Archive for July, 2009

It’s no wonder some people hate AT&T

July 28, 2009 at 5:16 pm · Filed under AT&T, DSL, Editorial, Internet, Michigan, Regulation, Telephone, consumer, corporation, customer service

I just has the distinct displeasure of trying, unsuccessfully, to help a friend obtain AT&T DSL service at his home. Right now he has phone service from a competitive phone company, but what he wants to do is get the least expensive DSL service that AT&T offers (the variety they have been advertising on TV, that does not require the customer to have their dial tone), then use VoIP for his phone service — but he doesn’t want to disconnect his current voice service until everything else is up and working.  Apparently, he might as well be wanting a flying car or a time machine.  Even putting aside the issue of the competitive phone service, the first thing that needs to be done is to get the DSL installed, and if ever a company acts like they don’t want your business, it’s AT&T.

On his first attempt, he picked an AT&T number out of the phone book and called that.  That attempt apparently came to a screeching halt when AT&T told him they could not install DSL as long as he had phone service from the competitive phone company.  Actually, there’s no TECHNICAL reason that you can’t provide DSL from one company and voice from another on the same pair, but for whatever reason it’s apparently just not done.  I wasn’t listening in on that call so I don’t know all the details, but after that we did a three-way call to see if we’d have any better luck (and honestly, I wanted to hear if it was as bad as he’d described it).

The first thing we did was to call the number that is advertised on the AT&T commercials for $19.95 DSL.  That, apparently, is your ticket into the seven circles of telephone hell.  If I’d been playing a drinking game, taking a drink every time we heard the phrase “your call is important to us”, I would not be drunk – I’d likely be quite dead.  We heard it from female voices, male voices, and disembodied voices that sounded like they were continents away.  I’d guess we were transferred at least half a dozen times, sometimes by voice response systems that didn’t even wait for a response and just seemed to randomly transfer the call.  The last time we were transferred, it was by some guy with a distinct accent — it sort of sounded Indian, but by that time the quality of the connection was so poor it was hard to tell — who told us that if we got cut off, we could call the AT&T DSL department directly on 877-722-9337 (my friend repeated the number back TWICE to make sure he’d heard it right, and I copied it down also).  That number may have belonged to AT&T at one time, but now it apparently belongs to an “enhanced” directory service (that has a web site at http://www.callingten.com/).  When their recording first answers, it almost sounds like you are being charged $4.95 (or some amount, it was hard to hear) for the call (I think you actually have to call a different number for that to happen, but it wasn’t really all that clear).

Anyway, when we got cut off after talking to the guy with the accent, and then getting the recording at the directory service, I finally went prowling around AT&T’s web site and found another number for Internet service – 1-800-288-2020 – and again we had to go through a voice response system and several minutes of wait.  Finally we reached someone who actually tried to be helpful, but it took her several minutes to find my friend’s address in their system (he lives in an apartment complex, but still, they do offer service there, so it shouldn’t have been a major undertaking to find the address).  Then she asked a bunch of questions about his phone, Internet, and television usage (I would have probably politely declined to answer, but he went along), and from that she deduced that he should order a triple play package that, if I recall correctly, would have cost over $70 a month.  When he said he was just interested in the basic low-speed DSL, she then (after some more time passed) said that they could not put the DSL on the same pair as the existing phone service (well, she didn’t exactly say it that way, but that’s what we figured out that she meant, after some conversation). At least she didn’t say he couldn’t get it at all.

But the real deal killer was that apparently she wasn’t at all aware of a promotion my friend had seen online.  According to him, the deal was that if you made a one-year service commitment, you got a free DSL modem and $100 back (I’m a bit skeptical about the $100 for that class of service, but I could see the free DSL modem as a possibility, given that AT&T probably buys them in bulk).  However, this representative basically said he’d have to commit to service for a year or pay an early termination penalty if he dropped the service before the year was up, and she couldn’t give him anything free or in any way sweeten the offer — he’d still have to pay about $50 for a DSL modem, plus a shipping charge!  It sounded as though she had no idea what deals might be offered on the web site. My friend wasn’t willing to set himself up for a possible termination charge, if for some reason he had to discontinue service (and I’m betting he wouldn’t — he’s the kind of guy that doesn’t like change much, so once they had him as a customer they’d likely have him for years — but in an apartment situation you just never know.  If there is a fire or a pipe breaks or something, he could be forced to move out with very little notice). After having been on the phone for over three hours, and being told that “your call is important to us” when clearly it was NOT, his sense of humor had long since evaporated and to basically be told, “this is the deal, take it or leave it” was just a bit too much to take under the circumstances.

