED
PEOPLE HAVE
TOO MUCH
TO READ
GOODBYE, BURMA SHAVE

Dana Blankenhorn writes:

This is bigger than Enron. It’s bigger than Worldcom. Only the victims this time are you and me.

You may (or may not) recall that last month, the FCC announced rules for its upcoming spectrum auctions that took a dim view of big operators “cooperating” with small bidders.

Turns out they weren’t blowing smoke. There was a fire. A big one.

Bruce Kushnick of TeleTruth has uncovered $8 billion in auction fraud (PDF warning), in which the big players created phony “entrepreneurial” bidders who won spectrum and then handed it back.

This is fraud on a grand scale. It’s classic, and blatant. It is breathtaking in its gall, mafia-like.  Russian mafia-like.

Read the rest of Dana’s post.

Obviously, having encountered this information for the first time today, I can’t really offer any informed commentary. I can only point you to the article, and invite you to form your own opinion.

Paul Kapustka makes an interesting observation in his blog today:

According to USA Today, the big phone companies (except Qwest) have been allowing NSA to build a database of tens of millions of calls made in the U.S. Still want to “trust” them when it comes to keeping the Internet open?

Note to net neutrality proponents: You may want to ask Congress a few questions about this one. And then get them to ask Big Ed and Ivan for some answers.

UPDATE: Ed Markey is already on the case. See here.

I learned a long time ago that you can’t trust the wireline phone companies to tell the truth, and that they aren’t always trustworthy, but their willing participation in this may drive the point home for some legislators that should have figured it out a long time ago.

Public Knowledge ran an article a couple of days ago that should make U.S. broadband users a bit green with envy:

The advertisement on the wall in the subway station was hard to believe — a broadband service with 24 meg download for about $45 per month. That was the good news. Unfortunately, the service isn’t available in the U.S. The ad was on the wall of tube stop in London and the company, Be, http://www.bethere.co.uk is British. Just to rub it in a little, it gets better. There is also a cheaper option, about $25 per month, which still gets you the 24 mbps download, but with a slower upload speed. This in a city in which a bottle of water will set you back about $2.25.

Now, let’s contrast that combination of price and service with an ad in today’s Washington Post, in which Verizon will sell you the blinding speed of 768 kbps for $17.99 per month with a yearly contract.

And for one more bit of shopping — Verizon’s FIOS service, their fiber optic super-speedy, up to 30 mbps version. What will that cost you? According to the Verizon web site, up to 30 mbps can be had for between $180 per month and $200 per month.

BeThere isn’t unique in competing in the U.K. broadband market. According to a blurb in the May 4 edition of The Independent, a British newspaper, the broadband market is very crowded. How crowded is it, Ed McMahon asks? It’s so crowded that, according to the paper, seemingly everyman and his dog [are] seeking to ‘unbundle’ BT (British Telecom) exchanges. There’s not enough space for all of them — quite literally as it happens, since many of the BT exchanges are not big enough to accommodate all the equipment that would-be competitors are looking to put into them.”

By what magic has such a vibrant and competitive market been achieved, when we here in the U.S. are condemned to a broadband duopoly? Again, from the Independent: “Local loop unbundling has given new entrants such as Sky the ability significantly to undercut the incumbents in the broadband market — British Telecom and NTL Virgin.”

You can read the rest of the article here. Oh, but I do have one bit of good news – Verizon lowered the introductory price on its 768K down, 128K up offering this morning. Now you can get that blindingly fast three-quarters of a meg (roughly) of download speed for $14.95 for twelve months.

Whatever else you can say about cable company advertising (such as the fact that they try to paint small-dish reception as unreliable, when the fact is that cable hasn’t reached 99.999% uptime yet by any stretch of the imagination), you have to hand it to them for attacking DSL on its one weak point – the “turtle-slow” download speeds that the phone companies tend to provide, especially with their lowest tier of service. Of course, that’s because the phone companies insist on trying to provide broadband over their legacy copper plant instead of just biting the bullet and realizing that sometimes you have to completely overbuild. In the last decade or so, the cable company has rebuilt their “outside plant” in my area twice, once to add additional capacity to their coaxial cable and then again only a few years later to convert the copper feeders to fiber (so that only the last few hundred feet are still coaxial cable).

Normally I would quote the important points from an article and try to summarize, but this article makes a number of important points, such that it would be difficult to pick out one particular quotation. Those who don’t think much of the current administration will doubtless like it a lot less after reading this.

NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls

I will only note that it seems we are losing our freedoms little by little – I don’t think that’s any big secret to anyone anymore, unless perhaps someone has lived in a cave the past few years and hasn’t watched the news – but what people may not be noticing is how many of the big corporations are willing participants in this process. It would be easy to just blame the government, but it seems like they have too many corporations that are far too willing to aid and abet them in destroying what we’ve always thought of as cherished American freedoms. One of those freedoms was always thought to be that they couldn’t snoop on anyone without a warrant, but I guess that somehow went out the window while we were all watching TV, or something like that.

One thing that’s always really irked me is to catch a customer service representative in a baldfaced lie. For example, several years ago I was trying to order phone service for someone in my family and because they used a “dial-around” long distance company (where you dialed a “101XXXX” code in front of your call), I was intending to order the line with “no PIC” (no default long distance company – if you only dial 1+area code+number you get a recording). Clearly the CSR didn’t want to put the order through like that. She first said that if we didn’t have a long distance company we’d never be able to make any long distance calls, or even calls to toll-free numbers. When I was unfazed by that, she delivered the coup de grace – “…and you won’t even be able to call 911 in an emergency!!!”

When I informed her (in no uncertain terms) that not one word of what she had just said was true, she somewhat deflatedly put the order through with no PIC (and yes, both toll-free calls and 911 calls went through just fine). But I wondered why a CSR would tell such lies to customers.

Well, now comes this story from ConsumerAffairs.Com:

A group of technicians employed by a contractor for DirecTV say they were fired for exposing the company’s alleged practice of heavily pushing customers to hook up their satellite receivers to phone lines, even though the service doesn’t require it.

The technicians, who worked for cable and satellite infrastructure provider MasTec in Orlando, Florida, told news station Local6 that they were pressured to tell customers “anything you have to” in order to get them to hook their receivers to phone lines.

Technician Frank Martinez told Local6 that he was ordered to “tell them if these phone lines are not connected, the receiver will blow up.”

Technicians said that $5 was deducted from their paycheck for every receiver they installed without the phone line connection.

As a result of the May 1st report, the technicians were promptly fired from MasTec, and say they are pursuing legal action against their former company and DirecTV.

Read the rest of the article here.

If the allegations by the technicians are true, I’d personally like to see them get at least a seven-figure judgment in this case. No employee should ever be forced to lie to customers in this way. Note that when you suggest to a customer that their receiver may blow up (which implies a possible fire, which in the customer’s mind suggests that they could lose their home if they don’t let the technician proceed), that’s not just a slight bending of the truth. That puts them in the same category as the phony furnace inspectors that sometimes prey on older people by suggesting that their house may blow up if a new furnace isn’t installed immediately – the dollar amount involved may be less, but it’s that kind of lie. No person with a conscience can lie like that for an employer.

This is the second time I’ve seen this story – the first time was in a Techdirt article last week.

While on the subject of satellite TV, I always wonder why people (especially people who live in areas where it snows) allow satellite dish installers to put the dish on their roof. Unlike a standard TV antenna, a satellite dish does not work better if you get it an extra 20 or 30 feet in the air (the sole exception being when there are trees in the signal path at ground level, but not at the roof line). Unless there is some really compelling reason to put the dish on the roof, it’s far better to mount it on a metal (NOT wood!) pole in your yard. Installers hate doing that because it requires two trips to do it right, because you need to mix and pour at least a bag or two of concrete around the base of the pole and let it dry before installing the dish.

But when you let an installer mount a dish on the roof, what happens is that he makes holes in your roof – holes to mount the dish, and also holes if he staples the cable to the roof. What happens then is that when it rains, water gets in these holes and starts to rot the wood underneath. Of course this takes time, and by the time you discover a series of leaks in your roof (maybe ten or fifteen years down the road, possibly sooner if termites or carpenter ants find the rotten wood first) the installer is long gone and the statue of limitations has run out. Then you have a potentially costly repair, because both the wood under the shingles and the shingles themselves require replacement. If for some reason I had to install a dish on a roof, I’d take up a tube of 100% silicone caulk and throughly goop up any mounting bolts before tightening them down, and also if I had to drive any staples I’d put down a dab of silicone caulk first, then drive each staple through the wet silicone caulk.

But the big advantage of a dish on a metal pole in places like Michigan is that, should you get one of those heavy, sticky snows that sits on your dish and takes your signal down to an unusable level, all it takes is a couple swipes with a broom and you are back in business. Of course there are such things as electrically heated dishes that will melt the snow for you, but in most places that’s overkill because you really only get the heavy, sticky snow once or twice a season (not nearly as often as the cable companies would have you believe, as if cable never loses its signal!).

Oh, by the way, the reason I keep specifying a metal pole is because a 10′ galvanized pipe of the correct size works very well and isn’t that expensive. I’ve seen some people mount dishes to wood poles, which is not a good idea because wood warps and twists, especially if you don’t seal the wood with a water sealant of some kind. If you know how to align your own dish and don’t mind doing it every so often, a wood pole will work, but most people are not going to want to bother with that. On the other hand, nothing short of a tornado, or hurricane-force winds, are going to bend or move a metal pole embedded in concrete.

