Birth, Death, Taxes, and High Speed Internet. Now written into Finland’s laws

Yes, that’s right. High Speed Internet is now a Finnish law. Starting July 2010 every person in Finland will now have guaranteed access to a minimum of 1 MB internet. Now, just when you might be thinking that 1MB internet isn’t fast enough, by 2015 every person will have access to 100 MB internet.

We’re clearly living in a world where cheap, and high speed access to the internet and technology is, and will continue to separate the have from the have not countries. The brain generation created by access to this technology is a competitive advantage. Give your people access to the tools and invest in the technology. There is, unfortunately, a big difference between the have and have not country internet adoption rates. According to the Internet World Stats web site, North American’s lead the group with 74% internet adoption, followed by Australia with 60%, and at the bottom of the pack, Africa with an extreme low of 7%. The good news for Africa is that their internet usage has grown the most of all regions at 1,360% growth over the last 9 years.

Internet is a standard utility, it’s a necessity. Just like the difference between a high speed highway and dirt road. A large city can’t function on dirt roads. Traffic jams happen, manufacturing and businesses suffer, and capital leaves. Bandwidth and high speed pipes need to be, in some respect, a joint venture between the government and the private sector. I suggest “in some respects” only because I’m not personally a big fan of the government intervention in the private sector, but, many rural areas would never get serviced if it weren’t for government intervention.

Technology adoption, access to high speed internet, and a clear understanding of technology and it’s place in society must be viewed as a necessity.

Finland gets it. Now the rest of the world has to catch up.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

If she wasn’t so frustrated it would actually be humorous

I wrote a post on Saturday titled – My wife is moving us from Bell to Rogers. The switch happens Sunday night. Let’s see how it goes. At the end of the post I promised to keep the readers up to date with a status report.

Before I tell you what happened, I want to explain why I’m writing about this on TheTelecomBlog.com.

This is sort of an experiment for me. For my wife this is serious business. She really wants Rogers cable, and while she’s at it, Rogers Home Phone. Actually, the Home Phone service is more like a “throw-in”. The Rogers sales rep convinced her to get Rogers cable and get a better discount on our monthly bill. She figured “why not” ?

I told my wife I didn’t want to have anything to do with this project. I’m actually quite content with Bell, and told her to look after it. I figured, just being in the business for so many years, that this wouldn’t go that well. I think she was destined to prove me wrong. Either way, she’s a typical consumer, and I figured that her / our experience with this exercise would be somewhat comical (or frustrating).

And it was.

Rogers showed up at 7:30PM, more or less as promised. The technician called 20 minutes before arrival, as promised, and even fixed some outdoor dangling cables before ringing the bell.

So far so good.

Next, the basement.

He quickly traced the cable feed, cut some cables, and began the process of transferring our services over. He asked about our 2 lines. We told him we didn’t have 2 lines. He insisted we had 2 lines, and showed us his work order to prove it. The 2nd number is actually a Bell Ident-A-Call service, not a 2nd number. My wife spoke in great detail with the Rogers sales rep about Ident-A-Call and the Rogers rep insisted it wouldn’t be a problem. The technician called the office, spoke with dispatch for a few minutes, and then showed us his laptop. He had closed the service order – the words “call closed” appeared on his screen. He quickly packed up his laptop, and told us we would have to call Rogers, explain the situation, and open a new service order. No cable, no phone.

My wife spent about 20 minutes on the phone once the Rogers tech left. She was REALLY frustrated, first with their automated voice response system, and then with the end result.

She needs to call back Monday to re-place the support call.

I sympathize with the average consumer who has to call Bell, Rogers … for tech support, billing services, change of service … It can be extremely frustrating.

More: You would figure, based on how visible this blog is, and the fact that this information gets automatically propagated to Twitter … that Rogers would have made extra effort to get this service call done right. The marketing department either isn’t doing their job, or, they’re not speaking with the service department.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

Cisco acquires Tandberg for $3 Billion

Cisco announced earlier this week that they acquired Tandberg for $3 Billion. Tandberg is a world wide leader in video conference equipment, and puts Cisco into a very dominant position in this market.

Cisco’s acquision gives them a bigger install base for their Telepresence product including a whole new line-up in the lower end of the market. This now also puts them in an excellent competitive position against Polycom, the other dominant market player in the video / voice market.

BTW – Polycom is now an excellent market play. I’m wondering who might decide to pick-up Polycom and gain a very quick foot hold in the voice / video market to better compete in the converged world. HP perhaps ? Silver Lakes, one of the private investors that owns Avaya ? Microsoft ?

