TELECOM Digest     Sun, 13 Mar 2005 18:44:00 EST    Volume 24 : Issue 112

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    A Spiritual Connection (Marcus Didius Falco)
    Behind the Digital Divide (Marcus Didius Falco)
    Re: FCC Wants Comments was Re: Should VoIP Get Numbers Direct? (Tim)
    Re: Draytek Router Problem - Class C Address Only on LAN? (Geoff Welsh)
    Re: Cell Phone Radiation Dangers (Tony P.)
    Re: Ohio Law Would Require Auction License for eBay Sellers (Tony P.)
    Re: Satellite Radio as "Broadcast Audio Internet"? (John McHarry)
    Re: Need PC Based Call Attendant/Answering Service (andrew@voicent.com)

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               ===========================

See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 03:48:51 -0500
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: A Spiritual Connection  from Economist.com


http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3713955

A spiritual connection
Mar 10th 2005
 From The Economist print edition

Technology and society: Around the world, mobile phones seem to have a
spiritual or supernatural dimension that other forms of technology
lack.

THOSE who go into the priesthood are said to have a calling from God. Now
the purveyors of faith the world over are using mobile phones to give
believers a call in a more literal sense. Catholics can sign up for daily
inspirational text messages from the pope simply by texting Pope On to a
special number (53141 in Ireland, for example). The Irish Jesuits offer a
service called Sacred Space, accessible via smartphone, which encourages
users to spend ten minutes reflecting on a specially chosen scripture for
the day. In Taiwan, limited-edition phones made by Okwap, a local
handset-maker, offer Matsu wallpaper and religious ringtones, along with a
less tangible feature each one has been specially blessed at a temple to
Matsu. And Muslims around the world can use the F7100 handset, launched
last July by LG of South Korea, both to remind them of prayer times (the
phone has an alarm system that works in 500 cities) and to find the
direction of Mecca using the handset's built-in Mecca indicator compass
(see picture).

Mobile phones also make it easy to donate money to religious
groups. In Britain, a company called MS Wireless Marketing offers a
TXT & Donate Islamic Prayer Alert service for .25 ($0.48) per
day. The profits go to Muslim charities such as Muslim Hands and
Islamic Relief. There are also dozens of Christian charities that
accept text-message donations.

Phones and religious beliefs do not always mix smoothly, however. 
Finnish authorities shut down a service which claimed to offer text
messages from Jesus for 1.20 ($1.55) each, and bishops in the text-mad
Philippines put a stop to people attending confession and receiving
absolution via text messages.

That technology and religion can be so intertwined is not new. After
all, the first book to roll off Gutenberg's new-fangled printing press
was the Bible. But unlike the personal computer, which has remained
paradoxically impersonal, the mobile phone has transcended its
pragmatic beginnings as a yuppie business tool and has burrowed its
way into popular consciousness, says Mizuko Ito, an anthropologist at
the University of Southern California. Fashion models don them like
jewellery and strut the catwalk, teenage girls in Japan use them as
lockets, sticking photographs of their friends into their battery
compartments, and some Ghanaians even choose to be buried in giant
mobile-phone coffins.

Mobile phones are a uniquely personal form of technology, thanks in
large part to their mobility. When you leave the house, you probably
take your keys, your wallet and your phone. Laptop computers are
carried by far fewer people, and do not have the same personal
associations. Mobile phones provide scope for self-expression, through
the choice of ringtone and screen wallpaper. At the same time, mobile
phones' ability to communicate with unseen, distant people using
invisible radio waves is almost magical.

Indeed, the notion that phones might be capable of supernatural or
spiritual communication goes right back to the inventor of the
telephone himself, Alexander Graham Bell.

According to Avital Ronell, a professor of philosophy at New York
University and the author of The Telephone Book: Technology,
Schizophrenia, and Electric Speech , Bell was just as interested in
using his invention to contact the dead as he was in talking to his
associate Thomas Watson. Bell and Watson had attended regular seances
in Salem, says Dr Ronell. Bell even drew up a contract with his
brother, agreeing that whoever lived the longest should try to contact
the other. For his part, Watson was an avid medium who spent hours
listening to the weird hisses and squeals of early telephone lines in
case they proved to be the dead trying to make contact.  AFP

Answering the call

The telephone still maintains such ghostly connections. In China,
people celebrating the Hungry Ghost Festival burn life-sized paper
effigies of everything from televisions to mobile phones so that the
dead can enjoy them in the afterlife. These phone offerings enable the
dead to call each other, rather than the living. Why shouldn't the
dead be as technologically advanced as we are? asks Genevieve Bell, an
anthropologist who works for Intel, the world's largest chipmaker. She
spent two years in Asia conducting field research about attitudes to
technology in different countries. In parts of southern China, she
found, it is customary to take your mobile phone to a local Buddhist
monk for blessing.

Even phone numbers can have supernatural connotations. In Beijing, a
man recently paid $215,000 for a lucky phone number. In Cantonese, the
number four sounds like the word for death, and is therefore unlucky,
while the number eight sounds like the word for fortune, and is
therefore lucky. It's not uncommon even for migrant workers to pay up
to a month's salary for a lucky telephone number, says James Katz,
professor of communications at Rutgers University. Since phones are
the most personal of all high-tech devices, it is hardly surprising
that their use should reflect the entire spectrum of personal beliefs.

Copyright 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily
media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra . Hundreds of new articles daily.

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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 03:54:13 -0500
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Behind the Digital Divide Economist.com


http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3714058

REPORTS

Reuters

Development: Much is made of the digital divide between rich and poor. What
do people on the ground think about it?

IN THE village of Embalam in southern India, about 15 miles outside
the town of Pondicherry, Arumugam and his wife, Thillan, sit on the
red earth in front of their thatch hut. She is 50 years old; he is not
sure, but thinks he is around 75. Arumugam is unemployed. He used to
work as a drum-beater at funerals, but then he was injured, and now he
has trouble walking. Thillan makes a little money as a part-time
agricultural labourer about 30 rupees ($0.70) a day, ten days a
month. Other than that, they get by on meagre (and sporadic)
government disability payments.

In  the new  India of  cybercafes and  software tycoons,  Arumugam and
Thillan, and the  millions of other villagers around  the country like
them,  seem like  anachronisms. But  just  a few  steps outside  their
section  of the  village a  section known  as the  colony ,  where the
untouchables traditionally  live the sheen of  India's technology boom
is  more  evident  in  a  green room  equipped  with  five  computers,
state-of-the-art  solar  cells  and   a  wireless  connection  to  the
internet. This  is the  village's Knowledge Centre,  one of 12  in the
region   set   up   by    a   local   non-profit   organisation,   the
M.   S.  Swaminathan   Research  Foundation   (MSSRF).   The  centres,
established  with the aid  of international  donor agencies  and local
government support, offer villagers  a range of information, including
market prices  for crops, job listings, details  of government welfare
schemes, and health advice.

A conservative estimate of the cost of the equipment in the Embalam
centre is 200,000 rupees ($4,500), or around 55 years' earnings for
Thillan.  Annual running costs are extra. When asked about the centre,
Thillan laughs. I don't know anything about that, she says. It has no
connection to my life. We're just sitting here in our house trying to
survive.

Scenes like these, played out around the developing world, have led to
something of a backlash against rural deployments of new information
and communications technologies, or ICTs, as they are known in the
jargon of development experts. In the 1990s, at the height of the
technology boom, rural ICTs were heralded as catalysts for leapfrog
development , information societies and a host of other digital-age
panaceas for poverty.

Now they have largely fallen out of favour: none other than Bill Gates, the
chairman of Microsoft, derides them as distractions from the real problems
of development. Do people have a clear view of what it means to live on $1
a day? he asked at a conference on the digital divide in 2000. About 99% of
the benefits of having a PC come when you've provided reasonable health and
literacy to the person who's going to sit down and use it. That is why,
even though Mr Gates made his fortune from computers, the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, now the richest charity in the world, concentrates on
improving health in poor countries.

The backlash against ICTs is understandable. Set alongside the
medieval living conditions in much of the developing world, it seems
foolhardy to throw money at fancy computers and internet links. Far
better, it would appear, to spend scarce resources on combating AIDS,
say, or on better sanitation facilities. Indeed, this was the
conclusion reached by the recently concluded Copenhagen Consensus
project, which brought together a group of leading economists to
prioritise how the world's development resources should be spent (see
articles). The panel came up with 17 priorities: spending more on ICTs
was not even on the list.

Still, it may be somewhat hasty to write off rural technology
altogether.  Charles Kenny, a senior economist at the World Bank who
has studied the role of ICTs in development, says that traditional
cost-benefit calculations are in the best of cases an art, not a
science . With ICTs, he adds, the picture is further muddied by the
newness of the technologies; economists simply do not know how to
quantify the benefits of the internet.