This may sound like a dumb idea at first, but think about it a minute. Let’s suppose some major motherboard manufacturer, put the equivalent of a two-port ATA-voip adapter on their motherboards, and let’s further suppose they made the technology open-source so that other motherboard manufacturers could put compatible ATA’s on their motherboards. And let’s further suppose that while the ATA could operate completely independently of the computer (that is, the “computer” could be shut off but the ATA would still be powered and could still make and receive calls, as long as the computer is plugged in and the network connection is up – basically the network interface and ATA circuitry would remain powered even when the user shuts the computer off), it would exchange information with the computer via a set of API’s.

And what would be the goal of this? Well, let’s see…

You could synchronize a video stream with a phone call. If the computer is on and a webcam is available, and a call was placed to a user with a similar setup, a popup would give the user the option to transmit and receive video. If the computer was in “suspend” mode rather than completely powered down, it could even be set to “wake up” to receive an incoming video call.

You could detect “presence” information from an instant messaging client, and also call by clicking on a name in an IM client. If you and they have compatible equipment, clicking on their name would give you the option to place a call to their phone, or to try a text connection. But if they have set themselves to “away” they could also use their IM client to set up a forwarding rule for incoming calls, or have a voicemail box built right into their IM client (in which case the voicemail would be encoded BEFORE transmission and simply sent as an audio file, transparently to both users).

In a really bad connection situation (where you have some connectivity but not enough for normal two-way voice), you could switch to “walkie talkie” mode. In this case you’d use your phone but click a button in your IM program while talking. While you are talking it would be digitizing the voice (on your system) and attempting to send as much as possible; as soon as you released the “click to talk” button it would finish transmitting what you said to the other end (taking as long as necessary) and then immediately play the complete recording for the user at the other end. A “predictive” algorithm could even be used so that in some cases the recording might begin playing to the recipient BEFORE the recording is completed, to increase turnaround time (at the risk of having a long gap in the message if it turns out to be much longer than usual). The thing about using a computer and VoIP adapter that can talk to each other are that this switch between modes could be done in real time, without requiring users to drop the call.

And of course there are the applications that the online merchants would love – a click-to-call that truly works with no hassle, and if the merchant has similar equipment, the call stays on the Internet and never even hits the PSTN. Say the customer had questions about how a product worked; with the video tie-in the merchant (who, presumably, would be using something of a bit higher quality than the average webcam) could actually do a live demonstration right in front of the camera, answering the customer’s questions in real time.

Or how about, pick up your phone, dial a number, and instantly watch a video or a TV show on your computer? Think anyone might go for that?

And thinking farther into the future, what happen when the “3D printers” that can fabricate small parts on the fly become widely available? Can you imagine calling a furniture manufacturer and saying, “one of the plastic braces in your computer desk kit is missing” and they say, “Turn on your 3d printer and we’ll send you the data to print it out?” Oh, did I mention that you’ll probably want a way to send documents (2D now, 3D later) as part of your call? Why don’t any IM programs have “printer drivers” that let you “print” to your current IM conversation, which would actually print out at the printers on the other end (with the permission of the recipient, of course?). We need a replacement for the FAX machine anyway!

But I digress just a bit. The point is that by building a VoIP adapter into a motherboard, you can essentially have the best of both worlds, as long as the VoIP adapter is powered up even when the main “computer” is off. If the computer and the VoIP adapter can communicate back and forth in an intelligent manner, it makes all sorts of things possible.

Of course another approach to this would be for the VoIP adapter manufacturers to build “next generation” VoIP adapters that would essentially exchange this same information with computers over the local network. And that may also be a valid approach, and one that could work quite well on a fast network (with the added benefit that a recipient of a video call wouldn’t necessarily be tied to a particular computer). But sooner or later, someone who knows how to code these sorts of things has to start writing the code, and if you want it to be universally accepted and used, you’re probably going to have to make it open source. Who is up to the challenge of doing this?

ConsumerAffairs.Com reports that AT&T plans to drop the Cingular brand and change it to AT&T Wireless. Only a phone company would spend millions (possibly billions) to build a brand name, then just throw it away, only to replace it with a name that they got rid of years ago. Old Coke, New Coke, branding’s such a big joke…

Quoting from this article at Earthweb:

Last fall, IT administrators in New Orleans set up the nation’s first free wireless Internet network that is solely owned and operated by a major U.S. city. The move was first aimed at helping aid workers do their jobs and was then expanded to boost the city’s struggling businesses and enable residents to communicate with friends, relatives and much-needed federal and city services.

