myprofessorvoip blog

Professor says agree on a standard!

Why? Because volume means cheaper? What does that mean? Well riddle me this Batman, if the world is supposed to go wireless make it easy on my local Best Buy sales rep in being able to identify a solution for me when I ask him to find me a coverage for my roaming laptop. Don’t give him a map with colors on it that will cause him to give me poor information.

Wimax is the first to take off, with deployments ranging all over the 802.1G spectrum. It has a prominent provider of CPE based gear in Zyxel. It already has developed countries singing its praise. All accept the United States. The US does not have one competitor in agreement or where to go next. Granted LTE utilizes most of the current infrastructure as 3G networks go, however WIMAX should be the future for 4G. Not because it was the first to hit the market, but because it just plain made sense.

What ever is chosen, we should know that it will exist over a predominantly IP infrastructure. 3GPP standards hasn’t even agreed on a standard, but Wimax can overly a GSM wireless infrastructure and is ready to do so now. What is the hold up? I’m tired of ordering T1’s only to be raked over the coals of its expensive and ridiculous installation costs. I want to order a connection and have it provisioned just as easy as installing an access point in the 4th floor cafeteria.

I know that is a little naive and I may be a little biased, but I have participated in a Wimax deployment and it was a work of art. Granted Wimax is not without its problems, but I would happily sacrifice growing pains then be a part of the non scalable legacy copper provisioning that has been happening over the last quarter century.

As we stand now, AT&T and Verizon will participate in the When-will-we-have-a -standard LTE. While Sprint and whoever Sprint buys next well be participating in WIMAX. What does this mean? Expensive CPE equipment that does little to fix the mobility problem the US has today. One scenario is that the rest of the world follows Korea and goes Wimax and some of us will be stuck using American only phones. The other part of the equation would be higher CPE costs because of the limited distribution of the technology and the cost that competitors imposed to stay competitive. Meaning Sprint. 802.1G was supposed to be the answer for 4G why not all consolidate our resources to agree on one standard. Count chips after that.

Way to easy. If you want a comparison of the two technologies please go HERE

This is more or less a very objective discussion on technology in general. Looking back in the early stages of IT, forums were the way to bring in new ideas and open discussions on technology strategies. I attempt to participate in a variety of discussion in order to stay afloat in my profession in order to have knowledge as to what the future holds as far as technology is concerned. It is very difficult to follow at this stage. And the need to focus on active participants from the consumer industry is needed.

Technology companies are the only companies that still utilize R&D budgets today. There are no more companies with desire to pay groups to provide solutions for business needs as far as technology goes now. This has hurt the playing field in many ways. Costs have been reduced. Solutions picked on basis of convenience and technology is driven by those who are profit driven. And have you seen requirements for CTO’s nowadays? The requirements are no longer for elite technical professionals, they are for business driven executives with a little bit of tech on the side. Where is the career path going for technical folks? 

This is where participation comes into play. Consumers should run the world, not technology companies. The flow should focus on business needs. R&D groups should be formed in hopes to provide custom based needs for corporations. Technology needs that are out of scope and out of budget should be outsourced for a vendor supplied solution. 

Supporting Example:

Enterprise verses traditional Telecommunications carriers. 

Having eyes in both areas provides me with more insight than most people have. For starters, network monitoring solutions. Most vendors that claim that their solution is the best are fooling only those who are too lazy to invest time to see what they actually want. Any solution should begin with need and followed by how we can achieve this. Most commonly in today’s workplace it is followed by how can we “obtain” this? And you will go on a bender putting two or three solutions together and achieve nothing but higher operational costs. “All” management tools can be created in house with local tools. That’s right, all, in fact if companies sat down and provided resources for excellent R&D they could save allot of money on operational costs and the purchase of commercial solutions. 

In most telecommunication companies, in house development of management tools has always been a necessity. New equipment arrives onsite and vendors participate with the consumer in developing the best API’s or MIB management interfaces so that the company is provided everything they need to manage. 