The view from the ground

Given the paucity of data, then, and even of sound methodologies for
collecting the data, an alternative way to evaluate the role of ICTs
in development is simply to ask rural residents what they
think. Applied in rural India, in the villages served by the MSSRF,
this approach reveals a more nuanced picture than that suggested by
the sceptics, though not an entirely contradictory one.

Villagers like Arumugam and Thillan older, illiterate and lower caste
appear to have little enthusiasm for technology. Indeed, Thillan, who
lives barely a five-minute walk from the village's Knowledge Centre,
says she did not even know about its existence until two months ago
(even though the centre has been open for several years). When Thillan
and a group of eight neighbours are asked for their development
priorities a common man's version of the Copenhagen Consensus they
list sanitation, land, health, education, transport, jobs the list
goes on and on, but it does not include computers, or even
telephones. They are not so much sceptical of ICTs as oblivious; ICTs
are irrelevant to their lives. This attitude is echoed by many
villagers at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. In the
fishing community of Veerapatinam, the site of another MSSRF centre,
Thuradi, aged 45, sits on the beach sorting through his catch. I'm
illiterate, he says, when asked about the centre. I don't know how to
use a computer, and I have to fish all day.

But surely technology can provide information for the likes of
Thuradi, even if he does not sit down in front of the computers
himself? Among other things, the centre in this village offers
information on wave heights and weather patterns (information that
Thuradi says is already available on television). Some years ago, the
centre also used satellites to map the movements of large schools of
fish in the ocean. But according to another fisherman, this only
benefited the rich: poor fishermen, lacking motorboats and navigation
equipment, could not travel far enough, or determine their location
precisely enough, to use the maps.

Such stories bring to mind the uneven results of earlier
technology-led development efforts. Development experts are familiar
with the notion of rusting tractors a semi-apocryphal reference to
imported agricultural technologies that littered poor countries in the
1960s and 1970s. Mr Kenny says he similarly anticipates a fair number
of dusty rooms with old computers piled up in them around the
countryside.

That may well be true, but it does not mean that the money being
channelled to rural technology is going entirely unappreciated. Rural
ICTs appear particularly useful to the literate, to the wealthier and
to the younger those, in other words, who sit at the top of the
socio-economic hierarchy In the 12 villages surrounding Pondicherry,
students are among the most frequent users of the Knowledge Centres;
they look up exam results, learn computer skills and look for
jobs. Farmers who own land or cattle, and who are therefore relatively
well-off, get veterinary information and data on crop prices.

I'm illiterate, says one fisherman. I don't know how to use a
computer, and I have to fish all day.

Outside the Embalam colony, at a village teashop up the road from the
temple, Kumar, the 35-year-old shop owner, speaks glowingly about the
centre's role in disseminating crop prices and information on
government welfare schemes, and says the Knowledge Centre has made his
village famous . He cites the dignitaries from development
organisations and governments who have visited; he also points to the
fact that people from 25 surrounding villages come to use the centre,
transforming Embalam into something of a local information hub.

At the centre itself, Kasthuri, a female volunteer who helps run the
place, says that the status of women in Embalam has improved as a
result of using the computers. Before, we were just sitting at home,
she says. Now we feel empowered and more in control. Some economists
might dismiss such sentiments as woolly headed. But they are
indicators of a sense of civic pride and social inclusiveness that
less conventional economists might term human development or
well-being.

A question of priorities

Given the mixed opinions on the ground, then, the real issue is not
whether investing in ICTs can help development (it can, in some cases,
and for some people), but whether the overall benefits of doing so
outweigh those of investing in, say, education or health. Leonard
Waverman of the London Business School has compared the impact on GDP
of increases in teledensity (the number of telephones per 100 people)
and the primary-school completion rate. He found that an increase of
100 basis points in teledensity raised GDP by about twice as much as
the same increase in primary-school completion. As Dr Waverman
acknowledges, however, his calculations do not take into account the
respective investment costs and it is the cost of ICTs that makes
people such as Mr Gates so sceptical of their applicability to the
developing world.


