Cost is pretty much no object: the potential gains in brand and business development are entirely unrepeatable. Their marketing & promotion strategy is fairly web-centric, and arguably the single best TV spot outcome one could hope for is direction to a rich information portal. The web, like no other medium, offers this for a comparably diminutive cost.

Not only do you get higher conversion rates than you would if a phone number were displayed, but you can also stem the inflow of enquiries to a more manageable rate than television would otherwise generate. This week I’m rapidly developing a new website for them, but also aiming to implement a new VoIP mechanism to effectively manage the anticipated telephone traffic surge. This is for a small business with no employees sitting at a desk 9–5 ready to take calls: they require a particularly agile strategy to appropriately leverage this media opportunity.

At the end of the day, the content of the actual television spot is relatively insignificant. If it converts to web traffic, it’s done its job. The web (and, in particular, telephone contact and subsequent relationships) is the crucial component in this marketing mix. It provides a way to appear as big as TV with finite resource constraints. Operating on such a limited time scale, we can’t throw money at this project fast enough to make it succeed: the limitation is in human resourcing and man-hours, rather than provisioning additional technology to achieve optimum capacity.

This client can respond to close-timeframe business opportunities in days, not months, chiefly through judicious application of Internet-based technologies (and a tremendously concentrated amount of hard work!)

• I need to build a caffiene tolerance. Last night became 3am before I realised (but I did get lots done, so it’s not all bad)
• O-week-day sucked. Hardly any corporate types handing out free crap this year. Not that I’m one of those acquisitive types, oh no. :|
• Went to a UNSW English lecture — just for kicks — and stuck my hand up to answer a question — again, just for kicks. It’s one thing to randomly rock up to lectures at another uni, and another thing altogether to actively partake in them. Good times. It’s kinda like the agony that was ENGL1005 only with tacit acknowledgement that it is, in fact, well within the realm of linguistics. It was a cross-listed english/lingustics course-coded course, and they’re focusing on systemic functional linguistics instead of pure functional grammar — the NCELTR/Butt UFG text was sitting on the lecturer’s desk, but she didn’t mention it.
  Which is, in my mind, probably more sensible. The lecturer clearly delineated that there are, in fact, two different disciplines at work in that course which can serve to complement each other, unlike in ENGL1005 at USyd where everything just got heaped into a mass grave and students were left to sort out the bones. The UNSW course is more like a well organised, air-conditioned morgue. (I jest, though feel that more than any other subject thus far, 1005 nearly killed me).
• UNSW have a nice relaxed library lawn at lunch. It’s like the front of the quad only more intimate & shady & with added live music… though that might just be them sucking in first-years in the opening weeks.
• I was not the only UNSW imposter today, which was at once strange, amusing, and scary.
• I am not a good songwriter and revel in sharing that general ineptitude in an amusing way. It is fun having someone around who can play the guitar well, even when they sing worse than you do.
• WordPress 2.1’s front-page-as-page capabilities are abysmally over-rated. Or, at least, I abysmally over-rated them when the feature was announced. There’s a reason it was a point-release addition, methinks. I’m using a mixture of post-chronology and the usual hackery that I tend to get by with. I’m renouncing Semiologic’s front-page-plugin because it’s easier to just hack it up in the templates nicely. I get by.
• I am scared of designers.
• I feel increasingly like a designer as the days go by.
• Everyone is getting business cards printed at a thousand different print shops. I am beginning to think the only thing that differentiates them is turnaround time. Mine takes ten working days. I need them in seven. *fingers crossed*
• I dislike having to wait on people for things with looming deadlines.
• I am looking for an excuse to complain about a certain website’s hosting so I can campaign to get it moved somewhere I trust (and not in a conflict-of-interest type way, for I wouldn’t touch running hosting for it with a barge pole)/with a better track record of reliability
• I signed up for a Voice over IP service with DID without really knowing why. Something to do with redirection and giving a mobile a landline number without incurring ridiculous bills in these dark post-Orange days. And no, 3 have nothing to offer me.
• A certain Pharaoh got very seriously pwned in the exodus of the Jewish nation from Egypt in the Bible. Everyone (yes, including the other people of the Egyptian nation) saw it coming, including himself: “Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the LORD your God, and against you. Now therefore, forgive my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the LORD your God only to remove this death from me.” So he [Moses] went out from Pharaoh and pleaded with the LORD.” — he pleads hastily, and begs to be forgiven only this one time. I think this is like people praying in extreme circumstances today — they don’t necessarily know anything about God, and just turn to him as a very last resort. But as soon as he’s forgiven (in this case, he wanted to be forgiven because locusts had just eaten every single plant in the entire country, and “the land was darkened” there were so many of them) his heart is hardened and he refuses to release the people of Israel from slavery.
• I am feeling particularly un-on-top-of-things at the minute, and anticipate this may get worse once uni starts up again. I’ve been working stupidly lots this week to try and get in front but it’s like trying to climb out of quicksand (hint: the best trick is not to move). Well, maybe not moving would be a bad thing, but even so. I’m only doing 3 subjects and hoping that’ll be beneficial in balancing various commitments.
• I am too excited about freelance things. They are the subsistence farming of web & creative employment. And pouring everything into a job is the subsistence farming of life… it’s never going to be quite enough. I am trying hard not to fall into that trap but can’t resist it by my will alone.
• My sleeping patterns need to be beaten back into submission. Last year I was more regular in holidays than any time uni was on, but this year I’ve been working from home so that means I’m free to work caffiene-powered 13-hour days if the need should arise. Less of this would be more healthy.
• As would joining uni gym and eating less pizza. I really have no idea where to start, though.
• I am going to bed 3 hours later than I had planned to.