While residents had an overwhelmingly positive response to the set up of the network, area telephone and cable companies weren’t as happy about the deal which offered free service within a three-square-mile range that covers the French Quarter, the central business district and the warehouse district. Vendors that offer broadband Internet service in the area have complained, pointing to a state law that mandates that any municipal network run at 128Kbit/sec — a far cry from the 512Kbit/sec service that is offered now.

Chris Drake, project manager in the mayor’s Office of Technology in New Orleans, says they’re working hard to keep this free, high-speed service up and running. For starters, the city’s CIO Greg Meffert is pushing to have the state law changed, allowing municipalities to run networks at higher speeds, according to Drake. The city also is in negotiations with Earthlink. Drake says they want the ISP to take over the existing network and then build it out to cover the entire area where the city’s population has returned. So far, Earthlink is reportedly agreeing to do this at the company’s expense. This free Earthlink service wouldn’t be able to run at 512Kbit/sec, says Drake, but they should be able to keep it at 384Kbit/sec — fast enough to enable most applications and Voice over IP phone calls.

Read the rest of this article to discover how the free wi-fi has greatly assisted in the city’s cleanup efforts.

I can’t help thinking that if wi-fi had been developed 50 years ago (and “Ma Bell” hadn’t had such influence on the nation’s communications policy), there would have probably be municipal wi-fi systems in many cities large and small, just as some cities have municipal electric plants, municipal garbage collection, or municipal operation of other “essential services.” And we’d probably still be arguing over whether those operations should be privatized. The only difference now is that some people think the large corporate interests should have the first bite of the apple, so to speak, even when it would be clearly advantageous to have a municipal operation, or to have a public-private partnership (as is being suggested here).

I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging more recently. Honestly, when I read the news lately I sometimes get so depressed that I just want to close my eyes and hope it’s all a bad dream. The very last thing I want to do is write about it, which forces me to think about it. And beyond that, when there is bad news it seems that every other blogger that covers roughly the same area also writes about it, and some of them are paid professional writers that probably have much better blogging tools at their disposal.

Yesterday, for example, the FCC again ordered all facilities-based broadband Internet access and interconnected VoIP providers to comply with CALEA by May 14, 2007. Unless I’m missing something, this is basically a case of the FCC dumping the problem into the laps of broadband ISP’s and VoIP companies without giving them any guidance as to how they are supposed to comply, or any financial assistance toward complying with the regulations. As such it is an unfunded federal mandate, and a somewhat unclear mandate at that.

Earlier this week, it looked like Net Neutrality was going nowhere. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who somehow has become much more powerful than he logically should be, given the small population of his home state, introduced some legislation that is basically a gift package for telephone companies and certain other industries, while at the same time watering down net neutrality regulation to the point of being almost non-existent.

Fortunately, it looks like another powerful interest group – namely the country’s biggest financial firms – are finally starting to wake up and realize that if net neutrality isn’t enforced, it could seriously hurt them. But will their objections be too little, too late? Or do they really have the muscle (and the will) to put the big phone and cable companies in their place?

The Universal Service Fund was in the news again this week. Though nobody seems to like it except those special interests that are feeding at the trough, it appears that not only isn’t it going away anytime soon, but that the aforementioned legislation by Senator Stevens would actually expand it so that we’d all be paying more into it, depending on what sort of (and how many) communications channels we have coming into our home.

To me, the USF is nothing more than highway robbery from consumers to fund certain corporate interests. It is not something consumers owe anyone, it is money the federal government has just decided to take from us. Like a bizarro Robin Hood, they take from the poor and give to the rich, and then try to tell us it’s ultimately for our own good. Or at least, for someone’s good. If they can’t think of any other convincing B.S. to feed us, they tell us it’s for the children’s good.

Another way to look at the USF is that it’s old-fashioned socialism. It is the government deciding that they know how to spend your money better than you do. It is the redistribution of wealth – namely, your wealth to someplace else you’ve probably never been, except maybe to pass through on the way to someplace else. The USF should be abolished, plain and simple. Anyway, the next time the Republicans come around on their moral high horse talking about “liberals”, you might want to remind them of Senator Stevens – he may be a Republican by party affiliation, but he sure comes off like a liberal. Of course you and I know that it’s not classic liberalism because the money is really going to big business, but I doubt you’ll ever get any supporter of the USF to come out and admit that, and those who admit to being liberals do the exact same thing, so there’s not a whole lot of difference.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say this week (unless something else blogworthy comes along). Oh, except for one thing: I’m dropping the Technorati tags at the end of my posts. They are a nuisance to create and I’m not at all convinced they actually accomplish anything, so begone with them.