I don’t know if my friend will ever get DSL service now or not.  He was somewhat enthused about it before this morning, but that certainly wasn’t his attitude by the time he was going into the fourth hour of phone hell. I am SO glad I don’t personally live in an area where AT&T and Comcast are the only viable choices available (my friend lives in Gaines Township which is near Wyoming, Michigan, in the Grand Rapids metro area, but not close enough to downtown to be within range of any inexpensive wireless services, as far as we know).

Why does AT&T bother to advertise the service if they don’t want people to get it?  Is it just bait-and-switch – you can call in for the $19.95 offer but if they can’t upsell you to something more expensive then they don’t care if you take their service or not? I might be inclined to actually believe that, but then I realize that most of the “phone hell” occurred before they had even determined why my friend was calling.

I have three takeaways from this:  First, if Comcast would just offer an entry-level DSL service for people who are, shall we say, not wealthy, they could clean AT&T’s clock.  I know a lot of people don’t like Comcast and there is probably good reason for that, but I have a feeling that if my friend had been willing to pay their rate, he wouldn’t have been on the phone with them for more than ten or fifteen minutes tops.  He certainly would not have been transferred all over creation because a particular rep didn’t handle Michigan, or DSL, or whatever the excuse was. Now, I have no way to know what his actual installation experience might have been, but at least trying to sign up for the service probably wouldn’t have seemed something akin to a root canal. Comcast really shoots themselves in the foot by doing that “introductory rate” nonsense — by now everyone is on to that (ironically, in part due to AT&T commercials) so what they really need is a low rate option with limited connection speed, for people who don’t do much more than check e-mail and go to a few web pages.

Second, after all this time, AT&T still acts like they are the only game in town, and that they really don’t need to give a damn whether ordering a service is a pleasant, or at least non-painful experience. In my opinion, any time a customer hears a recording saying “your call is important to us”, that’s a massive fail on the part of a company.  If you really thought the call was important, you’d answer it, and to tell us the call is important to you when it clearly isn’t is a massive insult.  And you wouldn’t put numbers in your television ads that go to people who have no ability to help the customer with ordering service, and who must transfer them several times before finally losing the call completely (actually terminating with a bust of hold music played at about four times normal volume, just before the call dropped entirely).  And speaking of which, I thought AT&T was originally a phone company – so why is their own phone service so dreadful?

Third, the phone companies still do everything they can to inhibit competition.  As I said earlier, there’s no TECHNICAL reason you can’t have voice service from one company and DSL from another on the same pair (and the plan was to drop the existing voice service anyway, but only after the DSL was working).  But apparently AT&T can’t make that happen, for whatever reason. My friend doesn’t know how many usable pairs are run into each apartment (in particular, whether there’s more than one) and due to family circumstances it would be pretty difficult for me to go over there and trace out the wiring for him right now – it’s just a bit too far away, and I can’t be away that long right now.

I know from reading sites like The Consumerist that dealing with companies like AT&T is getting to be a really horrible experience, but until I listened in on my friend’s attempts to get DSL service this afternoon, I had no idea it was that bad.  Now I understand why the iPhone users are so upset that Apple forged an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S. – based on what I heard this afternoon, the “AT&T experience” is almost the exact opposite of what Apple users have come to expect from Apple.  Does AT&T have a death wish, or are they really just that incompetent?

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Is FreePBX support for FreeSWITCH in the near future?

