hitting the wire*

VoIPTopia @ the June 2007 CT 27 dinner.

I was honoured to be asked by Dave Duarte to give a brief presentation at the last 27 dinner in Cape Town.   The guys from MissingLink have made a video of my 5+ minute rambling available on Youtube.  Before (& if!) you watch the clip you should know that I showed the "VoIPTopia" clip which we created for the Broadband Summit in Feb, which I posted about here.  (that is me... I've just stopped shaving so often)

The last time I watched myself on video was when I participated in a roleplay where I was a CEO of a company guilty of some disaster like a toxic chemical spill on the N1 being grilled by John Bishop (those of you younger than 40 may not recall the sharp, incisive, rather intimidating style of the man).  I won a dare & a case of cider by holding up a mini "Hi Mom" banner at the start.  Ah me, I must try and dig out the VHS clip and get it digitised.  Would be a good for a laugh I'm sure.

Henk was most amused that my notes were in the form of a mindmap - there is no way I can speak from a prepared text:

that's me.

UK allows 5.8GHz operators to pump up the power

Total Telecom reports that Ofcom is altering the power rules that govern the use of wireless equipment operating at the 5.8 GHz band in the UK, supposedly to "address the digital divide"

"[Using the 5.8 GHz band] is simply another way of providing broadband other than LLU or cable," said an Ofcom spokeswoman, speaking to Total Telecom on Monday.

Ofcom said that upping the power limits will extend the geographic reach of broadband services on the 5.8 GHz band, meaning more remote and rural areas will have access to high-speed Internet.

Now (a) it is great to see that the UK are allowing use of 5.8 GHz in the way they are:

According to Ofcom, the use of equipment in the 5.8 GHz band is subject to a light licensing regime that allows terminals to be registered with the regulator online.

The spokeswoman explained that the 5.8 GHz band needs only a minimal amount of regulation to protect it from illegal interference.

and (b) it is good to see regulator exploring ways to make better use of existing technology, but can one really call this a divide?

The report showed that 41% of adults living in rural areas have broadband Internet at home compared to 45% of adults in urban areas.

Tsk,tsk... can't have the lads in rural England lagging by 4% now can we?! ;)

But!:

The increase from 2 to 4 watts will lower the cost for operators intending to use the spectrum to deliver fixed wireless broadband services, the U.K. regulator said.

Now as far as I can recall from my days as an Elec Eng student, propagation of electromagnetic signals (using an omnidirectional and not a directional antenna) follow an inverse square law?  Which means doubling the power will increase the reach by only about 40% or so?  And as there is no indication of this use of 4 watts is restricted to urban areas, will doubling the allowable power not cause chaos in urban areas where previously workable solutions will be rendered inoperable?  Will this really make the deployment of rural WiFi networks @ 5.8 GHz more affordable and thus kick that 41% penetration of broadband up significantly?

Maybe the likes of Joe @ Amobia will have some answers for me?

The cobblers kids are poorly shod - confessions of an inept home sysadmin.

For someone involved in telecoms and IT, I sometimes think I make poor use of technology.  My home network consists of a 512k DSL link to the Net, a Linksys WAG54GS all-in-one DSL router / LAN switch / DHCP server / WiFi AP / Firewall, into which my wife's PC is plugged and a Senao PCMCIA card (SL-5354CB) which I bought at an iWeek when WiFi was still young here.  My kids are blissfully unaware I could network their PC and provide them with the joys of online gaming - right now the likes of Age of Empires and Sacred fulfil their thirst for death and destruction by design, with no threat to our traffic-cap.

I bought the Linksys from Miro about a year back and have been quite happy with it.  Until last week.

All of a sardine, the damn thing stopped issuing my laptop with an IP address.  Nothing I tried seemed to work.  I resorted to my fallback, and hauled out the HSDPA card I use when I'm out of town.  One or two automated backups later (I run Attix5 every night now after learning the hard way that dead hard drives don't talk) and my traffic limit is trashed.  Time to get the link to the DSL line sorted!

I find some other guy has had similar problems, but can't find an obvious fix anywhere.

