hitting the wire*

Having a problem with commenting?

If this is you after trying to add a comment to a post here and especially if you’re on the end of a DSL connection… do me a favour please.  Click on this link.  Note your IP address at the time (with Telkom DSL it changes daily), and drop me a mail (dave (at) hittingthewire.co.za) with a short description of what you experienced and the IP address you noted down.

I’ve had 3 people complain in short succession that TypePad either hung during the process or that comments never appeared after what seemed to be a successful save. Six Apart are playing with some spam-busting measures and admit they may have been too enthusiastic.  The IP’s and problem descriptions may help them.

As I am only too delighted to get comments from those taking time out to read my ramblings, I’m distraught to think of feedback going awry – let me know please.

Madam Minister, what were you thinking?!

There are times when politicians say the damnedest things.  Sometimes they are actually intelligent things.  Most of the time (as was observed by one wit in the chamber the other day) one could make use of the resulting hot air to help Eskom out of their energy crisis.  And then there are times when comments are made that are breathtakingly and gob-smackingly straight from the other side of Lewis Carrol’s looking glass!

If the report in ICT World which came out on Friday is correct, our Minister of Telecommunications is either highly disingenious, badly informed or ignorant of her own affairs (and as I have yet to renew my subscription to the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, I cannot verify her words). In a parliamentary briefing last week she allegedly excused the poor progress that the country is making toward market reform in Telecoms, and the desired drop in the price of telecommunications on the private sector.  Apparently we are “not coming to the party” on Self-Provisioning and VoIP among others.

This after ICASA, the industry and a good few telecoms lawyers interpreted her September 2004 statement as allowing VANS to self provide, which she then changed her mind on one day before the 1 February 2005 effective date.

ISPA have quite rightly called for clarification, and if the Vodacom fellow I was sitting next to on the plane to Joburg tonight is correct, she may have meant the Mobile Network Operators when she talked about Self Provisioning… but then, why didn’t she say so?  And aren’t they still waiting for spectrum?

And VoIP?  I thought things were rolling along very nicely thank you!  At least they are in our neck of the woods.  But VoIP and Broadband are tied at the hip in many respects and broadband is… well, not very broad and then when it looks that way, it suddenly shrinks again without notice.  And the ADSL regulations that came out last year from ICASA were not very helpful and have no implementation schedule attached…

You could start with a Broadband Policy?  Oh, you’re too busy working with the DPE to build the broadband network to solve all our problems? 

And if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly were you expecting Ma’am? We’ve yet to see some real leadership, clear policy and directives coming out of DoC.  If you keep making ambiguous statements and then retracting/correcting them with equally ambiguous statements… we’ll just have to “kyk noord en f** voort” neh?

aluta continua.

VoIPTopia at Broadband Summit 2007

I’m presenting at Broadband Summit 2007 on Tuesday 27^th Feb (next week).  The title is “VoIPTopia” a concept that Sarah Rice and I developed (OK, so she suggested it and then watched in amusement while I got carried away and went MontyPythonesque). We started to think about ‘OK, so we’re doing VoIP. It works. The environment is a bit restricting. Now what?’  So we decided to go right over the top. Indulge the secret SciFi wannabe in each of us.  Go Shatner, go Skywalker, go Buzz Lightyear, <sound effects please> …!

What if the environment was conducive to VoIP-to-the-max?  What if we all got really creative and leveraged the power of IP?  Where it was no longer a world of “so, how much will this VoIP dingus save us eh?”, but where VoIP is used because the quality is better and it enables us to be so much more creative with our communications. 

 

 VoIPTopia was born.

I’ll make the .ppt and the associated movie clips (yeah, we really did go OTT) available here after the 27^th (if you checked the link above you will have noticed the entry fee is just short of the GDP of a small country).  Adam Lange of SignPost has put together an really cool intro.  Andrew Bayley of Quirk succeeded in trimming it down to a barely emailable size (had to sacrifice a but of quality, but all in the interests of fun!  ) and Adrian Berger (aka Meshsmith) worked 24*7 to meet my ridiculous deadline despite trashing his hard drive and RAM on the way to create the cartoon of a dude called Dave, living and working in VoIPTopia.

