Google’s Entirely Frank Defense of Google Voice

It’s no secret Ma Bell isn’t happy with “upstarts” like Google Voice elbowing into their turf. The VoIP FUD machine, fueled by the telecom industry’s status quo, has been running on full blast for the last ten years, even to the extent that, until recently anyway, I was willing to concede that Ma Bell had won.

Now that AT&T has begun to ring the FCC about it’s dissatisfaction with certain players whose VoIP apps have gained momentum–chief among them Google Voice–the overwhelming debate between players in the Internet and telecom fields is now an out-front, obvious affair.  This is due, I suppose, to Google’s use of very frank, conversational techniques–like blogging–in defending its policy positions and in describing its products or advances.

Ultimately, Google is arguing that AT&T would like the FCC to regulate that all VoIP apps that originate or terminate calls on the PSTN–Skype and Google Voice, both mentioned in Google’s rebuttle–be treated like phone lines, and idea that Google and I both agree is silly.

I vote for getting rid of the term “phone line” altogether.  Where the app can’t be separated from the transport (as in a phone line), leave the existing regulations (and taxes) in place.  But as that paradigm dies, so should the regulations intended to take advantage of its popularity.

October 9, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , | 853 Comments »

Freeing Middle America from Tech Hostage Status, One Little Town at a Time

When I started my company, I used to jab that I was “bringing Silicon Valley thinking to my own backyard”, which, at the moment, is Lorain County, OH.   My firm, Best Technology, has its office in the county seat and the crown jewel of Lorain County (ask anybody) is a community college called LCCC.

The county seat, and home of the college, is the City of Elyria, and tonight I attended a council meeting during which the 11 council members were deciding whether or not to establish an official I.T. Dept. and increase the number of I.T. staffers from 2 to 7.  Of course, the city is also considering Police and Fire layoffs, so this issue is a natural hot potato.

The vote came up to tonight on Council’s agenda.  So I donned my best charcoal grey suit and purple tie, jotted down five pages of notes assembled from the talks I’ve had with various councilmembers and the city’s two I.T. managers over the last six months, and addressed council in a speech that went 6 minutes over my allotted time.

In my pleading, I wanted to know: where did they come up with 7 staffers as the ideal?

The Mayor responded by telling me, and all present, that the software consultant ACS, a Minneapolis-based firm that specializes in municipal line of business ware, was instrumental in coming up with the 7 number, and so, apparently, was the college. OK.  Free consulting MUST be superior.

The city wants to hire a full-time web developer to work on its 5 web sites–again, while considering laying off public safety officials. The Police Chief was on hand, glock-in-holster, to let Council know that he could cut nothing except people at this point, if asked to shrink his budget.

Haven’t these guys ever heard of WordPress?  It’s pretty hard to justify a $80k guy when you can get a consultant to do a Parks and Rec template on Joomla for a grand or less.  Not that I would take that sort of work.  But here’s where it got fun:  when I dropped the term, “content management”, I could just FEEL the wind getting sucked out of the room. Nobody had the faintest clue what I was talking about.

And then it dawned on me. Municipalities like Elyria have been left behind.  Little midwestern towns have been convinced that I.T. is what it was 30 years ago: expensive, inflexible, and inaccessible to people with more than 5 grey hairs on their heads.

Another local municipality, North Ridgeville, also in Lorain County, which runs its servers on a certain formerly-dominent networking product that now runs only on Linux, just can’t justify putting out the money to go with Windows and Active Directory, despite 95% of the world having moved to Windows Server some years ago.

How in the bloody heck will I ever be able broach the subject of VoIP with these guys?

These organizations are Tech Hostages, made inept and held to zero progress because their decision makers are committees that spend 39 minutes reading identical ordinance description over and over and over with a chairman saying “first reading” after each iteration.  It’s like listening to paint dry.  No, it’s worse.  I’m very much a democracy supporter, but if we can’t get these folks to innovate in the democratic process, how can we expect them to use technology more fervently, more effectively?

That, dear friends, is the job of Ted Wallingford.  Convince the Midwest that, at least when it comes to the silicon part, it’s OK to emulate Silicon Valley.

December 15, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

NY Times notices net neutrality issue

So the FCC may force telcos and cable operators to “disclose” what they do with their customers’ traffic, whether they slow it down, as in the case of torrenting, or speed it up, as in the case of “premium access”. They already do this, mind you. It’s just that the FCC is going to force them to disclose that they do it.

Yawn.

I hope this doesn’t bring us closer to legislation. Point is, if Joe Customer gets pissed at his service provider because of such tactics, he’ll just leave that service provider. The market solves the problem. Too conservative an approach, you say?

What about all these people bandying about terms like ‘discrimination’ to evoke feelings of humanism in this matter? We’re talking about packets, here, not lives. There is no civil rights movement in the telecom industry, just a bunch of (ingenius and deserving) startups teaming with Google to prevent Bell and Warner from bluffing their admittedly very heavy upper hand and making things sticky for a few years while the Internet access market, dominated by the few and privileged, corrects itself and the SpeakEasy-type service providers rediscover the niche of “no-frills-no-penalties” access.
But the startups have got to know resorting to such cheap linguistics tactics is about as low as you can get. We’re not talking about discrimination on the basis of race or creed (things that actually matter). No, we’re talking about discrimination on the basis of acceptable use, and, yes, abuse. The access providers are well within their moral boundaries to massage traffic to suit their profit needs. And if their customers get pissed off about it, well, those customers will just leave.

February 25, 2008 | Tags: , | 802 Comments »

Theory: Google’s ‘pump and dump’ spectrum scheme

The FCC is auctioning off lower-frequency spectrum (700 mHz) to the highest bidder, and they’ve previously stated that if the reserve price was met, all potential buyers would have to allow open access to the network that gets built using the spectrum. That means, bring your own cell phone, your own laptop, your own whatever, without consequence to the preferences of the network operator. In essence, I like the FCC’s move.

Well the reserve price has been met. But by whom? Some say Google. Other say Google has no real interest in the spectrum, but has been submitting bids just to get the price over the reserve threshold and into the range where open access is required–because that benefits Google whether or not they own the spectrum license. It will be interesting to see who the winner is, and how they got there :)

February 1, 2008 | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »