If you are one of the residents of North Eastern United States, you can already feel the slight nip in the air. The anticipation of a mother of all battles, i.e. Boston Sox versus New York Yankees, is a sign of what’s next: winter. However, if you are a telecom guy, you know things have been downright chilly for past few years. Sure there have been some sunshine, but that doesn’t mean its spring time yet. When I recently chatted with Juniper Networks CEO Scott Kriens about the state of affairs at his company, he cryptically added, “it’s sunny here in a partly cloudy industry.” Continue »
Archive for September, 2004
09/16/2004 VoIP Daily Headlines
- Vonage goes to Mexico
- Cisco’s Volpi joins Skype Board
- VoIPMDU partners with UnityVoice
- 10 numbers or one
- Its the VoIP Stupid
- Canadian Commission to meet on VoIP
- Nuvio calls on FCC
- iBasis Launches Pingo
- D-Link VoIP sales going well
- Skype for Treo next month
- UnitedGlobalCom rolling out VoIP in Europe
- Cisco buys DynamicSoft
- Xten Full Motion Video eyeBeam
- Skype has problems on iPaq and Axim Pocket PCs?
BusinessWeek to Apple: Go VoIP
Business Week columnist Alex Salkever urges Steve Jobs to heed VoIP’s Call and writes, “Apple has what it would need — including its ongoing transition to a services outfit — to make a “Macphone” network work.” He points out that nearly 105,000 mac users have downloaded Mac version of Skype, and that shows the high level of interest in VoIP technology.
I don’t mean Apple should lay a bunch of fiber-optic cable and fill large buildings with high-price switching equipment. Rather, Jobs & Co. could provide the graphical interface and the ease of use. For the guts of the network, Apple could easily contract with other companies or try a bring-your-own bandwidth peer-to-peer approach like Skype. The potential downside is minimal. The possible upside is significant. Continue »
Battle for the Routers
Looks like the battle for router market is getting downright ugly, and well interesting. Not many people give second thought to routers, unless of course they crash and all that and you can’t get the innnernet!
Cisco vs. Juniper: Punch, Counterpunch: Adding insult to injury, six-year-old Juniper, located just a few miles down Route 237 from Cisco in San Jose, Calif., has been poking fun at Cisco in comic-style ads that run in The Wall Street Journal each Tuesday. “We’re all for healthy competition, but I’d say they’ve done some things that lack class,” says Carlos Dominguez, who runs Cisco’s service-provider operation. Continue »
Dummies guide to Wireless Mesh
Sean Fioritto has written, in layman’s terms, a little intro to mesh networking .
I’ve written a little paper here that hopefully breaks down and explains in terms anyone can understand the basics of mesh networking. A word of warning: I am not an expert. Most of the stuff I say was learned by osmosis and general intuitions. I did not sit down in a networking class or read a really good book. In fact, I’m quite certain that some of this is incorrect, and one reason I post it here is so that people with more know-how than me can read it and post comments telling me what’s wrong. I want to create a paper that anyone can read and come away understanding the basics. Continue »
Broadband’s Ultimate Killer Application
Business 2.0: Online music is the one thing that will compel consumers to pay for bigger pipes to the home. [Link for PDF version] Continue »
Bite of the A9
Watch Out Google! Amazon Gets Search, warns John Battelle in his most recent dispatch from the front lines of war over Search.
What’s next for Amazon? The answer might be found at A9.com, Amazon’s search service. While it’s been in beta for months, A9 officially goes live today with a major upgrade, and could well become a one-stop search platform that offers interesting commercial possibilities that have the potential to trump traditional search players. A9’s creator Udi Manber. gave me a sneak preview of A9.com on Monday (as he did when A9 went into beta, see here), and I came away convinced that he has raised the bar for innovation in search. Continue »
The great handsfree debate
Scientific research somehow manages to prove common sense. For instance, research shows that if you give people too many choices, their reaction time in making a choice is much slower. That is one of the main reasons why many states have laws requiring drivers to “use “hands-free” devices when they talk on a cell phone and operate a car. The theory is, a driver will have slower reaction time – and thus be potentially dangerous – holding a phone and operating a car at the same time. Research by a Rice University professor suggests those new laws may not be effective. Kinesiologist Bruce Etnyre’s tests suggest that neither device should be used by someone while operating a car.
When his subjects had to split their attention between four different lights, their reaction time was noticeably diminished. Similarly, drivers using either type of cell phone are necessarily splitting their attention between their phone conversation and their driving, and that, according to Etnyre, is what will slow their reaction time. “Whether the driver’s hands are on the wheel or free doesn’t make a difference in how fast they can react to something on the road,” Etnyre says. “It’s not necessarily a matter of physically controlling the car while holding the phone. It’s the fact that they have to switch their attention between driving the car and listening and talking with someone. Continue »
When P2P Goes Mobile
So you think that record labels and movie studios are freaking out now! Wait for the day when mobile filesharing goes mainstream. According to New Scientist, “Music, videos and games could soon be swapped between cellphones using a mobile file-sharing network developed by phone maker Nokia. Lorant Farkas and colleagues, at the Nokia Research Center in Budapest, Hungary, have adapted the peer-to-peer (P2P) schemes used by internet users to share files and tested them on their 6600 model cellphones.” Continue »
Ozzies love their wireless broadband
Australians will be using some sort of wireless broadband by 2007. “Wireless access will account for nearly 10 percent of Australian broadband connections within three years, according to Ovum, a research group. Ovum says 298,000 of 3.1 million broadband connections servicing Australian businesses and consumers by 2007 will be wireless. Ovum says the figure includes both fixed (Wi-Max) and mobile (MBWA) wireless broadband connections, but excludes wireless data connections employing 3G mobile handsets. Currently there is a big brouhaha brewing as incumbent Telstra and upstart UNwired square off for the market share. Ovum also points out that these numbers don’t include the 3G connections. (Source: ZDNet Australia) Continue »