Now this is just one example and one area where this model can be helped. However, all areas can be helped by this and this is why forums were developed in the first place. To assist the consumer base, and not to assist the commercial market in developing new solutions.  Companies settle for solutions. Enterprise Security and VOIP have been bottle up into solutions and provided to consumers who take on the operational support costs and not fully understand if this solution is what they are actually looking for or does the name solve their last assessment. 

If I had the time I would put together a forum. As you can tell from the site, the professor gets busy. However, to fix the open community I would make time. I would like to take all small business into a forum and assist in providing solutions that may or may not include those that necessarily cost money. Develop security solutions that do not require a huge support contract in order to maintain. Help take open source VOIP to provide telephony at cost verses one size fits all solutions that are overkill. 

And next provide forums that comment on technology and participate on a consumer level and not a vendor level. 

For example:

In parallel to what is being developed in the mobile ip community, there is a protocol being written to provide mobility using IPv4 and can be used in conjunction with VOIP and mobility platforms. This protocol is called HIP. (Host Identity Protocol). The HIP protocol works in conjunction with dns and public keys to keep host identity intact for hosts. Consumer feedback would enable development for enterprise solutions as well as carrier solutions. You can all see how it applies to carrier based solutions, but in the enterprise, how cool would it be to have users that are quite mobile and still have access to resources provided by their own company. This is just one application, but it would be secure (certificate based) can survive without the need of a vpn tunnel.  

You could carve out a bunch of need for this technology.  In order to do so, we need to change how we participate. Lets not wait until it becomes relevant and then put in a feature request. Let’s mold it relevancy at its infantry. 

The reason this last chapter took so long is because like most of you I work for a living so I needed time to implement before I write a blog. The Professor doesn’t like to provide information unless he has did it himself. (I sound like Kobe Bryant with the 3rd person).

I have been involved in VOIP on and off for 10 years. So I have been eager to see it develop into an everyday phrase. There is not a phone call being made during the day that does not involve VOIP to some degree. Even if you still have that Verizon line at home and haven’t given in to Vonage, Comcast, or Time Warner, you have to know that even your TDM Verizon connection traverse a backbone of H.323 and SIP trunks to make it to the DS0 that is connected to your Grandma’s rotary dialed telephone.

Professor’s Conspiracy Theory

Q1: If the government can force you to go digital television, why won’t they force you to go VOIP?

Q2: If I purchased VOIP service from Comcast or Verizon, then why haven’t they converted my traditional lines with the same lines I use to connect my computers? (Cat5)

Q3: I hear about VOIP, I even have Voip service, where are all the bells and whistles?

Like you I have always asked these questions. When you order VOIP service from Vonage, they provide you with an ATA to convert your analog to digital. They also provide 802.11 and regular ethernet VOIP phones for you to connect to their service. They are not a big enough outfit to provide CAT5 cabling to you as well, but for the most part they provide the cheapest offering because they only have to invest in their core and infrastructure. You depend on your Internet Service Provider.

When you purchase VOIP service from Comcast, they have already done the math. They connect your Telephony Demarcation directly to the MTA so that all of your phones will not be changed and all of your existing wiring will be used, rerun or maintained.

This isn’t because they are making your life simpler. Your life would be simpler if you can purchase an 802.11 (wireless) cordless phones and have video conferencing from an IP handset in your bathroom. Softphones for remote travel options. In other words, IP flexibility. However, think of all of the money Comcast will lose if they no longer had to send a tech to your house because your know using 802.11 wireless router from Best Buy, which is plug and play, and not have to send a tech to search your wires and charge you $90 per hour. Dem boys are Union!!

Comcast has the technology to provided these services. They also have the technology to provide ip presence and other IP related features that exist today. But they don’t.

Okay, Asterisk: How to live free!

What exists in the market today are two different models to support subscribers. An IP PBX and a Class 5 server. Both are similar in terms of provisioning application based services, but are different in terms of scalability. You will not configure a PBX to handle 10k CAPs. (Call Attemps Per second).

