Level 3 Communications Blog
Resistance to change is natural. We all have that yearning for the familiar and distrust of the unknown. The changes we resist are a function of our beliefs, knowledge andassumptions. What we resist (and how strongly) often varies based on our level of familiarity with the subject of the change. I am reminded of a [...]
Try using the words Telephony (i.e. voice services) and Innovation in the same sentence and you’re bound to get some strange looks. This de-facto oxymoron is the byproduct of the industry’s focus on other areas mixed with the notion voice services have been around for over a century (so what could possibly be new under [...]
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 [...]
Ok so maybe I won’t qualify for the 86th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee next year. This year’s winner Snigdha Nandipati won by correctly spelling ‘guetapens’. Seriously, guetapens? Where did they come up with that one? Not that I’m afraid of the occasional obscure term. At my house when we play Scrabble, words like Ethernet, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In a previous blog post I talked about the role of the network in supporting cloud applications. In that message, I touched upon Saas desktop productivity software and some options for pairing the network and the application for optimal performance. Further proof of the growing need to match your cloud services with the correct network technology [...]
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 [...]