On another note, I find it rather interesting that Cisco overpaid for Tandberg, although couldn’t see any value in acquiring the Enterprise division of Nortel which was acquired a few weeks ago by Avaya for $900 Million. A Cisco / Nortel marriage would have created a Telecom powerhouse. True, there’s a lot of product overlap, and as I speculated a few weeks ago, Cisco decided to let Avaya take control over Nortel and wait for Avaya to mess it up. That’s the only reason I can think of for them not being at the Nortel bargaining table.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

Skype for Asterisk – now available for download

Skype for Asterisk is now available for download. Essentially, it is now possible to authenticate a Skype client to the outside VoIP world, and also to an Asterisk for dual mode IP PBX, and outside VoIP traditional Skype use.

According to Skype’s press release, you can:
… Add Skype as a complementary form of communications by downloading Skype for Asterisk, without additional costly hardware. If you’re an existing Skype user, you can benefit from the advanced call features of Asterisk, including call transfer, interactive voice response, automated call distribution, flexible call-routing and much more.

Although this news is interesting, with open standards and SIP end point services, the market is coming close to ubiquitous communications between any open standard SIP end point, and traditional IP PBX connectivity. I spoke about this the other day – I referred to this as Telecom 2.0.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

Telecom and Healthcare – 7 Applications for Integrated EHRs and IP/PBX

This guest post was written by Houston Neal. Houston manages the Software Advice blog focusing on Medical Software.

Having recently installed a new IP-PBX system in our own office, we got thinking about ways medical practices could combine electronic health records with IP-PBXs. By combining the two technologies, we think there is great opportunity for medical practices to reduce telephony costs, improve office efficiency and potentially improve patient care. To our surprise, little has been developed in the way of medical-specific IP-PBX applications. So we decided to put together a list of ways IP-PBX and EHR technology can be combined. Here is a preview of three applications:

Find me, follow me – The system would prioritize an after-hours call based on the urgency of the situation. Emergencies could be immediately forwarded to 911. Calls from patients that recently had an ambulatory procedure might be forwarded to the physician’s mobile phone. All others might receive voicemail or the answering service. Urgency could be assessed not only by patient responses (e.g. pressing 1 for an emergency), but also by the content of recent encounters (e.g. yesterday’s botox injection).

Dunning Voicemails - If a patient hasn’t paid their balance after a given time period, this module automatically calls and leaves a voice message: “Dear %%INSERT FIRST NAME%%, we recently noticed your balance of %%INSERT OVERDUE BALANCE%% has yet to be paid. If you’d like to pay now over the phone, press one. If you think you have received this message in error, press two.”

vPrescribing – Need to get a prescription refilled? Call your doctor’s dedicated prescription-refill phone number. Following instructions from the IVR, you can request a prescription be refilled. The system then automatically initiates a workflow for the physician to approve or deny the refill. This may be in the EHR, on a mobile device or even via the phone after hours by voice or SMS communication with the physician.

To read more, visit: Seven Great Applications for IP-PBXs in the Medical Practice

FCC to decide on Net Neutrality rules – Who plays internet COP ?

According to a recent Associated Press article, it looks like the head of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, will make an announcement on Monday which will propose prohibiting ISP’s from throttling, blocking, and “policing” the internet traffic going through their networks. This is part of a pre-election pledge that Barak Obama made promising net neutrality with laws prohibiting the carriers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T from blocking traffic going through their networks.

Of course the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) and major carriers want the unencumbered right to decide what traverses their networks, and to some extent, rightly so. There are of course many issues which need to be addressed with regards to net neutrality, but, the carriers should have some control over what, and how much travels across their networks.

Federal and state highways have the right to decide how much of a toll charge they charge cars that travel across their highways. In the same manner, it does seems reasonable that a carrier should have some control over the bandwidth, quantity, and speed they provide to their clients. Those customers needing more bandwidth, speed, and less intervention pay more of a toll charge, and those customers needing less pay less. As applications become more bandwidth intensive, the carriers need to spend massive infrastructure dollars upgrading their networks, and equipment, capacity … all of which costs money. Unless the US Federal Government wants to subsidize these infrastructure upgrade fees, they should allow the carriers, to some extent, decide how much, and what fees should be charged for anything crossing their networks.

