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.

Yahoo is upgrading Yahoo Messenger,

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Yahoo is upgrading Yahoo Messenger, by making a move into VoIP and expanding their feature set, making for a more robust and more simplified offering for people who do a lot of things with one another online.

Sort of.

Rather than go out and offer full telephone like capabilities and thus encroach into the territory of their two important partners in the DSL biz here in the USA (SBC and Verizon) Yahoo is taking an approach of let’s be the most feature rich online Voice Messenger tool that conforms with accepted standards that can more easily integrate with other already existing service providers by using SIP at the core of the application, without going the way of Skype Out or Skype In.

Basically Yahoo wants to deliver the most robust online only messenger product and hopes to leapfrog AOL’s AIM and MSN’s Messenger offerings. They plan on doing that by integrating a really neat photo sharing component, adding voice mail and blogging tools as well as simplifying some things in an almost Disney or Apple like way.

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Microsoft Partners With Sprint

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Years ago Microsoft and Qualcomm created a venture called Wireless Knowledge, sometime within the first year the venture sort of went sideways and the two slowly separated a lot quieter than they announced the marriage.

Now I see some of what the claims from back then of what the venture was to do making the light of day, only this time Microsoft is at it with a Qualcomm partner in Sprint, but without the kings of CDMA.

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Wireless Broadband From the Sky

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Tom Keating, back from his Disney adventures has a post about an interesting Satellite delivered broadband service. If it works, I wonder what the cost will be. Like Tom, I’d enjoy trying it out. Looking over the provider’s web site, it seems their technology is battle tested. I just wonder how much R&D went into … Read more