July 19, 2009 at 5:24 pm · Filed under FreePBX, FreeSwitch, VOIP News, VoIP, software

There is an alternative to Asterisk called FreeSWITCH that’s been of some interest, because in some ways it’s arguably better than Asterisk.  However, it’s not been nearly as widely adopted as Asterisk.  That’s in part because Asterisk has the name recognition factor, but also because, unlike Asterisk, there have not to this point been any good GUI-based interfaces for FreeSWITCH.  Much of the adoption of Asterisk has been in part due to projects like FreePBX, which spares administrators the chore of writing their own dial plans.

Now, a tantalizing hint has been dropped that FreePBX may offer some form of support for FreeSWITCH.  In a message thread at FreePBX.org, lead developer Philippe Lindheimer has posted this message: “There will be an official announcement within the next 2 weeks. Consider that period coincides with Cluecon which is in 2 weeks :) “

Makes you wonder…

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Geographic telephone numbers still cause problems for callers

July 19, 2009 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Editorial, Opinion, Telephone, VOIP News, VoIP, business ethics, consumer, customer service

I was about 17 years old and radio station CKLW (a radio station in Windsor, Ontario that was then the top-rated station in many nearby U.S. cities such as Detroit, Toledo, and even Cleveland) was running a contest — seems like they were always running a contest — called “secret satellite.”  The idea was, they gave clues (progressively easier) about where a “secret satellite” had supposedly crashed.  If you guessed right and were the correct caller, you won a brand-new Plymouth Satellite automobile. They gave out two numbers to call (neither was toll-free) — one was in Windsor and the other in Detroit. Since there was a pretty good chance you would not be the “correct” caller even if you got through, and since the rate at the time for an “international” call to Windsor was significantly higher that the rate to the Detroit number (which was itself high enough because it was an in-state call), the obvious choice was to call the Detroit number.  Well, I figured out the answer and tried to call — and got blocked by a telephone company recording.

Without going into all the details, that was where I first learned about geographic telephone numbers, and it’s also where I learned the power of contacting the Public Service Commission with a complaint.  I was mad because I knew somebody was lying to me — Michigan Bell was claiming that CKLW had requested they block calls from outside the 313 area code, and CKLW replied (by letter) that they had done no such thing. In the end, you get one guess who was lying (hint: the lies weren’t coming out of Canada). Had I been older and had my dad not been doing some contract work for Michigan Bell at the time, chances are I would have pursued the matter further, but at least I got them to unblock the number — long after someone else had won the car, after giving the exact same answer I would have given.

So I have some sympathy for the woman described in this Consumerist article, who claims to have lost $1,000 because Vonage routes all calls to 1-800 numbers through New York and the station could not, or would not accept the calls. The problem is that the woman (and apparently The Consumerist, judging by the headline on the article) appear to be blaming Vonage for the screwup. Now, Vonage isn’t my favorite company either, but let’s be realistic here.

When you have VoIP service — or cell phone service for that matter — and you place a call that goes to a PSTN number, the calls have to get connected to the PSTN network somewhere, and that somewhere probably isn’t going to be in your home town. In the case of a toll-free call, it gets dumped onto the PSTN, but after that several things can happen.  You need to understand that, without getting too technical, the telephone number of the phone originating the call can be transmitted in either or both of two ways — as the Caller ID number, and as Automatic Number Identification data (ANI, usually pronounced “Annie”). The least expensive ways for a VoIP company to send a call to the PSTN — particularly a toll-free call — often does not transmit ANI that corresponds in any way to the original caller’s number. Again, without getting too technical, this is because the original caller doesn’t own the circuit that makes the connection to the PSTN, and chances are the VoIP company doesn’t own it either (at least in the case of smaller VoIP companies).

So to cut to the chase, a VoIP company has few choices – in most cases they use a good but inexpensive method of sending toll-free calls to the PSTN, which may or may not send the correct Caller-ID number of the original caller, but in probably the vast majority of cases does not send ANI data that corresponds to that caller.  And in fact, most VoIP companies probably could not send out toll-free calls with a “local” ANI without increasing their costs dramatically, and for probably 99%+ of toll-free calls it’s not necessary, because most companies these days know better than to “cheap out” by putting geographic restrictions on their toll-free numbers.

