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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Posts Abouttelecom
Sprint AIRAVE
Ok… so we haven’t had the best of luck with Sprint (see here, and here) and while our company is slowly moving toward AT&T due to “some device” that came out in the last few months, I do have to hand it to Sprint for be one of the first companies to actually release a “why hasn’t somebody thought of this sooner” product.
What Is Sprint AIRAVETM?
Sprint AIRAVETM is a device that creates a CDMA signal for your mobile phone (like a miniature cell tower). AIRAVE provides enhanced and reliable mobile phone coverage in your house or office even if your existing wireless coverage is poor.
Free 411 Calls (Directory Assistance)
It seems that directory assistance (411) is getting more expensive every year. Cell and local carriers continue to charge more and more - all while more and more Internet sites offer it for free. The good news for carriers is that people continue to use it, to the tune of 6 billion directory assistance calls made per year (in 2005). At $1.00+ per call, that’s pretty lucrative!
Alas! Now you can have your directory assistance free (again)!
Ma Bell Rises
With the news that SBC is buying AT&T and Verizon and MCI merging again, the rolling back of regulation in the telco industry continues apace.
Check out the AT&T breakup on wikipedia, which has a rather hilarious disclaimer at the moment:
This article has recently been linked from Slashdot.
Please keep an eye on the page history for errors or vandalism.
You can’t take those slashdot kids anywhere.
VOIP Sabotage
Broadband news posts an interesting article about the potential for incumbent telcos to purposefully deteriorate the quality of VOIP over their circuits to better compete.
The full story is here.
red cross VoIP
Eweek takes a fascinating look at how the Red Cross is using VoIP telephony from VSATs in the field in lieu of a functional infrastructure to communicate. Pretty awesome technology and a good indicator how technology really can make a difference.
fighting back
Jim Baller of The Baller Herbst Law Group is the attorney representing both the municipalities that were targeted by a study by the Heartland Institute that aimed to show that municipal wireless/ISPs were a losing proposition. They have fought back against the studies claims, citing “mistakes, misinterpretations, unsupported and insupportable claims, irrelevancies, innuendos, key omissions and obvious untruths,”:
The chief problem with the Heartland study, said Baller, is in author Steven Titch’s interpretation of the Bristol data, notably his discussion of the financial losses the system has run in its first three years. Instead of using EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) numbers, as is usually done in the communications industry, he said, Titch uses the losses Bristol has reported that include depreciation of its capital assets.
rats!
As evidence that not all technology problems are glamorous and hard-to-understand, we have the recent outage in New Zealand that appears to have possibly been the result of rats chewing through the cable.
They really ought to stop making the cable conduits out of cheese.
vonage, linksys promotion
Linksys is running a promotion along with Vonage which looks to be a pretty good deal, if you’ve been wanting to try out Vonage’s service anyway:
Vonage and router-manufacturer Linksys have partnered to create what they hope will be an offer customers can’t refuse. Starting on June 12, and for six weeks after, consumers will be able to trade in any router for one of Linksys’ Wireless-G routers with two phone ports for VOIP for free after-rebates, when signing up for Vonage’s phone service.
T1 too little?
A good article over at Techrepublic focuses on the narrowing bandwidth crunch many businesses are feeling:
As e-mail worms like the resilient Sober variants spread, they consume a lot of bandwidth and computing resources. However, it really doesn’t take much worm traffic to disable e-mail services for an entire company, especially if that organization is using a single T1 line. Find out why Jonathan Yarden says the days of relying on a corporate T1 connection are over.
ISP’s Protective Measures - A Discussion
Chris previously posted on a mock trial for ISP’s that weren’t doing enough to protect their users. Their argument is that its a slippery slope - which can be construed as ‘no argument’ at all.
However the slippery slope (in this case, IMHO) is actually a good argument. That argument represents the true issue at hand - what should be done? For a lot of areas in the tech market, consortiums and coalitions help develop standards for the industry to use. In a utopia computing environment, we wouldn’t have these issues. The next step along the path is an ISP that protects us from all the dangers on the net. But to what end?
The reason they are not acting is because their acts can have true economic impacts on their business. AOL knows that hand holding can really turn off a lot of users. The people that use AOL are typically known as the computer illiterate who don’t know any better. A lot of that is due to their overt control of your Internet experience.
