Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Wireless Networked Music

This afternoon I was working away in my home office, making phone calls and generally trying to be productive. I had the doors shut, and was as hermetically sealed in my office as I could be.  It wasn’t enough.  The stereo, unfortunately, is in the living room, right outside my office door. On the other side of the house we have a sunroom, which Janice has converted to a small studio, where she spends a good part of each day working on a series of pastels that she’s had in mind for a while. And you know artists… well, the music was blasting, and despite the fact that my doors were closed, it was nearly impossible to have a telephone conversation. 

It’s her birthday tomorrow, and I have solved the problem with a Creative Labs Wireless Media Source unit.  This little ditty (and it is little!) takes MP3 or WMA streams wirelessly from your network, decodes them, and sends them to any amplified speakers you want.  The entire control UI is encapsulated in a small LCD display on the remote control.  You can choose playlists, shuffle, repeat, genre, and a bunch of other ways to play the music. 

I configured it this evening, and installed it in her studio after she went to bed.  I’ll give her the remote in the morning, along with the latest Diana Krall recording.

Russian Roulette for the Voice Industry

A couple of beautiful posts here.  In Mr. Blogs: Two phones that pass in the night, he writes:

All we need is a way for phones to find each other and to be smart enough to perform the lookups and carry out the call. That’s not hard. Skype shows one way, and it’s great that they prove the end-to-end concept, but Skype is a closed proprietary system. We have standards that already exist for doing this. SIP and ENUM is all you need and these are well established published and open Internet standards.

He’s exactly right. Skype is a peer-to-peer architecture, which enables point-to-point calls.  The peer part of the Skype architecture is used to manage their directory, and proxy calls through firewalls.  SIP is also a peer-to-peer architecture, and it relies on SIP proxy and registrar servers to work.  There is no magic.

The post that set Mr. Blog to writing was Martin Geddes Copper vs Copper in Telepocalypse.  Martin writes:

The correct price for point-to-point voice service is zero. There is no such thing as the market for VoIP calls. Its a mirage. The cost structure is lower than (zero marginal cost) email.

What’s most interesting following his post are all the comments, including the concluding comment from VoIPWatch Magazine’s Andy Abramson, who writes:

The business model for VoIP providers is not based on on net calls, as that’s gravy. The models are based on termination to PSTN or Mobile carriers networks and on services.

In other words, as VoIP providers succeed, they will obsolete themselves.  Today’s carriers will become big fat dumb pipes, with value added network services like unified messaging, web hosting, and conferencing as their revenue sources.

Where were these guys when I needed them?

I have spent the last three days battling with IP phones, and getting them to punch through firewalls from SMC and Linksys.  What I needed was the DrayTek VoIP Router. Here’s a picture of the configuration it’s designed to enable.

Cool!

TheFeature :: The Wi-Fi Positioning System. Quarterscope is using WiFi triangulation to determine your location.

Nextone on Softswitches

Interesting piece.  The assertion being made is that softswitches aren’t up to the task of controlling the network.  Something called a Core Session Controller is the answer, according to the folks at Nextone. I’m not sure their proposed model is any different from other carrier models, though.  At the end of the day, what happens when intelligence moves all the way to the edge?

Carriers Must Reasses Roles of Softswitches and Session Controllers (Converge! Network Digest). Packet-based technology â cheaper to own and operate on a call basis â is fundamentally reshaping the carrier model. Today, voice-over-Internet Protocol (<b>VoIP</b>) carriers are smaller and more nimble than traditional voice carriers.