telecom elearning, telecom training, telecommunications - Telecom WebCentral

…don’t we automatically keep, transcribe and index our half of all the calls we make? After all, it’s our speech. No need to record what the other person said. Just don’t use a speakerphone!

Why do we insist on ‘all or nothing’?

Where’s the Gmail for phone calls? Something that lets me search my life history of chatter.

PS - Skype chat search is rubbish.

You can here me talk at a panel at eComm here answering What Will Drive Wireless Innovation?.

For those without an hour to spare, I’m also on the BBC News site here today.

UPDATE: My eComm keynote on re-thinking the phone company is here. But you’ve got work to do, no time to waste watching videos on the web, no? ;)

In case anyone doubts the UK and US are two nations divided by a common language, here’s what my mum phoned me to ask today when booking online a hotel in Las Vegas.

“Marts, between the boxes for first name and last name there’s a little box with ‘M’ and ‘I’ above. What does that mean?”

“Middle initial, mum.”

“And then at the end, there’s a box with ‘Sr’ and ‘Jr’. As we’re over 62, shouldn’t we put ‘Senior’ in case there’s a discount?”

Pause.

“No, mum.”

Oh, and the telco angle? Shouldn’t there be an API for the web site to collect this stuff from their ISP, with due permission etc.?

Anyhow, I wonder how many US websites find thousands of people come from the ‘state or region’ of Londonshire?

easy enough mate - stay in bloody England - heh, heh!

There is an API already created - hcards and other microformats.

The google toolbar also used to have a rudimentary equivalent - it would attempt to fill in forms based on the data you gave it including credit card numbers IIRC. (I don't know if google toolbar still does this).

This is an area crying out for a solution, but I'm not sure that the telco is the best provider. the website is not asking for autheticated data - you are just proposing that it provide a service such as the above. It doesn't matter to the website who is registered to the IP address - I could be booking a trip for someone else, or on someone else's connection.

I can see hosted hcard services being an added feature to telcos, but even then they will simply be the default provider among many. Perhaps not a bad position to be in, but by no means game-changing.

Microsoft CardSpace or an Open source Identity protocol like OpenID will eventually eliminate the need for web forms...

You'll just drop and drag your virtual ID card onto the web page login to or form to fill, indicate which data you want to share with the provider (ie hotel) and click submit... you'll never enter a form again....

--JB

Any solution that requires my mother to do more than keep breathing is a non-starter, I'm afraid.

When a wee website gets pointed to by a big website, like Digg, it often falls over. That’s because it’s not in the host’s interest to pay a huge hosting bill just because everyone and his Internet dog would like a peek.

Now, who would disagree that a great improvement in the system would be for someone to be able to host their web site on, say, Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 platform, and set a limit on how much they were willing to pay out of their own pocket to host the site per month. Then, once they’ve hit that limit, the requesting ISP has to pay instead.

So now I can choose to subscribe to a ‘premium-enabled’ ISP, and get to see all that content that’s been Slashdotted, and get a monthly top-up bill for the pleasure.

Can someone who wants a network neutrality law please explain to me how they’re going to word it to avoid preventing such improvements to the Internet. Anyone?

Martin, I laugh at your strawman argument. Who's been buttering your bread lately?

What you are describing can easily be solved through agreements between /endpoints/ in the network, without in any way involving the ISP(s) or invoking network (non)neutrality.

Furthermore you might pick a problem that hasn't already been solved. (Tip: Google coral cache)

Now go away or I will taunt you a second time. :)

Martin,

Interesting idea. Not sure I have any answers; I'm not a pro-regulation guy generally. How would this be different than having my ISP be the bill collector for my porn site membership (for example)? And why must it be the ISP instead of Amazon collecting the "premium" in your example?

Granted the premium would be for popularity, not pretty pictures, but it still seems like more of an accounting issue than a transport or access issue. The ISP wouldn't be restricting access per se, the publisher would.

Frankly I think the NN crowd would be better served lobbying for true competition in the access pipe, then this silliness would all go away by itself.

Oh come on Martin, this example has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. There is no preferential treatment, just reverse payment. Google does something similar with Blogspot. You don't pay them, but they hope you start using adwords or something else.

Have a look at Andrew Odlyzko's paper on net neutrality and preferential treatment on other networks. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/net.neutrality.pdf It goes into why there were networks in the past (canals and railroads that had differentiation for types of goods, but disallowed discrimination between individual producers of the same good.

