Friday, November 5, 2004

Telepocalypse: Telco Manager Trouble

by alec on November 5, 2004

Telco manager trouble. Exactly… I haven’t paid for a conference call in six months. Why should I?

Verisign and VoIP

by alec on November 5, 2004

It doesn’t rain, but it pours… Verisign’s Tom Kershaw, speaking in BusinessWeek, had this to say:

But the role of the telephone company is a different question. I’m not sure we’ll even say that word anymore. We’ll think of communications providers as people who provide us with broadband access and people who provide us with applications. You won’t just buy dial-tone like you do today. You’ll do IM with voice integrated [into the technology]. You’ll have games with voice integrated.

In tomorrow’s world, dial-tone is a commodity. What we’ll buy are connectivity, applications, and addressing / name resolution services (think DNS). Verisign’s play here is a very smart play. Today’s VoIP infrastructure has just rudimentary address resolution capabilities, and no credentialling. Anyone can spoof the voice network once you’ve attached an IP device. Verisign’s expertise in security and secure credentials could be a critical piece to solve that problem.

Asterisk Case Study

November 5, 2004

Interested in setting up your own PBX? For $500 and the cost of a PC, you can, provided you’re a competent Linux hack. Softwink has published details of their experience doing just that, right here.

Read the full article →

Everyone is a phone company

November 5, 2004

Om Malik on H.J. Heinz and VoIP. This, of course, is the big fear of incumbent telcos everywhere. I had the opportunity to speak with COO of one of the big guys about a year ago. He told me that what kept him awake at night was the thought that his customers would install IP [...]

Read the full article →

Frank Clegg moves on

November 5, 2004

From this morning’s Globe and Mail, Frank Clegg is leaving Microsoft Canada. Truly the end of an era. When I joined Microsoft Canada in 1992, we were pumped up because we’d just had our first $200 million year. Now, 12 years later, it’s a $1.2 billion annual business. Frank has done an incredible job.

Read the full article →