Thanks guys – will give you some feedback after Tuesday.  I can just hear “Thunderguts” from “Men from the Ministry” (for those of you old enough to remember lying on the lounge carpet listening to Springbok Radio) yelling “AND DON’T MAKE A MUCK OF IT!”

that’s me.

Putting meat on the bones of the Electronic Communications Act

ICASA have published for comment a document which seeks to define the wholesale termination market. This is the first of a good few of these that are due to come out of ICASA as they start building the regulations that put meat on the bones of the EC Act.  Be a good citizen, read the docs, debate them with your colleagues and give some constructive comment on them.

It is vital that we define the markets (after all, it determines just how level the playing field is) as best we can in order to then agree on the rules that we will play by. Genesis Analytics have done a fair amount of work here and I recall Robbie Lipshitz being quite vociferous and asking some interesting questions at an EC Act conference last year. But it is not possible for one entity to see all the angles. Take up your chisel and do your bit in shaping the rough work into a passable form.

The terms and conditions for the Network Provider and Service Provider licenses are due shortly. Rumour has it that the conversion process is such that it will make any entity that had numbers issued to it by ICASA before 19 July 2006 (the date the EC Act came into force) a Network Service Provider. This will not require an invite from the Minister. A boon for some? A bugbear for others? (the licenses will not come without conditions and obligations!) An unexpected outcome for the Minister?

Some interesting months ahead.

(using BlogJet for the first time to draft this post as TypePad’s editor does weird things which drive me nuts and copy and paste from MS Word causes Feedburner indigestion… so please excuse any teething problems)

OK, so who's blog is this exactly?

I’ve been asked if this is a Storm corporate blog. Some colleagues seem to assume that it is and that I’m speaking on behalf of Storm here. Allow me to set the record straight.

I work for Storm. I actually have fun working there (most of the time, but not when I’m having to dredge up legal discovery documents for battles we’re not involved in – then I get homicidal!). I blog here at hitting the wire* where I also have a fair bit of fun too. I talk about the telecoms/ICT/VoIP industry here because it is a subject I’m quite passionate about.  I do not speak on behalf of Storm here.  Storm does not own 'hitting the wire*'.

Storm to support the SA Blog awards

Well, we succeeded. We persuaded the Tim’s to pony up a cool prize for the SA Blog Awards, but I can’t tell you what it is yet and I can’t tell you which category it is for either. Jon from CherryFlava and the other folk organizing the competition have to sort out a few details first. Marc Forrest & I will be out of the running for that one (not aware of any other Storm staff blogging at the moment). I’m waiting impatiently for the internal blog server to be up and running so we can start using it for internal Storm projects and forums.

Not that savvy on SA Blogs and where to find them?

SA Blog Awards - time to nominate your favourites

One of the best parts of blogging is the freshness of content. Someone, somewhere is cooking up something interesting, intelligent, relevant, funny, worth a read. You just have to find it!

I was totally unaware that the SA Blog Awards existed.  It seems to have been going since 2005. There is a magnificent prize of R20.07 for the Best of the Best, so I'm looking to enhance my Storm salary here - vote for me! <rolls about in mirth>

There are a bunch of categories...

Forget Anna Nicole Smith and get a Real Life.

Colleen, my wife’s brother’s wife (never quite sure if that makes her my sister-in-law or not) celebrated a milestone birthday last night (can’t tell you which one or she’ll never speak to me again). We left early, just before 12, and the party was still rocking. The theme was “1967”. I managed to fool Craig, my brother-in-law by dressing as a GI and not a hippy. Thanks Col – great party!

So, the kids are at friends overnight, it is raining, and I decide to catch up on some of the blogs and news sites I’ve had no time to visit for a while.

It is then that I spot a rather curious title on The Register.

Have you got your DAVE yet, found the Nokia N97 or considered ditching Outlook?

I find I've been productised, I decide the Nokia N95 is actually the phone for me, that the N97 does not exist, consider ditching Outlook and ponder on "us and "the machine" and blocked pipes on the Net.

I fell in love lust with the iPhone.  For no more reason than it looks sexy.  OK, so if I wanted an iPod that played video's and a phone in one it would be cool  But on reflection, I've decided I want more....