Category: UC

Unified Communications

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Engineer security voip

Announcing ITSPA trefor.net VoIP security workshop sponsored by Yealink

trefor.net itspa voip security workshop

trefor.net is teaming up with ITSPA, the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association, to produce a twice yearly VoIP security workshop. The first one is during the Convergence Summit South show at Sandown Park on October 8th, Read on to find out more.

Announcing the ITSPA/trefor.net VoIP security workshop

Telecom Fraud – Part 1 – A Case Study for the Channel by a Paul Taylor from Voiceflex @ 2.30pm

The Part 1 talk which is part of the main Convergence Summit South programme nicely sets the scene for the ITSPA/trefor.net VoIP security workshop colocated at the same venue. The ITSPA/trefor.net VoIP security workshop goes into the main types of fraud perpetrated on VoIP service providers and their customers and discusses how to stop it happening in the first place.

Telecom Fraud – Part 2 – Prevention is Better than the Cure by ITSPA (the UK VoIP trade body) & trefor.net @ 3.15pm

yealink secure voip provisioningThis VoIP security workshop is intended to provide attendees with an overview of the current fraud threats facing the Telecoms/VoIP industry, outlining its scale and discussing the ways to mitigate against these problems before it is too late. Looking from all angles (service provider, reseller and vendor perspective), there will be short presentations from various industry players, outlining their experiences, followed by a panel and Q&A session to discuss the best methods of combatting fraudulent activity and best practice tips. Nibbles and drinks will follow to continue the discussion.

The format includes:

1) Telecoms/VoIP Fraud – the current state of play and how bad is it? – Simon Woodhead of Simwood

2) An outline of three specific types of fraud and what to do to tackle it

a. PBX Hacks David Cargill

b. Accessing SIP credentials  Steve Watts of Yealink

c. Identity spoofing Colin Duffy of VoIPfone

Simon Woodhead will also do a slot on general protection against non-specific threats.

3) Audience Q&A – How to prevent fraud, spot fraudsters and adhere to best practice.

This week is also going to be VoIP week on trefor.net. We have a gang of regular contributors providing posts but if you have an idea for an interesting VoIP posts let us know. You have to be from the VoIP/ITSP industry and it should not be a blatant sales pitch for your company’s products and services.

Finally on the 8th October, the same day as the VoIP security workshop, we are having the 5th trefor.net UC Exec Dinner. This time the speaker is Dean Elwood, CEO of Voxygen. Dean is coming to talk to us about what is happening with OTT VoIP services in the big telco community. This is only open to senior execs in the UC industry. More details here.

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Business voip

VoIP week on trefor.net 6th – 10th October

Old Phone VoIP week best mobile phone

Advanced notice of VoIP week on trefor.net 6th – 10th October

There are times in the year where VoIP becomes a natural subject to talk about. On these occasions we have a VoIP week on trefor.net. This is where we get lots of guest contributors to write stuff about VoIP. In our case the guest contributors are normally senior industry executives and as such usually have something worth listening to (ok or worth reading if you want to be pedantic).

Our last VoIP week was way back in May where we had a diverse set of posts included articles on Net Neutrality (still in the news now), security and fraud, the technology of location identification for Emergency Services, considerations in designing conference phones, the birth of a new handset, will OTT services kill off the telephony service provider and more.

We saw nostalgia and forward thinking. What’s happening in the Google UC world and will ITSPs need to embrace Lync? There was also a post highlighting a real world case study of someone trying to find a serviced office that would allow them to use their own VoIP service.

The statistics for the week included 6,640 visitors, 9,352 page views and an average of 296 RSS feed reads a day. There were a total of 414 shares including 90 via Twitter, a whopping 188 via LinkedIn, 73 for Google+ and 63 for Facebook. This mix suggests a predominantly business interest in the subject of VoIP.

This coming VoIP week is timed to coincide with the Convergence Summit South, a channel trade show in which VoIP services resellers descend on Sandown Park Racecourse to discuss VoIP business and to drink lots of beer. That week we are not only having a week of VoIP blog posts. We have a VoIP security jointly organised with ITSPA – the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association and the twice yearly trefor.net UC Executive Dinner. More on the workshop very soon.

The Exec Dinner is by invitation only and largely attracts C Level individuals from the Unified Communications (ie VoIP) industry. Although attendance is by invitation if you are a senior exec in the UC game and want to come you are very welcome to get in touch and I’ll point you in the right direction. These dinners are always great networking events and have a senior industry guest speaker to spark a debate. This next dinner has Voxygen CEO Dean Elwood discussing OTT services in the large telco market.

Finally VoIP week wouldn’t be VoIP week without its guest contributors. If you think you have something to say by all means get in touch and tell your friends. Note this is not an open invitation to write a sales oriented post filled with links to your own product.

C ya.

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Apps chromebook Cloud ecommerce End User gaming google H/W internet Mobile mobile apps mobile connectivity Net phones social networking

The Hump Day Five (16-July-2014)

Colorfulish

The Hump Day Five is on Red Alert this week, getting all Google-y powerful on music in the cloud, Leftovers, and Ping Pong Mania.

1

Started watching a new TV show a couple of weeks back called “The Leftovers”. If you haven’t haven’t seen or heard of it, the premise is quite simple. On 14-October at a precise moment in time approximately 2% of the world’s population randomly disappears without a trace. Drivers from moving vehicles, criminals from prison cells, babies from car seats, one moment there the next moment gone. It doesn’t take much imagination to see compelling story elements in such a framework, and in fact it is easy to see how the utter chaos of such a situation could become too much of a good thing (entertainment-wise, that is). The creators, though, very smartly opt to confine the drama to a single small town somewhere in America and how “The Departure”, as it is called, has affected and continues to affect the populace three years down the line. Succulent details are offered via ancillary media — overheard radio, television news programs being watched by this-or-that character, etc., not a small amount of Internet-y stuff — and go so far as to include a list of celebrities who number among the 2%. Dark stuff riddled rich with despair, sure, and as television goes it isn’t for everyone, but if you like your diversion disturbing and in-your-face I highly recommend checking it out.

2

Since late June a new application for both iPhone and Android has been making its way through the zeitgeist in direct response to the once-again-heightening tensions between Israel and Palestine: Kobi Snir’s Red Alert Israel. The idea behind this new app is to alert users of incoming rockets so they can stop whatever it is they are doing and take shelter*. The alerts received (tied directly to Israel Defense Forces and Homefront Command) can be configured quite tightly — there are a great many individual areas, considering the country’s small land mass — and each alert offers allows for comments, which can include prayers and encouragement, as well as — not surprising, but enraging nonetheless — inflammatory notes full of disparagement and outright hatred. Red Alert Israel also includes streaming Israeli radio (in Hebrew) to supplement its alerts with more detailed information (I assume). All in all, it is a noble idea that falls definitively on the side of the angels (and I say this even knowing that there is no Red Alert Palestine equivalent).

So I am sensitive to the dead-serious nature of Red Alert Israel and applaud and support its above-reproach mission, but I would be fibbing BIG-time if I said the image of people running for cover from flying ordinance with their hands flailing high above their heads clutching their phones didn’t loosen a small smile. Got too many episodes of The Simpsons under my belt, I suppose. Please excuse (or feel free to flame me up but good in the Comments).

The Red Alert Israel app is free, as you would expect, though it does run shifting banner advertising, because in these times absolutely nothing should go unsponsored. I mean, think about it…is there an advertiser out there who wouldn’t want their product or service to be associated with the saving of lives? And thus a new business model is born!

*The users in Israel, that is, as it is quite evident that Red Alert Israel is being downloaded and put into use by people living elsewhere..for purposes of showing solidarity, inspiring prayer and greater empathy, to stoke flames of outrage, to feed whatever vicarious needs, perhaps to serve as the basis for gambling or drinking games, etc.

3

For someone who spends as much time driving keyboards and mice as I do, I really can be late to the party at times. Take cloud-hosted music (aka online music lockers, aka online music storage services). Available in various flavors for a few years now (the majors all bowed in 2011 — Apple, Amazon, Google — whereas an early achiever called AudioBox left the starting block in 2009), it was only this past weekend that I started to consider the idea of throwing some of my music up into the ether for ready access across my computers and smartphone. Naturally, I was aware of the cloud-hosted music concept, but that awareness was mostly relegated to Apple’s iTunes in the Cloud/iTunes Match service, and as I trust Apple’s software and service offerings about as much as…well, not at all, actually, I put up a willful “blind spot” to the whole idea. Of course, it also helped that my music collection far exceeded the 25,000 song limit put on the $25-per-year service by Apple, and that at the start – as is unfortunately so often the case — the service was available to U.S.-based users only.

A couple of years passed, and then along came KoryChrome. And with KoryChrome came promotions for Google services. And with the promotion in particular of Google Play Music — which I learned is now available in France and which includes the ability to load/match 20,000 songs absolutely free — came my revisiting the subject of cloud-hosted music this past weekend. 20,000 songs for uploaded/matched for free? Songs I can access from any Internet-connected computer capable of running a browser (Google Chrome need not be that browser, either), or from any Internet-connected smartphone? All without commercials or listening limitations?

Yeah, I know this party started ages ago, but as far as I am concerned there is still beer in the fridge and it’s still ice-cold.

4

On the subject of KoryChrome, La Famille Kessel returned to our Pays d’Auge family hovel in Blangy-le-Château this past weekend, and my keen and cool new Chromebook was thus reunited with its power source. And this time that power source made it into my computer bag for the trip back to Paris at weekend’s end. No doubt, a great many of you will now breathe easier and will stop wanting for sleep.

5

Got struck hard by a serious wave of irony a few hours ago when My Missus and I put The Boy on a train to summer camp. The camp he is attending is called “Ping Pong Mania” (translate from French), and it promises to be exactly that, with 90+ minutes of table tennis play and training each morning and another such session each afternoon. I blush with a certain amount of pride in saying that my kid is really quite masterful at the game, in no small measure because other than ping pong his free time these days is overwhelmingly consumed by Minecraft, Clash of Clans, SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition, youtube videos galore rooted in gameplay and game parody and what-have-you, and a bevy of other sofa-bound veg-and-play games and experiences.

My hope is the next 10 days will find The Boy matched up with other kids his age who are at or near his level. Otherwise, his hesitance to get off the couch and get out in the world (read: separate from his MacBook and iPad and Nintendo DS3) will have been justified…or so he will say and think, anyway. And this is where the irony lies as 32 years ago I remember feeling similar hesitation at heading off to summer camp, too…summer computer camp!

Categories
Engineer events fun stuff voip voip hardware

England v India Trent Bridge – a tale of two Andersons & Yealink VoIP phone

Trent Bridge cricket ground England v India

England v India highlights – Root & Anderson  10th wicket world record, I am nearly knocked out by a cricket ball, Pamela Anderson gets cricketer autograph & I spot a Yealink VoIP phone.

England v India at Trent Bridge was the backdrop for  great day out with the kids yesterday. There are two ways to “do” the cricket. One is with your mates. This is a boozy day out beginning with a pint and “full English” at 10am in the pub followed by a steady day’s cricket watching and a curry to finish off. The other is with the kids.

It was with the kids yesterday that I was nearly knocked out by a cricket ball and saw Pamela Anderson getting an autograph from one of the English players fielding at the boundary.

Arriving early we took our seats and settled in to watch a bit of net practice. Sat at square leg the nets were just in front of us but after a while the kids wandered off to look around the ground. There I was minding my own business, not particularly watching anything, when suddenly I heard a cry and I was hit by a cricket ball.

The ball glanced off the side of my head, hit my shoulder and plopped down beside me. It took me a moment to realise what had happened. One of the batsmen in the net had hit it over the top of the side netting. A couple of inches to the right and it would have landed squarely on the top of my bonce with potentially lethal consequences.

Without thinking I picked up the ball and threw it back. I should have kept it as a souvenir. There is evidence of the incident however. My hat – pictured in the gallery below was somewhat damaged as you can see.

