hitting the wire*

getting as much as you give.

If you take the p*ss... expect to have the p*ss taken out of you!

Storm has a number of parking bays in the basement of our building.  The bay I use is the same width as all the rest, but slap up against a brick wall.  The bay next to mine has a pillar on the other side of it, which allows the driver more space to get in and out of their car, even if the back of the car is close to the pillar.  If they park towards the left of their bay, I can get out of my car, but only if I scrape the wing mirror down the brick wall on the left and suck in my gut during the 'escape procedure'.

A few months back the bay next to me was assigned to a another company in the building.  After a few "narrow escapes" I left a note to ask the driver using the bay to leave me more room.  They obliged.  Then a week or two back, a different vehicle started parking there and the same problem began again.  Yesterday, I decided to leave a note again.  This is the note.

OK, so my handwriting ells you I should have been a GP and not an engineer, but I trust you get the gist?  When I got back to my car yesterday evening, what do I find on the windshield?

you guessed it.

a can opener.

Unbeknownst to me, our Customer Services Manager had acquired a new car and 'moved in next door'.

Nice one Steve... you got me.  If you find a potato in your car's exhaust one of these days, it might well be me! ;)

You’re OK, how am I? What do you want from your Telecommunications Service Provider?

In October, James Enck, in a post following up on a presentation he gave at Telco 2.0 entitled “10 things I hate about you” (it was meant to wake up the traditional telco’s to some of the concerns of the investment community), quoted a response from what appears to be a somewhat disillusioned, cynical supplier to the carriers of this world. As I’m a busdev guy pondering the merits between skunkworks mode and rigorous development processes, one phrase had me thinking about my own performance:

There is no money in services (any 18 year-old in the Valley is a better new business development manager than any of the telcos have);

In a recent post he pointed me to the blog of Ian Hay, Strategic Advisor at Orange in the UK, who has produced a “10 things I want from you” summary of a survey he conducted among his contacts to find out what they wanted from their telco. His results are interesting and I’ll quote from his post here:

1. Improve the Basics (16)
2. Transparent pricing (11)
3. Embrace internet and don’t compete or lock out (8)
4. Business and Personal(7)
5. Open Handset (6)
6. Flat rate Data (4)
7. Open development environment (4)
8. Open Source Technology (2)
9. Open Data (2)
10. PC integration (1)

Which pretty much backs up what Kevin Jacobson, our voice business unit manager, and I discussed the other day.  In line with Storm’s Keep It Simple Stupid approach to product and pricing as well as the “no bullsh*t” stance (which came from a submission to a local industry mailing list I lurk on where someone described us as a “no BS ISP”), one needs to ensure you focus on getting the basics of a product right before adding bells and whistles.

Ian has me thinking and I’m considering crafting a survey of my own w.r.t. what 3 things would you want from your VoIP SP / ISP / VANS, what would they be? I’ll leave it an open question and battle with the collation rather then forcing it into multiple-choice.

If you feel like commenting before I pester you, feel free! ;)

that's me for now.

Economic impact of deregulation and disruptive technologies

This is an open RFI.  I'm looking for any research that has been done - preferably in developing or 3rd world economies proving relationships between the introduction of deregulation, or disruptive technologies such as broadband, WiFi or VoIP and the economic growth (or decline!)  of the country.  If it ties % changes in GDP to % growth of X, or Y, or Z technology in any way, great!

Bit of background here:- I think it was in 2002 that a DoC official challenged me to prove to him why DoC should be legalising VoIP.  That is became purely academic on 1 Feburary 2004 when VoIP was legalised in South Africa. I then heard Dr Gillian Marcelle speak at a local conference where she bemoaned the dearth of quantitative research done by any organisation which would help regulators like ICASA to understand the implications of disruptive technologies and make wise decisions.

A week or so back, I came across a piece by William L. Hahn, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner, entitled "The Problem With One Laptop per Child" where he argues that rather than focusing on making cheap laptops ubiquitous, it is also necessary to stimulate the spread of broadband.

I'd like to be able to see something that either supports or refutes my view that disruptive technologies like WiFi and VoIP have positive impacts on GDP.  After all, in the words of John Rutledge and Sonia Arrison:

"…when telecom is dragged down, the entire country is affected.

The telecom network is not only a source of jobs, value and innovation in its own right, but it is also the central nervous system of the overall economy. We all use it to exchange information with our customers, our workforce and our suppliers. In today’s service-driven economy, the speed of the telecom network determines the speed of commerce, which we measure as GDP.

It also determines our pay checks. The amount we earn is limited by our productivity – what we can produce in a day of work. Faster information flows mean higher productivity and rising incomes."

