Previously we had pointed out that the Telcos can take care of their own. They have a revenue stream (well used to, it is getting a little frayed), that is mostly never ending. The resource is finite but better than what anyone else has. So why do they want to do this to their more lesser mortal peers? —

In the dead of night, just before the latest draft of the Stevens bill came out, a helpful Telco lobbyist inserted a little provision to stack the deck in the case of judicial review. Section 1004 of the Stevens draft now places exclusive jurisdiction for all decisions by the FCC in the D.C. Circuit. This includes not just network neutrality, but media ownership, CALEA, wireless issues, anything.

Why would anyone do that you ask? Because the D.C. Cir. is, without doubt, the most activist court in the land when it comes to pressing its vision of media and telecom policy. More than any other court, the D.C. Cir. can be credited with destroying hope of telecom competition in the United States by perpetually reversing and remanding the FCC’s efforts at rulemaking and enforcement until the FCC finally gave up and effectively deregulated. The D.C. Cir. is also responsible for vacating (eliminating by judicial fiat) the rule preventing cable companies from owning television stations where they have cable systems, and overturning much of the FCC’s cable and broadcast ownership limits. Finally, through the legal doctrine known as “standing”, the D.C. Crcuit has done its best to make it impossible for regular people to challenge FCC decisions or bring individual cases on antitrust grounds.

Source: WetMachine

Why? Well to make it more costly to litigate telecom policy. So if you are a small coop outside to Duluth and are being destroyed by some arcane rule your choice would be under this suggestion having to hire a high priced heavy weight from Georgetown.

There is something else that bothers me about this that has nothing to do with Telecom. Consistency. In the history of this country we have applied the mindset that one tries a case in the jurisdiction of either the defendant or the place where the infraction occurred. Even at appellate, you remand to the closest circuit district from which the original case issued. And NOW we are going to turn this on its ear? The system as envisioned has worked reasonably well, there is no need to change it at this late date.

This provision needs to be removed. Verizon can afford to get on a damn airplane like anybody else.

In this case its Verizon again. The name of the game is a Titanic shuffle of their data rate plan. May sound like small potatoes till you see the hurdle before you as a customer –

First, the details: Verizon has introduced a new data tier at $9.99 per month with a 25MB cap—this is the cheapest data plan now offered by the company and by most US wireless carriers, and applies to all 3G devices. Why does this equate to “upping” the data charges? Because the company is ditching its $19.99 per month plan with a 75MB cap altogether—you must either go with the $9.99 plan for a third of the data or or the $29.99 smartphone plan that applies to WinMo, Android, or BlackBerry devices.

This in a sense is a variant of the give the lantern away but charge for the oil dearly. Only this is charge minimally for low oil but if you want to use the lamp every night you has to pay!

Why can’t stuff be simple? Just charge .001¢ per kilobyte and be done with it. Equitable, quick and customers can check their bills quickly. But then that would not justify the marketees salary would it?

Linky.

As is give the Telco monopoly a run for their money in the voice only space. Today, Google officially announced that they acquired Gizmo5 the internet smart phone service for ~$30m. –

It’s a potent recipe — take Gizmo5’s open standards-based online calling system. Add to it the new ability to route calls on Google’s massive network of cheap fiber. Toss in Google Voice’s free phone number, which will ring your mobile phone, your home phone and your Gizmo5 client on your laptop.


Meanwhile you can use Gizmo5 to make ultracheap outgoing calls to domestic and international phone numbers, and free calls to Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo and AIM users. You could make and receive calls that bypass the per-minute billing on your smartphone.

Then layer on deluxe phone services like free SMS, voicemail transcription, customized call routing, free conference calls and voicemails sent as recordings to your e-mail account, and you have a phone service that competes with Skype, landlines and the internet telephone offerings from Vonage and cable companies.

That’s not just pie in-the-sky dreaming.

Google could pull it off. Combined with their existing Google Voice offering, a GV-Gizmo5 combo might give the Telcos the heebes. Like how about a serious integrated message stack? Its been implemented for years as a per supplier proprietary service. But till now, as an open available anywhere service? Just hasn’t happened. But Google has the tools/network/talent to pull it off. Oh and they have the customer base to go from nothing to the most dominant intgrated message stack on the planet.

Bank on it.

Linky.