Test match cricket is a great day out. The entertainment is not just on the pitch. The crowd provides just as much fun as the players. In the gallery below you can see a steward trying to confiscate a “beer snake” which is a stack of empty plastic beer glasses. Much beer is drunk at these events. For some reason the stewards want to confiscate the stacked glasses. The snake gets handed around the stand, growing in size as more glasses get added on the journey. The steward trying to confiscate the snake provides great sport as each time he gets near the snake is passed along to someone else.

In the gallery below there is also a photo sequence where “Pamela Anderson” gets the autograph of one of the England fielders. Pam was there with a party of lifeguards sat quite close to us in the New Stand. Also look out for a couple of horses sat amongst the crowd.

As far as the actual England v India cricket match went we were treated to a world record tenth wicket stand of 198 runs between Joe Root (154 no) and Jimmy Anderson (81 and no relation to Pamela afaik). The game now looks like being a draw and the rain forecast for the last day will hopefully provide some respite for the English team, now fielding, who have another test starting in a few days time.

There is, as is often the case, a technology slant to this post. Hanging around the boundary at lunch I couldn’t help noticing a Yealink VoIP phone nestled in amongst the equipment of one of the cameras. I love spotting little things like this. The kids have got used to it. The Yealink VoIP phone is not dissimilar to the Cisco I spotted at the Harbour Lights cafe in Peel in the Isle of Man. I’m not sure what the Yealink VoIP phone model is. I’m sure someone out there will know:)

Categories
broadband End User Net social networking video

Broadband – A Student Perspective on an Essential Service

Perspective Cool

Broadband is a key service students need to navigate their time at university

Trefor.net guest contributor Zoe Redfern recently completed a Masters in Computer Information Systems at the University of Lincoln and will relocate to Cheshire in the coming months to begin a graduate job with Siemens.

Having completed my Master’s Degree at the University of Lincoln not long ago, I am quite qualified to comment on the four years I had to put up with ‘Student Broadband Packages’.

At the time I moved into Courts (the on-campus accommodation) only an Ethernet connection was supplied, one to each bedroom. WiFI was installed soon after, though.  From that point students could actually connect their laptops to the Internet from their flat’s kitchen and living areas. This WiFi was great in the flat I inhabited at Courts during my first year. Although I was in the room furthest away from the wall mounted router I could still connect to it without any issues.

By the time I moved out of Courts the issue of Internet was very close to the top of my list, so I moved into an accommodation block that provided Internet as standard. The service started off at 8Mbps connection and went up by 2Mbps’s each of my three years there, and it suited me down to the ground. It was one less thing to worry about, and with me studying for an IT degree any problems would have fallen on me to sort out.  That, and chasing others for payments was something that I would have found to be really annoying.

To be honest, the Internet connection at my second accommodation — supplied by a company called Ask4 — was really good (and no websites were blocked by the Ask4 service, unlike the BT Broadband service I used whenever I went home) I was so pleased with the service, in fact, that I did on-site promotions for the company for two years after the landlord put my name forward. I was irritated and puzzled, though, that even though we had a standard connection we could pay extra to upgrade. For instance, we could spend £80 for the year to have a 30MB connection in one room only. My boyfriend was paying just a little more than that for a 100MB connection in his student house…a connection that that would’ve cost roughly £400 in my flat!

In the end, I paid for the 30MB connection for two years, using the money I earnt from Ask4 to do so (in essence, a win-win situation). I stuck with the flat rate this last year, though, and I must admit that other than it being a little bit slower for downloads it was just fine! And I honestly cannot say that I encountered any problems with the Ask4 Internet packages, etc., though it did become a bit tedious when the company would schedule maintenance to occur close to deadlines and throughout the night (times when most students were probably pulling an all-nighter).

I would say I used the Internet primarily for work during my last year (with the odd bit of procrastination here and there), and to keep in contact with family and friends as well. I also like to game when I have the chance, download TV shows and music, and stream football and other sports. Also, I found that I was using the Internet more to keep in contact with friends outside of Uni, too, as well as to arrange things with Uni friends. And I used Social Media to both keep in touch with people and to contact companies about graduate positions. Thus, with the Internet fulfilling so much of my contact needs, I discovered that even though I get unlimited texts each month on my phone contract, I was no longer sending as many texts as I once did!

Finally, the Internet connectivity around the University campus was always great! I used to take my laptop to the library to do work, making use of the Uni WiFi each time with no problem, and the speeds were more than sufficient for what I needed and wanted to do on the Internet.

Categories
Business UC

ITSPA Summer Forum

itspa summer forum drinks party

ITSPA Summer Forum and 10th Anniversary celebrations

ITSPA Summer Forum was a terrific success and a suitable tribute to the celebratory nature of the event. The afternoon AGM and series of talks and panel discussion went really well and we were lucky enough to have some serious industry players amongst the speakers.

The line up for the afternoon was as follows:

Keynote: Kevin Murphy, Head of Voice, BT

Market Update: Matt Townend, Director, Cavell Group

Regulatory Update: Pete Farmer, Head of Reguatory, Gamma Telecom

Provisioning Code of Practice:  David Cargill

Panel Debate – Retrospective and Futures for the ITSP industry in the UK: Trefor Davies, Matt Townend, Alex Kinch (Ziron), Dean Bubbley (Disruptive Analysis)

We were lucky to secure the services of Kevin Murphy who ran the highly successful BT London 2012 Olympics project and now runs the PSTN and all voice services at BT. That’s a big job. Also big thanks to Alex Kinch of Ziron for stepping in at the last minute due to the illness of another panellist. Alex is a contributor to trefor.net and was one of the founders of LONAP.

In the evening we adjourned upstairs to the rooftop terrace of Le Coq d’Argent. Top class it was fair play. The featured picture is of the crowd on the terrace – maybe one or two faces you might recognise? I don’t have any more pictures as I spent the afternoon chairing the meeting then afterwards at the bar I occupied myself eating and drinking networking.

All in all it was a fitting way to celebrate ITSPA’s 10th anniversary. The industry is in a healthy state and I think the next ten years are going to be full of excitement, if impossible to predict. Also impossible to predict is whether I will be around for the 20th ITSPA Summer Forum. Hey, one game at a time…

Categories
Bad Stuff broadband chromebook Cloud End User fun stuff gadgets google H/W piracy social networking UC

The Hump Day Five (25-June-2014)

FIFA 2014

On Wednesday Trefor.net’s Editor-in-Chief serves up The Hump Day Five, a weekly collection of short (and not so short) glimpses of the life in progress.

1

Bolting to meet My Missus for a Pay-For-Weekend-Well-Spent swim (the value of which we will immediately negate with a hearty follow-up Mexican lunch), and just realized that my mobile phone charge is at 9%. And being that this is my still-hanging-on iPhone 4 that ‘9’ might as we’ll be a ‘2’ as over the three-something years iPhoneKory has occupied my key right-pocket space I have seen it go from 7% to black so many times…

Is seven the new zero?

2

Despite promising myself I wouldn’t do so, I hung until 02h00 on Sunday/Monday watching the USA-Portugal World Cup match on ESPN via SlingBox, all the way to its bittersweet 95th minute. And in spite of a poor connection and a wildly unbalanced announcer team (Ian Darke = terrific, Taylor Twellman = dead awful), and although France has been my one-and-only International association football team since I moved to Paris in 1999*, I could not help but get caught up in it all. This was helped along in no small measure by social media, as both my Facebook and Twitter feeds were crackling with excitement and the wonderful over-the-top enthusiasm borne of sports spectatorship. Every breakaway, clearance, crossover, save (Tim Howards’s remarkable double-save!), and goal, by the USA or Portugal, had my feeds flying fast. But with that insane last play, with less than 25 ticks left in Injury Time…silence.

Yes, silence. The stunned heartbreak of that gorgeous equalizer — its sheer beauty cannot be denied — led to what may very well be the loudest imaginable Internet silence I’ve ever (not) heard. I have no doubt that goal was replaying on constant loop through the minds of a great many Americans on Monday, I am just as certain it was doing so in a soundproof vacuum.

*No true lover of the “Beautiful Game” will ever forget France’s unbelievablyf*ckingamazing come-from-behind last-gasp victory against Italy in the Euro2000 final, a game…no, an experience that galvanized this transplanted American’s association football fandom.

3

Readers going back three months — my long-term dyed-in-the-wool fans — will remember my enthusiasm for the latest Marvel Studios film, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”, and perhaps even the near-pathological (pathetic) need I had to see the film after having to wait 10 days following its release to find my way to the cinema. (And no matter if you aren’t one of those readers, because my preface sentence sets the table for where I am heading, regardless.)

With all of the build-up, all of the hype, the fact that I so thoroughly enjoyed “Captain America: First Avenger” (I expected to hate that first film as the character is an all-time favorite of mine — since I started reading super hero comic books at the age of eight — and just figured there was no way Hollywood could get it right), the scads of terrific reviews I was so careful to scan-without-spoiling, you would think that disappointment was inevitable. Not only was this not the case, though, but the film so deeply captured my imagination that I soon after found myself pondering a newed look in on the comic book itself, figuring the source material for such a great flick might be worth my time.

In days of yore (and up until actually not all that long ago), it was a lot more difficult to find and read back issues of comic books than it is today. In fact, without admitting to anything here or anywhere, I will say that despite my predilection for riding near the cusp of the Internet for lo on 20+ years now, I still find myself utterly floored by the ready digital availability of comic books new and old (and extremely old). A minimal amount of surfing revealed that “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” was based on Ed Brubaker’s run on the “Captain America” title from 2004-2012, and a single google-bing turned up the following torrent:

Brubaker Cap Torrent

WTF?

4

In less than a year I will turn 50, a number on the age scale that I know is supposed to mean…something. A greater sense of dignity? Less prone to silly excitements? Better perspective on what was and is and will be? Conversations turning ever more towards health issues? Yadda yadda yadda. To all of that, I have to call “Bunk!”, because (1) in my mind’s eye I am not balding, overly thick in the middle, saddled with mild hearing loss, or in need of glasses to read, (2) I feel no less a thirst for life than I did 10 years ago…or 20, and (3) I still get all kinds of giddy in the lead up to putting my mitts on new techy toys…such as the new KoryChrome (Samsung Chromebook 2), which I look forward to running my fingers over for the first time at some point tomorrow!

5

Today is the first day of summer vacation for The Boy, and he is marking it in style, sitting on the couch in front of the TV while simultaneously playing both “Minecraft” and “SimCity 4” with friends on his MacBook, and also looking in on “Clash of Clans” via the family iPad. Now if only he could get his toes engaged in some kind of input manipulation My Missus and I would have one reasonably efficient and well-entertained child! The drums, perhaps?

Related posts:

Categories
Cloud social networking

Facebook is down – something went wrong

Facebook something went wrong

Something went wrong with Facebook. Facebook is down. I just got that message. Looking at Twitter it seems widespread.

Is this news? In one sense it doesn’t matter in the least. Facebook is not mission critical to anyone. If you are a business you surely don’t rely on Facebook, do you? Ok so a few photos may not get posted, a pal might need to wait a bit to see your message etc etc etc. Who cares?

In another sense it matters a lot. We have other parts of our lives that are becoming increasingly dependent on the cloud. Facebook is in the cloud. If the cloud stops working we have a problem, Houston.

trefor.net exists only in the cloud (parties and networking events aside – you can’t drink the cloud). It’s normally a great existence. All our important files are there, our finances are run on a cloud service, our comms, everything. So if the cloud has a problem it can be everyone’s problem.

Now this is a fairly simplistic way of putting it. Facebook is already back on line. It was only unavailable for a few minutes. We don’t know why it was down. Connectivity to a datacentre? Virtualisation problems? Looking at it everything seem to be there. Phew.

As long as the data is not lost it doesn’t matter. We can live with cloud problems as long as they don’t lose everything. That’s when you begin to have real problems.