*files under “everything”*

Everyone always points at Telstra. Customers don’t care whose fault it is — they’re paying whomever to provide a reliable service, not Telstra. Upstream contracts/networks are someone elses’ responsibility altogether!

It’s pretty abysmal that it takes three days to get Internet servicing more than 100 people working again… Sigh.

I’m here at home on perfectly functional Internet, but the things I’ve needed to do the last few days have involved the project website which has been equally unavailable. If I were a full time employee I’d have been paid for two days of doing nothing this week… why don’t people take redundancy a bit more seriously?!

It also may or may not be diplomatic for me to whinge about the corporate VoIP service they’re using at this point… it’s still working (presumably a separate link altogether), but it sounds like a really bad pre-DECT-era cordless telephone service, and that’s when your ears aren’t being blasted by the sounds of a modem as you dial in.

Grumble grumble. I might delete this post later if I think better of it… for the minute, suffice to say Josh is in a pretty bad mood about quality of service he’s meant to be depending upon. I learnt last week that I don’t have the freedom to negotiate service contracts (yes, even where none expressly providing that kind of service yet exist — think mobiles…) which made me a little upset (because I thought I’d done really well talking with a certain vendor who will remain nameless), but saw the point of it all. But when reliability gets this bad, for an all-online venture, I am afraid to entrust hosting to that kind of environment. You can get really good hosting in Oz for way under $300/month (and even less if you’re prepared to commit to contracts, because that’s the way most Aussie providers do things) — not necessarily myth-of-the-nines hosting (SegPub are one hosting company with a really good rep, but they only do a 99.5% SLA), but waaay better than three days of downtime in a month.

In case you were wondering, that works out to about 90% availability per annum. And it’s not necessarily going to flake out at times no-one is using it, and, given the demographic, it’s not an office-hours-only kind of service. And I wouldn’t be looking at alternate service providers because…?

(Yeah I’ll probably pull this article soon… just wanted to whine.)

Yet, increasingly, our surfing habits are defined by this bizarre social concept that seems to be shaping certainly acquisitions and web-two-point-oh-bubblism, wherein websites serve users by connecting them with one another, not on the basis of them knowing what they wanted, but rather in a bizarre a priori manner whereby degrees-of-separation (MySpace) or user-supplied-already-knowns (LiveJournal, Xanga, etc.) define connectedness and displayed content.