That's me.  Too much strat planning has my head on the spin cycle.

TelFree to take over the South African VoIP market! (or "when we were very young")

I love start-ups.  I hanker after the days of chaos, uncertainty and that feeling of creating your world each day you get up.  Hang on, what am I saying... it's not that much different to today?  Well maybe a little. 

I also love it when people launch their start-up with not just confidence, but enough bluster to be undecipherable from bullsh*t!  Not that I'm underestimating the disruptive nature of VoIP and the ability of new entrants to make a serious ripple in the telecoms market, but really, today's announcement by TelFree (tell who?) that within 6 months (including 2 of the deadest sale months of the year) they intend to have 70% of the South African corporate VoIP market sewn up is somewhat excessive even by Toby J standards.

For those who don't know Toby, he was Storm's first Sales Manager, and a more enthusiastic, expansive, creative fella you be hard pushed to find.  Jupiter Drawing Room creatives have been known to listen to his ideas. 

His take on the TelFree announcement : "Even in my prime I couldn't come up with such fantastic kak!!!! Well done mate!!!!"

OK, enough taking the p*ss now, better go and wind the mechanisms on the VoIP machine...

That's me. finished!  ;)

Voice over IP – Quality matters.

“Sorry…. you’re breaking up… Hello? could you repeat that please?”

What price Quality of speech? What is acceptable speech quality on a phone line to you? What influences your perception at any one given moment?

I often get asked : “why should I pay you for a VoIP service when I can use Skype?”. I thought I’d write a bit about my take on VoIP quality.

There’s VoIP and there’s VoIP. There’s good quality voice and there’s not so good quality voice.  When Storm kicked off our VoIP offering back in February 2004, our Sales team were often faced with some serious skepticism – especially from IT Managers who had “been there, done that, wanna see my scars?”, referring to some voice over IP solution they’d tried and failed. The guys who often took the plunge in 2004 were the FD’s – keen to cut costs.  It did help that our solution was capex free for the customer and ROI did not need to feature.

Our customers being businesses, many of whom depend on their voice comms to keep the daily bread coming in – we’ve a fair portion of the BPO market here – will not tolerate bad quality voice. But the problem is this : quality is in the ear of the hearer. How often do I witness people battling to get a good signal on a GSM phone, accepting “poorer than PSTN” quality, calling back once or twice during a call and seldom thinking of logging a fault. I do it myself. But let my desk phone be faint, or noisy, or break-up, and my blood pressure starts to rise! Unconscious perceived value in the mobility of the GSM handset and acceptance of a norm that has arisen.

In a bandwidth-lean environment like South Africa, where uncontended last mile IP connectivity for an internet services provider is still prohibitively expensive (in November 2006), we have had to resort to an actively managed IP network. MPLS based virtual private networks with QoS, the order of the day. Quality VoIP, but at a price.

So it was with interest that I read two articles, reporting research into recent trends in the quality of VoIP over the open internet. Both coming to different conclusions.

One, referenced on the Gartner blog, quoting a recent VoIP study conducted by Brix Networks indicating that VoIP (not over a managed IP network) quality is erratic. The study asserts that quality has gone down over the past couple of years, but Gartner’s reading of the data leads them to think otherwise. They point out that a cut of the most recent data shows that VoIP quality is improving – but then it’s still 5% down on Feb ’05. Brix have a cute little app you can run on your desktop that measures and plots MOS scores to various difference global destinations – I ran it for a day or two until Google Desktop (which is it requires) irritated me enough to get rid of it. Some of the screenshots I’ve pasted into a Word doc if you’re interested - check under "Recent Presentations".

The 2^nd, a study by Minacom, seems to indicate that “VoIP phone service worldwide "now sounds better and connects faster than the standard public-switched phone network (PSTN)."” Better than the PSTN?!? They go on to point out that Brix’s tests were based on PC-to-PC type of VoIP, rather than VoIP such as we at Storm deploy, where we manage the IP network from the Gateway attached to a PBX to the last point before it is converted into a TDM signal again (if at all).

Better than the PSTN though? That brings me to an interactive white paper I love to quote (it’s a bit like a party trick for geeks! ;). The guys at Global IP Sound (who developed the iLBC codec used by Skype) put it together. I love it. VoIP has the potential to deliver broadcast quality audio on a voice call if all the elements (including bandwidth) are in place. PSTN cannot and will never. In the interests of squeezing every last drop of bandwidth out of the “pipes” we use, we purposefully degrade the quality of a VoIP call to the point where it is efficient, yet only just acceptable. That’s the line we have to walk, until the price of decent quality bandwidth falls..

