Senator Feinstein on Muni WiFI

I wrote to my senator (I hope you did too) about the importance of allowing municipalities to manage their own futures with respect to broadband and WiFi initiatives. After a few weeks delay I received the reply attached below. I have phoned the number at the end of the email as well as sending a follow up email asking a simple question that I hope Senator Feinstein can answer -- what is her position on this issue? Is that too much to ask?

Email from Senator Feinstein:

March 16, 2006


Mr. Edward Shelton
xxx xxx Avenue
xx, California xxx

Dear Mr. Shelton:

Thank you for writing to me with your concerns about prohibiting local governments from providing high-speed Internet services, or broadband. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.

To encourage competition among providers of telecommunications services, Congress passed legislation in 1996 which barred states from "prohibiting the ability of any entity to provide any interstate or intrastate telecommunications services." However, in recent years, some states have passed laws which prohibit or limit local governments from providing telecommunications services. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that current law is not specific enough to protect both private and public entities from the prohibition, but that Congress could do so by amending the language of the law.

Legislation has been introduced in the Senate which would specifically permit governments to provide broadband services. However, competing legislation in the House would prevent state and local governments from providing telecommunications services and cable in any area which already has similar service provided by a private sector company.

The demand for broadband services for private and public sector use is only going to increase in the coming years, and Congress is reviewing our telecommunications laws to see where improvements can be made. Please know that, as legislation is developed, I will be sure to keep your views in mind.

Again, thank you for writing. If you should have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact my Washington, DC staff at (202) 224-3841.


Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

http://feinstein.senate.gov

Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the Nation are available at my website http://feinstein.senate.gov. You can also receive electronic e-mail updates by subscribing to my e-mail list at http://feinstein.senate.gov/issue.html.

Digium Targets The Enterprise

(Spring 2006 VON, San Jose CA) Mark Spencer is all smiles as Spring 2006 VON opens in San Jose, CA. And why shouldn't he be? His company, Digium is celebrating yet another year of profit and growth. By his estimate, Asterisk is now running on over half a million servers worldwide. And more importantly, large enterprise deployments of Asterisk are now becoming an important part of Digium's business. "Hardware is still important," Mark said in an interview at the show, "but software and services are growing much faster."

The company is announcing two new hardware products this week, an echo canceling card with 1024 taps (TE420P and TE415P four-port T1/E1/J1/PRI) and a transcoder (TC400P VoIP transcoding card). Both products are aimed at the high-end of the market where Mark says that customers are "looking for a more deterministic solution." But hardware has become an extension of the Digium's software and services business. Last year the City of Manchester in Connecticut selected Asterisk for a 1500 handset deployment and more enterprise sized deployments are on the way. As these larger customers choose Asterisk, they are also increasingly fingering Digium for support and integration services.

"We have a special level of expertise since we drive the development of Asterisk - all of that code goes through our hands - and that is a value that enterprises are looking for," explains Mark. But he is quick to assure partners in the Asterisk "ecosystem" that Digium has no intention of competing with them. "We'd even be happy if we had partners that managed these enterprise opportunities."

Mark hinted that at least one large PBX manufacturer may be moving to do just that. While he wouldn't name the company, Mark suggested that a traditional proprietary PBX vendor was evaluating Asterisk as a possible product line extension. And if that happened, there might be a large enough partner for Digium that large enterprises wouldn't insist on Digium's participation in every installation.

I also followed up with Mark on IBM's initiative to build a "carrier-grade" Asterisk (which IBM demonstrated at fall VON). Unfortunately for IBM, Mark reports that their lead Asterisk advocate has left IBM - but this turns out to be good news for the Asterisk community as he has started his own company to bring Asterisk to businesses. Meanwhile IBM is getting back up to speed.

But asked about the importance of "carrier-grade" service, Mark spoke of his belief that this was not crucial to consumer adoption of VoIP. Mark pointed out how cell phone use has changed our expectations about call quality and reliability. "20 years ago if you were in the middle of the phone call and it dropped you would think that the person hung up on you or that the world is about to end. But today we just call back and say 'I don't know what happened, I'm back.'" In Mark's view dropping one in a million or one in 10 million calls isn't a problem. "If you want to go from 4 9s of reliability to 5 9s the cost is enormous -- and that one call that doesn't get dropped is a very expensive call. Do consumers really want to pay that expense?" Mark did, however, say that he was happy that organizations like IBM continue to work on these hard problems.

VON PR Workshop

I am sitting in the press room at VON which has been taken over for a VON workshop for press people. They have distributed a booklet called "A Step-by-Step Exhibiting Primer" and they have a speaker telling us what Marketing is... he wrote a book called "The Paradox of Excellence." He has just told the collected PR people that they are "trunk monkeys..."

Why am I blogging about this? Because of the posts that I recently made -- PR is Broken and More on the Death of PR... and also the corresponding posts by Andy Abramson (who is sitting right next to me), Jeff Pulver, and Tom Foremski. In other words, a growing concern that the way in which companies, their hired PR reps, and journalists interact is NOT WORKING.

The choice of Michael Weissman (author of Paradox...) as the speaker here strikes me as being entirely wrong. His message seems to be that the better the job we do, the less praise we will receive because our clients take us for granted. He used the analogy of the water district -- they always deliver water, so we don't praise them anymore. Well, PR is definitely not delivering. This is not the water department that is dependable and thus I can ignore them.

Looking at the "Step-by-Step Exhibiting Primer" what I see is a marketing brochure about why companies should attend VON.