Part of the suggested fix from Miro was to uninstall the driver for the card and reinstall.  Nice idea. Only no one told me Senao have discontinued the card and no longer supply driver files (and the ruddy install disk has eloped with my favourite pen and has not been seen in years).  Not good.  Fortunately, Miro managed to dig up the correct install file, but still no joy from the DHCP server.  Grrrr!

Decided it must be the AP - either a factory settings reset will sort it out, or it needs a brain transplant and I'll have to take it in.  Now, few things raise my wife's ire like a broken Net connection when she has a deadline to hit and is embarking on an all-nighter.  The time she caused it herself during a DSL network wobble by pressing the reset button for too long and inadvertently reverted to factory settings (while I was away from home)... she was ready to throttle her inept sysadmin!  So, with my heart in my mouth, I hit reset and went through replacing all the settings.

I can't tell what a relief it was to have connectivity back to normal.

If you need driver files for a Senao PCMCIA card (SL-5354CB) - drop me a mail.  If your Linksys AP's DHCP server goes on the fritz... start all over.  If it starts this crap again soon I'll be ditching it for a Netgear.

Now, if anyone can tell me what I can do to speed up my wife's PC that has slowed to a crawl, I'll be delighted.  So far, I've tried most of the usual tricks, so bar laser surgery to the registry file... or wiping the hard-drive, I'm stumped.

that's me.  admin'd out.

IT & Telecoms trends in 2007

At the beginning of March I was asked to distil my thoughts on what trends are likely to emerge during 2007/2008 in the local Information & Communications Technology market. I’ve held back on posting until now while Storm's overworked Marketing team get the customer newsletter out to avoid stealing all their thunder. As usual, this is a mix of “duh, of course, like that's news?” type stuff and some “what are you smoking!?” ideas that may well be way off the mark! Here goes:

Obviously the desktop hardware technology “refresh” will get going as IT budgets are approved and laptop and desktops using Intel’s new super fast core 2 duo chip’s start hitting corporate desks in earnest; followed closely by the early adopters of Microsoft’s much awaited new operating system ‘Vista’. (The more cautious of us will wait for Service Patch 1 or even 2 to appear!)

On the bandwidth front - Broadband, now far from broad, will continue to drop in price, but I doubt as much as we have seen in the last 18 months. I can't even recall who started the argy-bargy, but at one stage MTN appeared to have created a new benchmark at around R0.20/MB. It was allegedly intended to be a limited duration half-price special, but showed what could be done.  Sentech announced they planned providing more bang for buck;  Vodacom then dropped their price (by 61% according to their ads) after being almost double everyone else’s price. iBurst also dropped their pricing, but remain more expensive than Sentech for equivalent packages (sub HSDPA theoretical speeds). The unlicensed players like Amobia and Uninet are still an order of magnitude cheaper but don’t have the coverage advantage. It is all a bit confusing for the man in the street, but ultimately these changes will make getting online and staying there permanently, more affordable. Offerings should start to differentiate on quality (reliability of throughput) and you should be able to get fixed IP addresses – currently not available to ADSL users. This will facilitate hooking up remote offices for voice and data over IP.

More telco’s will announce moves to converge their voice and data networks onto IP based New Generation Networks like British Telecom’s 21st Century Network project. This will make networks more intelligent and flexible, but will unfortunately not impact on customers for some time to come.

Video on Demand is growing overseas (where real broadband exists) – people are prepared to pay a premium over the likes of Mr Video et al to choose their viewing for the evening from their armchair. Don’t hold your breath here – we’re too spread out geographically to make it profitable just yet (maybe satellite will save us). And Telkom still dominates the local loop.

IPTV is being touted by vendors as the next big thing. Again, dependent on broadband, and ownership of content will be key! It will not be over the Internet, but over managed IP networks.

Music and video downloads, both legal and illegal, continue to grow. More cell phones with better mp3 players will eventually make people wonder why they have a CD player, but probably not this year! Apple’s iPhone will develop a cult following but will hardly make a dent in Nokia’s global market dominance.

Instant Messaging (IM) will continue to grow. Local mobile phone based instant messaging service, MXIT (Think MSN messenger on your phone) will find ways of “growing up” and becoming more respectable. IM will start making deeper inroads into corporate culture with IT managers needing to develop policies on IM usage.

