Graves On SOHO VoIP

Timothy B. Lee over at Ars technica has an excellent piece on a pilot project going on in Ottawa, Ontario. A neighborhood is getting fiber installed to their homes at their own expense. Once that’s in place any ISP that wants to sell into that area will simply access a central facility to link to the homes in question. The homeowner owns the famously troublesome last mile. It completely bypasses the ILEC and CableCo.

My reactions to this are many. I certainly hope that the project is successful. Ottawa, while unbearably cold in winter, is a serious high-tech town at heart. I wish someone were that adventurous in the US.

With installation costs per home in the $1000 to $2700 range I don’t mind telling you that I’d jump on this in a heartbeat. It’d be like getting FiOS, but owning the last hop yourself.

In the US I doubt our backward thinking ILECs and CableCos will even notice. I see nothing that suggests they are interested in new ways of approaching the market, even if it could leapfrog them into new opportunities. All they want to do is protect their monopoly positions and find new ways to charge ever more for the same old level of service.

No, this kind of NewThink takes a fresh perspective. Let me state unequivocally, if you build it I will pay.

After several months of thinking about it I finally got around to recording a screencast tutorial about setting up the traffic shaping feature in m0n0wall to accommodate VOIP traffic. Phillip Cooper’s series of screencasts were the inspiration for this. In going though his work (thank you!) it occurred to me that  documenting the settings that allow my VOIP systems might be useful to others.

I have a new (ish) Comcast cable modem service here in my office, which gave me a testbed to setup another router and go through the setup process from scratch.

The finished screencast is not online yet. I’ve passed it to the m0n0wall project leads for comment & revision before making it public. It should be available in the next few days.

Well it certainly was a pity that today’s VOIP Users Conference call didn’t happen. Randulo, our host, was just about to start the call when he lost IP connectivity with the world. As such he lost control of the Talkshoe conference bridge. People could call in, but he could not unmute anyone.

Judging from irc channel and the Talkshoe web app there were a number of people trying to be on the call. However, the conference bridge kept us all muted. Too bad.

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Over at www.broadbandreports.com a VOIP forum member has noted an interesting problem. When he suffered a power outage he also lost his cable modem service. This despite the fact that he dutifully provided a UPS solution to keep his network gear running. We can infer that the CableCo doesn’t provide similar UPS capability in the local cabinets serving his area.

This is in stark contrast to Telco’s, who historically provide continuous service through power outages. They have put huge effort into achieving 99.999% uptime, and continuous power is a major consideration.

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Holy C%&^@. Does the broadband in this hotel ever suck!!!! Seriously, I’d be better off with a 56k modem and trying to dialup my Covad access. This week I’m staying in Austin TX at the Candlewood Suites, which is an extended stay portion of the Holiday Inn empire. At $119 a night its not dirt cheap, and they promote the free broadband as a major feature. It’s wired too, which is normally better than free wireless.

However, it’s provided through an outfit called SuperClick. They suck. I spent 30 minutes on the phone to them this evening just because their captive portal arrangement was so slow that it never offered me a login page.

Their tech support was operated out of Montreal, which is nice…I love Montreal…IMHO its one of the greatest cities to visit in North America.

Je suis Canadien, j’adore Montréal. New Orleans as well.

But even after they got me logged in the service was barely functional. For some insane reason they backhaul everything to a location in Atlanta. Any web service that makes an effort to guess my location by IP thinks that I’m in Georgia.

Maybe this will be the motivation for me to sign up for an EVDO service, or perhaps WiMax eventually. Since T-Mobile is finally rolling out its 3G network maybe I can tie a new wireless broadband service into my cell account. I spend enough days on the road that lack of functional broadband causes serious frustration.

Do you hear that Mr Holiday Inn? I will not be staying here again. I’ll be at the new Hyatt Place or Marriott down the way. G’night.

You really need to see this. It’s Walt giving a presentation outlining trends in TV viewing on PCs vs home theater and the sorry state of the broadband reality in North America. I don’t always agree with Walt, but he has this completely nailed. He very lucid and well spoken on the matter. He also highlights AppleTV & Tivo as well as the pending (60 days) availability of a 3G iPhone.

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Jared Valentine has posted an interesting description of a system he developed for automatically manipulating QoS & bandwidth allocation to support the use of VOIP over his DSL service. He calls this “Application Aware Triggered QoS.”

He described his initial problem as being trouble with inbound bandwidth management. This is something that I’ve never experienced myself. My trouble was always related to limited outbound bandwidth.

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So this week the Bush Administration published a report on US Broadband Policy and extolled how well its working. Curious given that members of the FCC have reported that they don’t think we actually have one. Ars Technica has the coverage.

As I’ve written before, my broadband options have not changed a bit in over ten years. Oh, the price goes up for decent service, and there’s dirt cheap DSL for marginal service. The providers are arrogant, lazy companies milking consumers while trying to minimize what we actually use so that they can avoid infrastructure investment and maximize their profits du jour.

Time-Warner is trying a new pricing scheme involving bandwidth caps in Beaumont, TX. Comcast is traffic shaping p2p activity. AT&T believes in spending to buy other telcos, but built U-Verse on the principle of not spending on infrastructure if at all possible. (The exploding DSLAMs in neighborhoods are really neat though!)

Verizon may have their problems too, but at least they made the investment in technology to deliver real fiber-to-the-home. It’s a longer term view that will serve them, and the country, well over time.

The administration is deluded. But that’s not exactly news…is it?

Something needs to change, and change BIG! We need a federal regulator with some backbone to ensure that the general public good is served as well as the corporate shareholders.