The real issue here is that, without commenting on this specific case (of which I know nothing other than what I read in the Consumerist article), radio stations are notorious for pinching pennies — I know because I’ve worked at a couple when I was much younger, and the lengths that station owners and managers will go to in order to save a few cents are legendary in the industry. When you have a toll-free number, one of the things you can do (particularly if you’ve obtained the number from a traditional telephone company) is request that you only receive calls that appear to originate in certain area codes.  And why would you do that?  For one reason and one reason only — you don’t want to pay for wrong number calls and prank calls that come from outside your service area. Of course, with the advent of “soft” PBX’s, the end-user can now do similar filtering, based on either ANI (if they receive that on their incoming trunk) or Caller ID.

That MIGHT have been a good idea back in the 1980’s and before, when toll-free calls cost the subscriber a lot more than a couple of cents per minute. It’s certainly NOT a good idea now.  Why?  Because people are starting to keep their phone numbers even when they move. I could be sitting in the lobby of your radio station in Washington, D.C., and whip out a cell phone and try to call you, and you might think I’m in California if I originally obtained service for my phone in California, or if my provider is connecting call to the PSTN via a gateway that’s not sending ANI associated with my cell phone.  The same is true of VoIP — even if I’m sitting at home a block away from you and using my VoIP line to call you, if you are basing the decision on whether to accept my call based on ANI there’s an extremely good chance that the ANI isn’t going to be in any way associated with my actual location.  Even if you use Caller ID data, I could still be a block away from you but have a number in an area code 3,000 miles away, so that’s not going to work either.

The real message here is that radio stations either need to stop refusing toll-free calls based on ANI or Caller-ID data, or if they are just too cheap to do that (and believe me, based on my previous experiences with broadcasters, many are) then stop using toll-free numbers altogether.  Or, give out a toll-free number AND a local (non-toll-free) number, specifying that cell and VoIP callers should use the local number. Or, just keep cheaping out, and risk alienating more and more of their listeners.  If listeners cannot get into their contest lines, what’s the point of listening to a commercial radio stations, with all their ads and (sometimes) annoying announcers?  There are always online services like Pandora and Last.fm, or personal music players that play the selection of music that you like, not the stuff the radio station is force-feeding this week. Personally, even the possibility of winning a thousand bucks would not be enough to induce me to listen to today’s banal and annoying commercial radio (I know, I’m an olde phart now, but from what I’ve been reading, the kids aren’t listening to radio much either).

By the way, I’m not a lawyer, but if the woman in question decides to sue anyone in small claims court, perhaps the best course of action would be to jointly sue Vonage, the radio station, and the local telephone company that supplies the toll-free service to the radio station (if she can find out which company that might be), and let the court figure out which is actually liable.  I don’t know if it would be worth the effort for a thousand bucks, but I think it would be interesting to many of us to see which party a court would actually hold liable in such a situation.

Meanwhile, if you run a VoIP company, you might consider including some language in your Terms of Service that says something like this (again, I AM NOT A LAWYER, and this is NOT legal advice – before you do anything like this be sure to run it by YOUR lawyer): “(Company name) does not warrant that calls sent to the public switched telephone network will always contain correct Caller ID and/or Automatic Number Indentification (ANI) data.  If a customer places a call to a toll-free number, and the owner of the number rejects calls based on Caller ID or ANI data, they may sometimes reject calls from our customers, for reasons that are beyond our control.  In such cases, it is the customer’s responsibility to contact the owner of the toll-free number and request that they discontinue blocking of calls based on Caller ID or ANI data, or to obtain and call a non-toll-free number instead.  Nothing in this paragraph applies to the routing of emergency calls to 911 services.” Again, this is written by someone with maybe a small bit of technical background but NO LEGAL BACKGROUND, so IT’S NOT LEGAL ADVICE, so DON’T USE IT WITHOUT CHECKING WITH YOUR LAWYER FIRST.  Got it?!?

Maybe it’s high time for the FCC to step in and ban geographic or area code restrictions on toll-free calls (at least at the carrier level) for precisely the reasons I’ve mentioned — telephone numbers are more and more becoming non-geographic. The possibility of having “one phone number for life”, no matter where you move, is no longer a farfetched notion – a child coming of age today could indeed arrange to have one phone number for life, barring technical changes that revise the way phone numbers are issued, or a company that goes out of business along the way or some such thing. Businesses need to realize that, and get rid of this antiquated and silly notion of blocking calls based on area codes and/or exchange prefixes, which nowadays often give no indication whatsoever of the geographic location of the caller.