I started this post thinking I’d come up with some profound statements regarding the need for reliability with apocalyptic visions for when things go wrong. Apocalypse is not now. My wifi still works. I have time left on my Chromebook battery. I think I’ll move on:)

Categories
Engineer webrtc

WebRTC at #GBP14

genband sponsored car aat the #GBP14 conference

Thoughts on the WebRTC market and opportunity for service providers

Interesting place, Orlando. The weather patterns seem very repeatable every day. It starts with a warm morning and heats up through the day until the humidity and heat combination becomes uncomfortable at which point nature  steps in and thunderstorms visit the land. Later the rain stops and the cycle begins again. It’s why it’s a very green place . It is worth however issuing a warning to Brits considering coming here on holiday.  Summertime in the UK, that time of year when you all want to take off somewhere, is low season in Florida. As I write the pool has emptied and lightning lights up the land.

Although you have been seeing blog posts showing what a good time I’ve been having in Orlando I am actually here for business. Tomorrow I’m participating in a panel on Unified Communications. In the UK some people have been trying very hard to move the buzzword on. It’s tired they say. We need something new and fresh.

Continue reading “WebRTC at #GBP14”
Categories
Business business applications UC

The trefor.net #orlandoroadtrip Day 6 #GBP14 conference proper begins

genband sponsored car aat the #GBP14 conferenceDay6 of the #orlandoroadtrip began with a conversation in the lift.  I was stood there in my Hawaiian shirt with a Genband Perspectives 14 badge hung around my neck when a girl started talking to me: “We don’t have your name in the UK”. She had read my badge. I dunno. I told her I was from Lincoln!

Breakfast was a bacon bagel sandwich with HP sauce (brought my own) , glass of milk and tangerine juice.

The #GBP14 conference proper has begun. I’m going to share some highlights which will in the main be sound bites and general impressions – there isn’t time to do full blown blog posts on every subject.

Genband Perspectives 14 was opened by Genband CEO David Walsh. Impressive guy. His talk made me think of one I attended where Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com used the word “awesome” about fifty times in every sentence, interspersed with “amazing”. The only common features of the two talks were the fact that they were both American and both leaders in their field.

Walsh was a very believable individual. I switched off when listening to Benioff – it was a pure sales pitch. I paid attention to the Genband CEO. My own experience of working with Genband has really been limited to their SIP Applications Server combined with a smidgeon of Session Border Controller. Walsh showed there was a lot more to the company.

His talk was generally an observation that the market was both moving and growing very quickly and that technology companies needed to make investment bets up to seven years before the market is ready for their products. What he has done at Genband is to assemble a set of capabilities through the acquisition of business who have already made these significant investments.

To understand the way the world is changing it is useful to look at some businesses in similar markets. Spotify is now worth more than Warner Music, Uber is worth more than Avis and Hertz combined and Instagram worth more than Kodak.

You can arguably take company valuations with a pinch of salt. In the high technology game people seem willing to pay stupid money for the promise of future returns. Notwithstanding this the comparisons with old and new are valid.

As a startup businessman I try to only use modern technology. For example trefor.net doesn’t have a phone number. We rely on OTT services such as Skype and Google Hangouts, only use online banking and use SAAS products such as Freeagent.

We got a nice quadruple play case study from David Walsh as to life in the cloud based world. Kids these days arrange parties using Tinder. You tick on people’s images you might like to invite along and if they approve of your image you are both hooked up.

The quad play goes like this:

Use tinder to find a date
Use uber to get a taxi to the date
Use opentable to grab some dinner with the date
Use airbnb to get a room…

Apparently this is an evolution of the triple play presented at last year’s Perspectives13 conference. One wonders what a five play might look like in 2015.

More later. Ciao amigos…

Complete set of really fantastic posts on the #orlandoroadtrip  to date:

Day 5 – golf
Day 4 – Kennedy Space Centre
Day 3 – Hawaiian Shirts, alligators and beer
Day 2 – BA2037
Day 1 – Ronnie Scotts & The Haywood Sisters

Categories
End User internet Net social networking UC

One Out of 1,874,161

Over the weekend I received a Twitter request from someone unknown to me to participate in a dm (direct message) exchange. Figuring it at first to be some kind of scam or sales come-on I was just about to use TweetDeck’s “Block” function to keep the party from contacting me again when I noticed in their Twitter handle something we have in common…a four-letter sequence beginning with ‘k’ and ending with ‘y’ (and just so you know, my Twitter handle is @kory).

Here we go again.

Since registering to use Twitter (7-March-2007) I have been approached more than a few times by other Twitter uses looking to appropriate my Twitter handle for their own use. These enquiries have nearly always been of the friendly variety — there was one guy who dealt with my “Thanks, but no.” by trying to rally his thousands…er, hundreds…well, dozens of followers into hotboxing my acquiescence (and I am happy to say that his call to action backfired, with plenty of this fella’s so-called “friends” publicly shaming him on Twitter) — and in most cases even led to mutual Twitter following for a time. Knowing what it is to grow up Kory, I understand the propensity all Korys out there seem to share in wanting to have @kory for themselves…it is simple, direct, easily remembered, somewhat unique (it isn’t ‘David’, ‘John’, ‘Steve’, ‘Alan’, or ‘Mike’, anyway), and it is short. Really short. In fact, it is that very four-letter quality that seems to stir the pot of desire more than any other, likely because the shorter your Twitter handle the more freedom with characters you can provide to those who might want to tweet to you, or retweet your tweets or your own retweets!

1,874,161. That is the number of valid four-character Twitter handles, taking into account that the valid characters for Twitter usernames include all 26 letters, the 10 digits, and underscore, and the fact that characters can repeat. 37x37x37x37. 1,874,161. One of those 1,874,161 is my @kory — yet another is trefor.net’s very own Trefor Davies’s @tref — which I first used to tweet seven years, three months, and three days ago. So with so many four-letter Twitter handles to be had, why is my own proving so popular? Silly question, I say, as any self-respecting Kory on Twitter must certainly aspire be @kory! Would be and should be thrilled to be @kory!

So pea-cocking aside (maybe just a little more…being @kory really is terribly cool, but it pales in comparison to this), I need to give some credit where it is undeniably due as I didn’t just stumble into the Twitter scene early enough to be the 817,772nd registrant to the service. No, the reason I am one of the First Million Twitterers (and before you can ask whether that is a real select club I will stop you with a “Heh. You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”) is because long ago I hitched my social media caboose to the barreling-fearlessly-into-all-things-social-on-the-Internet phenomenon that is Jeff Pulver. I won’t go into deep detail here on Jeff’s exploits, antics, and achievements in social media as just a wee bit of googling and or binging will tell his story far better than I can here. I will say unreservedly, though, that were I not attached securely to his new technology bullet train it is far more likely I would be @kory498852 on Twitter and not @kory. So kudos once again, @jeffpulver.

@Kory Stats

Getting back to my story, the tweet I received at 06h09 on 7-June-2014 simply said, “@kory hey man dm me when you get this”, from a Twitterer (Tweeter?) going by “@korycomtois”. Being a diligent type, once I had decided not to immediately block this fellow Kory I clicked over to his Twitter page to learn what I could, which honestly wasn’t much. Still, @korycomtois looked harmless enough. Also, I am almost always up for a little back and forth, and — who knows? — maybe this would be the magical Twitter exchange that would change my life, thus I tweeted back. It took another day to get our DMing ducks in a row (my fault as although @korycomtois was following me I was not yet following him), however before weekend’s end we had made contact. And sure enough, @korycomtois was keen on ending my reign and assuming the @kory crown.

Yup. Here we go again.

No doubt, there is a question lurking on the collective tongues of my readership, that being whether I have ever been offered actual cash money for the @kory handle. The simple answer is…I think so. I think so because although numbers have been bandied about — back in 2011 one seemingly determined soul went as high as $5000 — I have never encouraged or considered such offers to the point where the nuts-and-bolts of actual payment and follow-through became part of the discussion, and as such I cannot definitively say the offers were legit (and, yes, that $5000 offer did get me thinking for a short while).

@korycomtois wrote, “I am very interested in it (your handle), would you ever consider parting with it?”, and when I wrote back I mentioned that I had once turned down $5000 for it and asked whether he was prepared to offer “an amount that is worthy my giving it a re-think”. I didn’t have to wait long for a response.

“I’m sorry I cannot come close, I am a high school student that just wanted my first name as my handle.”

Young Kory went on to apologize for wasting my time (he hadn’t…I found myself delighted with our exchange, his politeness, and just the fact that he steeled himself up and asked the question as so many would not have), and we parted as fellow followers, for the time being at least. Then earlier today, seeing a tweet @korycomtois posted I found myself dwelling a bit on the connection. Here was a kid who when I first leaped onto Twitter was at most 11 years old (The Boy is a year past that), who joined the service 1,151,558,938 Twitter accounts after my own @kory was issued (not a real number as at some point Twitter skipped whole swaths of numbers…a fun one nonetheless, though), throwing a flag out into the ether hoping for a connect and a magical Twitter connect that would change his life (or, at least, his Twitter handle). Jiminy!

So I say this to @korycomtois: I am going to hold onto @kory for now and into the foreseeable future, but you have my solemn word — 140 characters of it — that when the day comes that circumstance or decision results in my vacating @kory it will be yours to carry forward.

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Business Mobile Regs voip

So Long 084 and 087 (and Thanks for All the Fish)!

Trefor.net welcomes guest contributor Alex Kinch, Founder and CEO of Ziron.

The game is finally up for many ‘rip-off’ 084 and 087 numbers. Thanks to the EU’s Consumer Rights Directive – and the corresponding UK legislation (The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Payments) Regulations 2013), as of 13-June-2014 customers will not pay more than the “basic rate” when calling a wide range of businesses for customer service, complaints, renewals and cancellations. Hopefully by that point the majority of businesses will have already swapped their numbers, however what is really interesting is the reason why this change is taking place and what the impact will be.

Alex Kinch

I may be showing my age, but I remember when the 084/ 087 numbers hit the mainstream at the start of the millennium. For businesses the advantage was clear: profit resulting from the call charges. Understandably, though, this didn’t make consumers very happy, and you can see their point. After all, who wants to be charged a premium rate whilst waiting an age listening to “Greensleeves” on repeat?

Mobile operator Three estimates the cost to consumers at half a billion pounds a year with research and testing company Which? pitting the figure at £385 a year, per household, which is not really small change by anyone’s standards. Thus, it’s no wonder that 67% of the consumers surveyed by Which? thought that these high-rate numbers were being deliberately used to discourage people from calling them.

So with Which? and other consumer rights groups complaining to the government to take action, it is great that something is finally being done to end this ‘rip off’. As with everything, however, there is a catch: certain types of companies are exempt from the legislation, including financial services, gambling, construction, and property sales and rental. There is hope, of course, that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will put pressure on their members to voluntarily comply.

All of this has been good news for the numbering market, as demand for 03 numbers has gone through the roof. It feels as though consumers get that 03 numbers are ‘national’ numbers, but that they are billed like a geographic call. The real question, though, is how this will affect call volume and whether businesses will find other ways to recoup their lost revenue. I guess we will find out next month…

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security voip

Wot? No Password?

UM Labs Ltd. Founder and CEO Peter Cox’s post is based on a presentation given at a recent ITSPA workshop on the risks of auto provisioning.

Everyone understands the need for security on the Internet. We all know the importance of using strong passwords and — painful as it may be — regularly changing those passwords. As such, would it surprise you to learn that there is one widely used Internet service that routinely provides sensitive information to anyone that asks without asking for a password or employing any other form of authentication?

The service I refer to is phone auto provisioning. If your company has an IP phone system (as most mid-to-large companies do) or if you outsource your phone system to an IP service provider, the chances are that your phones are using auto provisioning and possibly without using authentication. ITSPA has recognised the problem and is working on producing guidelines to address it.

