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The Telecom Digest for January 21, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 21 : "text" Format
====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 07:41:36 -0500
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Ringing Finally Ended, but There's No Button to
Message-ID: <MPG.29832b0ace5ee603989d79@news.eternal-september.org>
In article <GdW4jD.A.8kF.0atFPB@telecom>, dcstarbox-usenet@yahoo.com.au
says...
>
> On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:51:45 -0800, John David Galt wrote:
> ..........
> > As to your other suggestions, I stopped being interested in them the
> > moment you said that the managers of a concert hall should take the place
> > of individual responsibility.
> >
> Actually one simple solution would be a small metal bag that you could
> collect when entering the venue and then put the device in so it is 100%
> shielded (and return on exit for your deposit refund) but you still keep
> hold of your toy.
>
> It wouldn't stop things like Appointment alarms (unless the bag also had
> good soundproofing - an option!), but it would stop any incoming signals
> triggering other noises.
>
> If someone goes out an invents this bag and makes a squillion dollars,
> please remember where the idea came from! ;-)
[You] need a ground somewhere in the mix there. Where I work someone had
built a small box that was essentially a Farraday cage. Nicely
constructed and it used a standard three conductor power cord to tap
ground. That's when we found out that the outlets at our desks, didn't
have a real ground.
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:08:41 -0500
From: "Geoffrey Welsh" <gwelsh@spamcop.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout
Message-ID: <268da$4f19d815$adce4530$11077@PRIMUS.CA>
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
> That's a great idea. I'd expand it to have Google delete all search
> results that point to the Congress, or (better yet) redirect them to
> public-interest sites that expose some massive pork barrel in the
> relevant district.
I don't think we want to advocate censorship based on source because,
no matter how gratifying such quid pro quo might be, it's just as
wrong as SOPA and there is no need or, IMO, justification to
inconvenience the American public who may need information published
on those sites and have done nothing wrong to deserve interference.
[I will understand completely if you do not feel that this is
sufficiently telecom-related to be published but I felt that the
comment should be made.]
***** Moderator's Note *****
It's telecom related, because it touches on a profoundly important
issue, which is the way the U.S. Congress is threatening to hand over
censorship authority to private parties. By that logic, AT&T and
Verizon and Centurylink might be allowed to censor phone calls that
touch on "dangerous" issues or contain unpopular words, or just
because they can.
All kidding aside, I am reminded of a warning that a very wise friend
once gave me: "Nothing that you see on TV or read in the paper is ever
what really happened." SOPA isn't about "Copyright protection": that's
just the public face of a more scary reality.
As I wrote in my blog (http://billhorne.com/), I think SOPA is really a
calling card, one that serves notice on the Internet's ruling
class that the old-world Brahmins expect them to pay for front row
seats at the Congressional Opera, and chip in to keep our favorite
legislators well equipped with straw hats and stump speeches. In other
words, SOPA is an extortion note, which says "That's a nice
Internet you have there - be a shame if anything happened to it"!
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:27:35 -0500
From: "Geoffrey Welsh" <gwelsh@spamcop.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain
Message-ID: <50ace$4f19dc0c$adce4530$15911@PRIMUS.CA>
> ***** Moderator's Note ***** [...] it seems to my untrained eye to
> allow companies to extend copyrights which have already expired, and
> that would allow telecom equipment manufacturers to 'proprietize'
> the technical information needed to keep older equipment in service,
> thus driving owners toward new purchases.
I'm not certain that I understand all the rules that have been in
effect in the past, but wasn't copyright even under the old rules long
enough (at least if a manufacturer renewed them after 28 years, when
that clause applied) to make any equipment in use today pretty much
obsolete before the documentation became public domain?
Date: 20 Jan 2012 14:48:08 -0500
From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Some unanswered questions from January 2011
Message-ID: <jfcgdo$7ee$1@panix2.panix.com>
In article <2755e$4f1888cf$adce4530$30287@PRIMUS.CA>,
Geoffrey Welsh <gwelsh@spamcop.net> wrote:
>Garrett Wollman wrote:
>
>> [3] It was obviously stupid to use TCP for multimedia applications.
>
>I was intrigued by that statement. [Garrett] mentions discarding list
>UDP packets, which might be fine in an uncompressed media stream, but
>aren't errors/omissions likely to cause disruption to a compressed
>media stream (for comparison, consider that data compression was only
>commonly implemented in dialup modems on top of error correction)? Or
>is the 'compression' implemented in the codecs themselves (lower D/A
>resolution and/or sample rate) so that no data compression per se is
>required and thus missing samples are not a serious problem?
Well, really neither one of these protocols are appropriate for realtime
applications. But IP connectivity is so damn cheap.
If we had serious ATM to the home, it might be different, but the network
of the 21st century isn't really how I'd hoped it would be in the 20th...
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 15:58:11 -0500
From: "Geoffrey Welsh" <gwelsh@spamcop.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Some unanswered questions from January 2011
Message-ID: <98b0b$4f19d52a$adce4530$14461@PRIMUS.CA>
Garrett Wollman wrote:
> Codecs that couldn't do this were rejected as unsuitable.
... which kind of brings me back to the original question: if codecs
that don't handle dropped datagrams gracefully were discarded as
unsuitable as streaming evolved, why the heck wasn't SIP discarded as
unsuitable for VoIP when it became apparent that it was not going to
play well with NAT? It would have saved me and many other networking
types many headaches.
Thanks to Garrett and Dave for their explanations.
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:04:49 -0500
From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Federal body concludes LightSquared can't work with GPS
Message-ID: <CAFY5RQ+vShBD4fXTePcKY2GAqbEsixCb-k=WefHcg1UizARrUg@mail.gmail.com>
A committee overseeing GPS said interference can't be fixed in months or
years and called for an end to testing
By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
January 13, 2012, 6:42 PM -- A key federal agency involved in
testing the proposed LightSquared LTE network has concluded that there
is no practical way to solve interference between that network and
GPS, possibly dealing a crippling blow to the startup carrier's hopes
for a terrestrial mobile network.
In a memo released late Friday, the National Space-Based Positioning,
Navigation and Timing Executive Committee (PNT ExComm) said the nine
federal agencies that make up the body had concluded unanimously that
none of LightSquared's proposals would overcome significant
interference with GPS (Global Positioning System).
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:07:53 -0500
From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: LightSquared says GPS interference testing was rigged
Message-ID: <CAFY5RQ+r829B5FhaNqwwHdusN=wX6NPapLrLrMBMXFWvcCGWpw@mail.gmail.com>
by Marguerite Reardon, CNET
LightSquared, the company seeking final FCC approval to build a
nationwide 4G wireless wholesale network, said that a test showing
interference between its service and GPS systems was rigged by
manufacturers of GPS receivers and government workers to produce bogus
results.
On a conference call Wednesday with reporters, LightSquared executives
Jeffrey Carlisle and Geoff Stearn, along with paid consultant Ed
Thomas, a former chief engineer at the Federal Communications
Commission, said that recent tests conducted by the Air Force Space
Command on behalf of the Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and
Timing Executive Committee (PNT EXCOM) were set up to produce negative
results.
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