Andy Abramson

Money For Nothing, VoIP’s Not Free

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Paul Kapustka thinks Vonage may be the winner, in a weird sort of way from the FCC’s decision to implement E-911.

Industry insiders estimate Vonage will have to spend $60 million just to get E-911 up and running and about two million a month to keep E-911 working for their customers.

While Paul thinks this is a victory of sorts and that Vonage will be the winner over the other VoIP providers in the USA.
I politely disagree as the cost and added burn rate to Vonage is a burden they and the other early stage companies all have, which companies like AT&T, Verizon and the cable operators don’t have. If Vonage and the other newcomers have not factored te expenses into their budgets, then their previous multi-billion dollar range valuation are likely to flatten faster than the dot.com bubble.
As a matter of fact all of this and what follows speaks directly to the valuation of VONAGE and other VoIP players who have to either buy or build E-911 capability into their system.

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Skype Share Is Cool

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I love it. I’m listed right below Skype Journal along with the giants like Jeff, Om, Joi Ito (who I knew back in the 80s on line and face to face) and uber a lister Robert Scoble as blogs they read. Check out Skype Share !!! But what’s really cool is how Skype has embraced … Read more

When Redundancy Isn’t Enough for Packet 8

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Even with redundant servers in their network architecture Packet 8 seems over the last few days to have a problem keeping it up, as yesterday alone the Santa Clara company had two outages of the thirty minute variety, on top of an outage outage last week.

Like Vonage has claimed in the past, it was due to a "server" malfunction related to an upgrade. Packet 8 in an email reply to my questions said "upon further investigation, I (we-sic) learned that the recent Packet8 service outages were caused by a server malfunction brought on by a software glitch associated with the feature upgrade we are currently implementing. This problem has been resolved and we are adding new servers to the network tomorrow while also telling me they have redundancy in their network.

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Time To Sell VoIP Companies or How To Spell Consolidation

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Today’s ruling by the FCC about E-911 may spur consolidation within the growing next generation VoIP industry here in the USA for one big reason. Development cost. Solving E-911’s issues aren’t cheap, which is why the cellular industry has danced around it for years. In a blog post, Russell Shaw quotes a former FCC Wireless … Read more

Red Herring on E-911

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The Red Herring yesterday provided an overview on the upcoming E-911 efforts from the FCC. I’m going to reserve judgement and not overly speculate, but I think the FCC is clearly making changing from the days of Powell.

A Dissenting Opinion

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With the FCC here in the USA expected to issue some guidelines about E911 today, I spotted this story on Canada.com that seems to take a dissenting opinion about the CRTC’s direction about VoIP in Canada. It is extremely old line carrier centric and presents a viewpoint that is more about describing what was wrong … Read more

An Eye on Irish VoIP

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I’m guilty of being sometimes to USA centric, and with VON Europe coming out I found this story about the attitudes about VoIP in Ireland from a carriers perspective.