Search is no longer the macro-inter killer app, but an intra-site facility applied to microcosm — often based on “transparent” technology that has, on the basis of known knowns (in the words of a certain Rumsfeld), already done some of the hard work for users (I should say people, but don’t out of habit: it is an industry hazard) without actually asking them anything. This is where location– and organisation-based matching (cf. MySpace, Facebook, etc.) come in.

But none of this data is intelligently searchable by generic engines.

None of this data (in the case of Myspace especially, horribly marked-up doing-everything-wrong-with-the-web technically entity that it is) is available for indexing by search engines because it’s not abiding by any defined semantics. There is not, for example, any overwhelming use of microformats — hCard, etc. — for defining contact details in any common sense. Yet these things are searchable within a given website.

And, what’s more, these things are searchable with great precision within (social networking) sites. This is because of a very well defined internal semantic (not the “semantic web”, but internal data structures) and an enforced obedience to these structures that was never a part of pre-SocNet sites.

SocNet platforms are radically different from web 1.0 systems in that they are (ironically) vastly more constricting. As “web 1.0″ I would cite Geocities and free web hosting services, portals, and all-things-to-all-people content networks. Now, we’ve got blogs (precisely defined websites), MySpace (chiefly SocNet profiles with bits on the fringes common to the users, and now with enough impetus to appear unstoppable), Flickr (free — and fee-for-service that people actually pay for — web hosting, precisely defined as photo hosting), and, strangely, a portal (Yahoo!) still on top of Alexa 500 rankings. A portal that owns both Flickr and Geocities, but has changed the model of the latter to place greater emphasis on fee-for-service hosting. But I digress into strategy — the point is not that, but rather in the way social data is stored.

Flickr is meta-data rich. It uses a well defined system based on EXIF, intrinsic semantics (title, description, tags — tags that get used properly, unlike Facebook which doesn’t bother to make such things clear — I want Facebook to flop, by the way, because it annoys me, so don’t expect nice things to be said about it. It’s a poor closed-system imitator, albeit with a stupidly effective advertising model everyone else should be wishing they came up with first but haven’t seen in order to copy… because it’s a closed system (or used to be) exclusive in scope. Which makes it very effective SocNet/Web 2.0, by my own definition, so I don’t really have a basis for complaint.) and extrinsic semantics (groups, pools, etc.).

Profiles, unlike ‘pure’ SocNet (Myspace, Facebook), permit anonymity, but allow disclosure of as much as is desired: at any rate, that is not the purpose of the site. Myspace/Facebook’s raison d’etre is profiles. (Well, and that and cash-cow-marketing-tool of the *R**IA’s of the world) Accordingly, its profiles have very definite semantics even whilst the rest of the site may not (I speak of Myspace more, here). Myspace gives core “Details” profile info individual fields, whilst allowing a diverse “Interests & Personality” information in freeform textareas that are designed to entice users into participation (and, possibly, aiding more fuzzy searches — but mostly I think it’s just compelling content, as there is no immediately obvious way to search that data).

“Interests & Personality”, along with blog content, seems to be the only freeform contributed material available on the site. Want music or a video with your profile? You’ve got to browse to the band’s site, load the player (no go in Opera with Flash at the minute, it seems), and then select “Add” on the track. They (yeah, it’s kinda big-brotherish) know exactly what song you chose, what band it’s from, what genre, etc. — that is to say, unambiguously and certainly beyond a probably-common song title. This isn’t an upload-yourself-and-we’ll-manage-rights kind of thing. The officiality gives that internal data structure that much more depth: but, again, the point is that the data is internal and not open.

This, it seems, is the defining quality of SocNet. That’s what makes the ideas of open federation advocated by Google Talk earlier this year so bizarre for the rest of us. We don’t particularly care, because closed systems mean innovation (because we can define new data for ourselves to work with) and/or extensibility that isn’t possible in an open platform (if, for example, not all federated partners agree to a spec extension — take, for example, Google Talk’s own Jabber base and proprietary VoIP on top of that). Openness is in Google’s interests, because it’s so dependent on things being open for its core business (search). But real people want services that work, not services that push them to another site. I’ve never trusted sites that bounce me off to Google for their site’s search, even if it’s one of those crappy co-branded things. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you make someone inspect your website from an inferior perspective when all the information is stored in a database, with the possibility of more semantically meaningful search open internally only?

Google won’t deal with your internal search needs. It’s not designed to. It does a great job of dealing with publicly indexed materials completely aside from SocNet services. SocNet sites thrive on and are empowered by strong intrinsic semantics that make clever profile-based (or UGC–based) search possible, which builds loyalty etcetera in a way foreign to informational websites. SocNet is experiential and (surprise surprise) social — it doesn’t have to be about anything.

Content was deposed as king sometime in the middle of the first decade of the twenty first century, and with that regime change his deputy, Search, was also shuffled to a somewhat less prominent position. Somewhere out of sight, Search’s identical twin, Query, is the real power behind the throne: it uses unindexed data and makes clever links to bring people closer together in a way that traditional search engines had never even envisaged.

Orange today informed us that they’ve become 3. High-powered marketing blitz to existing customers of Orange has begun, and is expected to continue in force. This line typifies the level of crap I’ve come to expect 3 (and most other 3G telephony — not data, that’s okay — networks) to spew:

So, on our 3G network, you can enjoy the same great value, plus international roaming, Bluetooth™, picture messaging and more.

Okay. Let’s analyse this a bit. My call rates are going up, even though the volume of users on Hutchinson’s 3G network “is now larger than our CDMA network” (cost/volume should go down, but hasn’t). I could get international roaming with Orange, albeit only in places with CDMA: no-one should ever choose CDMA without being aware at least to some degree how the technology works/is applied globally (if that’s something they care about — I don’t, global roaming is still way too expensive + I don’t go overseas often enough). Bluetooth is the pinnacle of crap in this line, having absolutely nothing to do with the network — unless it’s a provider-supplied phone with Bluetooth disabled because they’re scumbags. I don’t need to elaborate on this point, suffice to say I sincerely hope no-one with any technical knowledge copy-proofed this. Picture messaging is arguably the most useless thing that ever happened to telephony.

As for the other crap HT have spun, I especially love this line from their FAQ:

What happens to my Orange contract?

Your Orange contract will remain valid, however, as a special offer we are allowing a full waiver of all remaining handset instalments when you upgrade to 3G.

Marvellous. Not only am I being forced onto more expensive plans + call rates (call rates matter for where I’d like to take my mobile phone usage patterns — at present, I’m price-conscious to the point of making less calls than I otherwise would, and SMS usage is trivial at 11c to any mobile in Australia. With 3 I get some free SMS, but I’m not at all helped on the call rate front), there’s also absolutely no exit option.

Effectively, HT would love to change my contract so I’m on a volume-economics-powered 3G network on which they have higher margins and I see no real benefits. Get this:

Can I keep my current phone when I upgrade to 3G?

Yes. The phone is yours to keep, however we will not be connecting any new services to Orange and this phone will not work on any other network, including our 3G network. We have developed fantastic upgrade offers that include a free handset within the plan. We are in the process of setting up a recycling program to take all old mobiles.

The phone is mine to keep, but there aren’t any CDMA networks left in Australia (WCDMA is actually nothing to do with CDMA and has no interoperability with it). “Fantastic upgrade offers” refer to marginally reduced SMS costs (which, so far as I can gather, is the most profitable part of non-business-account telephony services in Australia: namely, Orange’s core market. They never made a big impact on the business telco scene, and their flagship product — before they ditched it — was a landline-replacement plan) and increased call costs if I were to choose a plan based on my current usage. “Include a free handset” refers to the ability to get a free phone if I agree to be shunted onto a new contract term. Not terribly likely. In fact, I’m going to see this contract term out, then switch to another telco.