I don't blame VON management for not solving this problem -- this is not limited to the VoIP industry, this is a major crisis for the PR/Media co-dependent relationship. Here is my brief take on the core problem, and it comes from following the money.

Companies see that advertising is becoming less and less effective. But people still read articles, so less money is spent on advertising and more money is spent on PR.

This has two unintended consequences -- on the Media side, as ad budgets shrink, editorial budgets shrink. So a smaller number of reporters are being paid to write about a given topic (VoIP in this case). On the PR side, more and more money is being spent to reach this smaller group of journalists.

The result is that PR companies are flooding a shrinking number of journalists with less and less relevant information. This model will ultimately fail.

What is the solution?

Pulver/Evslin Petition to the FCC

Jeff Pulver and Tom Evslin have filed an important petition with the FCC on post-disaster communications that deserves the community's attention and support. From Jeff's Blog:

Today, Tom Evslin and I filed a Petition with the US Federal Communications Commission in an effort to mitigate the effects of long-term telephone outages in the event of natural disasters or other public crises. Our concern is that if the FCC waits too long for formation and formal recommendations before taking any further action to address emergency situations, then communications providers will be unprepared in the case of an immediate emergency. With the threat of terrorist action still looming and the next hurricane season right around the corner, we thought it was important for the FCC to act soon to ensure that the consequence of outages to telecommunications services are swiftly mitigated prior to the time communications links can be restored.

Read the rest on Jeff's Blog.

VON Coverage

IP Inferno will be attending VON. We are looking forward to a great show with many substantive issues discussed. Consumer adoption of VoIP is now accelerating so we hope to see new applications that truly show how VoIP can be different from POTS... surely the market is large enough by now! Unfortunately most of the pitches we've heard so far are about the infrastructure. Not that its unimportant -- but its not differentiating! How do you present VoIP as an improvement over POTS when you have to spend all of your time talking about security issues? If I didn't know better, I'd guess that VoIP is actually a big step backwards. You have to worry about hackers breaking into your PBX?

So while security and network management are necessary, expect our coverage of the show to focus on innovations that truly make VoIP different from just picking up a telephone. Surely you folks are out there! Drop us a line at press (at) ipinferno.com.

More on the death of PR

Attention PR people! Your days are numbered! GET SMART OR GET A NEW JOB. Another terrible call this morning prompts me to write again on this topic. A PR person called me to pitch a meeting with her client and didn't know anything about me as a writer or blogger, who I might write for, or why I might be interested in her client. She was simply dialing for dollars. PLEASE, at least know something about me and what I write about before you call me! As I pointed out to her, without knowing the basic facts, she might be wasting my time and her clients time. Of course, since she gets paid by the hour by here client, her time isn't wasted... which is the problem here!!

A quick roundup -- Andy Ambramson has a great (long!) post entitled "Ted's Right And I Have The Answer" (blush) In which he, fairly, makes the point that journalism is broken also. Yes, it is a two way street and we all need to evolve a new model. Andy's comments are a good start.

Jeff Pulver has a good post announcing a briefing for PR people to be held on March 14th -- hey Jeff, want some help on the messaging?

And Tom Foremski has another great post about killing the press release... These two issues -- press releases and press cold calls -- are tightly linked in my book and both need to be solved. Let's figure this out folks!!

Putting AT&T Back Together Again

All the way back on September 23rd, 2005 this correspondent reported the rumor that SBC would buy BellSouth and then change the name of the company to ATT... So I got the order wrong. First SBC changed its name to ATT. Now they are buying BellSouth. I guess they didn't feel the need, given the current administration, to conceal their desire to reconstruct the old AT&T monopoly.

The question that we as citizens should be asking is, in a country where politics clearly can be influenced by money, why do we want to have only one (or two) companies to have responsibility for a public trust like our data networks? Remember the old saying, "what's good for General Motors is good for America?" Will we soon hear, "what's good for ATT... ?" I don't want public policy in the US to be determined by corporations at all. But since it is, let's at least encourage healthy debate amongst the corporate interests by having a multitude of voices calling for the governments attention. Not a single behemoth that simply dictates policy.

PR is Broken

Tom Foremski, over at Silicon Valley Watcher, said it so much more eloquently -- Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!. But to this refrain may I add, Die! PR Telemarketing! Die! Die! Die!. And to what do you owe this morning rant? Jeff Pulver's VON. HELLO VOIP COMPANIES -- STOP WASTING YOUR MONEY ON PR PEOPLE. I just got a call from a PR person representing Nero, Inc. asking if I would be interested in coming by the company's booth for a demo. I try to be nice when these calls come in (about 5-6 a day). So I said, innocently enough, "ok, what does the company do?" This is where things went downhill fast.

The PR person on the other end of the line said, breathlessly "free computer to computer phone calls!" Oh boy. That really set me off. I couldn't be nice anymore.

"That's it?" I asked. "That's your pitch to get me to meet the company?"

"Uh, yeah..." said the now worried PR flack.

"Wow! What will they think of next? Free phone calls!" I'm afraid I got a bit sarcastic...

I asked him if he actually knew anything about the company or if he was just making phone calls and he admitted that he knew nothing. And for that, poor Nero is probably paying $150 an hour!!

Here's a hint, SAVE YOUR MONEY. PR has fallen, and doesn't know how to get up.

By the way, with 5-6 calls a day coming in, I can't possibly agree to meet with anyone anyway -- especially when there is no news angle provided by the caller. "Umm, we'll be making some announcements but I can't say what..." is the typical comment from PR flacks. Well guess what, if you can't say what the news is, I can't say if I can come to a meeting.

See you at the show.