Asterisk is an IP PBX. Asterisk can provide voicemail, text to voice, voice to text, trunks, extentions, anything a TDM pbx can provide. Asterisk is more or less a core system. You will have to provide a front end. Other than that I would put Asterisk against any of the PBX’s that I have experience on. Such as the Nortel CS2k/ CS2100 and the Cisco Call Manager.

For the purpose of this lesson, I will tell you how I use Asterisk and how it provides a very cheap and flexible alternative for my home living. I have built an Asterisk server for the sake of providing a cheaper service. Asterisk is free, however the time it took to compile and get working was less than 8 hours. There are many white papers that would assist you out on the web.

Cost: Minimal. I used an old computer with a P4 processor. I purchased refurb for $150. I did not purchase a Digium card used to connect to TDM trunks. So I am not using a T1 or DS0 to connect. This is a purely sip connection. So total price of hardware would be $150

Service: I chose to go with a very lightweight service provider. The quality is not perfect, but it isn’t bad either. I am tinkering around that 50ms range which becomes noticeable. But I am pay $14 a month for the service and a DID.

So with $14 a month I am connected to a Sip service provider and I am paying .0012 per call globally. With comcast I pay $19 a month for all US calls. So if I am just comparing Nationally based calls then I make a very minimal profit due to quality concerns.

Applications:

Voicemail is additional with phone service. It is included with Asterisk. Nice part is that with Asterisk you can do what you want with your Wave file. What I have done is configured my Asterisk server to email my wave file to me when I get a call. What I am working on is providing voice to text emailing. There are services out there that I can send my WAV file and they email it back transcribed, but that thats the fun out of it. So bottom line is free.

SMS: Now Comcast supports SMS to Voice services for free. Right now it is a demo, but there is a Perl module that you can use to send SMS to a public SMSC that will forward your messages, but that will take text to voice and I am not a big fan of text to voice. So until that changes I will not be doing this.

Mobility: I can connect to my IP PBX via a soft client. I use many of them and they are all free. One that is readily accessible is Xlite. Comcast has yet to support softclients so this is an added bonus.

Now the way I have my service configured is that everyone in my home is a different extension. So I only have one DID, but for an additional 10 bucks I can get more DID’s. There are other services cheaper, but the total cost of the sip trunk goes up. I don’t need that. I rather have an operator ask you want extension you would like.

Manageablility:

Now you do have web access for Comcast, just like I have web access to my server and any subscriber has access to alter his/her account. I like mine better because it is free. But you can go on the server and look at your voicemail in .WAV files.

Asterisk is a very cool tool that is free and very customizable. I like using pure IP, but you can purchase a card that will have you connect via TDM if you wanted to do so. Only problem I had is RTP proxy. You must have a firewall that does RTP proxy or your voice will never make it in. I use Ubuntu as a firewall so I compiled it very easy. And it is activated in my ipchains rules when every my firewall is restarted.

For a medium sized organization looking to go VOIP, this would be a perfect solution. Even for a large size corporation if you scale it correctly. However, Asterisk is not for the technically weak. So you must be willing to get your hands dirty and your solutions hat on hand. Enjoy.

One of the most frustrating things about being in technology is the amount of operators in the field. Let me elaborate on the term “operator”.

Ten years ago, majority of the information systems staff were operators. People who managed a system around the clock using commands that were supplied to them in hopes to keep the network up and running 24/7. This included making backups, verifying disk space, and also making sure they ran certain commands that needed to be run at off peak hours without fully understanding what the purpose was. It wasn’t their job to find out, it was their job to perform what was asked of them. Similar to my grandmother when she calls Dell support to find out what is wrong with her internet connectivity.

There are thousands of professionals out there who take what is provided to them to perform certain functions day in and day out. These could be network professionals or System Administrators. It is not solely their fault, this is what has become of the field due to vendors who advertise “IT for dummies” solutions. If you are one of those people who purchased a CCNA book, got CCNA certified, and wondered why your salary hasn’t broken the bank yet, you are one of these people.

