Level 3 Communications Blog
Once upon a time, back in the days when Level 3 was deploying its North American nomadic E-911 network for VoIP, I was often struck by the complexity of the task. Thousands of Public Safety Answering points served by hundreds of Selective Routers using SS7 or CAS DS-0 “trunks” which had to meet a disparate [...]
Driving 75 MPH up the Rocky Mountains, it does not take me long to pass that Winnebago doing 40. You know the one. Car and bicycles in tow. Satellite dish on the roof. Older couple up-front, jovially chatting while staring into the horizon, hot cocoa mug in hand. Suddenly, I feel a touch of jealousy [...]
They say you learn everything you need to know in kindergarten. I have a confession to make: I never attended. As a result, I never learned the secret handshake or whatever else it is you kindergarten grads pick-up at those hallowed halls. Word has it that amongst these valuable life-skills, kindergarteners learn that sharing is [...]
Kodak’s bankruptcy got me thinking: In these final years of circuit-switched telephone service, are there some lessons we can learn from the world of film? What lessons can the world of photography hold for telephony? If you think about it, plain old telephone service (POTS as we acronym-obsessed telecom folk call it) is not all that [...]
With 2012 quickly approaching, I figured I’d dust-off the old crystal ball and make a few predictions regarding the world of voice telephony over the coming year. 1. Mayan long-count calendar will be re-set to 2018 To the dismay of the hoards who had anticipated the final day next year (as preliminarily predicted by the Maya), [...]
Romance languages (Italian, French, Rumanian, Catalan and over thirty others) are somewhat similar. They all derive from Latin and this common origin means knowing one gives you a leg-up in learning another (or so they claim). Over the past month, I’ve been putting this hypothesis to the test, and while it would have been really [...]
As Carolyn was talking about, this year the call to CIOs at Gartner IT Expo is stronger and more urgent: “You have to do more then keep the lights on!” IT can no longer be just the people that give us the goodies like iPads and load the latest Windows patches. IT needs to help [...]
The battle cry (or marketing pitch) of the Unified Communications charge typically goes something like this: “UC increases productivity (trust me), just let SIP Trunking savings fund the business case (productivity is an upside)”. Platform providers, systems integrators and carriers with low cannibalization exposure are all making similar claims. It seems everyone has an online ROI [...]
Last weekend, I helped a dear friend change a flat tire. Ninety five degree weather and a half-hour of fumbling to find the hoist shaft (which releases the spare from under the vehicle) conspired to turn a minor inconvenience into a major event. While I contemplated the irony (had this been my car it would [...]
One of my wife and my favorite hobbies is to look at new homes. We always find it fun to see what the latest design trends are and how quickly the features in new homes seem to improve. One of the downsides is the inevitable comparisons that we make to our existing home. After touring [...]
