avery's blog

If there's one thing that a VC can get behind, it's the idea of the virgin market. Being the first entrant into a sea of untapped, not-yet-tapped consumers gives the possibility of actually owning a whole market. Be the first with the new widget and everyone's catching up with you, fighting for your marketshare and feeding off the scraps you left behind.

There's an old business axiom that fits this model: "Those that lead, bleed".

As someone who has been in the thick of the enhanced voice world for well over a decade, it's funny that as much as things change, things really stay the same. Sure, we've made major shifts in infrastructure by beginning the migration from TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing, better known as the common phone network) to VoIP, but these infrastructure changes haven't really shown a significant benefit to business end users aside from cost reduction.

As we are constantly working to prevent issues like the no-audio condition that some of our customers experienced last week, I realized that it might be a good idea to take a minute and explain a bit about how the phone networks work in general, and how they interconnect with Junction Networks.

It's been a while since you've seen any real commentary here on the Junction Networks blog. It's not because we don't have anything to say - but our conference season runs from mid August (SpeechTek) through September (IT Expo) and into early October (VON) and that means that we've been spending lots of time on the road, preparing for briefings, etc.

This morning, we performed a number of small maintenance updates and upgrades on our system. There was no system interruption during the upgrade.

Starting at 14:00 EDT 8/14/07, one of our primary upstream providers of inbound telephone numbers started experiencing issues, and at approximately 14:30 - we stopped receiving inbound calls into the network.

As of 15:45, we are starting to receive calls again.

A full explanation will be posted as soon as it is made available.

As I mentioned in the inaugural post on this blog, we're getting very close to the release of onSIP, the next generation of our Hosted PBX offering. We're still a few weeks away from screenshots, but we wanted to at least share something. So, without further ado, here is the new onSIP logo!

Questions? Comments? Leave a comment or discuss it on the forums!

Well, it seems that conspiracy theorists are running around like mad putting up rumors that TeleBlend, one of the two SunRocket named "preferred providers" alongside Packet8 is really just SunRocket (or ex-SunRocket employees) poaching back their customers.

Now, I love a good conspiracy theory as much as anybody, but I don't think that there's anything that nefarious at play.

The theory seems to be based on three specific facts:

The MyTeleBlend.com domain was just registered on 7/18
The MyTeleBlend.com website has an appaling lack of information about their true identity

Over a week after its dramatic implosion, Sherwood Partners, one of the firms handling the wind-down of SunRocket, has done the right thing for its (ex-) customers by facilitating the transfer of accounts to a preferred provider.

TeleBlend, a small CLEC, has purchased "key assets" which will allow SunRocket refugees a simple migration over to TeleBlend services. What it looks like is that TeleBlend has purchased is the following:

The SunRocket Boot Servers, or at least the DNS entries for the SunRocket Boot Servers.

This afternoon, we changed our internal SIP addresses from the @junction.onsip.com domain over to the @junctionnetworks.com domain - so our email addresses and our SIP addresses are synchronized.

Cool, isn't it?

This did cause a 20 minute outage to the Junction Networks internal lines while we migrated our accounts over and re-configured our phones. If you called between 2:15 and 2:35 Eastern Time and got a busy signal, or if you called and nobody picked up the sales/support line, that's the culprit.