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Archive for the ‘reliability’ tag
Sick of obtaining low numbers of useless visitors for your website?
Just Say “NO” To Used CAT 5 Cables.
When my little girl went from being a benign, unmoving lump of sleeping, drooling baby to a terroristic unplugging, biting, chewing, eating, swallowing, gagging, breaking, pulling, tugging beast of a toddler, my home decor changed. When we moved into our excessive 4 bed / 2.5 bath home in 2007, we had dreams. We had a guest room, and a Disney room, and my home office taking up about 25% of the under A/C space. When the beast began terrorizing our home, we retreated into a fallback position and isolated her to the safest room in the house, my former office. I was relegated to Read the rest of this entry »
Cellular Service in the Movies
Dan York wrote a fantastic post today over at Disruptive Technology…
Humorous video – in how many movies is the “No Signal” theme over-used?
Its Friday, so here’s a bit of humor… I admit that I had not really paid attention to how incredibly over-used the “my cellphone has no signal” theme has been in recent movies until I saw this video. Keep watching, though, because after the “no signal” theme, it does go into other amusingly over-used themes like dropping mobile phones in water, ripping them apart, burning them, etc…
Kudos to someone named Rich Juzwiak for apparently editing together pieces of 66 movies!Posted from: http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2009/09/humorous-video—in-how-many-movies-is-the-no-signal-theme-over-used.html
Cloud Security Not Air Tight

How's the view up there?
Cloud Computing, the buzz phrase that won’t go away, attracts new users daily. The most common “cloud” approach uses resources, accessible through the public internet, as a service. Although this computing approach provides (generally) much higher rates of reliability and lower rollout cost, an organization looking to the cloud may find some grey skies on the security forecast.
Besides unknown physical access concerns to your data (as well as not truly knowing who can access your “system”), the main security risk resides with the end user. Take for example Twitter. For the third time this year, someone accessed sensitive corporate documents via an employee email account. If a password can be guessed, cracked, or obtained, chances are your security just became a little foggy (ok, no more cloud puns).
Storing sensitive information in the cloud (including your web accessible email accounts) seems to be the 2009 equivalent of leaving your briefcase on the front seat of your car parked in a very open driveway. The AP recently posted an article on the Twitter reference, and it’s not a bad read. Read the rest of this entry »
VoIP and the Residential Phone Bill

Residential VoIP - No Operators
Some say the media sensationalizes our economic woes for their personal gain. Others say the media accurately portrays the extreme financial burdens we find ourselves facing. And some people say, “Hey. I don’t care about anything, I always have and always will try to save money.” With today’s world becoming increasingly digital, VoIP (digital telephone) seems like a naturally good idea.
Clearly, we at VoIP Tech Chat advocate VoIP. We love it. We love it so much, we made a website called VoIP Tech Chat. And we actually now and then have chats and write articles on VoIP (ok, that last part was a little sarcastically since both Patrick and Fred seem to have been too busy to actually talk or write lately… but anyway…).
Read the rest of this entry »
Phone Geeks Unite – The Asterisk S-Prize Awaits
Digium’s John Todd announced an amazing little contest — The Asterisk S-Prize. Asterisk, the open source VoIP telephony software from Digium, finds itself in small / medium businesses routinely. But more and more, large businesses and enterprises are switching to Asterisk to fulfill their telecommunication needs. With this in mind, Digium announces the S-Prize — geared at designing a single system capable of processing 10,000 call legs.
Here’s the information, directly from the source: Read the rest of this entry »
Level3 Outage Leaves Room For Speculation

What? Where?
On Sunday December 29th, Level3 Communications, one of the largest IP transit networks in North America and Europe, suffered an outage affecting sites such as ESPN, Amazon, and CNN. Noticeable missing from Level3? Any official acknowledgment or discussion of the incident; and an outage that disrupts ESPN on a Sunday will definitely be noticed.
When one of the largest internet backbones shows trouble, there are two ways to handle the situation (after fixing the issue of course). The first would be what we here call the “Duck and Cover” method (sometimes referred to as the Vinnie Barbarino approach). In this method, the company either makes no mention of the incident or does a classic Vinnie impersonation… such as:
Concerned User: I think there’s an outage.
Level3: What? Where?
Concerned User: I think there’s a problem with the network.
Level3: I’m So Confused.
(mugs to the camera and audience goes crazy)
VoIP Carrier VoicePulse Suffers Outages, Uses Twitter
VoicePulse, a New Jersey based VoIP Provider for residential and business consumers, experienced outages early starting Monday morning. Although the VoicePulse website is down, the company reported via their Twitter account at 10:30am EST:
VoicePulse is currently experiencing a partial service outage due to a generator explosion at one of our NYC datacenters.
SSA VoIP News
Thomas Hughes, CIO of the Social Security Administration (SSA), gave a nice interview to Nick Walkerman of Washington Technology. The interview provided some insight into the VoIP deployment of the SSA.
For more on the deployment, check out our VoIP Tech Chat article.
Non-breaking VoIP News
About a month ago, Fierce VoIP reported on VoIP quality testing conducted by Keynote Systems. The results proved quite interesting.
Keynote determined (based on testing providers such as Packet8, Vonage, Verizon VoiceWing, Lingo, etc.) that most VoIP users can expect “merely tolerable” telephone service when compared to an at&t POTS line.
One of the VoIP providers tested failed to achieve any calls with an MOS score of 4.0 or better (ouch).
Why did Voip Tech Chat wait more than a month to post this news? Patrick and Fred were too busy talking about Lifelock and Ben Affleck movies.
Oh, and Asterisk Voip News posted that a cool new IP Phone with a huge video screen is coming soon.