Or maybe not, but I’d certainly like to. Anyone have recommendations for a $35–40 plan, preferably with cap? Yes, even Telstra is an option if the cap is good enough. It’d mean we could get rid of our landline, still have a discount on Internet (two or more Telstra services on one bill), and switch to VoIP. Sure, Telstra are still getting our money but they’re shooting themselves in the foot doing it! I just want the family to get past the “learning curve” of VoIP so they’re hooked on the idea and then we can find a more compelling ISP, pick the cheapest possible landline rate with a non-Telstra provider, and then they’re only getting ULL money from us.

Did I ever mention I hate telcos?

Dependencies, incidentally, were the main reason it didn’t get installed on a Debian system as originally planned. Pacific Internet’s apt repository seems to have been borked the last few days, so there were missing packages and packages in the database but unable to be installed and all other kinds of junk… When it got to the point I couldn’t even get something to install from CPAN because of lower-level dependencies in Perl itself, I kind of gave up and started downloading Asterisk@Home. That was yesterday. I cancelled the download because Pacific was being too slow for my liking (Telstra Cable has spoilt me with downstream), and this morning before heading in I downloaded the distribution from Sourceforge in about 10 minutes. Bad checksum. Downloaded again. Burnt to CD. Still faster than it would have been to download at work. Ah well.

I didn’t get in til 9.30 because I was burning CDs etc, and had a functional system calling between PCs and with voicemail, reception message, etc., by 11.11 (I noted the time, it being a seminal moment in my personal VoIP-using history, even if I did cheat and use a pre-packaged version!). Good stuff.

Also, if you’re going to use Asterisk@Home in Australia, install the OpenVoice IVR prompts and recordings. It’s much better than listening to that American voice which was driving us nuts even whilst testing :P Having said that, you may need to restart the server when changing voice files… ours was doing some weird thing where it seems to have cached the old files in voicemail IVR prompts. The voice would be chiefly Australian, but for a “one” sound. Might’ve been the inflexion (falling “one” or neutral “one” instead of rising “one”), but I didn’t think they had particularly concerned themselves with that when writing most PBX/voicemail systems… could be wrong. Anyway redialing the voicemail extension a few times seemed to help resolve things. Bizarre.

The Asterisk box, to borrow a term (Hi Steve :P), is running with 256MB of RAM — but is sitting perilously close to swap whilst running. It doesn’t help that it leaves two instances of mpg123 running in the background for hold music, as well as vsftpd (seriously, who’d use that on a telephony server? If you need to backup voicemail, write a cron job to copy the files to a remote server. Bingo, no FTP server required! Grr.) and a handful of other crap. Anyway, it’s probably going to get more memory before it moves into production use. There are two Fritz! ISDN cards in it, but they haven’t been set up yet. Anyone seen a site about installing Fritz! cards with Asterisk? All I’ve seen about them is that they need kernel recompilation for chan_capi stuff… and recompiling kernels has never struck me as particularly fun. (The few times I have tried, bootloaders have been unco-operative… i.e. I didn’t know what I was doing!)

I just called Tori in HK for about 30 minutes and it’s like… ~1.5c/minute. That’s 45c, which is nearly as cheap as a local call from a payphone here in Australia. Sure, there’s the cost of a local call to connect to the calling card service — let’s say ~20c, but still… wow. The cheapest VoIP rates here for the same service are still like 5c/minute or thereabouts.

Good stuff!

Also good stuff is the reason I was calling (well, at least part of)… Tori was in the SMH for getting Band 6 in every unit (along with Louis Garrick and Angus Thompson from SACS)!

Dean Jones responded to my Ansearch Answers post with the following:

All in all I feel [the post is] a fair representation of the so called facts, but I stand by my recent email… namely that simply reviewing us on technical issues that most people either

1. wouldn’t have discovered, or;
2. would not likely care about,

is selling your audience short.