AFP

Now that's what I call antivirus technology

Indeed, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor at the Indian Institute of
Technology in Chennai (formerly Madras), argues that cost is the
deciding factor in determining whether the digital divide will ever be
bridged. To that end, Dr Jhunjhunwala and his colleagues are working
on a number of low-cost devices, including a remote banking machine
and a fixed wireless system that cuts the cost of access by more than
half. But such innovation takes time and is itself expensive.

Perhaps a more immediate way of addressing the cost of technology is
to rely on older, more proven means of delivering information. Radios,
for example, are already being used by many development organisations;
their cost (under $10) is a fraction of the investment (at least $800)
required for a telephone line. In Embalam and Veerapatinam, few people
actually ever sit at a computer; they receive much of their
information from loudspeakers on top of the Knowledge Centre, or from
a newsletter printed at the centre and delivered around the
village. Such old-fashioned methods of communication can be connected
to an internet hub located further upstream; these hybrid networks may
well represent the future of technology in the developing world.

But for now, it seems that the most cost-effective way of providing
information over the proverbial last mile is often decidedly
low-tech. On December 26th 2004, villagers in Veerapatinam had
occasion to marvel at the reliability of a truly old-fashioned source
of information. As the Asian=20 tsunami swept towards the south Indian
shoreline, over a thousand villagers were gathered safely inland
around the temple well. About an hour and a half before the tsunami,
the waters in the well had started bubbling and rising to the surface;
by the time the wave hit, a whirlpool had formed and the villagers had
left the beach to watch this strange phenomenon.

Nearby villages suffered heavy casualties, but in Veerapatinam only
one person died out of a total population of 6,200. The villagers
attribute their fortuitous escape to divine intervention, not
technology. Ravi, a well-dressed man standing outside the Knowledge
Centre, says the villagers received no warning over the speakers. We
owe everything to Her, he says, referring to the temple deity. I'm
telling you honestly, he says. The information came from Her.


Copyright 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.

http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3713955

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily
media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra . Hundreds of new articles daily.

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without
profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the
understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic
issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I
believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S.  Copyright Law. If you wish
to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner, in this instance, the Economist Group.

For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

------------------------------

From: Tim@Backhome.org
Subject: Re: FCC Wants Comments Re: Should VoIP co's Get Numbers Direct?
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 04:03:09 -0800
Organization: Cox Communications


Jack Decker wrote:

> point for the numbers to another CLEC.  I think allowing this change
> would allow VoIP companies to provide better service to customers, and
> by the way it would also probably remove the current impediments for
> customers wanting to take their phone number from one VoIP provider to
> another (or to a landline or cellular company, for that matter -- in
> other words, local number portability for VoIP numbers would probably
> be a reality).

What is scary is that the FCC has allowed Vonage and others to claim
true LNP when that presently simply isn't the case based on what you
are stating.  So, someone who has trusted Vonage (or other VoIPs) by
switching perhaps a coveted number to Vonage has, in fact, placed
ownership of that number in potential, if not actual, jepordy.

------------------------------

From: Geoffrey Welsh <reply@newsgroup.please>
Subject: Re: Draytek Router Problem - Class C Address Only on LAN Interface?
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 09:49:39 -0500


paulfoel wrote:

> Pretty disappointed with the draytek router. We tried a cheap netgear
> router and this handled the subnets fine ...

Most 'residential' broadband routers support only a class C address
range on their LAN port.

Geoffrey Welsh <Geoffrey [dot] Welsh [at] bigfoot [dot] com>
Ambidextrous?  No, I said I'm ambinonscattous - I don't give a crap
either way! 

------------------------------

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: Cell Phone Radiation Dangers
Organization: ATCC
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:43:27 -0500


In article <telecom24.110.8@telecom-digest.org>, sjsobol@JustThe.net 
says:

> Tony P. wrote:

>>>> Consider that Ms. Wood readily admits she has an agenda (she has an
>>>> axe to grind with cell phone manufacturers over what she perceives as
>>>> "iron-clad control over phone releases and pricing, its
>>>> ever-lengthening contracts, and the annoying habit it has of crippling
>>>> Bluetooth phones so that [she] can't use them the way [she wants]
>>>> to").  I would thus take this with a heavy handful of salt.

> If Miss Wood thinks that retail phone pricing and contracts are the
> fault of the MANUFACTURERS, she's probably too stupid to carry a cell
> phone in the first place. I doubt the removal of certain functions is
> done by the manufacturers on their own, either.

>> The problem is that many of the headsets are now Bluetooth enabled.
>> Those put out signals on what, 2.4GHz at relatively low power.

