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The Telecom Digest for January 21, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 21 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Ringing Finally Ended, but There's No Button to (T)
Re: English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout (Geoffrey Welsh)
Re: Supreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain (Geoffrey Welsh)
Re: Some unanswered questions from January 2011 (Scott Dorsey)
Re: Some unanswered questions from January 2011 (Geoffrey Welsh)
Federal body concludes LightSquared can't work with GPS (Bill Horne)
LightSquared says GPS interference testing was rigged (Bill Horne)

====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======

Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Bill Horne 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 that person, or email address owner.
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We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime.  - Geoffrey Welsh


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


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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