One of the benefits of VoIP is that you can take a phone out of the box, plug it in just about anywhere, and it works. Of course, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. For instance, for an IP phone to work it must first be configured with such details as a phone number, the network address of the system it should connect to, and a password the phone uses to authenticate itself to the service provider or internal phone system. Calls cost money, so phones must be identified and authenticated when they connect to the service and when they are used to make calls. The problem is that the complete configuration for a phone is long and complex. It could include 100 or more parameters, for example:

	sips persistent tls:     1
	download protocol:       HTTPS
        sip line1 proxy ip:      xxx.xxx.xx.xx
	sip line1 registrar ip:  xxx.xxx.xx.xx
        sip line1 proxy port:    5060
	sip line1 registrar port:506
	sip line1 password:      xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Of course, nobody wants to have to type such information in, so this is where provisioning steps in. When a handset is connected it contacts a pre-defined provisioning server (just a specialised web server), identifies itself via its unique MAC address, and downloads its configuration. Simple! The problem, though, is that most provisioning servers identify the phone (particularly when hardware IP phones are connected) solely via its MAC address — a 12-digit value unique to each phone that is normally printed on the phone alongside the serial number.* As such, if a provisioning server gets a request for a MAC address it recognises the server replies with the complete configuration needed to configure the phone….and most provisioning servers DO NOT ask for a password or use any other authentication mechanism. Thus, anyone who knows or is able to guess your phone’s MAC address can download its configuration, including the password needed by the phone to make calls.

Distributing passwords to anyone who asks without some form of authentication is clearly a bad idea. And guessing MAC addresses is not as difficult as it sounds. All an attacker has to do is to connect to a provisioning server and try each of the 16.7 million possible addresses for a specific vendor, which may sound like a big challenge but which in truth is not. To support this point I recently wrote a very simple script to do exactly this in just 5 minutes. I then pointed my script at a service provider’s provisioning server and ran it using a restricted set of 1,000 address. Running on a £25 Raspberry Pi, my script took roughly 7 minutes to complete and returned the complete configuration of two phones including passwords. And as I had no way of knowing if any of the 1,000 MAC addresses belonged to phones connecting to the service provider, 1,000 is a good hit rate.

At a rate of 7 minutes to scan 1,000 MAC addresses it would take 86 days to scan the entire range of 16.7 Million addresses used by a particular phone manufacturer. Then, having done that, I could get the configuration — including the password — for every phone from a single vendor used by the targeted service provider. And what if I was not willing to wait 86 days? I could invest in faster hardware or spend a bit more time writing a more efficient script (or both) and easily complete the scan in a week.

The information that my script returns would be invaluable to an attacker, offering an easy route for call fraud that could leave the victim with a bill of tens or thousands of pounds. Thus, ITSPA’s initiative to address the problem could not be more timely.

*All systems connecting to a network, whether a wired Ethernet connection or a WiFi connection, must have a globally unique MAC address hard-wired in when the device is built. These MAC addressees are managed by the IEEE, with each manufacturer assigned a six digit prefix (A list of vendor prefixes is published at
http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/oui.txt). MAC addresses are base 16 numbers, so the remaining 6 digits can be used to create 16.7 million unique addresses.

Categories
broadband Engineer net neutrality voip

VoIP not working over your broadband connection? We may have the explanation.

landline use Timico VoIP phone app for iPhone available from Apple App Store

VoIP over broadband not working? It may be the router.

Routers provided by some major ISPs are preventing their customers from using VOIP services such as Skype.

For some time now members of the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association have been keeping a list of routers through which VoIP doesn’t appear to work. The routers themselves include functionality or elements of firmware that are either not user configurable or there are elements of the ISP service that mandate their router without an obvious means of using an alternative. This means that if a customer wants to use Over The Top VoIP services such as those provided by ITSPA members they usually can’t.

Unfortunately whilst this may well not be a deliberate act of anti competitiveness on behalf of the ISP it has the same effect as if VoIP was being blocked in the ISP network – interesting considering that some of these ISPs offer VoIP services of their own.

If you have such a router you probably can’t use Skype or any other VoIP service offered by the 100 or so independent providers in the UK. Whether this is deliberate or not is a moot point. The end result is that the ISP is affecting your ability to use the broadband service you pay for.

Most major ISPs are signatories to the Broadband Stakeholders’ Group Code of Practice and have undertaken to respect what is known as Net Neutrality or the promise not to favour any one type of traffic over another. This is a fundamental principle of how the internet works.

If an ISP provided routers over which 3rd Party VoIP services did not work whilst their own VoIP service continued to work perfectly well they would be flouting these principles. Effectively they would on the one hand be saying they are “good guys” which comes with obvious PR benefits whilst in practice being “bad guys”.

Dan Winfield, CEO of VoIP provider Voxhub says:

“This is an ongoing problem. It can affect customers that work from home at any time even if they have things up and running. A new update is shipped out by an ISP and effectively wipes out their phones. You can see the roll outs happening over a period of time as people call for support. The worse side of this is that customers get angry with us and we cannot do much. We cannot guarantee our service will work on home broadband as a result. When we roll out to offices, we always supply routers to get round the problem but this doesn’t work for home users.”

Not all ISPs are affected. It would be interesting to hear from any reader who has a broadband service but over which VoIP will not work.

Categories
Apps gadgets H/W Mobile mobile connectivity phones social networking wearable

Me and My Pebble Steel

Steve Hodges is the Managing Director of Astro Communications, Ltd.

So I am a fully ‘out’ closet techie. Really. Having starting in comms when ADSL was a pipe dream and you could get 9.6Mbs on your Nokia phone, I suppose I joined the technology industry just after those that created it and ahead of those lucky enough to feel as though they have always had email/internet/mobile phones. In the last 20 years some interesting and useful products have come and gone — Rabbit Phones! BT Home Highway! Even the old Palm TRIO! — and about a trillion products have turned up look like technology used simply for the sake of technology.

I have an HTC One Mini for work (which I love), an iPhone 5 for personal use, a standard Lenovo Twist laptop for day-to-day, and an iPad for out-and-about. I also carry a MiFi device “just in case”, all of which keep me connected, productive, and agile.

Yesterday I took delivered of my Pebble Steel watch. Second only to Google Glass (when it turns up), I felt when I read the reviews that the Pebble Steel watch could possibly be the most exciting advancement in technology since the smartphone. A member of my management team wears a Sony SmartWatch, which is just too…‘Speak and Spell’-looking for my liking. I am sure the uber-cool can get away with it, that is if will.i.am is your style guide, but for me — dressed in a suit and tie most days, normally rocking an Omega Seamaster Professional (yes, like James Bond), driveing a Volvo 4×4, life complete with chocolate Labrador — it simply wasn’t for me.

Pebble Stone 1

The Pebble Steel arrived in a beautifully crafted box, complete with leather strap, metal bracelet, and magnetic charger. Its face is just big enough to display a few lines of text (monochromatic text, which is a shame), but is not so big that it looks as though you accidentally left your diving watch on following the weekend. It has three chunky, easy-to-use but unobtrusive buttons on one side, and one on the other. In my view, the Pebble Steel has the looks of an elegant timepiece.

Out of the box, the Pebble Steel just needs to be paired with your phone via an app, and you are on your way. Box to brilliant in under three minutes. The notion of how it delivers its information is a little more complex, though, as it requires the installation of a number of apps (the watch can only take a maximum of eight at any given time, however they are quite easy to interchange), of which there are plenty to choose from on Google Play.

2014-04-05 20.58.42

The documentation that accompanies the Pebble Steel watch states that the battery will last about five days, and that the device is waterproof to a practical level. Also, the Bluetooth connection is robust, and thus far I have had no trouble maintaining my information feed upon leaving my phone on my desk and wandering around the house or office.

At the start, I loaded a calendar app, a notifier app, a weather app and a navigation app. I do want to clarify that these apps don’t have much in the way of functionality in themselves, that they take the capability from my phone which pushes notifications over Bluetooth to the Pebble Steel which then passes information back. When a notification arrives on your wrist, you can set it to subtly vibrate and let you know there is something to look at. No more reaching for the mobile every few minutes!

Aesthetically and technologically the Pebble Steel watch is exactly what I had hoped for and more. In fact, I truly believe it exceeds delivery against all my “I need one of those because….” justifications. Just last night while in the house I was receiving tweets/SMSs and email previews on my wrist. Calendar invites were turning up, too, and without as much as a glance at my desk I knew what I needed to know and could ignore the beeps and vibrations from my phone regarding the things I didn’t. And this morning I was able to leave my phone in my bag and wander through my calendar appointments, preparing myself for the day ahead without once popping open the laptop or picking up my phone.

Pebble Steel 3

Out and about, while walking to the train station, I was able to see notifications of new emails and also see when an incoming phone call was coming in, all without fumbling around in my jacket for my mobile. I rejected the call from my Pebble Steel, but had I had a headset on I could have simply answered the call and used the call control from my wrist. I went to the ticket machine at the train station and scrolled through my calendar until I found my reservation number in my diary entry for the day, with the ticket collection number and seat reservation at hand. It even gave me turn by turn instruction on my walking route by paring with google maps on my HTC via the Nav app. Of course, I could have done this all with my mobile, but now I can leave that in my bag or jacket and get instant notification of anything I need on my Pebble Steel. Oh, and it also tells the time!

Functionally the watch has already justified its cost (£151 ($279), plus the £35 import duty). I will have to change some of my day-to-day set up, improve my email filtering, and set up my “Do not disturb” notifications to ensure that I am not woken up in the middle of the night by a barrage of overnight spam, but this is a tiny price to pay for having such a useful piece of technology at hand.

Other aspects of the Pebble Steel that I have yet to investigate properly include the music and phone dialer app — I can control the music and the voice functions of my phone from my wrist while driving in the car — and the extended from-your-wrist camera operation functionality (personally, I doubt its practical benefits, but I am sure it will appeal to and find use with many).

As for criticisms, I guess it is all a matter of perspective. Would it be nice if the Pebble Steel had a touch screen? Maybe. Would it be better if it came with a colour, high resolution face? Possibly. Would it be better if it had a mic and speaker so I could talk to my wrist? Not better for me, but I am sure it would be better for someone out there. Would I prefer to be able to delete, forward and/or reply to my messages? I think so, but there might be an app for that as well.

Considering what I was hoping for — the ability to leave my phone in my bag, jacket or office and get real time notifications of emails, SMSs, tweets, phone calls and other useful information — the Pebble Steel is simply perfect, and it looks the part too. I am delighted with the new high tech addition to my PAN set up. It get five out of five for looks, five out five for build quality, five out of five for ease of use, and six out of five for practical application!

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Engineer fun stuff H/W voip voip hardware

Snom Audio Lab

Dusan Aleksic is the Head of Hardware Development for Snom Technology AG

In the end of nineties Serbia was under UN sanctions and as a young electro engineer I was a part of the small team tasked with maintaining the gas masks in stock. I had an open issue before me: the carbon microphone was out of date and needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, the microphone in question was originally produced in another part of the former Yugoslavia and it could no longer be had. Also, copying it didn’t work as our punch tool machine was unable to make such complicated rounded holes with the strange patterns, and simply making holes on the microphone’s surface and trying to talk through them produced terrible results. We quickly realized that we would need to create a new design and establish a correlation between hole-shapes and design patterns of the microphone and its audio performance. In our audio lab we had a single B&K audio measurement system, which was a bit old hat but still in good shape and still in calibration range, and after some time the job was complete.

I moved on and became a part of the new growing network convergence world that first developed digital terminals and after that VoIP and wireless devices. In the beginning of the 2000s, VoIP’s early stages, the acoustical audio measurements become unimportant. People believed that the “mighty” DSP could solve any problem, and the knowledge on terminal devices and acoustic design had been pushed to the second plane: in most cases speech transmission quality judgment excluded electroacoustic components.

How It All Started

At snom technology AG we were aware of the complexity of VoIP terminal devices from the early beginning. We improved audio quality over the years by combining our acoustic experience with the latest DSP algorithms and our VoIP signaling know-how. Specifically, we solved various issues inherent in VoIP technology, including processing delay, network delay, network packet loss, need for VAD and CNG, countless types of noise, etc. And, of course, we addressed the main issue, that being synchronization, as by its very nature VoIP is an asynchronous connection, and sometimes audio packets are dropped simply because the sender and receiver are not using the same clock.