I have never seen IT that way and I refuse to look at it that way . For every problem, there is a solution. Just because no one has provided a vendor solution, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Example:

I was working a Carrier VOIP project. The softswitch I was using supported SIP, so it was a SIP registrar. Every night at a certain time all SIP connections were going down and causing endpoints to re-register. This problem had been occurring for a long time and without the there were finger pointing without much proof.

I always travel with a linux (Ubuntu) laptop. So what I did was configure a Sip registrar (Asterisk) on my laptop and croned a nmap job as well to verify open ports to the endpoints. I used another script to register to the laptop so that a session was established to another registrar other than the Class 5 server. That night at 2am the same problem occurred. The client lost connectivity and nmap caught the ports that were closed.

The problem easily pointed to the firewall that was setup to detect and act upon attacks and there seemed to be a very mild DOS using port 5060 that cause the router to reject traffic to that port for a period of time. Simple automated approach.

I just used this example because tools aren’t purchased they are improvised. You can ask all of those idiots who purchased a flute years ago and are still trying to find everyday use for them.

People go out and purchase network management tools and utilities everyday  all they are is a bunch of scripts running snmp get and set packaged in pretty java/html pages. When the same can be done on a regular linux platform with cron and referenced in man pages. Why wait for the vendor to upgrade the software to manage switches now, when you can walk the MIBS of the device and update your own scripting.

This is what is wrong with IT. If the paid “network engineers” and “system administrators” cannot develop tools of their own then what is their value add? You can pay the vendor to train a monkey to be an operator.

Three months ago I wrote a perl script for a client that enabled him to automate a packet trace to isolate a problem that was occurring off hours. Every night from 2 to 3 am the script took the trace and then ftp’d it to my ftp server so that I could review and take a look at what was occurring. Now the client is looking into 3rd party vendors that could do the same for them because they fell in love with the concept. I did not have the heart to tell them that it was only 5 mins of work, but this reinforces my view.

Technology is ever changing. Things you purchase today have been available for years. Just because Cisco or Microsoft offers it does not mean they invented it. There are always cheaper, more flexible and cost effective alternatives. Be an engineer, not an operator!

I have been in this industry my whole life and I still find it very strange for people to call themselves experts. Ten years ago finding someone to proclaim they are an expert were very far and few between. 15 years ago, claiming that you knew routing wasn’t even cool. Desktop technician was the way to go. After Desktop, knowing how to configure a server had you thinking McDonald’s was beneath you. So why is it today, all you have to do is search for expert and you get half the networking industry?

Searching for a security candidate provides you with individuals that mostly know security from an application standpoint. Knowing how to configure a firewall makes you less of a security engineer as it is to know how to spell security. If you do not know how to decipher an ethereal trace or to expose typical threats on a a user’s pc, without the use of tools and scripts, then what makes you a security expert?

To know how to configure a router is far easier than to know the in’s and out’s of routing protocols. Why would you consider yourself and expert if you know BGP, but cannot articulate when and why to use RIP? Isn’t being an expert knowing when to use a certain technology and tool? I blame that on Cisco, but only a little bit. I mostly blame the industry. Again to properly hone your skill set and evolve with technology, but know the basics is what is missing in networking.

If you qualify yourself as a VOIP expert, then I take my hat off to you. Voice over IP is a hybrid of Telecom and IP. Knowing Voice over IP is very demanding because if you do not know the ins and out of TDM technology, you will not know how it is supposed to work in the IP world. Being able to bypass tolls have more to do with how to design a Voice network and less to do with how to get Voice to properly work in a IP environment. The routing is more complex and is disguised in complex and confusing Dial plans, and the rules you configure are enough to allocate a whole server to perform. Yet, there are certified experts in the market who can configure a call manager and run a Voice probe.

An expert is a term that goes hand in hand with perfection. No one can ever obtain this title, but only the good ones pursue because the chase is worth it.

