From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Apr 20 00:15:56 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i3K4FuX24651; Tue, 20 Apr 2004 00:15:56 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 00:15:56 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200404200415.i3K4FuX24651@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #196 TELECOM Digest Tue, 20 Apr 2004 00:15:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 196 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson MIT Technology Review Magazine Recognizes Lucent Technology (VOIP News) VoIP Companies Come Together to Support ISP/ESP Exemption (VOIP News) Emergency Service Challenges VoIP (VOIP News) Re: Who is "VOIP News"? (Steven J Sobol) Re: Who is "VOIP News"? (Barry Margolin) Re: Who is "VOIP News"? (Jack Decker) Broadcasters Say FCC's Digital TV Plan is Flawed (Monty Solomon) Re: BellSouth Introduces 3.0 mbs Speed to Broadband Portfolio (McHarry) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. 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Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: VOIP News Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 23:43:14 -0400 Subject: MIT'S Technology Review Magazine Recognizes Lucent Technologies Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/04-19-2004/0002154270&EDATE= MIT'S Technology Review Magazine Recognizes Lucent Technologies for 'Killer Patent' on Voice Over IP Bell Labs' Method for Improving the Quality of VoIP Service Named One of 2003's Top Five Patented New Technologies MURRAY HILL, N.J., April 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Technology Review, MIT's magazine of innovation, has selected Lucent Technologies' (NYSE: LU) patent for improving the quality of service for network traffic such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) as one of its 'Five Killer Patents'. The honor marks the third straight year that one of Lucent's patents from Bell Labs has been included on the publication's annual list of the five most important patents issued during the previous year. The list appears in the May 2004 issue of Technology Review and on the web at http://www.technologyreview.com (see current issue). This patent, U.S. No. 6,529,499, granted to Lucent on March 3, 2003, was also the 30,000th patent Bell Labs has received since its inception in 1925. "Bell Labs networking expertise is at the very heart of what makes Lucent a leader in making voice over IP more efficient, reliable and secure," said Bill O'Shea, president of Bell Labs and Lucent's executive vice president of corporate strategy. "This patented technique is one example of how Bell Labs is working to bring the quality of today's circuit-switched network to VoIP. This is an important, standards-based approach that represents Lucent's desire to vastly improve packet-based services for the industry." Bell Labs tackles Voice over IP challenges Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, which Bell Labs helped develop, is a global, standards-based IP telephony signaling protocol primarily used for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls. SIP-based VoIP is a technology that holds tremendous promise for consumers and businesses alike. However, one of the major challenges with VoIP is that IP-based networks were designed to provide 'best effort' service for data applications, but couldn't provide the higher level of quality required by the public switched telephone network (PSTN). The potential of VoIP may remain largely unrealized until the service quality and reliability that people expect matches that of the PSTN. Making VoIP more reliable is a difficult challenge because the Internet was not built for steady-state, real-time communications, such as voice calls and streaming video. In the circuit-switched world, network congestion is managed by reserving a point-to-point connection between two parities in a call. In a connectionless IP network, data packets are routed through the network with no regard for the congestion created by this traffic. This can result in lost or delayed traffic. That's acceptable for elastic applications such as email where lost packets are retransmitted, only delaying the delivery of the email. However, when packets are lost or delayed during real-time voice or other interactive communications, the person on the receiving end might hear part of some of the words, or their connection may be dropped altogether. A major culprit in degrading Quality of Service (QoS) for VoIP and other real-time IP services is network capacity, and how that capacity is managed. By adding more VoIP calls and other traffic to the Internet, network links can become overburdened. As a result, everyone's experience tends to degrade. This drop in quality affects not only new calls being placed over the network, but also can impact calls in progress. Simply adding more capacity is not an effective solution, since network demand (traffic) continues to grow exponentially, and adding more capacity at the right places in the network requires careful planning and intricate knowledge of traffic demands, which is not readily available. About the Patent: A Bell Labs' solution for VoIP To alleviate this congestion, and improve VoIP quality, Bell Labs developed a software-based Virtual Provisioning Server and a "traffic cop" connection resource manager (CRM) that monitors network demand and creates 'virtual trunk groups' where information flows uninterruptedly between senders and receivers. For example, when a user attempts to make a voice over IP call or to view a streaming video, the CRM checks whether there are enough network resources along a path to accommodate the request. If there are, then the new call is allowed and uninterrupted communication with acceptable loss and delay is guaranteed. If the path between sender and receiver does not have enough network capacity, new requests for sessions may be denied, then re-routed