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Marketwire: 1-800-FREE411 Now Offering Free Long Distance Calls Within U.S. and to Most International Destinations

July 18, 2009 at 12:56 pm · Filed under Telephone, VoIP, consumer

1-800-FREE411, a well-known provider of free directory assistance calls in the United States, is now branching out and allowing people to complete calls for free, even to international destinations. Here’s an excerpt from their press release:

BILLERICA, MA–(Marketwire – July 15, 2009) – The nation’s first and leading provider of free directory assistance, 1-800-FREE411, has launched a new feature that connects callers to most phone numbers worldwide for a FREE long distance call. Callers from the continental United States can place a five minute call through 1-800-FREE411 to reach out and connect with loved ones no matter how far away they may be.

To place a free long distance call, callers dial 1-800-FREE411 and listen to the main menu prompts where they can select “free call.” After entering the phone number that they wish to call, including a country code, they will be connected free of charge for five minutes. Callers have to listen to two short advertisements and there is no limit on the number of calls they can make in a day. Mobile phone callers may still be charged for minutes by their service provider. …..

Read the rest of the press release here.

This seems like a very useful service, particularly since it’s reachable from an 800 number.  I don’t know if the number is blocked from pay phones (does anyone still use those?), but if not, it could conceivably be used even to make free local calls. (EDIT: According to a comment left by Casey, the number is blocked from pay phones. Too bad, but not unexpected given the outrageous rates charged for completion of toll-free calls from pay phones).

If you live outside the United States, there are several ways to make free calls to U.S.-based 800 numbers using various VoIP services – I won’t elaborate on that here, but a bit of time spent using a search engine should yield a method that will work for you.

I only wish someone would set up a sip-based service like this, so that from your sip phone you could call something like destination_number@someaddress.com and the call would go through, because we could then route international calls from home-based PBX’s to such a service, and while we’d still hear the ads (presumably), at least we wouldn’t have the two-step dialing process.

I just hope this one lasts a while, since previous services of this type have had a tendency to disappear after a month or two. But, 1-800-FREE411 has been around for quite some time now already, so I’d be more inclined to assume that they have their business model figured out.

BILLERICA, MA–(Marketwire – July 15, 2009) – The nation’s first and leading provider of free directory assistance, 1-800-FREE411, has launched a new feature that connects callers to most phone numbers worldwide for a FREE long distance call. Callers from the continental United States can place a five minute call through 1-800-FREE411 to reach out and connect with loved ones no matter how far away they may be.
To place a free long distance call, callers dial 1-800-FREE411 and listen to the main menu prompts where they can select “free call.” After entering the phone number that they wish to call, including a country code, they will be connected free of charge for five minutes. Callers have to listen to two short advertisements and there is no limit on the number of calls they can make in a day. Mobile phone callers may still be charged for minutes by their service provider.

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The Consumerist: Beware Buying Advice From Bloggers On The Take (Commentary)

July 13, 2009 at 3:14 pm · Filed under Blog, Internet, Review, VoIP, business ethics, consumer, government

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The Consumerist has posted an article entitled, Beware Buying Advice From Bloggers On The Take. The gist of the matter is that there is no “code of ethics” for bloggers, and therefore you get all sorts of opinions, some bought and paid for. And that is true, as far as it goes.

I will tell you this much up front. I have accepted freebies in the past, in two categories. One is books — publishers frequently send out review copies of books, and I’m not above reviewing one, once in a while. I did this 25 years ago when I was writing for a computer club newsletter and I’ll still very occasionally do it today. The difference today is I’m a lot more selective – usually I won’t even accept a book unless I think there’s at least some chance it will be interesting or useful to me. Just within the last week, I declined the opportunity to review a book because, frankly, I have a bias against both the company behind the product that is the subject of the book, and against the author of the book, due to (ironically enough) what I considered unethical practices by both.