VoIP Audio Measurement equipment evolves in sync with VoIP technology, and as a VoIP pioneer snom has helped it to quickly reach a mature state which, improving overall overall audio quality through the use of various narrow and wide band codes.

Snom Audio Lab at a Glance

For modern telecommunications, old audio standards such as TIA-810B (Narrow band) and TIA-920 (Wide Band) fail to match requirements. These standards are focused on half duplex connection. Important aspects of the audio quality are not exposed, and many typical problems remain unresolved.

snom1snom2

TIA-based audio optimized devices are unable to match customer expectations for perfect audio quality, and for that reason two years ago the snom development team began following the latest audio requirements for wide-band audio based on ETSI 202 739 and ETSI 202 740.

With ETSI, all requirements from the TIA standard are covered, but it doesn’t stop there. ETSI extends the requirements in frequency response domain and in loudness ratings, which requires high quality electroacoustic converters. ETSI also includes double talk behavior measurements and speech quality in presence of network impairments (packet loss, jitter) and, at the end, speech quality in presence of the background noise.

snom3snom4

Today the snom audio lab uses Head Acoustic software and equipment, and I believe we have the best-in-the-market tool to create the non-compromise audio quality. We can fully cover all ETSI measurements, and we can do additional various HQS-IP items, such as TOSQA and PESQ, or spectral echo attenuation vs. time, or test our mockup designs to fix all over-limits distortions in the very early phase of the ID development.

Snom has put all of these tools and software to design the 7xx phone family, and with this product we deliver the best quality to our customers, this according to the latest requirements of modern telecommunication. Snom7xx, for example, has been built to pass the frequency response requirement based on ETSI 202-379 at every handset-to-ear pressure. The handset uses a specially designed high leak receiver that allows for the best sound quality at every handset. We use the most realistic artificial ear type during tests, too, which makes the receive curve extremely difficult to surpass.

On another front, high quality jitter buffer and packet loss concealment software in snom 7xx have been improved via the Head Acoustic network simulator in very bad network conditions. The speakerphone has excellent double talk performance, and algorithms such as background noise cancellation and adaptive gain control provide for voice clarity in every condition.
snom5

In the end, I am glad to appease the machine haters out there by saying that subjective tests are as important as objective tests, and I can remember many cases where the good objectively-tuned phone just provides bad audio. At snom, well-tuned audio devices mean a lot of objective tuning followed by subjective sessions, until the job has is finished.

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End User fun stuff voip

When You Look Behind You There’s No Open Door

Someone asked me, “What is the future of VoIP?”

I can’t even predict my future living situation, let alone the fate of the Internet.

I went to dinner last night with an out-of-town friend. We met some other friends down in a part of south Austin that not long ago was a dinky mostly-Hispanic neighborhood, complete with dinky houses and dinky Mexican restaurants. On this occasion, though – and I understand this is pretty much the norm now – we waited over an hour for a table at a restaurant called El Chile. On a Monday night.

Once again: ATX WTF?

What’s going on? Is there some festival in town nobody told me about? All of us are baffled. And more than merely baffled we all lament our missed opportunities, having not bought more real estate in Austin in the 90s.

Back in 1992 I lived in a little cabin off of West Mary Street in south Austin, close enough to the railroad tracks to high-five train engineers as they passed by my window. And when I say “little”, I mean that place was small, with a ceiling low enough that any person of average height could extend their arms overhead and press against it. I was reading a lot of existential literature back then. The guys who lived in the other half of the cabin dropped a lot of acid, and I had a standing invitation.

I realized one day that I had to make a life change, when while reading one of Henry Miller’s diatribes on the value of excrement I found myself saying, “This guy makes a lot of sense.” That was too much. I couldn’t go down that path. I laid down the Miller, and the Sartre, and the Nietzsche. I cleaned up. I sobered up. I resurrected my forsaken programming skills, and I went to work, launching a career in software development.

Computer science was not a profession on the radar when I was a kid. Instead, it was called Data Processing. A bunch of guys huddled in the basements of tall buildings who wore pocket protectors, button-down white shirts, and who carried slide rules. And I am not talking caricature. I met these guys, being friends with various adults who worked near the data processing department, and that is how it truly was. The image from the 70s of the stereotypical weakling engineer getting corporate sand kicked in his face? Based on fact. Those programmers were not among society’s movers and shakers.

Things change.

Nowadays, it’s like those old E.F. Hutton commercials. (I know, you’re too young. Google it.) These days in a post-9/11 world, where the dot-com bust has faded in memory, the guy who launches the latest greatest IPO has the ear of the tech world. When programmer geek-nerd talks, people listen.

And who is that? Who has everyone’s ear these days? Is there anyone who can really track where technology is going to be in 5 years? In 2 years? Next year?

I’m sitting at dinner with my friends – instead of waiting an hour behind a line of hipsters we walk across the street to another restaurant called Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse that offers a Slacker Buffet: rice and beans. Perfect – and we start talking about missed opportunities. I tell my out-of-town friend that the little cabin I occupied in 1992 is probably selling for $500k these days, and he — correctly — winces in disbelief.

Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse

Another friend at the table worked at Microsoft for a time, and he tells us of one project manager who got in early and cashed out with $20 million. This person then created a startup with that money and sold a grand total of 13 units of her product, 5 of which she bought herself. $19.8 million burned through. Riches to rags.

Some people who end up in the right place at the right time come to the (wrong) conclusion that they are geniuses. Others realize the nature of luck and don’t ascribe their success to their personal abilities. And still others have to fail and succeed several times before their true abilities shine through. Time reveals the truth.

People who work hard and who are smart tend to do well in a meritocracy, which often leads to the incorrect assumption that someone who is in a position of power or success must have greater abilities than someone who is not. This is one of the pitfalls of living in a meritocracy.

Who came out on the winning side of last year’s technology?  Is that going to be the winning horse in the next race?

I worked with a woman who left PCs Limited in 1988, just before that company changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation. She kicks herself to this day. How could she have known? I kick myself sometimes for not re-investing in Apple in 2008. I kick myself sometimes for not investing in Netflix. I try not to dwell in regrets or on those blind spots of the past, though, opting instead to derive what lessons there are to learn from it all.

The fact is that there may yet be some value in the words of Henry Miller, who wrote:

“This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it.”

Over this past week I spent time trying to grasp the future of data and voice over the Internet. It’s just an area of focus. There is no end point. There will never be a point where it’s all understood.

I am reminded of something the wise old Tallulah Bankhead said:

“If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.”

So I guess this is it. It is the time. Get on with it.

Categories
Business UC voip

#VoIPweek roundup

Last week was #voipweek on trefor.net. This follows on from #peeringweek and will be part of an ongoing programme of themed weeks focussing on particular technology subjects relating to the internet.

Although we do occasionally ask for specific posts the contributors to our themed weeks are by and large left to choose their own topic. This makes for a diversity of content that we probably wouldn’t otherwise  see. Diversity is indeed what we did get.

The week saw the publication of 28 posts most of which were VoIP related. VoIP content was wide ranging and included articles on Net Neutrality (in the news at the moment), security and fraud, the technology of location identification for Emergency Services, considerations in designing conference phones, the birth of a new handset, will OTT services kill off the telephony service provider and more.

We saw nostalgia and forward thinking. What’s happening in the Google UC world and will ITSPs need to embrace Lync? There was also a post highlighting a real world case study of someone trying to find a serviced office that would allow them to use their own VoIP service.

In one sense VoIP is now a boring subject because it is mainstream. People like new things. It’s impossible to talk about new things all the time – they just don’t come quickly enough. The content for VoIP week was current enough though and being written almost exclusively by CEOs or Technical Directors in the industry was pretty authoritative.

The statistics make for interesting reading. During the week we saw 6,640 visitors, 9,352 page views. Add to this an average of 296 RSS feed reads a day. Posts were shared a total of 414 times including 90 via Twitter and a 188 via LinkedIn. Google+ at 73 shares came in higher than Facebook at 63. This mix suggests a predominantly business interest in the subject of VoIP.

One post which discussed the future of Unified Communications had 54 shares on LinkedIn which has to be a record for this blog.

All in all we can say that #voipweek was a great success and we should certainly look forward not only to more guest posts from those contributing last week but to other themed weeks in the months ahead.

I’d like to thank all the contributors for helping to make it such a success. Without their authoritative posts #voipweek could not have happened.

Categories
Business phones UC voip voip hardware

Invest Wisely to Get the Best from VoIP

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Dan Winfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Voxhub and 2014 ITSPA Council member.

Starting in, I want to say that this is only my second blog piece on Trefor.net (the first being The Smoking Rooms of Net Neutrality, published yesterday), so please excuse me if I state the bleeding obvious. Yes, I know this site’s readership is a refined audience, one with Gig connections, fibre thing, flashing lights and fancy equipment — the whole package — however I am aiming today at normal businesses that might stumble over here via Google.

I’ll try to explain.

VoIP is the most sensitive service that graces computer networks. It needs love and care to ensure that it performs as a telephone service should, for every call, over and over, 24 hrs a day. And to push it around, it craves low latency, as well as highly available constant bandwidth connectivity with reliable networking equipment. Ironically, for many VoIP is about saving money, yet the less you spend the less likely the chances are that it is getting the environment it needs. All of which is why you need to invest wisely to get the best from VoIP.

As a council member for ITSPA I can safely say that the vast majority of member service providers have invested well in their data centres and equipment. If you are a business that uses one of these providers and you are having quality problems, then 90% of the time (or more) it is your lack of investment that is to blame.

At Voxhub we often receive calls from people saying that they have poor quality VoIP from another provider and want to hear about what we can do better. Many years ago my first thought would have been that their problem had to do with their provider and I would have sympathised with them. Today, though, I go further and try to work out precisely why they are experiencing poor service. After all, there might be some underlying reason for the problems that we wouldn’t want them to bring over, should they opt to switch to our service. It never takes very long to realise that 90% of the time (or more) the cause of the problem is a lack of investment on their side, the most likely candidates being poor cabling, cheap routers, and single Internet connections that are shared between computers and phones.
Voxhub-Logo

Sadly, a lot of businesses don’t invest in their Internet connections for any type of on-line service from which they plan to draw benefit, so any advice I give from this point forward applies to investing correctly to benefit from any VoIP, cloud, or on-line service used by your business. Of course, I cannot say precisely how much should be spent, and I think that for the smallest business investing doesn’t have to mean spending very much at all. I would suggest, though, that when you invest you think about the following to help put things in perspective:

1. Don’t cut corners. Consider your goals and be careful not to erode them by being too cutthroat or going too cheap.
Service Provider: “We have a proven 4 minute abs program for rippling muscles, guaranteed.”
You: “Can you do it quicker? I have seen that available on-line for 3.
2. Put your VoIP outlay in context by comparing it to what you spend on other business expenses.
I know of a company that spent hundreds of thousands on fine wood floors for their new office and still took convincing to spend any money on good network equipment. If you have no problem buying an iPhone as a business expense then you have should have no problem spending half that on a router that is used by your whole company every day of the week.
3. Imagine you are investing in an invisible team member.
Everyone agrees that ‘Investing in People’ is essential for good business. As such, it can really put things into perspective to consider any Internet/VoIP investment you make as an invisible team member, a “person” who is relied upon by everyone in your business for all of your essential services, telephone, mail, administration, banking, security, and even employee happiness (if you let them watch cat videos and essential World Cup events). If you don’t make the right hiring choice you will end up getting poor attendance, under achievement…in essence, a “person” that lets down your whole team.
4. VoIP may not work on a network just because the BBC website loads quickly.
I am sorry to say it, but at some point the finer details become important. Working out what you need to invest versus what you have already invested requires some evaluation expertise. At Voxhub we take on this responsibility for our customers, providing advice, verified equipment, and testing tools for networks that tell us our customers what kind of performance they are actually getting.