to a different path with enough capacity, thus preventing new any new sessions from adversely affecting ongoing VoIP conversations. Bell Labs researchers Yung-Terng (Y.T) Wang of Bell Labs' Advanced Technology Group and Enrique Hernandez-Valencia of Lucent's Integrated Network Solutions Group in Holmdel, N.J., along with former colleagues Bharat Doshi, Kotikalapudi Sriram and On-Ching Yue, received this patent for their research. Since filing for the patent in September 1998, the Bell Labs inventors have leveraged the capabilities of Internet standards to evolve this technique. Additionally, they are working closely with Lucent's business units to build this capability into Lucent's Accelerate(TM) portfolio of VoIP solutions. With Accelerate(TM) solutions, wireline and mobile service providers can rapidly deliver profitable IP-based voice, data and multimedia services. The solutions are built on top of an open industry standard services architecture, originally defined by the 3GPP/3GPP2 standards group, and referred to as IMS (IP Multimedia Solution). IMS fully supports the convergence of traditional voice services with multimedia services, including Web-based features. This allows service providers to offer consumers and enterprises new converged voice and data applications such as unified communications, multimedia messaging, location-based services, IP Centrex, and voice and data virtual private networks. Previous Bell Labs patents selected by Technology Review for this honor include Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (BLAST), a method for vastly improving wireless network capacity; and Raman amplification, an innovative technique for extending the distance and capacity of optical networks. Technology Review's Patent Scorecard, also in the May 2004 issue, again ranks Lucent Technologies as #1 in overall technological strength in telecommunications, a spot Lucent has held during the previous six years on average. More information on this year's Killer Patent is on the web at: http://www.bell-labs.com/news/2003/march/patents.html. About Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies Bell Labs is the leading source of new communications technologies. It has generated more than 30,000 patents since 1925 and has played a pivotal role in inventing or perfecting key communications technologies, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular telephony, electronic switching of calls, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Bell Labs scientists have received six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. National Medals of Science and eight U.S. National Medals of Technology(R). For more information about Bell Labs, visit its Web site at http://www.bell-labs.com. Lucent Technologies designs and delivers the systems, services and software that drive next-generation communications networks. Backed by Bell Labs research and development, Lucent uses its strengths in mobility, optical, software, data and voice networking technologies, as well as services, to create new revenue-generating opportunities for its customers, while enabling them to quickly deploy and better manage their networks. Lucent's customer base includes communications service providers, governments and enterprises worldwide. For more information on Lucent Technologies, which has headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, visit http://www.lucent.com. SOURCE Lucent Technologies Web Site: http://www.lucent.com http://www.bell-labs.com/news/2003/march/patents.html http://www.bell-labs.com ------------------------------ From: VOIP News Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 15:09:18 -0400 Subject: VoIP Companies Come Together to Support ISP/ESP Exemption Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Apr/1032782.htm [April 19, 2004] A group of leading VoIP Companies has agreed to support clarifying language proposed to the FCC in an ex parte letter sent by PointOne to the Commission on 4/14/04. The language would specifically exempt Internet Service Providers (ISPs) & Enhanced Service Providers (ESPs) in a rumored pending decision on AT&T 2002 VoIP. Additionally it would recognize that some so-called phone-to-phone or PSTN-to-PSTN services may indeed be information services. Businesses that have been built around the current ISP/ESP exemption are not asking for anything new with the proposed language, but to simply reaffirm that the rules around which they built their businesses continue to apply. This would appear to be consistent with Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell, recent statements. "We want the incentives to be toward technological innovation," Powell said last Tuesday (4/13/04) while at Dartmouth College. Full story at: http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2004/Apr/1032782.htm ---------------------------------------- How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/ ------------------------------ From: VOIP News Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 19:33:28 -0400 Subject: Emergency Service Challenges VoIP Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/33470.html By Phil Hochmuth Residential VoIP service provider Vonage last year made 911 tracking possible for its customers through a partnership with a 911 telecom services firm. For a company one of the so-called "blessings of VoIP" turns out to be a curse in terms of e911. While support is improving for Enhanced 911 emergency services on corporate VoIP systems, IT professionals and analysts say the technology is not yet standardized across platforms and can be tricky to use in mixed-vendor environments. E911 is the FCC's advanced version of the well-known 911 emergency-calling system that provides additional location data to emergency responders, such as street address and floor inside a building. Carriers have a deadline to implement all phases of e911, which includes extended data from wired phones, and the location (within 1,000 feet) for cell phone users. The FCC's deadline for implementing this system is October 2005. Full story at: http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/33470.html ------------------------------ From: Steven J Sobol Subject: Re: Who is "VOIP News"? Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 14:40:52 -0500 Jeff nor Lisa wrote: > When a Baby Bell screws up, it makes front page news and gives them > nasty publicity. But when a non-Bell screws up or defrauds customers, > no one notices. I believe one wireless company -- T-Mobile, changed > its name twice in recent years, previously being OminiPoint and > something else (Jamie Lee Curtis spokesperson). Doesn't that seem > strange to anyone? Uh, no ... VoiceStream was bought by Deutsche Telekom, which bought Omnipoint not too much later. Omnipoint had already bought Aerial, a smaller GSM provider. So those name changes were all due to actual sales of companies to other companies. Deutsche Telekom subsequently rebranded VoiceStream to T-Mobile because T-Mobile is the brand name they use for their wireless phone properties worldwide. > Some new company offered unlimited local and long distance for a > cheap, as its bold type headlines blared. Except the cheap price > advertised wasn't the cheap price offered. But I guess that's ok. It's not ok, but did anyone make any noise to the FCC or the news media? werner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Again, a couple points: I do not think > Mr. Werner is **really serious** about wanting *all* the headers left > in messages. No, but if I may offer some constructive criticism: My news reader WILL NOT display the messages in threads unless it knows which messages belong to which threads. The Message-ID and References headers are required for that to happen and I agree that they should be left in. No one said ALL headers should be left in. > itself. However, if Mr. Werner wants to see the message headers > followed by a single line of text "I agree with you" or whatver, then > he can view this Digest in Usenet rather than read the Digest format. Time out. You're forgetting that some people read the Digest via the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup. Regarding headers, most e-mail clients don't display them by default, so adding a couple headers won't make a difference even to most of the people who read the Digest by email. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net Domain Names, $9.95/yr, 24x7 service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/ "someone once called me a sofa, but I didn't feel compelled to rush out and buy slip covers." -adam brower * Hiroshima '45, Chernobyl '86, Windows 98/2000/2003 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There is even a way around that. If you go to *my* news reader for telecom stuff at http://telecom-digest.org and the TELECOM_Digest_Online section you can get all the messages for the past two or three months (usually 1500-1700 messages) sorted as you wish, such as date order, author name, subject matter or thread. Choose any sorting protocol you want, thumb through the index then click (on the thread, for example, or the author or the subject, etc. I do not think too many news spools keep that much telecom on line. About eight to ten thousand readers use that part of our web site each day on a regular basis. When Bill P. helped me build that script before he passed on, he pointed out "this is a good way to get rid of the tyranny of Usenet." It has worked quite well for that purpose. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: Who is "VOIP News"? Organization: Looking for work Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:33:53 -0400 In article , werner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Again, a couple points: I do not think > Mr. Werner is **really serious** about wanting *all* the headers left > in messages. A Digest is not intended to do that. It is intended to be > a short, concise presentation of the essence of the message. Headers > are frequently double or triple the size of the actual message text > itself. However, if Mr. Werner wants to see the message headers > followed by a single line of text "I agree with you" or whatver, then > he can view this Digest in Usenet rather than read the Digest format. I suspect he *is* reading the Usenet version. I just checked, and these messages aren't properly threaded. Luckily, my newsreader provides the option of sorting messages into threads by Subject line as well as References fields, and I've enabled that for this group. Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Good! I'm glad you were able to fix up Usenet to best suit your needs. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 21:44:06 -0400 From: Jack Decker Subject: Re: Who is "VOIP News"? Pat, please conceal my e-mail address as usual -- and since you're closing the thread, I'd just like to add one thing. Apparently some people take exception to my practice of using press releases. I would just say this much -- where possible, I usually try to present the original press release, and it's usually very obvious that it IS a press release. Very often, within a day or two of the time a press release appears, I see anywhere from one to several "news" stories which are basically attempts to rewrite the press releases to make them look like fresh material, and/or hard news. Today, for example, AT&T announced that it was expanding its CallVantage VoIP service to New York and a few other places. All day I've been seeing essentially the same story crop up in various other locations. And very often it's just a rewrite, or in some cases a verbatim lifting of paragraphs from the press release. Now the problem is that press releases do announce what some would consider news. Granted that it is news favorable to whoever issued the press release, but it is news nonetheless. If you lived in New York City and for some reason had a burning