To my way of thinking, once a book goes out to a reviewer it cannot be resold as new anyway, so why would the publisher want it back? At that point it has minimal value — sure, I suppose that I could resell it as a used book if I were so inclined, but I don’t ever do that. But more to the point, the fact that it’s a free book isn’t sufficient to cause me to write enthusiastic praise about it, particularly if the book is a real dog.

The other category is hardware. In the two cases where I have reviewed a hardware product since starting this blog, I have contacted the distributor of that product because it was something that I was interested in and because I thought the product was something more people should know about. I basically wanted to verify that the product worked as advertised. In one case the product was so interesting to me that what I had intended to be a one-post review turned into a seven-part series, and yet I still reported as honestly as I could on the subject (does anyone who read that series not get that I thought the documentation that came with the unit was deficient?). I didn’t say good things about the unit because I got to keep it after the review; instead I said good things about it because it works well and could solve a problem that many users have (getting VoIP to work through a difficult firewall setup).

The actual reason that I had become interested in that particular product was because I had recently tried (and failed) to help someone get a SIP connection working using a Linksys PAP2 on a connection that had to go through two routers. The double NAT setup just killed the audio in both directions, and the guy I was trying to help wasn’t inclined to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. I got to thinking how nice it would be to have a VoIP adapter available that uses the IAX protocol, which usually works quite well in that sort of situation. The Atcom AG-188N seemed like a good choice, but I didn’t have an immediate need for one, so I thought I’d try requesting a review sample. And when I received it, it was one of those happy situations where the unit actually delivered a lot more than I had expected (even if the documentation left something to be desired).

But would I ever write a bad review of a hardware product I had received for free? Oh, yes, I certainly would. Back in the early days of the TRS-80 computer, I had an early dot matrix printer (to this day I’m embarrassed to say what I paid for that thing – suffice it to say I could probably buy about ten laser printers today for what that underpowered dot-matrix printer cost back then). Anyway, a company that was advertising in one of the computer magazines was selling a device that, when inserted between the computer and the printer, was supposed to provide enhanced page-formatting capability (remember, back then most dot-matrix printers were LINE printers and had no text formatting capabilities whatsoever). I requested a review unit, and had it worked even reasonably well I would have reported that honestly. But frankly, the product sucked. Not only did it not work as advertised, it actually interfered with normal printing!

I reported that as accurately as I could, and advised people to avoid the unit. The manufacturer was very upset with me, to put it mildly, and wrote me a nasty letter demanding I return their product, which I was more than happy to do (who needs a piece of useless electronic junk lying around?), even though I was under no legal obligation to do so (I then wrote a followup article, noting the manufacturer’s petulance). Apparently they thought that by giving me a free unit, I could be bought – and they were wrong. Free or not, it still has to work as advertised.

There are two things I will not do. One is that I will not let someone else write a review for me and publish it in my blog. If and when I use someone else’s words, I clearly identify them (for example, I might include a list of product specifications from the manufacturer’s web site, but I will tell you the source, and usually include a link). The other is that I would never accept any payment to write a review. I guess I don’t consider being allowed to keep an under-$100 product as payment (now, if I were reviewing expensive wide-screen TV’s, that might be a different matter). Again, my reasoning is that once I’ve had the product in my possession, it can no longer be sold as new, and frankly I don’t want the bother and expense of having to ship it back, and I usually wouldn’t have requested it in the first place if I didn’t think it might be useful to me at some point. But think about it – if the only “compensation” I am getting is being allowed to keep the product, and the product is a piece of crap, what possible inducement would I have to say anything good about it?

I know that a few of the major print magazines make it a point to ship review products back to the manufacturer when they are finished with them, but they usually have a lot larger budgets than most bloggers (not to mention an in-house shipping department). But keep in mind that not all reviews you see in a magazine are necessarily the result of in-house testing. Some of them may be “work for hire”, which is to say, articles purchased from independent writers not directly affiliated with the magazine. In those cases, you (and perhaps the magazine publisher) have no way of knowing if the reviewer got to keep the product — or got any other form of compensation (beyond what the magazine paid) for writing the article.