> So? My phone runs on 1.9GHz ... I still haven't heard anything
> definitive either way, either that cell phones DO or DON'T cause
> illness.

Go and read up on Part 97 of the FCC rules for Amateurs. It was scary
enough for them to require certifications of RF safety. But then, we
hams are allowed to run 1500W in the HF bands and a couple hundred in
the 2M and 70CM bands so I guess the RF exposure is a little more
intense at those levels.

------------------------------

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: Ohio Law Would Require Auction License for eBay Sellers
Organization: ATCC
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:47:36 -0500


In article <telecom24.111.2@telecom-digest.org>, first.last@comcast.net 
says:

> In article <telecom24.102.9@telecom-digest.org>, 
> kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net says:

>> In article <telecom24.101.4@telecom-digest.org>, lisa_minter2001
>> @yahoo.com says:

>>> CNN, via Yahoo News on Tuesday reports that the State of Ohio has
>>> become very unfriendly toward online sellers using E-Bay.
>>> According to CNN-Money, State of Ohio now requires an auction license
>>> of people who want to sell on E-Bay, as well as a one-year training
>>> class required of sellers _and_ a fifty thousand dollar security 
>>> bond. The auction license costs two hundred dollars. If you fail to
>>> do these things, they have some jail time waiting for you. Their
>>> excuse is they want to 'cut back on internet fraud using E-Bay'.

>>> http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/07/technology/ohio_ebay/index.htm

>> Tax revenue. That's what every state is about. 

>> On a related note -- a couple years ago I get notice from the state of
>> RI that I never filed my 1990 taxes and owe them $1,300 between fines,
>> etc.  So the past few years they snatched my refunds.

>> This year I decided I want receipts from this point forward, and I'll
>> keep my tax records for more than three years so I can prove I filed.
>> Turns out the RI Division of Taxation won't give a receipt. I got the
>> woman to stamp my copy with their "RECEIVED - RI DIV TAX" verbiage
>> with the date and all.

>> Hopefully the state will lose one more of my returns -- then I can
>> bring the receipted version to the news hounds and watch as the sparks
>> fly.

> Haven't you ever heard of Certified Mail / Return Receipt?  I have
> signed, stamped return post cards for every Fed & State return since I
> started filing.

When one works right across the street from the building that taxation
is in (It's part of Dept. of Administration) it's easier to just walk
in and drop it off as I have other business in that building many
times per month.

------------------------------

From: John McHarry <jmcharry@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: Satellite Radio as "Broadcast Audio Internet"?
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 04:13:26 GMT
Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net


I don't think the inability to directly measure audience is much more
of a problem for satellite content providers than it is for AM and FM
broadcasters. About all they have to work with is Arbitron and the
like, which is pretty dicey for smaller markets. At least the
satellite broadcasters would have national data.

I have thought for some time that XM and Sirius are likely to start
leasing channels, or even timeshares of channels, rather than to keep
trying to fill all their channels themselves. Some of the content
looks a lot like that now, although I have no idea what the business
arrangements are.

------------------------------

From: andrew@voicent.com
Subject: Re: Need PC Based Call Attendant/Answering Service
Date: 12 Mar 2005 21:42:54 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com


If you are a developer than you can use Voicent Gateway to create your
own voice mail software. Voicent Gateway is an open standard based
VoiceXML gateway that works on a PC with a voice modem.

The shareware version, as well as autodialer and reminder products,
are available for free download at http://www.voicent.com/download.

Thanks,

Andrew

Voicent Smart AutoDialer Software - Easy to use and affordable
http://www.voicent.com

------------------------------


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Visit http://www.mstm.okstate.edu and take the next step in your
career with a Master of Science in Telecommunications Management
(MSTM) degree from Oklahoma State University (OSU). This 35
credit-hour interdisciplinary program is designed to give you the
skills necessary to manage telecommunications networks, including
data, video, and voice networks.

The MSTM degree draws on the expertise of the OSU's College
of Business Administration; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the
College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. The program has
state-of-the-art lab facilities on the Stillwater and Tulsa campus
offering hands-on learning to enhance the program curriculum.  Classes
are available in Stillwater, Tulsa, or through distance learning.

Please contact Jay Boyington for additional information at
405-744-9000, mstm-osu@okstate.edu, or visit the MSTM web site at
http://www.mstm.okstate.edu

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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #112
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