Telco Access & Interconnection Making You Nuts?

Mistakes and missteps in engineering, provisioning and managing your access
and interconnection networks elements can cost your firm millions – and lead to inefficient operations and poor service to your customers. That's why you should make plans now to attend CCMI's Understanding Telco Access & Interconnection conference on Oct 20 and 21, in Washington, DC. Click here to get the best deal...
http://www.ccmi.com/telcoaccess/home.html?WT.mc_id=C1096DIDX

This comprehensive 1½-day program is led by access and interconnection expert Andy Regitsky, a savvy industry veteran who has worked and consulted on access and interconnection with interexchange carriers, LECs and regulators for more than 20 years.

Join him and your peers at this conference and you'll:

* Get a solid grasp of the regulatory environments that determine price, availability and performance of access and interconnection services.

* Understand how coming legal, regulatory and legislative changes will
impact your ongoing network costs.

* See how the piece parts of access and interconnection

* Learn how and where competition – or its absence – influences you network
costs.


* And much more.

Understanding Telco Access & Interconnection is the best way to make sure you and your staff are operating with the skills and knowledge needed to manage your local network costs. In fact, CCMI guarantees it! If after attending Understanding Telco Access & Interconnection, you don't feel you have a deeper understanding of access and interconnection, CCMI will refund 100% of your registration fee, no questions asked.

Don't miss this chance to make sure you and your staff are up to speed on every aspect of your local and long distance access networks... reserve your place now online at http://www.ccmi.com/telcoaccess/home.html?WT.mc_id=C1096DIDX or call (866) 620-5938.

DIDX is a media sponsor for this event in order to share with its 11,000+ service provider members at www.didx.net with information and discussion on access and interconnections, such important issues to the telephony industry. Other events DIDX sponsors are listed at http://www.didx.net/events.


What this post is really about? USAC, FCC, sales and use, communications, federal excise, rural empowerment, footprint, and you know, all the headache, making sense of it and understanding it all.

Women in voIP Panel

Several men and a few women I met at Astricon suggested there be a Women in voIP panel discussion at a few conferences. How can you help with this idea? Let's start by gathering answers to these questions.

1. What topics should be discussed on a women in voIP panel discussion? One person suggested a 3-5 min. description of how each of the panelists got involved in voIP and telecommunications. Another was shared best practices in networking and marketing as well as technical know-how and experience.

2. Who should be on the panel? What company do they work with, position in company, URL, their experience and services they provide?

3. How to get more females in the IP communications, voIP, and telecommunications industry to participate in conferences in not only group roles but also leadership roles? They can be in business, working on a degree in these areas or considering them, all ages.

4. Do you have a blog? Will you blog about this also?

This is not proposed because these women are women, but because we're missing out on accomplishments, ideas, collaborations, and experience of these women. I hope to get some serious discussion on this blog post at this blog, myvoIP by Association blog and on my Facebook network in the notes section. John Cirner was the first to propose the idea to me at Astricon... thanks, John!

Carlton O'Reilly Wins Nokia 810, at Astricon's Code Zone

DIDX (also known as DIDXchange) sponsored Astricon 2008's Code Zone Developer Room and Party to show its deep appreciation to the Asterisk developer community around the globe. Carlton O'reilly won a Nojia 810 at the Asterisk Bake-off at the Code Zone.

See more pictures from Astricon 2008 at my Facebook photos Astricon 1 or Astricon 2 or at my Picasaweb Google photos. If you know anyone in them, please tag.

And check out what a Nokia 810 looks like and what it can do. Wikipedia shows on Sept 28, 2008 at 6:24 PM... "The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is an Internet appliance from Nokia, announced on October 17, 2007 at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Despite Nokia's strong association with cellular products, the N810 is not a phone, but instead allows the user to browse the Internet and communicate using Wi-Fi networks or with a mobile phone via Bluetooth. It builds on the hardware and software of the Nokia N800 with some features added and some removed."

Congratulations, Carlton.

I didn't get to see who want the Asterisk Troubleshooting Contest. Let me go check that too. Astricon.net's website does not state who won. Does anyone know?

Astricon 2008 Code Zone Developers, Robot, and Lumenvox

... give me time and I'll add several dozen other videos from Astricon 2008 in Glensdale, AZ. They range from you vicariously experiencing the Code Zone Developer Party Tuesday night sponsored by DIDXchange to around 1 AM robot demo to Gerd Graumann announcing exciting new apps can be created because of Asterisk and Lumenvox's partner I6net.com.

Gotta go study now.

Yes, it's Double Posting, but I just gotta share

http://blogs.didx.net/2008/09/weiland-underground-during-itexpo.html ... more great times with people in your and my industry. We should do this more often!

Douglas Kimani Discusses Africa voIP in Swahili at ITEXPO West 2008

DIDX Hosts Party at Weiland's During ITEXPO West

...