Because the FTC and others are suddenly become concerned about this, I’m probably going to have to add a line to any future reviews, that says something like “Disclosure: The publisher let me keep the book after I was finished reviewing it”, or, “Disclosure: The distributor or manufacturer provided this product for review purposes and is not requiring me to return it” whenever that is the case. I’d suggest that other bloggers who accept books or products for review may want to do the same.

But what you really need to beware of are those bloggers that will publish “ghost written” reviews, or that actually accept money (or other compensation) to write positive reviews. The thing you are trying to detect is the “quid pro quo”, where there is an actual or implied understanding that the blogger will only write a positive review. One possible tipoff is when a review says only good things (nothing is perfect, after all), but on the other hand, keep in mind that it is possible that the reviewer was simply very impressed with the book or product (it does happen — sometimes a product really surprises you). Perhaps a larger clue is if the blog in question seems to deal almost exclusively in reviews and other “PR” type material — or has only one or two posts since creation, and they both just happen to be reviews! Of course, I would hope that (whenever possible) people would seek out multiple reviews before buying a product, and not just depend on a single blog posting.

Anyway, if anyone has a VoIP-related product they want reviewed, my conditions would generally be these: First, I don’t write reviews for hire, so expect an honest evaluation. Second, if the product costs under $100 (retail) and you decide you want it back after the review, I’m probably going to think you’re a little bit chintzy, but you’d best mention that fact up front. Third, in any case, if you want it back you’ll need to provide a prepaid UPS return shipping label (and be aware that I don’t live all that close to a UPS dropoff point, so it might be a little while before you get it back). Fourth, in the future I’ll probably have to add a disclosure line to my reviews, as mentioned above. And fifth, and most important, I don’t have the time or inclination to review anything and everything, so unless it’s something I have a particular interest in (such as a VoIP-related product) don’t be surprised if I decline — I do not want this to turn into a “review blog.”

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New Products Wanted, part 3: Consumer-grade DTV channel demodulator and remodulator

July 3, 2009 at 3:00 am · Filed under Digital Television, consumer, invention, video

It’s another in my (very) irregular series of “why hasn’t anyone made this yet?” posts…

The idea on this one is simple. Since all the television stations in the United States are now broadcasting in digital format, and since you can buy DTV converter boxes for as little as about $50, I’m assuming that decoding a DTV channel’s data stream isn’t a real big deal.  So why not take that one step further and allow that signal to be remodulated onto a different channel?  The difference between a converter box and what I have in mind is simply this:  A converter box takes a digital signal and converts it to another channel, but the output is analog.  I’m saying do the same thing, except make the output a digital signal, on a different channel than the original.

And WHY would you want to do this?  Well, for any of several reasons:

  • Your antenna is at a distance from your house (or from another building that you’re feeding a signal to), and a station you want to get is way up on UHF, and coaxial cable is typically quite lossy at UHF frequencies.  So, at the bottom of your tower, you convert that channel to VHF (say channel 2, which is now unused in most areas) and now you can send it even a few hundred feet down RG-6 (or RG-11) and still have a usable signal.
  • You have two adjacent channels that you want to receive that are almost equally strong, but in different directions (say for example, channel 8 from the south and channel 9 from the north).  You want to put up a separate antenna to pick up the one station that’s in a different direction from the others, but you can’t just combine the signals using a reverse splitter because on some channels the two antennas might cancel each other out.  Nor can you use a JoinTenna because they are not recommended for use on adjacent channels. So you run the one antenna in a digital demodulator-remodulator and change only the one channel you want to a low VHF channel that’s unused in your area.
  • Cable channel substitution – say your cable company gives you a channel your wouldn’t be caught dead watching (the gimme-your-money religious and shopping channels come to mind) but they don’t give you a channel you want to watch that you can receive with a rooftop antenna. A deluxe model of this unit could actually do drop-in channel substitution – say you receive the over the air channel on 9 but you want to replace a station on 24, you could do that.

Give me enough time and I could probably think up a few more uses – point is, this is a DTV problem solver.