desire to have CallVantage instead of an arguably better and cheaper VoIP service (from a company like VoicePulse, Vonage, or Packet8), then it would have been news of high interest to you to know that AT&T was starting to offer service there. If you ran a competitive VoIP company, you might also want to keep track of what AT&T is doing because of the impact it could have on your own efforts to acquire customers. Much as we might wish it were not so, the story of telecom in general and VoIP in particular is a story about what businesses are doing. Often that story is told via press releases, some from the companies themselves, and some from consumer groups or regulatory agencies, all of which use press releases to tell their side of the story. Personally, if I'm going to get fed information that came from a press release, I'd like to know that up front. It helps me decide how much credibility to assign to the contents. If a press release comes from a company that has been known in the past to not deliver what their press releases promised, I can factor that in. I do dislike the amount of hype present in some press releases, and if I think it's really obnoxious I'll sometimes edit it out. But even there, one person's hype is another person's news. Of course, I do try to use news from others sources, too. If someone thinks that "VoIP News" is nothing but press releases, they probably only read about three messages and quit. But I can only use what I can find, and by design press releases are easy to find, so some days you will see a few of them. Now having said that, Pat asked me if he could use the VoIP News items in Telecom Digest, and I consented. I wasn't exactly prepared for some of the snide comments that have been made, but guess what, I used to participate in Fidonet many years ago so I've been flamed by the best, and you critics aren't even close to being the best. You want to add VoIP news items to your killfile, go ahead -- I certainly would not try to force you to read about a topic that doesn't interest you. But there are other items that appear here that have little interest to me, and you don't see me suggesting that killfiling them is a good thing to do, do you? But the one claim you cannot make is that VoIP news is not telecommunications news. You might as well be saying that you refuse to read anything about high definition television because you have some objection to HDTV. You might as well killfile all items about new designs of automobile engines because you're in love with the internal combustion engine and hope it never goes away. The debate is not WHETHER circuit-switched telephony is going away -- that is inevitable. The question is how soon it is going away, and whether whatever replaces it will be saddled with all the taxes, fees, and "corporate welfare" subsidies currently applied to traditional telephony. If some people want to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that VoIP won't be a major part of telecommunications, that's certainly their prerogative. But when they complain because you're presenting TELECOM related news in a TELECOM Digest, I just find it a little difficult to understand where they are coming from. I guess if I were the moderator, my response would be, if you don't like it, don't read it (which would be a polite way of telling them to stick it in their ear, or some other part of their anatomy)! There must be thousands of other mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups out there. I would say, find one you like, if you don't like what you're reading. Any time Pat decides that carrying VoIP News isn't in the best interest of the Telecom Digest, he's perfectly free to drop it -- it will still be available to those who want it via Yahoo Groups, except of course to those who use one of those blacklists that treats everything from Yahoo as spam (not my problem -- since I don't get paid anything for doing this, it's really no skin off my nose if a few people cannot subscribe because of their e-mail filters). But whether he continues to carry it or not, I would just say that some of you complainers act like a guest who is invited to someone's home and then starts making derogatory comments about the furniture, the color scheme, the decorations, etc. And I'd probably best stop there, before I get anyone really upset with me (if it's not too late already)! Jack [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Don't worry about who does and who does not like your messages here, Jack. They've always got their kill-file things, and I *do* try to bend over backward to accomodate readers here when I can, but I am not some contortionist and I am not double jointed. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 22:52:20 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Broadcasters Say FCC's Digital TV Plan is Flawed By Jeremy Pelofsky LAS VEGAS, April 19 (Reuters) - Television broadcasters on Monday piled criticism on a plan by U.S. communications regulators to switch to crisper digital signals by 2009, but some acknowledged the idea was not completely dead. The plan, drawn up by the staff of the Federal Communications Commission, is flawed, according to people attending the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Las Vegas, because it could let cable companies convert the new signals back to analog to all of their subscribers and, consequently, few would see digital channels. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=41108459 ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: BellSouth Introduces 3.0Mbps Speed to Broadband Portfolio Organization: BellSouth Internet Group Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 23:53:16 -0400 The price they quote is only as part of an expensive bundle and is untrue in that it leaves out a $2.97 surcharge that goes straight to their bottom line. ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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