You're right regulating this will be hard. But are you really happy with Virgin or BT just saying that itunes will have to pay treble the costs of Amazon MP3 because that is how they see the world?

Fact is that currently there is no shortage of bandwidth. Nowhere in the network there is a shortage of bandwidth except at the end-points. In the UK and the US there may be some problems with regards to backhaul, but those are mostly regulatory. There is absolutely no reason to expect a bandwidth shortage any time soon. If there would be a shortage than telegeography wouldn't report dropping prices in long haul prices.

If there is abundance,if there is no shortage, why would we need differentiation.

Good luck,

Rudolf

Martin I'll concede that there is no obvious way to word a law enshrining strict network neutrality that does not run at least some risk of preventing an ISP from innovating. At least in North America however this is a purely hypothetical risk as the ISP market is an effective duopoly of cable and incumbent telcos neither of whom have ever been known to innovate. If there were robust competition one could perhaps count on market forces to ensure that both neutral and "improved" bandwidth were available assuming enough consumer demand but as no such competition exists regulation is required to prevent the destruction of existing real innovations; regulation that yes could interfere with potential telco/cableco innovations. For example in Canada both Rogers (the largest cableco) and Bell (the largest telco) have begun throttling P2P traffic ostensibly to resolve network "congestion" and improve performance for the average user. If congestion were truely the issue would not by the bit pricing be the solution? One wonders whether their respective television subscriber bases are also part of the calculus. In Bell's case they've even throttled wholesalers who otherwise might offer their customers the "inferior" congested service.

Martin,

I agree with Rolf that this is not a particularly good example of Net Neutrality issues.
However, the differentiation is pricing and service levels is an interesting idea. The proposition could include any combination of payment (reverse, ad-funded, subscriber pays, pre-pay, etc).

But different from what Rudolf seems to suggest, this pricing/proposition innovation has nothing to do with either a shortage or abundance of bandwidth capacity. And different pricing between 'procuders of the same good' is an economic fact, typically based on demand, agreements, service levels etc. Martin, suggests that by introducing different tiers of service levels differentiation in pricing/proposition may occur.

BR

Colin

colin,

I don't disagree with the possibility to introduce this new way of paying for access to content that is not available anymore because of slashdotting.

I do however oppose the idea of Network Schmootrality. As I do think that there is serious reason to belief that not keeping the net neutral will seriously degrade the possibilities for countries and companies to compete in the services and content market.

The main argument for Non-network neutrality is about price differentiation being necessary to pay for the network, which in my opinion is a load of you know what :-)

People aren't paying for youtube videos and slashdotted content.

GameRail just went bust

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/GameRail-Closes-Up-Shop-93738

You know who would pay to have their content privileged? Advertisers. The argument you've made here isn't that strong, but your other one, about the advertising-funded Yahoo! broadband for poor people would.

Who would fund it? Perhaps Merck, to tell you their drugs are safe? http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=merck+advertisements

Martin,

Net Neutrality aside, how realistic are these complex reverse payment models in terms of implementation. The idea sounds great, and I could see potentially paying such a premium to get through to overburdened content, but, what is the administrative cost do to the OPEX of the system. Micropayments were supposed to be a savior, but few have them effectively deployed. As a corollary, I look at US healthcare where there are thousands of individual settlement contracts putting a miserable 25% overhead tax on the system. Compare this to Singapore with one payment method and 2% OH.

This may not be the most compelling comparison, however, "technology will wring out the efficiencies" does not pass my sniff test on the complex models.

-Todd

Here’s a regulation/law I want to see enacted.

Any time an IVR announces that your call may be recorded, without giving you any choice in the matter, you are also automatically entitled to record the call without asking.

And not only that, you’re allowed to publish it, too.

Sauce for the goose…

You can! or at least you will be able to once fonolo launches :)

http://wirelessnorth.ca/2008/03/19/fonolo-deep-dialing-is-cool/

Absolutely. Having long ago given up using landlines or mobiles to call such numbers but instead using Skype-Out, I automagically record those calls and respond when they say they are recording that, yes, so am I thereby making the contract. If they use it to improve customer service, I'm perfectly happy to join in that endeavor including publishing it if needs be. Goose=sauce :: Tit=tat

How come we never read about the companies that update the prompts for voicemail? They must be making a mint these days since every system I interact with says "Please listen carefully as our selections have recently changed."

While we're on pet peeves, how about on-hold agents that don't search for an available rep until you have listed to the full cycle of advertisements. i.e. "Did you know that you innovative energy company has devised a way for you can check to see if the power is out by going to our website?"