On the other hand, what I have objection to is the carriers selectively choosing certain applications, specifically the ones which compete with their own services, as the ones which need to be throttled. Voice over IP, and Internet TV is specifically sited as the traffic the carriers would like to throttle. VoIP services, like Skype, cost the carriers long distance revenue, and Internet TV cost the carriers lost cable revenue. For them to selectively decide to throttle that specific bandwidth is anti-competitive and the government should step in. They should treat all bandwidth equally, and charge network usage on a fair basis, not based on kind of traffic.

I have a problem with the carrier controlling the pipeline and the content on that pipeline and selectively choosing which services to throttle based on anti-competitive measures. I don’t have a problem with the carrier publishing rates for usage and speed. Let’s see what happens at Monday’s FCC’s commission hearing.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

Twitter: Tweet to Talk – Telecom 2.0 here we come ! Introducing JaJah@call

Now here’s a neat technology.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about Telecom 2.0. I also wrote a post about my “ah-ha” moment with Twitter. I called it – Twitter – the light bulb moment. Over the last couple of weeks I started using Twitter more often (and my wife is now calling me a Twit). I won’t tell you what I have started calling her !!

Now, let’s combine Telecom 2.0 and Twitter. What do you get ?

First, let me recap my Twitter post from a couple of weeks ago: (and I quote from that post):

Just as Google has stretched their dominance into so many different elements of the web, Twitter has the same potential to be a technology game changer. The chatter that happens on Twitter is text driven, but, it could be voice, video, or any other form of multi-media driven.

And then, from a customer service perspective, there are so many touch points that hit a service based organization. Phone, email, fax, and new media (like Twitter). Integrating Twitter and other forms of social media into an organization’s operations. For example, someone needing live help could activate a real time command and voice or text into a service organizations help desk.

I was really just speculating, but, expected that in the not to distant future we would see some form of “Tweet to Talk” app get developed for Twitter.

I also did a post on Telecom 2.0 and mentioned the following:

What does Telecom 2.0 look like ?

Speaking along the lines of paradigm shift, the next generation of phone systems will be a highly intelligent server, much as they are now. The talk/communicate medium will not necessarily be the bulky phone on your desk, but rather a variety of end point devices.

Skype, Google, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Blackberry – these all-in-one appliances will be the talk/communicate path, and the server at the back end will bridge these technologies together. And with the recent news of Silver Lakes (Avaya’s parent company) being part of an investment group buying a 65% stake in Skype, it will now bring together the old and newer emerging technologies.

OK. Enough of the background – I have set the stage for a new app from a company called Jajah@call. I have pulled this description from their web site:

JAJAH gives short messages a voice. With the new JAJAH application, Twitter users can make free phone calls on their favorite microblogging service. Now in Beta, JAJAH@Call allows you to make a free two minute call (the verbal equivalent of a tweet) to other JAJAH@Call users. It’s free, it’s easy and works no matter how you use Twitter, whether it’s on your cellphone, via Seesmic, TweetDeck, or any other way.

TELECOM 2.0. This is what it’s all about.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

Google Android market now has 10,000 apps in their app store !

It seems like just yesterday that Google introduced Android, the open source OS for the handheld market, and so it came as quite a surprise to read that Android has over 10,000 apps available in the Android App store. In actual fact, Google Android became available to the general public for commercial use on October 28, 2008, less then 1 year ago, which makes 10,000 seem remarkable.

I did some small investigative work, and if you can judge the success of a handheld OS by the number of apps available in their store, it seems like Apple still has the lead followed by Google as follows:

Apple – 70,000 apps
Google – 10,000 apps
RIM – 2,000 apps
Palm Pre – 40 apps

It seems that the reason the Palm Pre has so few apps available is because Palm has limited who has access to it’s webOS SDK. By comparison, Apple after the same length of time in the market had about 500 apps available.

Google is certainly a formidable force in the IT space, and will continue their dominance in the handheld space as manufacturers adopt the Android OS in increasing number. In many respects it seems that Google’s dominance across the web and IT space, and the consumer reliance on a single brand, will position them in the similar anti-competitive spot that Microsoft found themselves in not that long ago.

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed

Internet Phone Service for home offices and small companies

This is a guest post written by Cyril Bird. Cyril’s contact info can be found below.

We are witnessing several marvels in today’s electronic world – particularly in the field of communications. High-speed broadband services and technological advancements in voice and data compression are making conversations possible without a telephone network while reducing communications costs.

It is a fact that large organizations have increasingly started using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for their phone needs. Individuals, home offices and small businesses are using a combination of landlines and cell phones for business communications. For home offices and small offices, there are today quite a few options when it comes to setting up business communications facilities.