WiMAX equipment will drop in price as the economies of scale kick in and more networks other than Sprint Nextel in the USA do mass roll-outs. It will continue to disappoint those who believed all the hype w.r.t. 70Mbps @ 70 miles @ 70mph. Some Meshed WiFi networks will appear here in SA, whether legal or not, and we’ll continue to see a LAN technology play in open spaces it was never intended for. Unlicensed Mobile Access, with VoWiFi phones following along behind, causing Mobile Networks to get edgy.

Spectrum is being fiercely fought over. It is a scarce resource and it is unlikely that anyone other than a few established players will get licenses. There will be many frustrated wannabes.

Municipal networks are coming to the fore, with the Cape Town tender awarded, but challenged, eThekweni ready to roll but caught up with legalities, and City of Joburg now out on tender. They are unlikely to have any real impact this year. They do not really have much of a sustainable advantage in the long run, as they will have to allow others access to infrastructure and will find that building a telco is not trivial.

The Mobile networks will announce HSUPA with great fanfare. Mobile broadband will then be about as broad as it gets for a while, but as up- and down-load speeds will be around 5Mbps, it will make quadplay (or fourplay?) possible – mobile/voice/internet/video.

Mobile interconnect prices are due to come down by 20 to 25% shortly. This should allow Telkom to drop the price of calls to mobile phones – whether they will pass on the full benefit or not will have to be seen. Mobile packages are unlikely to change as a result though. Least Cost Routing will become more and more marginal and the shift to Communication Service Providers using VoIP will be become more obvious.

Asterisk, the open source “IPPBX” will continue to make some serious inroads into the PBX market, with damage being done at a “higher level” in the market than originally proposed – medium to large corporates instead of SME’s. Watch the call centres here – they’re the weather vane of change.

Hosted IPPBX’s will start emerging as broadband improves and investors in some of the early VoIP entrants who committed large capex in these sorts of solutions seek to get ROI moving.

Social Networking using web based applications like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Second Life etc will become more widely known and used as people get used to being online 24*7. We’re seeing South African flavours of these appearing.

DSL and SSL VPN’s will become more popular as DSL prices drop and quality improves and mobile broadband grows. Business will seek help to set up and manage increasingly complex networks of devices.

As broadband improves in throughput, price and reliability, ASP services will become more popular, with companies seriously considering (but possibly not committing to just yet) such things as Getting Things Done, Gmail and Office packages from the likes of Google rather than Microsoft (from one evil empire to another!?).

VoIP will start emerging as more than just a cost saving exercise with some of the first real value adds starting to come through, with integration into calendars, address books, CRM’s and PBX’s.

There will be a lot of consolidation in the next few years, with bigger players buying smaller, more niche players to fulfill the need to have broader voice and data offering.

Oh, and Neotel will start taking on Telkom in the retail market and Infraco will make its clumsy and controversial way onto the stage…

(and if I look back on my 2006 predictions... if we see half of these during 2007, we'll be doing well! :( )

Dave Gale

March 2007

VoIPTopia - when VoIP gets funky.

When it comes to VoIP, we've all got a bit fixated on the means to the end instead of the end itself, which is to make communications not just cheaper (a definite fixation here in SA), but easier and more productive. VoIP is a technology.  Actually it is a protocol, which in turn is only a predetermined method of communications between devices. 

This post is long overdue and I apologise to those who had given up hope of me ever providing a version of the animation we used at the SA Broadband Summit in Feb this year.  Truth is, I've been busy and I couldn't get the HTML right first go.  I've finally hacked it (helps to follow the programmer's instructions to the letter!)

Here it is, a maybe not so futuristic view of what (Vo)IP can enable for the knowledge worker.  There is much it can do for the consumer, but that is another story.  If it seems the narrative is a bit rushed, it is; MeshSmith, the animator, begged me to cut it as short as possible - after all I did give him an impossible deadline - which he made.  Hit the play button below and adjust the sound for optimal listening pleasure! ;)

that's me.  and no one yelled "fore!" dammit!