TMCnet produces the US's most exciting Internet Telephony shows every fall and spring...this is at the DIDX Dinner Party meet during ITEXPO West 2008 at Weiland Brewery Underground... some of the guests are Jeff Simonton and 2 lovely ladies... I didn't get their names of TW Telecom, Bill Miller of Digium, Rehan Ahmed, Jenny Callicott of Celtrek is filming, angel investor Val Babajov, Partners 1993, Roberto Hernandez of BlueVisor, Douglas Kimani of Accents, Bob Emmerson of TMCNET and Electric-words.org, Peter Radizeski of rad-info.net and tmcnet, Max Schroeder of Faxcore, Rehman Sheikh of Billcall, Dennis Eodice of Alta MediaGroup, Michael Cardillo and Ronda Scheer of Sotel IP Services, Doug Makishima and Farshad Ghazi of D2 Technologies, Rich Tehrani one of the world's most respected IP communications gurus, etc.

Chasing Wholesale Customer Service Reps, LOL

Let David Frankel of ZIPDX LLC tell you all about it. Really nice to meet another happy successful DIDX member at ITEXPO West 2008 in Los Angeles this week.

ITEXPO West 2008 - See for yourself!

... pictures will be added regular on many Facebook friends' ITEXPO West 2008 photo gallery folders such as mine, Max Glucksmann's, Suzanne's Picasaweb, and on ITEXPO site. Know someone in the Facebook or Picasaweb galleries? Feel free to tag and comment. (Be nice please.)

Check out the Toyota Prius that someone will win on Thursday. You can join the ITEXPO Group in the groups section and Networking Event Area in the events section on Facebook now.

Live in the Los Angeles Area? Come to ITEXPO

If you live anywhere near Los Angeles, I recommend going to http://www.itexpo.com right now before it's too late, sign up for a free expo pass or for a great deal on full conference pass to Internet Telephony West 2008. Message me on Facebook and let me know you'll be there!

A friend of mine on Facebook named Tinu Abayomi-Paul tells everyone that Suzanne's the voIP guru in her network. I think she needs to add Rich Tehrani, Mark Spencer, Rehan Ahmed, or Jeff Pulver (whose birthday is one day before mine, and I have somehow disappeared from his Facebook network a second time ;-) and then Tinu will have a real "Oh Wise One." Thank you much, Tinu, for the praise you gave me on Blog Radio.

I am writing this blog after having had revueltos y cafe muy negro in a park with some homeless people. I really enjoyed talking with them. (See a video of one of my interesting homeless friends in San Jose.) Topic for today... talking on the phone! (I'm in Mexico City seeing Daniel Reyes, CMO for MCM Telecom and Alejandra get married. We met running at Spring VON San Jose 2006. Yes, people who sit at computers to work also might run.)

We all were talking about our careers. My turn? I said that I'm in the business to make sure the people who are important to us start calling us and I also use telephony to help people get jobs and start businesses with the magic of the most special piece of our identity, the telephone number. Many of them had heard of Skype, Yahoo, MSN, Vonage and were curious about other internet-related telephony services.

I demonstrated with my cell phone the services of Celtrek, Truphone, Fring, Gizmo5 and MobileMax. Then with my laptop, I let them try Skype, Virtualphoneline, Groovytel, Comtel Networks, and FWD (a service our company is a corporate sponsor for).

They had so many questions. I referred them to a couple friends in Mexico who are in the voIP business. Who knows? Maybe one of them will startup some new mashup. They're better at thinking out of the box than I am.

Meanwhile, I really meant this blog to be to my friends on Facebook, in Pensacola, Florida; on Linkedin, on Emerald Coast Racing Team, my family (well, they all use Super-phone and Gizmo5), and the world ... the best way to learn...

is to mix in with the brightest minds in telecommunications. Whether you are a consumer, student, entrepreneur, traditional telco, or what?

Sign up now at http://www.itexpo.com to attend the ITEXPO West Sept 16 -18, 2008 next week in Los Angeles, California. If you live anywhere between Silicon Valley and Tijuana or over to Las Vegas, etc... that's a short trip. Learn how to start a new career, check it out.

Braintel Brothers: Masters from Viruses to Triple Play

Pictured above are Amjad Alvi, Rehan Ahmed (CTO and President of Super Technologies, Inc), Suzanne Bowen of Super Technologies, Basit Alvi, ???, and of course, Shahid Alvi is taking the picture. Where and when? Dubai, United Arab Emirates in 2003.

Pictures of the Times Magazine cover and one page of the several page article on Viruses of a 1988 issue are included below.




(Time is trademarked, and I (we) do not have any relationship with Time. All credit for the magazine goes to Time.)

In 1988, Time Magazine published a whole issue about viruses and our friends at BrainTel (Brain Ltd). The Alvi brothers (Amjad and Basit) were highlighted for their little code added to their in-house developed software to catch those who were pirating illegally. (There's a third brother ... Shahid, thanks to him for the photos and the info on the Time Magazine article.) Braintel is known for its innovation in telecommunications and anything to do with IT despite the often suffocating atmosphere and vague criteria for legal versus legal voice business in Pakistan and in the Middle East in general. (Note TRAI has legalized voice over Internet protocol this past week. Pakistan's next door neighbor India took the brave step.)