From the depth’s of Kuwait sandy desert, to the shores of Rome,Italy, through the dark corners of co-location centers of every Middle Eastern country’s Telecommunications infrastructure, the Professor is back in business!! I am working on redoing the website and provide you with tidbits of my knowledge and experience.

The Professor has been an on again off again revolutionist. I am an hypocrite. I believe in many different things, but I also believe their arguments as well. I admit, I believe in an open source way of life. I beleive that someday Linux should share the desktop market. I believe that software should be free and the open community would benefit because of it.

One can’t beleive in angels and not beleive in devils. I enjoy buying a gadget and seeing the microsoft logo embedded on the box. It ensures me that when I plug and play that the odds are in my favor that I will be able to entertain myself with my purchase right away.  As oppose to Linux whereas I may be googling all night for a device driver. There has been strides made most notibly Ubunto, but is it enough to leapfrog Mac and challenge Microsoft?

The answer is maybe. If enough of us make the plunge to make Linux better.  That is how it works. Developers from Microsoft have the privilege of hiring an QA staff, but Open source has us. It looks as if Microsoft stole a page out of open source by unleashing Vista on us very early.

Take the plunge. Take an old PC and load the newest release from Ubunto on it. Or better yet take an laptop. If you are scared of not knowing linux commands then you will be very surprised to hear that nowadays Linux is all Gui driven.

In fact as soon as I get enough people to work and play on this site I want user grades on Ubunto.

I welcome any posts on Open Source. Any questions on the topic.

Americans call them text messages, which is the most idiotic name I have ever heard of. First of all the protocol is SMS. Second of all everyone else in the free technology world calls them SMS. So therefore I move that all Americans get their head out of their butts and conform to the rest of the free world.

Just like T1’s. We are the only country in the world that uses T1’s. Everyone else uses E1’s which are much more efficient. Do the math 32 channels for an E1 verse 24 channels for a T1, all at 64k. Even Canada uses E1’s.

The SMS protocol is the simplest protocol written. It is much similar to HTTP. There is a server which is called the SMSC and clients, which are your cell phones, voicemail servers, and anything else that uses SMS. Just like HTTP it is a connectionless protocol. It is very lightweight and very efficient.

Now you know what SMS is and does, now you can know why I really despise American Cell providers. Most of the free world does not charge for SMS messages, think about it some places charge 2 cents per minute for each text message above a certain threshhold. SMS should be free. It does not cost Telco’s anything to provide the service. If you already have cellular service then SMS uses a fraction of the resources.

Why as Americans do we put up with this? Because we think we are above other countries enough not to worry about what services their cell providers charge. We are also the only country who’s Cell providers charge for incoming calls. Go figure. The next time I see a finiancial lose news conference for a cell provider, remind me to send their CFO a “Text Message” giving him my support.

Okay. You may think that I am impressed by Michael Dell’s business push to ship Dell PC’s with the Ubunto Linux OS. Far from it. Dell has been lacking a real business strategy since it’s two competitors joined forces (HP/Compaq). BTW Dell is #2 in computer sales. IBM made a similar push and even vowed to support Linux when it sold PC’s with the RedHat Linux OS. I was impressed with IBM though, they shipped and supported servers and desktops. They offered IT support to residential customers that made the switch. In a time that device drivers were kicking everyone’s ass. I mean VPN drivers, which still are hard to find, and wireless drivers. Things of business necessities and a era that made linux popular among home users.

Those days are over now and those of us who got frustrated moved on to Apple. IBM moved on the quietly sell Linux based computers, but only offer the support on certain models, but now Mike B. Dell is marketing this as a breakthrough strategy. I will give him this, his timing is impeccable. I mean with Vista looking like crap and people not liking the pop up messages, people will try anything. And dont get me wrong Ubunto looks good, I am not sold.

