TeleTips Network

Google has caved to pressure from the International Olympic Committee and pulled a video from YouTube which shows a protest about the subjugation of a peace-loving Himilayan country by an unelected dictatorship. Here is a link to the video, thanks to Slashdot.

We recently began using what we call an SMS Push application.  SMS Push allows us to send Text Messages to our subscribers in bulk.  Typically these messages are some Marketing promotion or a Customer Service announcement.   The message text and a list of MDNs is provided to the application and it sends them serially, one at a time.  We wanted to speed that up.

The SMS Push application was provided by Quantum System Integrators in Costa Mesa, CA.  We’ve worked with them on several projects before and they’ve always high quality software and services with excellent customer support.   The application runs on Sun Solaris and is started from the shell command line.  It sends a predetermined messages to each MDN in a list provided as a command-line argument.  The application spawns a single instance of itself and sends the messages .  Through-put has been about 1 message per second, using an SMPP link to our Primal Technologies SMS-C. Read More…

Today Nortel presented their solution for monitoring and billing high bandwidth users of the wireless broadband network.  Software running directly in the Starent PDSN  basically uses deep packet inspection to implement traffic shaping.  The product is called Enhanced Charging Services (ECS) and it claims to provide integrated content-based billing.  The solution as presently sold might not truly be called “deep” packet inspection.  It only looks as deeply as layer 4, TCP and UDP packets.
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All voice network operators are continually looking for ways to cut the cost of delivering outgoing long distance calls. The best way to do this is to use 2 or more Inter-Exchange Carriers (IEC, in FCC-speak) or what you and I might call “long distance service providers,” and cherry pick the cheaper provider for each dialed destination. This approach is called “Least Cost Routing.” Seems simple, right? Well, it’s not, really.

First there is the tyranny of numbers. A Least Cost Routing application typically will use the Local Exchange Routing Guide (LERG) to determine all possible dialed destinations. The LERG defines roughly 450,000 destinations. For each destination you might have a cost proposal from several IEC. We tried evaluating 8 IEC.

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Starting late last year our long-distance network has been overwhelmed with calls to various for-free services. These services often appear to be the proverbial free lunch, with no apparent business model because the service is 100% free to the end user. Typical offerings include free conference calls or voice chat rooms. These services can completely destroy a flat-rate all-you-can-eat telephony service provider.

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Information Week is reporting that  BlackBerry Users Experience Service Outage

What’s going on over at RIM?  Is this the 3rd or 4th highly publicized network failure they’ve experienced in the last year or so? Running a network is a highly repetitive, process-oriented business.  Not much sex and magic involved.  Widespread service-affecting events are signs of poor blocking and tackling:  time for RIM to get back to fundamentals.

This just has to leave user shaking their heads and heading for the exits.   Typographic error we expect to see soon: “current BlackBerry infrastructure outrage.”

So over on Yahoo! this article is interesting.  The advantage to Motorola is clear, more cash for a business it does not appear to run well.

The advantage to Nortel is less clear.  Nortel already has switching and radio kit for a variety of wireless technologies and air interfaces. We’ll need to wait until more information becomes available.  I wonder if Nortel would get the iDEN infrastructure busines, too?

The Mozilla foundation has recently announced that they intend to extend their web browser to allow it to run on mobile devices. I have to wonder about the opportunity they perceive. Outside the US there may well be a chance for a new browser to become popular on mobile devices.

Within the US however, the mobile operators wield so much control that it seems very unlikely the mobile browser could ever aspire to achieve the success the PC-based browser has. The path to that success for mobile devices is far more challenging. Read More…

The European Commission has launched a case against Qualcomm for the way they license their technology to other companies. Cellular-News has the story, among others. I first caught wind of it over at Howard Chu’s HowardForums. My post there was a bit of a knee jerk reaction. Since that post I’ve done a little more reading and I have to say that my opinion is unchanged, though I also have a better understanding of why the EC is after them. Read More…

OM Malik is one of my favorite bloggers. He generally writes about the technology industry with a focus on telecoms and the Internet. Today he covered news of Verizon Wireless and Google jockeying for position prior to the American 700 MHz spectrum auctions coming in January. It’s clear that both sides believe that much is on the line.

From Verizon Wireless’ perspective they must have at least 2 objectives in winning the auction. First, to acquire more spectrum to expand their existing business. They’d prefer additional nationwide spectrum. But I’d expect them to hedge that bet by selectively bidding for regional licenses.

Second, they can hope to eliminate a competitor, or at least reduce the scope across which a competitor might compete with Verizon Wireless. Both are clearly worth billions. Trailing 12 month revenue for Verizon Wireless is $91 billion. If a competitor or competitors could deny Verizon Wireless as little as 10 percent of that market it makes the cost of licenses pale by comparison.

A lost opportunity of $10 billion/ year has a net present value of around $25 billion. If that represented the cost of doing nothing, spending $10-12 billion to buy more spectrum seems like a way to save $15-13 billion. I count on Verizon Wireless to go all out before the auctions and to bid ferociously during them.

This show is only starting folks. don’t touch that dial.