Somewhere along the line you will need expertise and advice, whether the quantifying comes from your own team, your IT company, or your VoIP provider. Once you find the right source of help, trust them and let them deliver for you…then be sure to hold onto them and don’t let them go!

VoIP Week Posts:

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Business Cloud hosting UC voip xaas

Hosted VoIP/UCaaS is Going Upmarket!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Huw Rees, Senior Vice President of Business Development at 8×8

The hosted VoIP/UCaaS (aka cloud communications) market is growing strongly in the US and it seems that the UK market is not far behind. According to Frost and Sullivan, Gartner, and others, US CAGR is somewhere around the 25%+ mark, and certainly the results from the few pure play publicly traded companies in this space seem to be consistent with these figures. So what is really driving this growth? What is really going on under the bonnet (or hood, for those of you in the US)?

What appears to be happening is that cloud communications is being adopted by much larger businesses than it was even two or three years ago. The early adopters for hosted PBX services were the very small businesses, typically less than 20 employees. In terms of IT, these businesses were generally unsophisticated and the owner could make the decision rapidly without asking a lot of detailed questions, especially when the provider would clearly save him/her money and often offered some kind of money-back guarantee. Thus, with nothing to lose, these small businesses signed up in significant numbers. Larger business were not so quick to jump on this bandwagon, however, as they needed clear answers to such questions as availability, reliability, feature set, scalability and — of course — compliance and security. Their questions in these areas were not easy to answer in the early roll out of these services, and unfortunately some of these items (especially compliance and security) are still not being properly addressed by many providers.
8x8 logo

As some of the vendors started to address these mid-market and even enterprise-level concerns, CIOs started to pay more attention. They began to see the clear benefits of a sophisticated, scalable service that they could subscribe to, effectively getting out of the telephone management business and concentrating their IT resources on projects that were critical to their business and part of the differentiation their business had in their markets (i.e., stop managing boxes in closets and start bringing real value to the business). Gradually at first, businesses of a few hundred employees signed up, followed by 500+, and now businesses significantly greater than 1000 employees subscribe to these services.

For the service provider, larger customers provide major benefits. For instance, they have more sophisticated IT teams, and so the ratio of support calls to deployed phones is reduced. Also, the acquisition cost is potentially less on a per-phone-deployed basis. And perhaps most importantly, the churn rate from larger customers is dramatically less, as larger businesses are generally more stable and therefore tend not to cease business with anywhere near the frequency of the very small businesses. This reduction in churn rate clearly benefits the service provider’s top line, as to grow revenue you must, of course, stem any revenue loss from defecting customers.

As we look forward to 2015, the trend of larger businesses moving to cloud-based communications will continue, to the point where the enterprise market will also start to adopt these services. Soon enough, it will not be uncommon for businesses with many thousands of employees — perhaps even tens of thousands of employees — to start subscribing, which will result in a booming business for the service providers that are truly ready to tackle such a scale.

VoIP Week Posts:

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Apps Business Mobile mobile apps mobile connectivity UC voip

Will OTT VoIP Apps Destroy the Telecoms Industry?

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Alex Kinch, Founder and CEO of Ziron.

As soon as the Telecoms industry came to terms with the WhatsApp acquisition and what it could mean for their SMS revenues, CEO Jan Koum dropped another bombshell: the company would be launching voice services from Q2.

For many this announcement spelled the end. Surely operator executives around the world should start packing their suitcases and call it a day. After years of racing to the bottom the industry has finally hit rock. Well, not quite. In my view, it’s high-time these doomsayers started to examine the opportunities that come with the increase of OTT voice apps (mVoiP), rather than demonising the unstoppable tide of technological evolution.

The ‘telco industry camp’ and the ‘mVoiP camp’ needn’t be enemies. There is room a-plenty for them to co-exist, at least for the foreseeable future. News reports would have you believe that the only people using landlines are rural dwelling anti-tech luddites, however Ofcom has reported that in the last statistical year call volumes from both fixed and mobile phones were in excess of 100 billion minutes. Their report states that 82% of adults still use a home landline – but only 28% of adults use any form of VoIP. The report also said that there are currently 82.7 million active mobile subscribers in the UK, but a report from Analysys Mason clarifies that only 20% of them are active mVoiP users.
Ziron logo

It is essential to keep in mind that mVoIP isn’t new, as in recent years a host of mVoiP apps have launched, including Fring, Nimbuzz to Viber. We’ve had a long time to come to terms with mVoIP apps and adapt business models accordingly. The key is to think about how you can value, rather than trying to stand in the way of change. At least one popular OTT app has been conducting trials with traditional telcos, in which calls from the PSTN made to a user’s regular GSM number are intercepted and delivered to the app instead of via the SIM. This kind of forward progress must be embraced. We must ask, “How we can add value and work together to deliver an enhanced customer experience?”

Massive scope exists for smart VoIP operators that can act as a gateway between the old world of the PSTN and the new world of OTT apps. As someone that has been in Telco for more years than I dare ever admit, I remember similar hysteria taking hold ten years ago when Skype first became popular. Today, Skype is feeding and contributing to the Telco industry, driving a third of the world’s phone traffic. The fact is that Telecoms is evolving, and,to survive we are going to have to evolve with it.

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voip

Secured SIP Provisioning

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Tim Bray, Technical Director for ProVu Communications

Most SIP providers in the UK use auto provisioning to look after their SIP phones, with the phones calling home to a central server via HTTP to download configuration files.

Auto provisioning is an essential part of the hosted SIP and SIP PBX market in the UK, which would be unviable without it. The advantages offered are a consistent phone setup and an ongoing ability for the support team to manage and support the device.

Parts of the system

  • Provisioning server
  • Provisioning client on phone
  • Redirection server at manufacturer
  • Multicast detection (for a PBX to detect phones on local networks)
  • File format – usually key/value based or XML

Recent security disclosures (Cal Leeming, et al) have given the impression that all auto provisioning is insecure, the basic argument being that phone MAC addresses are predictable and thus a provisioning server can be easily scanned. I am not sure these disclosures have really brought out anything that was not already understood by the competent players in the market, but they did bring to light the fact that some people are acting in an insecure manner and probably need to tidy up their systems a bit.

SIP usernames and passwords have a value in the underworld of VoIP fraud.

I know from personal experience that security holes in phones cause more damage than exploited provisioning servers, and having the ability to rapidly upgrade thousands of vulnerable phones by way of a provisioning server is invaluable.

At Provu we run a provisioning system for many thousands of phones, and we act as a provisioning service provider for ITSPs who need it. We have always had a policy to only provision SIP passwords one time and then to immediately delete those passwords, and phones that never call home get their passwords deleted as well, all of which provides some level of protection.
ProVu logo

Authentication

It is my view that the provisioning session between the phone and the server should be authenticated. A very good way to do this is to use HTTPS with client certificates (the certificates are for client authentication, with the https encryption almost secondary) that are installed in the phones at the factory. A provisioning server can then use the public part of the Certificate Authority (CA) to authenticate the phone. Each phone has a unique certificate and the MAC address of the phone is embedded as a field within the certificate, and thus a provisioning server can know for certain which phone it is talking to simply by checking the certificate.

The main advantage of the certificate authentication method is that no setup is required on the phone.  The certificates are inserted at the factory and can be validated by anybody with the CA file. Some phone vendors already support this, too, it being an idea that was first put to use by Sipura sometime around 2005.  For years, I have been asking the phone vendors I deal with to add certificates as part of their manufacturing process, and I would very much like to see a world where client certificates are standard on all SIP phones. The certificates can also be used for SIP as well, serving to immediately block an avenue for fraud.

Wider Security

There are many phone configuration best practices that can be enforced by a provisioning server, including:

  • Enforcement of strong passwords on web interface
  • Disablement of dialing from web interface
  • Updating firmware with all the latest security fixes
  • Configuration of SIP on a random port number
  • Disablement of backdoor entry points for click-to-dial software
  • Disablement `hidden` web access usernames and passwords
  • Enforcement of long SIP passwords (much easier to provision a 20 character random password than have the end user type it in)

Provisioning Server Security

  • Use authentication — Must be not replayable
  • Rate Limits — Basic sysadmin firewall type tasks
  • Patched up-to-date with security fixes
  • No directory indexes
  • Use script that deletes passwords once provisioned

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Business voip

Provisioning, Cloud Management and Obihai

The name may be new, but you’ve probably provisioned, configured or used an IP phone or ATA over the years that Obihai’s core engineering team had a hand in developing.

Back in 1999 a company called Komodo released the first ever voice ATA.  The Komodo product quickly caught the attention of Cisco, the company was acquired and the Cisco ATA-186 quickly became ubiquitous in the emerging VoIP marketplace.  Soon after, Jan Fandrianto and Sam Sin started a new company, Sipura, where they further evolved mass market low-cost VoIP devices and provisioning.  The Sipura approach to secure, remote provisioning was quickly emulated across the industry, and Cisco acquired this business as well, after which the team further expanded the SPA product range before starting Obihai in 2010.  Since that time they have been working on a new generation of voice hardware, supported by an advanced cloud management platform, and are now working to expand into global markets.

With a new company came a new opportunity — to design a voice platform from the ground up, and to innovate based on the knowledge gained over the past decade.  First a new SIP stack had to be written, and Dr. Sin’s experience in writing the Komodo and Sipura SIP stacks ensured that this new stack would be feature-rich, expandable, and bullet-proof.  Obihai have even used its SIP stack in its WebRTC implementation using web sockets. Next came the development of the OBiTALK cloud management platform, which is unique in that it can be utilised for HTTPS-based remote device management and provisioning in a wide variety of fashions, depending on the service provider’s infrastructure and cloud capabilities.

Customers can leverage the OBiTALK portal in a variety of ways, depending on how the OBi devices reach the end user. For example, end customers can purchase their own hardware for use via the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) service within the portal, which allows the customer to choose and sign up for IP voice services via Obihai’s “Approved Service Provider” (ASP) program. This program allows ITSPs to offer their services for provision via OBiTALK with the user selecting and purchasing the voice services, and in turn the device automatically configures for the chosen ASP.  Once the ASPs services are added to the OBi device, the ASP can then check the status and change the configuration of their services on the device either via API into their own platform or via the ITSP view within the OBiTALK portal.

Manage ITSP Devices

For ITSPs, there are a number of ways to provision and manage devices.  A “Zero Touch” (ZT) approach is available, with the ITSP able to push XML-based profiles with smart adaption to the specified device. Traditional methods are available as well, including DHCP Option 66, TFTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. Profiles are sent securely to devices using HTTPS, Open SSL or by profile encryption using the OBCrypt tool.  Additionally, cloud-based provisioning, configuration and management can be obtained via the OBiTALK portal.  This approach allows the ITSP or their customer to purchase regular off-the-shelf Obihai devices and to add the device to the ITSP’s service by simply dialing a star code.  It also allows even smaller service providers — those without a provisioning infrastructure — to offer ZT or near-ZT services to their customers. For ITSPs with a deployed provisioning infrastructure, the OBiTALK portal can be used alongside as a technical support and inventory management tool, showing all OBi devices on the ITSP’s network, their status, location and also enabling the ITSP to browse to the device’s local admin page.  Additionally, all the functionality within OBiTALK can be accessed via API, allowing ITSPs to integrate the portal with their own systems.  The ability to provision even extends to Obihai’s range of USB accessories, the OBiWiFI Wifi adaptor, OBiBT Bluetooth adaptor and OBiLINE FXO adaptor can all be configured by the xml profile.

Today, as evidenced by Obihai’s ATAs, and IP phones, almost anyone can securely provision and manage their devices regardless of existing infrastructure.

VoIP Penguins Phone

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net neutrality voip

The Smoking Rooms of Net Neutrality

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week contributor Dan Winfield, Co-Founder and CEO of Voxhub and 2014 ITSPA Council member.

Net neutrality is a hot topic amongst those in the VoIP industry and something all VoIP providers have had to deal with in one form or another, usually looming its head in the land of large network providers and mobile networks. Did you know, though, that there are many places in the UK where you are not free to use your favourite VoIP provider? No joke, as difficult as it is to believe, there are still places in 2014 that judge based on the protocol. And these places are on every block, every city and are allowed to openly discriminate.

