john's blog

Last week, Nectar announced the release of their Virtual Session Border Controller service (vSBC).” Nectar is notable for one of their clients’ phone service success, 1-800-FLOWERS. Based on their "Phone Options", it appears Nectar offers a hosted Avaya IP PBX service on a per seat basis.

While the REFER request has been around since RFC 3515 (April 2003), the details on how to actually implement call transfer have been somewhat grey. In practice, this has lead to less than stellar interoperations between vendors' phones. For example, Polycom phones have a "semi-attended transfer" implementation, enabled by default, that isn’t supported by phones from other manufacturers.

I occasionally get questioned about our choice to run our own network and servers when we could outsource it all to a "cloud" provider like Amazon and thus save a lot of money while simultaneously improving the reliability of our service. I hate this question because it is loaded, and I know they are not likely to understand why we can't run on a cloud service no matter how patiently I try to explain the technical issues.

I was sad to hear today that Tanta, a blogger at the finance and economics blog Calculated Risk, passed away. For me, the world will always divided into pre-Tanta and post-Tanta. She will forever mark a change in my reading habits. Outside of my narrow professional field, traditional media and journalism had always made up my primary source of information when trying to make sense of current events in the world around me.

While a true story, the following contains what may very well be a bad idea...

I have an external 250 GB hard drive that, as of a few days ago, would not spin up. Upon power up, it would make an short buzzing sound following by, click, click, click, click, click and so on. I tried disconnecting and reconnected it a few dozen times with different cables, different ports, different power supply. No luck.

I don't currently have an official home office, but I've had an office phone at home for years now. This home office phone mirrors the phone on my desk at work. Both phones are registered as a contact for my SIP address so they both receive all my calls an otherwise behave exactly the same - all very easy to do with OnSIP Hosted PBX, but that's another story. A few weeks ago I swapped out my home office phone for an Aastra 57i CT which comes with this nice little cordless handset that syncs with the main station.

The upgrades are going well and we expect to be done around 2pm EST. Thank you for your consideration.

We are currently doing some network upgrades to add additional capacity to our core routers. While we don't expect any issues with 99% of calls during this period, it is possible that some customers may experience short term interruptions to some in progress calls. Thanks for your consideration.

I spent the good part of a couple of days last week helping track down packet loss at the edge of a PSTN carrier's IP network. They were dropping 1-5 packets out of every 10000 due to an incorrectly configured port on a gigabit ethernet switch. Now 0.05% packet loss doesn't seem like a lot, but at the end of the day it really depends on the phone you are using. If you are using a Polycom phone, you will likely never notice it. If you are using a Grandstream GXP-2000, the experience may be almost unbearable.

On and off over the last couple of years, as Skype, YouTube, and more recently Facebook got tagged with silly sums, I've been having the occasional flashback to bubble-land circa 1999. The hype, the parties, and that good old frothy feeling. Ah, the memories.