Above all, though, Weigman is still a teenager. While he expresses remorse over his swatting attacks, he takes giddy pleasure in recounting his other exploits — whether punking celebrities or playing the phone companies like an Xbox. “The phone system and infrastructure is just weak,” he says. “I had access to the entire AT&T and Verizon networks at times. I could have shut down an entire area.” Then he segues into an earnest pitch for a future job. “I’d love to work for a phone company, just doing what I do legally,” he says. “It’s not about power. I know the phone and telecommunication systems and can be a crucial part of any company.”

This is one graph out of a very interesting phreaking story here. Most that read this board probably know what a phreak is — someone who manipulates the PSTN network for fun. Please do read the whole thing, its interesting.

But the sobering side shows just how vulnerable our telecommunications on PSTN is at two levels. A) That it can be socially engineered around. B) That the infrastructure itself is very naive.

The latter first. Back in the 60’s two things happened. The Bells figured out how to design a computer that could operate like the old mechanical stepper CO switches without all the support issues. The second was the development of FSK keying better know to the public as touchtone. Both developments design at a time when shall we say the world that America operated in was one of innocence. The thoughts were, why would anybody muck with the phone systems? Its dull boring stuff that even those in the companies found only peripherally interesting. It never occurred to anyone that Bell could represent a ‘respectable’ challenge to manipulate.

Consider touchtone® its basically a two tone modulated signaling system. Barely a step up from Morse code. Its weak link is that it is in the human audio range. From a security perspective probably the worst set of choices one could make. Tones can be recorded. Tones can be generated to overcome the system (a blue box.) Compared to systems to day, its a security nightmare.

Then there are the companies themselves. For years, even while I was there, if you were ‘in the Bell loop’ you were a trusted entity. The companies are vast and diverse. If you work there you live on the phone, conduct most business via long distance and for the most part rarely if ever physically meet the people you interoperate with on a daily basis. It worked quite well so long as parties worked on the knowledge that their peers could be trusted. And why not? You were an employee!

That breaks down when outsiders can mimic the technobabble that is used in the industry. Even though employees are trained to spot interlopers, a 10% failure rate in that regard opens a large bundle of opportunity. Security training is required yearly at most Telcos. They still do it. But here is the interesting thing. To my knowledge none of them have implemented the simplest of measures for providing secure lines for fraud, security, and collection departments. Its one of the prime reasons that phreaking works.

Still sound droll, even with a possible threat of a swatting attack going wrong? Well then think about this before you go to bed tonight — What could Weigman have done had he been hired by terrorists?

Significant numbers of cell phone users have been moving to lower cost prepaid plans pushing revenue per subscriber down for the wireless cartel. The Telcos have relied on over priced and quota limited mobile data to pick up the slack in keeping stratospheric profit margins in place.  The cable guys may be getting ready to upset the apple cart as thier own revenues from pay TV are beginning to decline.

Comcast is offering two combo plans: a metro service that combines home broadband and WiMAX mobile broadband for $49.99 for 12 months (after which the price jumps to $72.95), and a nationwide service that combines cable broadband with WiMAX and Sprint’s 3G network for $69.99 for the first year (it then jumps to $92.95). Clearwire, which Comcast has an investment in, is providing the WiMAX service. Considering that Sprint charges people $60 a month for mobile broadband and Comcast charges about $42 a month for its lowest tier, this second option is a great deal for the first year, and still offers savings over the long term. Think of the fast WiMAX speeds for local mobile broadband as a nice bonus. (GigaOM)

BT is bringing call centre jobs back to Blighty from India.

The move was revealed in an answer to a shareholder at BT’s annual general meeting yesterday.

Ian Livingstone, chief executive at the telco, was asked, to huge applause, when he would close the firm’s Indian call centres.

In response he said he would move about 2,000 jobs back to Blighty. The telco employs about 5,500 customer service staff in India and could eventually shift as many as 2,750, back to the UK.

Looks like as the global economy teeters the outsourcing price shift is occurring too. Outsourcing to India was very favorable when MBA’s could be had for $4/hr. Well those days are over. Couple that with changing tax rules, concerns about IP security and cultural differences, if you can’t work out a 33% disparity then it is probably not worth the move.

So what is to happen long term? Call center and mid management functions will probably come back to the host countries. Specialized skills will probably remain where they are. Engineers familiar with FPGA has almost become an Indian specialty not many in the US know how to program them.