Landline replacement services are offered by several local broadband providers. They either replace or bypass the exterior connection from the phone company. You continue to use the existing phones, and there is also no change in phone number. As a matter of fact, you are not even required to be a broadband subscriber. All that is needed is you should be within the broadband service area of your service provider.

VoIP services are indeed attractive as compared with traditional landline service as you can enjoy unlimited calling facility for a fixed monthly fee – apart from enjoying several features like voice mail, call waiting, caller ID etc. One serious limitation is broadband phone service will fail during a power outage unless you as well as your broadband provider have a working battery backup.

Vonage V-Phone offers direct landline replacement and there is no need for a computer. The device is called a V-Phone, which is a flash drive with a headset jack and plugs into a Windows XP computer. The V-Phone has limitations as it only works with wired headsets and with PCs and does not fully support Windows Vista.

MagicJack is a competitor to V-Phone. Like the V-Phone, Magic Jack plugs into the computer’s USB port but has a phone jack at the other end so a regular telephone can be used. Service plans include an incoming phone number, and unrestricted outgoing calls to the U.S., Canada and other MagicJack users. Many standard features such as caller ID, call waiting and call forwarding are included. MagicJack has the same drawbacks as V-Phone as it requires the computer switched on. MagicJack runs on Windows XP, Vista and Macs.

T-Mobile, a mobile phone service, offers two VoIP services to subscribers. T-Mobile @Home is a landline replacement service. It also requires an existing broadband Internet connection, and a special router purchased through T-Mobile. The @Home service has features like call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, three-way calling and voice mail.

T-Mobile also offers subscribers a HotSpot service for cell phones. This service allows your cell phone to place and receive calls over a Wi-Fi connection. Calls made or received through a Wi-Fi connection are free and are not subject to deduction from your monthly allotment of minutes.

Skype is universally popular. Skype enables making and receiving calls using the computer. Skype can work with a dial-up Internet connection instead of broadband. Skype requires a computer for setup and usage, although special handsets allow Skype calling over most Wi-Fi connections. You can install Skype on your computer, plug in a headset with microphone, and talk with other Skype users anywhere in the world while connected to the Internet. If you have a webcam, you can also indulge in a videochat.

The Internet Phone Service that is best suited for you depends on your specific requirements. If you want total reliability for calls and consider 911 important, traditional landlines are still best. If you want simplicity with savings, then look at landline replacement services. If you are a frequent traveler or make many international calls, consider Skype, MagicJack and Vonage V-Phone.

About the Author:
Cyril Bird is a copywriter for Internet Phone Service, Toll Free Numbers and Virtual PBX. He has written many articles in various topics like Answering Service, 800 Numbers and Internet Fax Service. For more information visit: http://www.ringcentral.com/

Winning bidder for Nortel’s Enterprise business to be announced today. Avaya ? Siemens ?

At some point today, barring some major complication, the winner of the Nortel Enterprise (Corporate Networking) business will be announced. It appears that there are 2 companies bidding. Avaya has made a $475 Million stalking horse bid, and Siemens Gore will be submitting a counter bid. Early rumors were that there were 3 bidding firms, Mattlin Patterson or Ciena rumored to be the third.

It also looks like there were some complications during the day Thursday with Verizon going to court to oppose Avaya’s bid on U.S. national security grounds. “Verizon says it has purchased equipment from Nortel that is now in use by virtually every arm of the U.S. federal government, including the military, anti-terror units and 911 call centres.”

I’m wondering what Verizon is hoping to get out of such a claim ? Fair enough – The US federal government is using Nortel hardware in many of their operations. Nortel’s bankruptcy, and Avaya (or Siemens) acquiring these assets will pose a threat to US national security, but, what exactly is Verizon hoping to accomplish with such a claim ? Nortel is bankrupt. The assets are being sold to the highest bidder. Someone is going to acquire these assets, and hopefully, provide continued support to the current customer base.

This decision … to acquire and take on the number 1 phone system manufacturer and morph the staff, channel, products, engineering into one cohesive unit … That takes a savvy business team with a very deep understanding of the business, business model, and opportunities for success. And to parlay that into a new, successful business model – well, the acquiring firm certainly has their work cut out for them.

Hopefully history will prove that this team made the right decision. Stay tuned – I will be posting my thoughts and end result at the end of the day.

More: My prediction is that this thing will sell for $825 Million. Just a wild guess really. What do you think ?

Written by: Jeff Wiener. www.digitcom.ca. Follow TheTelecomBlog.com by: RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, or Friendfeed