Mindless Fluffiness » VoIP

Sad tail of 911, VoIP, and death of Elijah Luck

fluffy — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:13:45 +0000

There has been plenty of coverage of the death of Elijah Luck in Calgary. The short version is that when the family dialed 911, but the address that Comwave who provided the VoIP phone service had on file was out of date as the family had moved. Comwave had an updated billing address but did not have an updated address for the location of the phone. Emergency response could not be routed in to Elijah in an acceptable time and Elijah later died.

Sure sucks that updating where to send the bill was a higher priority than keeping people alive.

Probe of tragedy raises further questions – The Globe and Mail

Canada’s 9-1-1 emergency – The Globe and Mail

Regulator blames Net phone provider in fatal 911 mix-up – The Globe and Mail

Internet phone company sounds 911 alarm – The Globe and Mail

911 tragedy in Calgary reveals perils of VoIP – The Globe and Mail

Open SigComp

fluffy — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:05:25 +0000

Estacado is going to release an Open Source SigComp stack – this is an technique used for compression of SIP messages. It’s good to see this happen – most the stuff needed to build very complex SIP applications is available in open source but this is the first SigComp stack and they are pretty complicated to write.

You can find it at:

Open SigComp

Forbes and Open Source PBX

fluffy — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 18:42:24 +0000

Oddly I had quite a bit more to say about open source but it seem the author of the article “Dial D for Disruption” in Forbes, 04.10.06 http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0410/063.html?partner=yahoomag was less interested in that I think the articles is of the view that it is best not consider that telephones and networks are one of the things that the telecom industry sells. If you ignore the telephones and other end user communication devices, and all the things that connect them together regardless of if they are packet or circuit switched, well then call control looks important.

Dan explains SRTP keying while I drink coffee

fluffy — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 15:49:39 +0000

http://www.blueboxpodcast.com/2006/04/blue_box_podcas.html

Dan’s slides are at:

http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06mar/slides/raiarea-1/sld1.htm

http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/06mar/slides/raiarea-1/raiarea-1.ppt

SMS 911 and Die

fluffy — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 13:26:55 +0000

There is a wonderful dumb moment in E911 as point 26 in Business 2.0′s dumbest moments in tech – February 1, 2006 where they quote Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skpe as saying

“If there’s a burglar in my home, maybe I send an e-mail or a text message to the police instead of making a call.”

Now I suspect that Niklas many have been trying to say that in some situations it would be nice to have alternative ways to contact a PSAP and I would agree but we will always want voice as one way, and mostly likely the primary way, to contact a PSAP?

SIP Identity, the really compressed version

fluffy — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:02:20 +0000

Francois Audet and I are now famous being quoted alongside such people as Paul Mockapetris. Ok, I won’t let it go to my head but you can find the worlds most compressed explanation of SIP Identity at:

ComputerWeekly.com

UBC Award

fluffy — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:16:03 +0000

Outstanding Young Alumnus Award – UBC Alumni Association

PSTN, down again

fluffy — Sun, 29 May 2005 17:26:24 +0000

My PSTN phone line has been down since about 10
am this morning. Bizarre thing is that 1) is still how power on the line, just
no dial tone 2) DSL is still up. I did try dialing 911, it did not work. Six
months ago or so it was down for several days.

Update – got fixed and working again
Tuesday evening – downtime was about 56 hours.

If we estimate the MTBF at 5000 hours
and the MTTR at 50 hours, we get a availability of about 99%. I would be
embarrassed if my IP Phone was this flakey.

New SIP audio/video/IM client

fluffy — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 01:25:08 +0000

Just playing with href="http://www.ineen.com/"
target="NewWindow">http://www.ineen.com/ it looks like it might be
nice – and it seems to run on my mac.

BlackBerry 7270 – SIP + WiFi

fluffy — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 18:18:51 +0000

Got to play with a href="http://www.rim.net/news/press/2004/pr-18_10_2004-02.shtml"
target="NewWindow">7270 the other day. It has 802.11 and a SIP
phones. Quite nice. Only has voice – no SIP based IM or presence yet.

P2P SIP

fluffy — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:49:36 +0000

Just did a draft on P2P SIP with David – it is
at

target="NewWindow">http://www.p2psip.org/

More on ringback tones, localization, and privacy

fluffy — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:43:37 +0000

The article href="http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3423008"
target="NewWindow">“Your Cheating Phone” from Dec 2, 2004 Economist
points out that Hong Kong businessmen did not leave their phones on when they
went to sleazy Macau because the ringback tone revealed their location and their
location revealed what they were doing. Once Macau changed to have the same
ringback tone as Hong Kong, roaming revenues soared.

What do you use?

fluffy — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 04:09:43 +0000

News reel at
11
href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/0034259&tid=215&tid=95&tid=1"
target="NewWindow">http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/0034259&tid=215&tid=95&tid=1

Remind me again the difference from
stored IM and email