That’s me.

Btw. If anyone can point me to the results of some guys who have been doing regular pings around the world for the last decade or so and publish the results, please drop me a line.

horsing around?

Mexican Magic, my son Dylan's horse, decided he wanted "in" the other day... a good thing the door was bolted, or some collateral damage would have resulted!

What price do we put on fighting Spam on our customer's behalf?

I read an article on PC World that struck a chord.

As an Internet Service Provider, Storm has invested a lot in anti-spam measures.  Before  SMTP sessions are accepted from 'foreign' mailservers, we run checks.  We have debated various rigorous measures with unfortunate side effects at length before reluctantly dropping them.  We've even fired a channel partner for spamming South African email users.  Quite frankly, spam, spammers and the guys who supply them with email addresses p*ss me off!  If I had my way, they'd be keel-hauled, hung, drawn and quartered, then used as chum.

I suggested to our news@storm list (a wee bit tongue in cheek) that we lift our guards for a day to let our customers see what we quietly do for them (at no charge!) behind the scenes. Aish! - responses I got.  The techies are all for it of course - they're the ones sweating with little recognition. The helpdesk and the Ops manager were for some reason less enthusiastic?! ;)

I'm for priming our customers for "Storm Spam Day" - when we lift our skirts and let the ravening horde of barbarians in for the day! ;)

Some stats to reveal the extent of it:

On the setup in Cape Town alone just short of 60% of mail smaller than 250k is being rejected as SPAM and that figure is after we have already rejected mail based on other tests (the SMTP sessions check with 'foreign' mailservers mentioned above). On one of the blacklists we implemented a few months ago we dropped 159,133 SMTP connections in Cape Town yesterday.

Viruses are not so bad, we stopped 3207 for the day.

That's me.  I'm off to the dentist.  Broke a tooth on a marshmallow (I kid you not!)

bloggers block?

(ok, so I was just too knackered to work up the material on VoIP Quality of Service  - maybe Monday.)

How long before Google catches on?

James Enck, keen observer, commentator and blogger of all things telco-like and chaotic, in a recent posting points to a new search engine which takes searching to a new dimension - using dynamic visual relationships to guide you on your search.  Punching in "broadband policy" took me rapidly to a few juicy items that were not initially obvious when I did the same in Google.

The concept is not that new actually -  LivePlasma has been around for a while now and useful for pointing you to music and movies you're likely to enjoy given your current tastes.

I moved to Google from a variety of search engines I frequented, among them Altavista, many moons back, preferring the clean, uncluttered approach of Google to begin with.  I see Altavista have become more Google-like by now - long time since I've visited.  Can an alternative like Quintura give Google a run for its money, or will Google bounce back rapidly with its own dynamic visual relationships option?  Once you've got to the point where your brand becomes a generic term for your product (e.g. Kleenex) or a verb (e.g. Google), you're hard to beat.

That's me.

The most awesome broadband policy on earth, right here in your own back yard.

Bet that woke you up! Can a policy really be something someone in their right minds gets excited about? OK, so maybe it’s reaching a bit to use me as an example there, but think about it…

A policy sets government agendas for the future. It can define clearly what objectives need to be met and what resources can and will be harnessed to achieve those objectives. It can give the private sector some clear rules to steer their investment and strategy decisions. A plain piece of paper covered in symbols which communicate thoughts and intentions really can unlock energy and catalyze action.

The Canadians created a broadband policy, the US did not.  The Canadian broadband market grew faster than the US despite being more expensive.

So what you say? Well, the local Provincial Government is trying to work out what they need to do to boost Information and Communications Technology in the region. Not just the ICT sector itself, but the use of ICT to grow the other sectors that show promise. I was invited to participate in a bit of a brainstorm with the Chief Directorate: Economic Sector Development, Department of Economic Development and Tourism (them yes) the other day. I suggested that creating a good Broadband policy might be a good place to start.  Seems the idea has been well received and I might have to pay for my cockiness and be dragooned into some sort of task team.

Which is where you come in, gentle reader! I need your help, I need it fast, if my sanity is to last. (Can you tell I’m in need of a good night’s sleep?) Seriously though, I would like to throw it open to you to debate (on this blog as a forum if you like or by mailing me direct) what you would like to see regional government doing to improve telecoms? What role do you believe they should play? What should they focus on? What technologies should they push? What access models should they give preference to? What commercial models? What kind of policies would you like to see put in place? What should go into those policy documents?

If you feed me with good stuff, I undertake to give you full credit. And if you prefer to remain anonymous, that’s fine too – just make sure you say so! C'mon get your thinking caps on.

'til the next urge to blog, that’s me.