Yes, I am talking about serviced offices.

VoIP services are about flexibility, and ironically this is what serviced offices are supposed to offer. So why do I put my head in my hands when I hear that a client is moving to a serviced office? In my experience, Voxhub customers making such a move typically have to leave because they are not allowed to use our service or they cannot do so due to firewall blocking. Also, much stress is generated during such ‘events’ due to customers becoming annoyed with the situation and, in the case of blocking, are often caught between two parties with no service! Of course, at Voxhub we do our best to find a diplomatic solution for any customers wanting to move to a serviced office, but it isn’t a task we like to undertake.

Before going any further I should say that I am fully aware of the financial dynamics of serviced offices, and the fact that they often have to invest in telephony for whole buildings in advance and figure out how to somehow repay this investment.  The grey area in all of this — and where the real problem lies — is that all serviced offices supply ‘Internet’ to their customers. Thus, as ‘VoIP services’ are synonymous with ‘Internet’, such services should not be blocked on the grounds that they compete with the in-house telephony VoIP or otherwise.

So why do I care? Let me quote Bender, that wise robot from the much loved cartoon “Futurama”:

“This is the worst kind of discrimination. The kind against me!”

I’ll explain. I have spent much of the last 6 months looking for office space for our Voxhub team in London, and as such have been forced to enter the underbelly of the office world as a potential customer. We sought our own office, but also investigated the serviced office option. Normally I would cross the road when I see a serviced office for fear of being jeered at, but there is a disturbing new type that dress themselves up as modern, fun and ‘Internet’ savvy. They even have high ceilings, wooden floors, unfinished walls and random furniture in corners of rooms. I was fooled, enough at least to give the concept a chance.

In one case, I was actually quite near to signing up with one of these new breed serviced offices. Naturally, I had asked questions about using our own phones, but I always had a sneaky feeling that they didn’t understand. At the very end of the process, in fact, they asked me how many of their phones I would want, and they even went as far as to increase the quoted rent costs when I said they could keep their phones because I didn’t need them. They tried to concede, but then stupidly said I had to pay an extra charge based on the number of phones in the room. Anyone who has seen our desks knows that this is a dumb thing to say, as during service development or trials we often have upwards of three or four phones on a single desk! Of course, I told them to stuff it.

I decided to make one last set of enquiries for serviced offices to see if my prejudice is correct. Sadly, it only made it clearer in my mind that these businesses need to be slapped into shape when it comes to understanding net neutrality.

  • All advertised Internet but gave no warning that certain services were not allowed.
  • Many very clearly indicated that I could not use VoIP telephones.
  • Some said I could use Skype but not the Voxhub service.
  • Some didn’t know anything but told me I had to direct my question to their telecom provider.

I had a very colourful call with one lady that highlights the problem. She told me that for our service I was allowed to use a software phone like Skype, that I wasn’t allowed to use a hardware VoIP phone, that I was allowed to use a laptop with a headset (and if the headset looked like a phone handset, that was also OK), and that I wasn’t allowed to use a laptop that looked like a phone with my headset from the previous question that looked like a handset.

VoIP Serviced Offices

As you can no doubt imagine, at this point I was trying not to laugh and the woman was probably wishing she hadn’t spoken to me. I snuck in one last question about using a phone that looked like a laptop, but I think by that point she realised something was going on and made an excuse about me needing to speak to someone more technical.

In all seriousness, by the end of the process I felt that not only was VoIP effectively blacklisted, but that my business wasn’t even allowed to trade in a serviced office without using someone else’s phones or paying danger money for being there!

A serviced office, in my opinion, should be considered a service provider and be included as part of any regulatory requirements and / or best practices, especially if they have outsourced their operations to a service provider that in any other environment would not operate this type of practice.

At day’s end, I am extremely glad that we were pushed away from taking a serviced office. Voxhub has now been accepted as a member of TechHub (we love hubs) and we are moving into our new studio space in Old Street today!

VoIP Week Posts:

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broadband Business business applications internet net neutrality peering voip

Net Neutrality and Telephony

Net neutrality and VoIP telephony – thorny issues the industry needs to negotiate

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Rob Pickering, CEO of ipcortex.

Most folks who work in the VoIP industry have at some point been subject to a casual horror story from a new acquaintance about evil VoIP and how they tried it once and that it nearly brought their business to its knees. My heart sinks whenever I realise that this is the direction in which the conversation is going, at which point I usually find myself wishing I’d said that I did something less controversial for a living…like writing computer networking software! I listen, though, nodding politely, already forming a conclusion — after all, it would be unlikely that the problems experienced were due to a fault in their equipment or termination provider, both of which are probably perfectly reliable. No, a lack of a suitable quality of service (QoS) between their premises and termination provider is almost always the culprit in such circumstances.

The UK service provider industry has developed lots of solutions to the QoS problem, and things are far better now than they were just five or ten years ago when the market was in its infancy. The quality and availability of last mile circuits, particularly in metropolitan areas, has massively improved with successive advancements such as LLU, FTTC, FTTP, and cost-effective, high bandwidth Ethernet IAD type circuits. There has also been a trend towards integrated providers delivering the whole service — access circuit, Internet and telephony — as a single package. Behind the scenes, this may or may not translate technically into a full end-to-end in-house QoS-managed solution, depending on the provider and sometimes the geography of the customer. It does, however, assign commercial responsibility for delivering a fit-for-purpose solution to a single party, and this can only produce a better quality outcome for the customer.

ipcortexlogo

Such an approach is certainly not universal. The US market has developed differently, for instance, and most VoIP termination providers don’t get deeply involved in provision of access circuits, instead opting to rely on decent low loss, low jitter transit or peering arrangements, and their customers’ own commodity access circuits. Often they will do a bit of automated “connection testing” as part of their signup process, however in general customers on unsuitable circuits tend to weed themselves out.  This does produce some benefits for customers, including more transparency with regard to costs, as well as a bit less lock-in as there is no commercial linkage between access and over-the-top (OTT) voice service. Today, in fact, several of those US suppliers are entering the UK market with this same business model.

Which brings us on to Net Neutrality. Whenever this subject comes up, we tend to think about its obvious effects on consumer entertainment services. The future development of the telephony industry is, however, intimately linked with this issue. Whilst the raw, per-consumer bandwidth requirements of a VoD service like Netflix is greater, the network characteristics required to deliver a reliable telephony conversation of at least ISDN quality are in some ways more onerous. Though buffering can always be used to counter horrible jitter on the underlying path for a video stream, and content caches are already used to reduce transit requirements, neither of these methods can be used to reduce the pain on a real-time voice conversation. If telephony providers can no longer get good, zero-packet loss, low jitter transit, or peering with many leading access providers, then an entire business model may very well be frozen out.

How do you think the industry will develop? Vertically integrated one-stop shops for network access and telephony, or universal OTT providers? I’d love to know your thoughts.

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Business voip voip hardware

Voice Technology Makes Conference Calls Sound Amazingly Clear and Life-like

Trefor.net welcomes “VoIP Week” contributor Jeff Rodman, Polycom‘s Chief Technology Evangelist. Since co-founding the company in 1990 Jeff has been instrumental in the realization of Polycom’s iconic products for voice, video, network communications, and other media.

When was the last time you used a conference phone? Today or perhaps yesterday? For a good many of us it likely hasn’t been more than a day or two. For many of businesses today, open-air voice conferencing is as ubiquitous as the traditional handheld or headset.

To ensure maximum efficiency and productivity during conference calls, it is critical for the speech to be clearly understood. We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of struggling to work out what someone is saying, be it due to noise, their distance from a microphone, or just an unfamiliar accent. Our minds are good at compensating for missing words and blurred sounds, but the more time they spend figuring out what might have been said, the less well we understand is actually being said (as seen in this short video). Therefore, it is vital that the physical “what we hear” stage be as clear and as accurate as possible.

Five aspects of speech audio work together to make or break a clear, understandable conversation: Bandwidth, Reverberation, Amplitude, Interactivity, and Noise. These five aspects, taken together, are called the BRAIN model of practical audio communications. The job of any conferencing system is to tune and balance these aspects automatically to provide the best possible hearing experience for the parties on both ends of the call.

B-R-A-I-N

Bandwidth: The Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) most of us grew up with carries less than half the information inherent in human speech, and this shortcoming was unthinkingly brought over into early IP telephones. However, newer system greatly enhance intelligibility through the implementation of HD Voice, making conversation much easier to follow and less fatiguing. The standards-compliant IP phones and conference phones that deliver this much higher audio bandwidth offer amazing clarity that rivals the best video systems, making it seem that you are in the same room as those on the other end of the call

Reverberation: Room echo at either end of a phone conversation makes the sound die down more slowly, thus smearing words together. While a “perfect” solution would include acoustic wall coverings for absorption, wall-mounted diffuser panels, and a personal headset or lapel mics for every participant, the reverberation problem is much more easily addressed via a multiple-microphone conferencing system that can intelligently steer and focus the pickup patterns to dynamically match the location of each talker in a room.

Amplitude: Insufficient amplitude, or loudness, can make it difficult to hear a talker. Repositioning the talker and listener are obvious solutions, but are not always practical. Conference phones are available, though, that can automatically adjust microphone gain to greatly help in these situations, and the difference in ease of understanding can be breathtaking.

Interaction: Interactive speech between distant groups can be difficult to conduct for a number of reasons, due in no small part to the absence of a true full-duplex system that allows for transparent interactive speech. A conference phone with good full-duplex technology enables talkers at both ends to be heard clearly without any delays or distractions. Beware, though, as although many speakerphones today lay claim full-duplex performance it is a very sophisticated feature that few can actually deliver.

Noise: Common noise sources share much of the same spectrum with speech and can make it difficult to understand conversations. First, try to fix noise at the source. Move the microphones farther from air conditioner ducts, overhead projectors, coffee makers, and so on. There will always be residual noise, of course, but the HD Voice technology found in high quality conference phones eliminates traditional clicking, buzzing, hissing, and other noise artefacts, and can thus make a big difference in ensuring that the voices of all participants on the conference call are clearly heard in spite of any acoustic challenges in the room.

So the next time you plan or join a conference call, consider the elements of the BRAIN model. Remember that they work together: each BRAIN component can compensate for deficiencies in others, which can be very important as some are much easier to address than others (consider the cost and difficulty of soundproofing a room compared to simply slipping in a better IP speakerphone with HD Voice and steered microphones, for example). You can learn more about the BRAIN model from Polycom’s The “BRAIN” Model of Intelligibility in Business Telephony whitepaper.

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Business End User ofcom Regs voip

A VoIP Spring

A regular trefor.net contributor, Peter Farmer is the Commercial and Regulatory Manager at Gamma, as well as an ITSPA Council member and Chair of ITSPA Regulatory Committee.  We are pleased to present his “VoIP Week” post.

So, Trefor asked me to approach an article for “VoIP Week” from a commercial perspective as opposed to regulatory…. took me a while, but sunstroked approaching Havant cycling from Esher to Portsmouth, it dawned on me.

We’ve had our VoIP Spring. We just don’t realise it yet.

Last year, there was much furore around Ofcom’s decision (enacting an EC Recommendation) to reduce geographic termination rates to the Long Run Incremental Cost (“LRIC”). These rates were previously calculated using Fully Allocated Cost (“FAC”). Very roughly, FAC is 5x LRIC in this market, so 0.3 became 0.06 pence per minute.

