Reporter’s Notebook: Seen and heard at the Fall VON 2005 Conference & Expo
Contactlovedones.org helps displaced Katrina victims get in touch
One VoIP-related project that is helping Katrina victims right now is contactlovedones.org. The project involves a free voicemail system set up to help displaced New Orleanians receive voicemails from concerned friends and family. Dialing the number 866-78-CONTACT connects callers to an automated prompt, where people can leave voice mail messages for displaced friends or family, based on the person’s New Orleans telephone number. New Orleans residents can retrieve messages by dialing the 866 number, then entering their old phone number at the prompt.
The system is based on the open-source Asterisk IP PBX system, which includes automated attendant and voicemail management applications. Five Linux boxes run the Asterisk servers along with Apache Web server and a MySQL database, which creates and organizes the voicemail boxes according to phone numbers. Voicemails are stored as compressed WAV files, and can also be accessed via the Web.
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“This system would have cost well over $50,000 and taken many months to set up,” if traditional telephone hardware and software were used, says Yaakov Menken, one of the site’s creators, and CEO of Capalon Internet Solutions, a Baltimore-based Web hosting company. Instead, VoIP and open-source technology allowed the site to go up in weeks.
Always connected: virtue or vice?
VON being a diverse show with attendees from all over the world, a group of orthodox Jewish men at the show managed to find a quite place on the exhibit floor to form a minyan, or orthodox prayer group. As the men bowed and prayed, one person in the group appeared to be thumbing a hand-held mobile communications device. One observer noted: “If you’re going to make time in your schedule for prayers, just put the Treo away.”
Editor’s Note: On Sept. 26, we received this feedback from a reader: “Regarding your article about my using my Treo during our Jewish prayer service. You will be happy to know that I was not checking e-mail, Rather I was using my Palm Hebrew prayer book that I keep on my Treo during the services!! I keep it there specifically for times when I need to pray and no prayer books are available. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify.”
A real live VoIP customer!
Of the dozens of companies that hit us up in the weeks preceding VON, only one — an outfit called LineSider Communications in Charlestown, Mass. — was able to accommodate our request for an on-site meeting with an enterprise network customer (many of the exhibitors sell mainly to carriers and only a few IT customers were even featured on panels). John Rooney, Jr., executive vice president of business development for IT service and support company DecisionOne, says his firm swapped out an old TDM-based phone system for a hosted VoIP service when moving its Philadelphia-area headquarters this summer. He began exploring VoIP offerings as part of his job in new business development, as DecisionOne is increasingly looking to support laptops and other newer IT technologies in addition to the old IBM and Digital Equipment machines it has serviced over the years.
The new managed system provided by LineSider delivers not just the converged voice and data services that DecisionOne sought, but also VPN security, Rooney says. He says the traditional voice people at DecisionOne didn’t give up running their own PBX without a fight, but it was decided that a hosted service would give the company more flexibility in terms of supporting new applications, such as a hosted helpdesk. So far the company has shifted 250 people at headquarters onto the new system (which works in this case with Polycom phones) and is rolling the service out to field personnel as well. “We wanted to get as much of the network off of our prem and onto someone else’s,” he says. “We didn’t want to get stuck with more big iron.”
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Rooney says that he looked at close to 30 providers from the big name interexchange carriers to providers of regional centrex-like IP services to companies that originated in the security services market. LineSider got the nod for its security capabilities, enabled in large part through policy-based engines it deploys, and the fact that DecisionOne was able to keep its phone numbers. Also, Rooney said the offering, at about $40 to $50 per phone per month, is more affordable than others he examined. The ability to easily make moves, adds and changes with the IP-based system has also been key given the moves that have accompanied the headquarters shift. “I’ve already moved my office twice in the past two months,” he says.
If DecisionOne had it all to do over again, Rooney says the company probably would have done a few things differently with its migration. For one, it might have chosen to migrate pockets of employees at headquarters to VoIP initially instead of the whole office. He also says the company could have better articulated its need to support faxing over the new system since faxes are a key tool in DecisionOne’s business. To support this, he says the company probably would have brought over a couple of traditional AT&T lines. Finally, he says that the company could have put more upfront planning into number portability, which turned out to be a several weeks project.