In my opinion, an excellent unit of this type Would have two coax inputs and two coax outputs:

  • An input that carries the channel you want to convert (often from a “secondary” antenna)
  • An input that carries the signal that you want to insert the converted channel into (the cable line or “primary” antenna feed)
  • An output that carries the combination of both the second input and the converted channel from the first input
  • A “passthru” output for the first input, that passes it through unchanged

The reason for the last output would be so you can “stack” boxes, in case you have multiple signals coming off that “secondary” antenna.  You’d bring that antenna into the first box, have that one convert the weakest signal, and then pass the line to box 2, and have it convert another channel.  Your primary feed (cable or main antenna) would pass through both boxes, and each box would insert a channel.

Options: Each box should have a way to do basic setup. Options that would need to be set are as follows:

  • Channel you want to convert (specified by channel number or frequency)
  • New output channel (also specified by channel number or frequency)
  • Option – primary and channel to be converted are on same input

The last option would be used in the case where you have only one line coming in but you still want to convert a channel, say from UHF to VHF.  In this case, the converted channel would still appear at its original postion, but would also be downconverted to the lower channel and inserted back into the feed.

An inexpensive unit might only allow a limited choice of output channels, say VHF only (or even low VHF only, but please not just 3 and 4!).  A deluxe unit might allow the type of channel replacement I mentioned above (actually removing a digital channel from the primary feed and replacing it with another channel).  A VERY deluxe unit might have a network connection that would present a web interface browsable on the TV or the local network, allowing selection of video files off the local network or perhaps from online sources, and could modulate those files onto a particular local digital channel, in addition to (or instead of) remodulating an off-the-air signal.  In addition, the deluxe unit might have the ability to convert more than one channel from the second antenna or source.

But the main point is, in no way should this be an analog conversion, and absolutely no RF should be allowed to cross paths – each input and output should be totally isolated from the other inputs and outputs, except of course for the “passthru” output, which should carry ONLY the unchanged signal from the secondary antenna. When a channel is changed in frequency, it should be done by extracting the data stream from the original signal, then regenerating that digital stream and remodulating it on the conversion channel.

Finally, I’ll even throw one other idea out there, if someone wants a real challenge – have a “replacement signal” mode.  How would that work?  Well, extending the previous example, let’s say your digital channel 8-1 and your digital channel 9-1 are both CBS affiliates.  And let’s say that neither is 100% reliable.  So what you might do is, in some way indicate to the box that both digital channel 9 from the secondary antenna and digital channel 8 from the primary antenna are to be converted to digital channel 3, but you want the channel 8 signal to take precedence.  The receiver would constantly demodulate both signals, but if for any reason the channel 8 data stream is interrupted, it would smoothly switch over to the channel 9 stream until the channel 8 signal comes back to an acceptable level.  This feature, of course, would probably only work well during times when both stations are showing the same network programing, and even then might be a little disconcerting, but not nearly as annoying as having a program disappear completely for thirty seconds or a minute. And, it would seldom or never work right for the secondary channels (e.g. 8-2 and 9-2 in this case).

(I might also add that it could look at the SAME channel on the two different inputs, in case you’re trying to use “diversity reception” techniques – in essence it would then pick whichever data steam was the most usable at any given moment, and try to “fill in the blanks” from the other, converting the best data stream to the remodulated channel frequency).

Now, I know that you can buy equipment designed for use at a cable company head end that can do this sort of thing, but what home viewer has two grand to drop on something like this?  That’s why I say, make a consumer grade unit and keep the price reasonable – the lowest end units should not cost more than about $75, certainly not more than $100 (and if you charge that much, please include a fantastic tuner!).

Whoever is the first to make something like this will be hailed by consumers and TV antenna installers alike!

Of course there’s also that OTHER device that a lot of people want, but that we may never see — a device that will take the HDMI video output and digital audio output from some source, and modulate it onto a channel for local distribution. No, even that would NOT replace what I’ve described above, though, because it would likely only be able to modulate one video source per channel, whereas the over the air data streams may actually contain three or four program streams (which makes my “replacement signal” idea a lot more difficult to do properly).  But my thought is that if you’re going through the trouble and expense of remodulating a channel, you at least want ALL the programming on that channel (the entire data stream, in other words).

Originally posted on Friday, July 3, 2009 at 4:00 AM EDT.

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