All the views espoused on that subject were valid, especially as we have a diverse industry with many niche interests and many unbalanced portfolios of net termination and origination. In the same market review, however, Ofcom transferred — for BT at least — the foregone common cost (the difference between LRIC and FAC, attributable to costs such as your CEO and Finance and HR teams, etc., and not directly to each incremental unit of what you are selling) in the termination market to the origination market. Granted, this had the perverse effect of reducing the cost (through the Significant Market Power Condition that governs non-geographic out-payments), but what it did to was virtually double the per-minute cost of the origination leg of Carrier Pre-Select and Indirect Access. Granted, again, this nets off against calls to UK geographic and non BT terminating non-geographic (why BT itself is exempt is a very long story that I will tell another day), but means that calls on legacy ISDN30 estates to mobiles and international numbers increased. Markedly. We are now in a situation where the direct cost of getting a call from the Network Terminating Equipment (“NTE”) over the Local Loop to the Digital Local Exchange (“DLE”) is five times that of getting it from the DLE to a mobile in the US of A. Seriously.

If you’re an over-the-top provider, your cost base just went down. You don’t have to worry about that leg from the NTE to the DLE. Your voice traffic is ones and zeroes encoded in packets of data over broadband frequencies, not analogue on narrowband frequencies. The per minute cost of providing the service to any caller has plummeted, relative to an ISDN2 or 30 or even a single WLR line.

And that right there, Ladies and Gentlemen, was our VoIP Spring. Let’s make the most of it.

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Vastly Objectionable Ignominious Phrase

What the lone acronym in “VoIP Week” does NOT represent.

As a longtime fan of Marvel’s super hero comic books — 40 years and happily counting — I find myself quite satisfied with the persisting Hollywood trend of putting these Fantastic! Incredible! Amazing! Uncanny! Mighty! characters on the Silver Surfer…er, silver screen. And almost as much fun as seeing these wonders brought to life is the narrative means used to tie them all together, that being the oh-so-shadowy government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., which as acronyms go is one heckuva Marvel-ous mouthful (originally “Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division”, then changed in 1991 to “Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate”…both way-cool).

S.H.I.E.L.D.

So what does all of this have to do with VoIP? Well, as great acronyms go absolutely nothing, as S.H.I.E.L.D. is way-cool while V-o-I-P is decidedly not. In fact, though the meaning behind V-o-I-P — Voice over Internet Protocol — is a cause célèbre, worthy of consideration, contemplation, conjecture, and cockeyed optimism, the “word” verbalized evokes images of a thick liquid dripping onto a badly-tuned piece of tin poised alongside a carnival microphone.

Say it with me. Or better yet, don’t.

As awful an acronym as V-o-I-P is, one has to wonder how it came to stick as the most common reference term for the technology it represents. Could it be that as bad as it is, V-o-I-P is actually the best of a really bad bunch? Let’s see…

IPT (IP Telephony)? Difficult double-consonant at the end, and perhaps too easy to rhyme with “gypped”…
IT (Internet Telephony)? Taken.
VoBB (Voice over Broadband? Again, like IPT, too easy to set a negative rhyme to.
BT (Broadband Telephony)? Taken.
BPS (Broadband Phone Service)? Proves that an ugly-sounding acronym is better than one with absolutely nothing going for it.

OK, so maybe I am no longer wondering how V-o-I-P took hold in the tech-y lexicon. After all, nature abhors a vacuum and all that (Horror vacui!). Also, sadly, nothing better was in the ether (evidenced above), and it isn’t as if the average man-on-the-street is going to say “Voice over Internet Protocol” every time they need to refer to the concept (of course, there is no way said average man-on-the-street is ever going to comfortably use the acronymic word “VoIP” either, but let’s not get bogged down in reality’s messy details). Still, it sure would be nice to be able to lay blame for V-o-I-P at someone’s keyboard, but unlike the massive majority of Internet-based whatever-and-whatsis there is absolutely nobody out there laying claim to originating — starting? envisioning? founding? — the term. Even if we could force somebody to take responsibility for this *four-letter-word* of a four-letter acronym, though, a proper punishment could never be levied as any attempt to do so would likely raise the ire of the Kids from C.A.P.E.R.*

At this point the Marvel-literate among you might be gasping (Gasp!) for me to return to espousing on and praising the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe, for those of you not in-the-know who have hung on this far). It is “VoIP Week” at trefor.net, however, and other than their diametrically opposed acronym quality no other useful correlation can be made between S.H.I.E.L.D. and V-o-I-P (other than the fact, that is, that S.H.I.E.L.D. agents likely make extensive and heretofore unknown — and way-cool — use of VoIP technology). Still, you can’t beat a good opening.

*The Civilian Authority for the Protection of Everybody, Regardless

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VoIP and Emergency Services – Location, Location, Location…

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Ray Bellis, Senior Researcher at Nominet UK and Director at NICC Standards Ltd.

UK Proposed Architecture

I’ve blogged previously on the UK Specification being produced by the EmLoc Task Group of NICC Standards regarding the thorny problem of Emergency Services determining the location of a VoIP caller who may be unable to disclose their location, for whatever reason (e.g., the caller is under duress and is unable to talk, or they simply doesn’t know their location, etc.). This work was driven by General Condition 4 (GC4) of the “General Conditions of Entitlement“, which apply to all Communications Providers:

The Communications Provider shall, to the extent technically feasible, make accurate and reliable Caller Location Information available for all calls to the emergency call numbers “112” and “999”, at no charge to the Emergency Organisations handling those calls, at the time the call is answered by those organisations.

At the time of publication these were draft specifications — they’ve since been made publicly available as NICC Document ND1638.   For more details of the architecture please see the aforementioned blog posting and the NICC Document.

A key component of the proposed architecture is that it would require every Internet Service Provider and Access Network Provider (ANP) to operate a service known as a “Location Information Server” (or “LIS”).  The protocol provided by the LIS is described in RFC 5985 and is known as “HELD”, short for “HTTP-Enabled Location Delivery”.
Nominet NICC

Whilst Ofcom has not (yet) carried out any enforcement activity on ISPs or ANPs relating to GC4, they have commissioned a report on the NICC Document that concluded that the architecture described therein is “technically feasible”.  It is therefore to be expected that at some point Ofcom will start enforcing this requirement.

Work to update ND1638 to reflect recent changes to IETF standards is ongoing, and also to allow device-provided location (e.g., GPS readings) to be sent to the Emergency Services during call setup.   However, even if device-provided readings were available, ultimately the Emergency Handling Authorities (EHAs) would trust the network-provided location as the primary source of location, with device-provided location acting only as a means to enhance  the former and be used when consistent with it.

ETSI M/493 Architecture

The European Commission published Standardisation Mandate M/493 in May 2011, requiring European Standards Organisations to develop standards in support of a “Location Enhanced Emergency Call Service”.  This work is being carried out under the “End-to-End Network Architectures” (E2NA) ETSI Project.

The draft architecture being devised by the ETSI working group builds upon previous work by the National Emergency Number Association, the European Emergency Number Association, the Internet Engineering Task Force and others, and many of the functional components are very similar to those used in the UK architecture.

The draft ETSI architecture has one very significant difference from the UK architecture that reflects the more complicated emergency call routing required in some countries.  In the UK all emergency service calls are now handled by BT, so the VoIP operator therefore has no need to make any call routing decisions other than recognising that the called number is an emergency number and passing the call to BT via the appropriate interconnect. In some European countries, however, that initial call routing also depends on the caller’s location, and therefore the architecture requires that the IP Access Network must provide the caller’s location to the VoIP operator before the call can be passed to the emergency services!  This makes the LIS an essential component of the architecture, and therefore safety-critical, with all that this entails.

With EC and ETSI backing for this architecture it seems more likely than ever that ISPs and Access Network Providers will have to implement additional services within their networks to support emergency service calls, even though they are just “mere conduits” for those calls.

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Voice Fraud – You Need to Act!

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP guest contributor Simon Woodhead, CEO of wholesale voice provider Simwood.

In February, we published VoIP Fraud Analysis, a white paper that details Simwood’s three years of operating a Honeypot, coloured in by many years of real-world experience servicing wholesale voice clients of all sizes and seeing them compromised. Our research has been very well received in official circles from OFCOM to ACPO, at industry events comprising scarily competent people, and we’ve since been able to compare notes with others in darkened rooms who study this for a living. Of course, I won’t repeat the full content of the white paper here — and it certainly wouldn’t be appropriate to do so — but I will be glad to share a few observations from it.

VoIP fraud — an estimated $46bn a year problem — has come as no surprise to anyone, and as we’ve run through the mechanism of attack the majority of people in the audience have seen at least parts of the behaviour we describe in the wild. If we were describing other kinds of crime most people would be looking in from outside, but VoIP fraud is pervasive and everyone in the industry has seen it at some level. Similarly, nobody has questioned the solutions proposed; some of which are unique to Simwood though they can be employed by any provider on almost any equipment. Despite this, people remain reluctant to act and, dare I say, a little complacent. It is somebody else’s problem until it is their problem, and by then it may very well be too late. Remember, $46bn is the estimated measure of the good guys’ incompetence…the bad guys’ intent is infinite and, as we’ve seen, can quite literally put a provider out of business in just hours.

The sad fact is that the bad guys are becoming far more professional. Gone are the days of script-kiddy intruding with such blunt force that it was apparent as a DoS attack. They are still there, of course, and can still be very effective in breaching completely unprepared networks, but the serious people — the professionals — are…well, professional. There’s no impatience or fervour to their attacks and they do their homework very very well. Their reconnaissance is unobservable to those not looking out for it at the packet level, and their early compromise testing is lost amongst legitimate call traffic for those unaware of the test numbers identified. Then they wait, patiently.

Christmas 2013 was a busy time for us with almost every night seeing one of our customer’s end-users compromised. Actually, we saw the same customers compromised repeatedly night after night, as the bad guys had identified a specific vulnerability present in the equipment they’d deployed to their end-user businesses. Where the customers were ISPs (with a defined block of IP addresses containing customer equipment) the attackers had been able to identify a list of similar targets on their network vulnerable to the same attack. This would have taken a long time and a lot of patience, before striking when eyes were furthest from the ball. On every single occasion we identified the incident, proactively made contact with our customers to advise and help resolve the incident. The attackers left quietly, knowing they had a long list of other targets and could come back later. They did, every night for the Christmas period.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just a “VoIP” problem. Many incidents are targeted and exploit non-VoIP technologies (e.g., those present by virtue of traditional PBXs being retro-fitted with IP capability) while many others are at other levels altogether, such as the http interface of CPE or provider admin systems. The traffic may pass over VoIP as a consequence, but in many cases once the VoIP side of it has been contained it will then pass over traditional phone lines connected to the same equipment. It must be an anxious time waiting for the CPS invoices afterwards!

My point here is not to scare you, but to highlight two trends: (1) providers are becoming more complacent, and (2) attackers are becoming more professional. A destructive combination, indeed, and one that is sure to end in more tears. Attackers are not going to become less capable and less professional, so the only option is for providers to be less complacent and to — this is critical — take action. Very few if any are doing everything they could, whereas others dismissively rely on techniques that may help but are incomplete and therefore give false confidence. The bad guys can turn on an attack at any point after the reconnaissance is complete, and if you think they cannot then how will you notice and be able to react when they do?

The solutions are often simple and free, however they require a willingness to implement and generally bring many other benefits. By way of example, the vast majority of providers operate SIP on UDP 5060 because that is the out-of-the-box behaviour, whilst you’d struggle to find equipment nowadays that doesn’t support TLS. Not only are TLS endpoints far less common targets, but TLS and SRTP also give end users the privacy I think they already expect they have. Similarly, billing more frequently and getting as close to real-time as possible not only enables fraud monitoring but provides massive operational and commercial benefits too. Your carrier monitoring and enforcing fraud controls on your wholesale account, safely away from your network, is by far the most effective preventative measure, and some of us do that to varying degrees.

simwoodlogo

There are many more solutions contained in the Simwood VoIP Fraud Analysis white paper, and we urge you to implement them, and also to lean on your carrier to help you to do so. Please note that in all the “Christmas” examples it was we the carrier — not our customers — who noticed end-user compromise.

The key take-away I want to leave you with is that if you are having no trouble sleeping at night because you believe it can’t/won’t happen to you, then you really need to act now. Your network may already be compromised, with eyes awaiting your being off the ball, perhaps over a coming Bank Holiday.

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