When asked about the biggest surprise with the new system, Rooney didn’t hesitate: “Voice quality. It’s no different than what you’d have on a regular line.”
Rooney says DecisionOne will likely start rolling out some new applications to exploit the VoIP system around the start of 2006. But first things first: “We still don’t even have our cafeteria,” he says.
Introducing Aylus… sort of
Found roaming the halls at the show was network industry veteran Mahesh Ganmukhi, who has started a new company called Aylus Networks that’s based in Westford, Mass.
Ganmukhi recently returned from a trip to Bangalore, India, where the company set up a development center. Ganmukhi, who is keeping the company’s plans close to the vest for now, says in general that Aylus is looking to help service providers solve the problem of delivering multimedia offerings more effectively to mobile devices. During a press conference in India, Aylus disclosed that it has raised $10 million in backing from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Ganmukhi has led companies such as Cereva Networks and Ignitus Communications and worked for others including Ascend Communications and Cascade Communications.
Katrina aftermath
The storm and its victims continued to be on the minds of many at the event, with several speakers incorporating Katrina-related information into their presentations.
“I think it would be a disservice to the industry to say that VoIP runs no matter what – it requires the same infrastructure [as traditional telephone service],” said Bill Smith, CTO of BellSouth. He was addressing the idea that VoIP service would have withstood Hurricane Katrina better than other telecommunications services did and that it would have gotten up and running more quickly had it been in widespread use in the affected areas. Three times in the first five minutes of the talk he gave on Monday, Smith referred to that notion as a “disservice.”
Separately, telecom industry veteran Tom Evslin, now a consultant, lamented during his presentation that the telecommunications blogsphere wasn’t as influential as it thought it was or hoped it would be in the wake of the storm. Bloggers called for the FCC to take immediate action to ease regulations they believed would help restore communications more quickly.
“The FCC didn’t cower even though we barked,” he said. “Even if the levees aren’t going to be safe from a category 5 storm, the phone networks can be safe from a category 5 storm and because they can be, they should be,” he added.
Skype: The $2.6 billion partner
Skype President and Founder Niklas Zennstrom during a talk at the show repeatedly referred to eBay as Skype’s “partner” rather than as the company that is buying Skype for $2.6 billion. “We can take advantage of the size of eBay, but we’re not going to be integrated into eBay,” he said. Zennstrom was supposed to appear via videoconference, but technical difficulties that show organizers said were purely related to the laptop that was being used and not to Skype’s system, meant that only his comments could be heard by the audience. This was after an hour delay in connecting with him, during which time two other speakers were moved in the schedule to fill in the gap.
A few words from maddog
“You must be telecommunications people who expect your software to work,” said speaker John “maddog” Hall, executive director of Linux International. His riposte came after he received a smaller-than-expected response to his request for a show of hands of how many people in the audience had sent bug reports to software companies and then actually had the bugs fixed.
Some 850 million people globally use software and 250 million of them want to change it in some way, Hall said. “I know because they’ve told me – all 250 million of them have told me.” Of that number, 250 million actually have time to make a change, while 65 million have the expertise. In the end, 33 million software users will actually change software code to suit their needs, he said.
Hall also took a swipe at Microsoft. He noted that for a company in China that brings in $1,000 annually in revenue buying Microsoft Office is the equivalent of paying $40,000 in the U.S. “If I had to pay $40,000 for Microsoft Office, I’d put a black patch over my eye and go, ‘Arr, arr, arr! I’m a software pirate!’ “
Do you take this digital man?
“This past weekend, I attended a digital wedding,” said Eugene Roman, group president, systems and technology at Bell Canada, during his keynote speech. “At this same digital wedding, I took 800 photos because I could.” The couple who married had set up a Web site to connect wedding guests and share information as their wedding day approached, a concept his kids thought was “the coolest thing ever.” He tied his comments about the wedding to remarks about what a powerful communication tool the Internet is and that it can be used to “enhance the human experience.”