I met a startup company who reminded me of me 5 years ago when I made the plung to live off the earth and use Linux. Open Source. It took me 5 hours what it took most people with Windows 2 minutes. But that is okay i was living the life. Well this startup company made a no windows allowed policy and only run ubunto. It is quite impressive. There help desk support is a woman. Nothing drives me more crazy than a female who knows her way around a file tree.  I said “OFFICE” and they say “open Office”. I am impressed.

Even though I have been that route and have had open office cost me some good presentations. I love the fact that this company chose to lead instead of be led. More power to them. I would love to hear feedback and i would definately like to have people post who like linux or is willing to take the plunge with Ubunto.

Apple has been around a long time, and if you remember correctly, it should have been Apple on all desktops now and not Microsoft. Not that I mind, I was never a big Apple fan until now. With Apple giving in and moving to the intel chipset and the use of the UNIX kernel, I think Apple has swung leap years ahead of Microsoft on many fronts. Only if they can capitalize via good marketing.

It has begun, the last 10 years you have witnessed the IPOD come out of nowhere using itunes to convert MP3’s to MP4’s (proprietary), a music store that is more convenient than anything which allows you to buy digital music fast and reliable. Then the same Itunes allowing you to download tv shows that you miss via regular TV just as quick and reliable.

Now Itunes will be marketing a movie rental. Now that is definitely a Microsoft type strategy. You see, everybody who is anybody has Itunes because they already have an IPOD. A device in which Microsoft could not even rival. And even though it has been a model idea netflix and blockbuster’s movie through the mail is just too tedious. Nobody uses snail mail anymore, just bill collectors. Being able to download them on itunes and not have to worry about returning the videos. America’s lazy. It is tough enough to pay bills, which is why people using web bill pay.

This move would make Itunes and hence Apple a very dominate player in residential computing. You match that with their new product Apple TV and there is a possibility that Apple could go further than the PC. Apple is no longer the icon of the weak competitor

                I have not been keeping up with IPTV like I would want to, but I will provide feedback with either a blog or an article at a later date. I want to publish news that should make you excited. It seems that a telco in Poland just signed a contract w/ Nokia/Siemens to provide IPTV.

I am excited. Very very excited. Because another phone is coming out on the market? Not exactly, there is a new phone coming out daily. Now-a-days everyone is a gizmo freak. It kills me that you see little old ladies with bluetooth technology hanging from their ears, speaking such terms as VOIP and saying “where is my flash drive?”. I can’t take it!! At the same time it warms my heart. 15 years ago I had to deal with 10 gig hard drives costing about a down payment for a car. The geek squad wasn’t a marketing ploy as much as it was a stereotype for everyone in the profession.

I love the way technology is converging. 10 gig flash drives the size of a keychain. Grandmama’s giving me the cell signal w/ their fingers when they want me to call. And along the way we lost why we used to get excited about technology and this is what the Iphone represents. It is not another gadget w/ the Palm OS or Windows CE, it is something entirely new. Something we will actually have to read the directions for. Somebody is out there trying to pave a new way up that metaphoric mountain in parallel to the other paved paths. I am really excited for the coming of age of the MacOS. And before you hmm and haw, I hated Mac OS until Mac OS X. All love all things with a Unix Kernal. Back to basics, back to basics.

First of all, Mac OS X is simpler than Windows. First of all when i load a plugin I want it to work right away. I dont want to query google to see how many people had the same problem that I am experiencing. Step out on a ledge, instead of getting a product you already know what to expect, get something that you will actually try to read the manual. Get something that you will end up calling customer service questions and not feel embarrassed.

I wish I had a glass of wine so I can toast the brilliant, once fired, gifted salesman Steve Jobs!!

OH… June 29th is when the Iphone is projected to hit shelves.

Idiot Article

A man in Michigan got busted stealing internet connectivity via WiFi from a coffee shop. First of all, define stealing WiFi? If i get a signal I will try to use it as well. But you see that isnt the point of this story? How do you get caught? I want to know. Any Idea’s? I have a few, but none of them would deflect the fact that this man is an Idiot.