The wheel turns again.

Linky.

In the world of FOSS FSF has a track record of not losing. That track record stays intact with their only case to go to court. Upon getting their it appears Cisco had an epiphany of the first order –

The question we asked in January about whether Cisco would make it to court against a Free Software Foundation (FSF) GPL violation suit has been answered.

The answer was no.

The settlement announced Wednesday is everything open source could have wished. Cisco will ride herd on its Linksys subsidiary, where these violations have been taking place, it will notify customers of their rights, it will release the relevant source code, and it will make an unspecified “contribution” to the FSF.

A blog post on the settlement emphasized that compliance, not cash, was and remains the FSF’s goal in these suits.

This was the first time the FSF went to court over a GPL violation, the blog post noted, adding:

When the violator admits that there’s been a mistake and demonstrates they want to fix it, we take it as a sign that we can cooperative productively, instead of an opportunity to pounce.

“We’re not out to wreck businesses or make lots of money. We just want compliance,” the post concluded.

For Cisco this means something more than they (thru the Linksys sub) just goofed. It also means that there will be a flood of knockoffs coming both at the software level but at the hardware level as well. So to a point, the bottom is falling out of pricepoints for the consumer grade market at Linksys. All a geek has to know is that the outside of the box says “MRT54G” compatible and the rest is history.

There is one other aspect to this that is significant as well. Cisco as a company is in many ways like Google. They let you peek, but they don’t really give away the deep secrets. Been operating that way for years. So the question has to be asked how much of their enterprise grade equipment is also using FOSS software? That too will be exposed.

Can you imagine ‘Tomato’ on a Cisco 7301 router?

Linky.

A 13yo teenager has racked up 14k+ text messages for the month on an AT&T bill. The saving grace was the parents had a $30 unlimited text plan. Thank goodness –

It works out to 484 text messages a day, or one every two minutes of every waking hour.

“Then I thought maybe AT&T made some mistake on the bill,” said Hardesty, of Silverado Canyon.

The reporter for the Orange County Register grilled his daughter on her texting habit - by text message, of course.

“Who are you texting, anyway? Your entire school?” he asked.

“Well, a lot of my friends have unlimited texting. I just text them pretty much all the time,” she explained.

She messages a core of “four obsessive texters” - all girls between the ages of 12 and 13 - on her LG phone.

Reina had a karaoke birthday party, and while other people were singing, she was texting her best friend sitting right next to her.

This is a case of insufficient parental supervision. Not only that but if the teen is texting every 2 minutes what the heck. She is doing it during school too? How are her grades and is she a nuisance in class?

Answer — Find–something–else–to–do!

Linky.

Google has foisted a name change on the old GrandCentral service that they bought several years ago but did nothing with. Oh and still have done nothing with. Don’t even bother going there unless you already have a GrandCentral account. They have not opened up the service yet to other users –

Google Voice is the name of the updated version of GrandCentral that runs on Google’s infrastructure. At this time, the service is only available in the US to the existing GrandCentral users, but Google promises to extend its availability soon. The good news is that GrandCentral will continue to be free and you’ll only have to pay for international calls.

“Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones — a phone number that is tied to you, not to a device or a location. Use Google Voice to simplify the way you use phones, make using voicemail as easy as email, customize your callers’ experience, and more. Google Voice isn’t a phone service, but it lets you manage all of your phones. Google Voice works with mobile phones, desk phones, work phones, and VoIP lines. There’s nothing to download, upload, or install, and you don’t have to make or take calls using a computer,” explains the new help center.

Google Voice Blog mentions that the service added many new features: “voicemail transcription, SMS support, conference calling, GOOG-411 integration, low cost international calling”. Voicemails are now searchable, you can embed them in a web page and you can receive email notifications. Text messages sent to your Google number are automatically forwarded to your mobile phone and they are also available in the web account, where you can reply to the incoming messages.

Sounds nice, but I can’t use it yet.

Linky.

We covered the change in Verizon T&C here. Well there is more. It seems it is a big mystery as to how to do it online. Fact some subscribers could not even get to a link, having been blocked out.

Well there are detailed particulars at the Boing-Boing site here. Or you can call an 800 number — 800-922-0204. Either way, exercise your right to privacy.