Signaling Blog

Forget iPhone, the Gphone is here

One of my favourite Martin Geddes quotes is this one:

Here’s the deal. In the old world, the economic activity started when the phone call began. In the new world, that’s when the economic acivity ends. The money is all in presence, social networking, filtering, privacy management, and so on. It’s a complete inversion of the economics of telephony. Therefore expect many of the vendors to be disemboweled in the process.

Although no man can predict the future with complete accuracy, I would whole heartedly agree with the sentiments being expressed. So I was quite happy when trawling back thru two months of unread blogs to discover not only a good Telco 2.0 article but another great quote in a similar vein:

The basis of competition in this third wave is about prompting and connecting people who need to interact — social and contextual awareness — whilst preventing unwanted interruption and connection — i.e. security and privacy. By the time the phone call starts, the money-making is over. If the call was wanted, it’s the broker who gets the payment; if it wasn’t, it’s the filter.

Today I came across the Triple-I conference (I-Know, I-Media, I-Semantics) which takes place in Graz (Southern Austria) 5-7th September. All being well I plan to attend. I am glad to see such a multi-disciplinary approach. I certainly see great overlap and synergy between knowledge management, new media and semantic web technologies. Personally I’d opt for a Quintuple-I conference so that a ‘I-Communications’ and ‘I-Positioning’ was included!

Skype has been down for well over 24 hours now. In the meantime I switched over to using GizmoProject - shame my contact list on Gizmo is so bare. For those who do not know, Gizmo is a Skype clone; it is powered by the same great Global IP Sound (GIPS) codec as well as also using a self-organising peer-to-peer (P2P) network to route the call signalling. It tries to differeniate itself by claiming to be based on completely open standards (e.g. it purports to use standard SIP, although I am unsure how the P2P element is then handled as it is not using any P2P SIP standard) unlike Skype which went for a blackbox approach. I’ve often had software crashes and other problems with Gizmo (C++ runtime errors etc.) plus I dislike the interface in comparison with that of Skype - let alone the fact that my buddy-list is well populated on Skype. Hence when Skype eventually works again, I will be switching back.

For those battling with the telecom vs Internet reliability dichotomy I’d like to throw in a point to reflect on. Signalling system #7 (SS7/C7) has had its degree of outages. See for example Aspects of Integrity in the NII , John C. McDonald ,MBX Inc. Quote:

“Several well-publicized SS7 outages occurred in 1990 and 1991 due to software bugs ^{[6, 7]}. The first had a nationwide impact and involved the loss of 65,000,000 calls. Others involved entire cities and affected 10,000,000 customers. In response to a massive outage in September 1991, the mayor of New York established a Task Force on Telecommunications Network Reliability. The task force noted that “the potential for telecommunications disasters is real, and losses in service can be devastating to the end user” ⁸.”

6 Fitzgerald, K. 1990. “Vulnerability Exposed in AT&T’s 9-Hour Glitch,” The Institute, March.

7 Andrews, E. 1991. “String of Phone Failures Reveals Computer Systems’ Vulnerability,” New York Times, July 3.

8 City of New York. 1992. “Mayor’s Task Force on Telecommunications Network Reliability,” January