I’m inclined to disagree, and just wanted to quickly post to say that. I like to think I understand the ‘audience’ here fairly well. They’re either people with (web-)geek tendencies, and are hence interested in any analysis and criticism I can deliver on the technical aspects of products, etc., or (and this category is completely unrelated to the former) students and humanities-focussed people reading various content I’ve published here — ranging from stage plots to a short story to an essay on the nature and effects of the digital divide.

Most guests in the latter category are just that: guests. They generally discover this content via a search engine, read what they want, and leave. Over 80% of my visitors stick around for one minute or less, presumably because they find what they need quickly, or discover that the content isn’t what they were looking for.

The “regular” audience/participants, however, are not that. I don’t think you’re all geeks, but this blog leans towards that style of content, and you match that accordingly. You don’t come here looking for product recommendations (the one exception to that being someone who viewed my post on Asterisk/VoIP, and asked me what my experiences with it had been some time later: to which I replied, we haven’t bothered, as we moved into a house with a Commander system preinstalled!). You come here, I think, for the quality of writing, for rants, for occasionally insightful (I hope) comment on various facets of things I deem interesting.

This is a blog. This is not a newspaper, though it is possible that search engines, ironically, are changing the clout of this medium to something similar. The distinction between newspaper and blog becomes blurred with posts like the one that inspired this, because of the form it was written in. It is important, however, to remember the audience.

People don’t come here to shop for search engines. We might be interested in how they work, what they do, what the potential benefits and failings of each one is, but ultimately it doesn’t affect anyone’s choice in the real world. Similarly, investors are unlikely to come here, scoping out Ansearch’s offering before buying into parent company Optum. And, if they did, my concluding remarks were positive — I genuinely believe the story balanced out in their favour more than anything else. If I overplayed the significance of a small flaw that could potentially be abused, my apologies. I don’t, however, regret including it in there at all, because I think it’s something my audience is interested in.

As you stated in an earlier email… “I’m not 100% sure as to how one should go about reviewing a search engine.” Here’s a tip. like Google, Yahoo, MSN… we are a business. For us to stay in business we need to generate revenue.

To do this we need to get more people to our SE, to get them to come back more often, and to, through their usage (CPM, CPC etc…) generate revenue.

To achieve this we need to provide a search service that the user finds useful. Given our rapid growth over the past months in UV’s and revenue, I would say we are doing OK.

Unfortunately for Ansearch and anyone else who wants to use this as an advertising space, we don’t particularly care if you’re making money. It’s good to hear they’ve grown: if their evolving product is anything to go by, they deserve it. But metrics such as revenue and Unique Visitors mean little to this audience, even if it’s what investors want to find out all about.

I think this is a fair assessment of this site’s ‘audience’ (the important ‘audience’, for me, being the minority that don’t come through search engines, subscribe by RSS, and come back regularly) — though, as always, your role is not restricted to that. You are participants. In light of this, I’d invite comment and discussion on this post as to your role as you understand it. It’s possible I’ve got this all wrong… but I doubt it.

VoIP (using Skype on Linux) wasn’t playing nice, so we wound up using a PSTN, with the phone at the remote end (remote to me, anyway) hooked into a sound console with three microphones patched in (as well as computer audio, but that doesn’t bear mentioning!) for each participant. Using VNC (I’d have preferred to use MS RDC, but that doesn’t allow multiple simultaneous users on one session), we collaboratively worked on a website design in Photoshop simultaneously from opposite ends of Sydney.

Sure, it helps that one end was a sound studio, and that both ends were using real — as opposed to 256 or 512k “broadband” — broadband… but that just goes to prove even more firmly how much technology rocks!

Aside from that, various content management systems were out in force — including one or two that apparently haven’t caught onto the semantic web yet. Most notably, one was demoing their CMS on a massive plasma screen with blatantly obvious character encoding errors everywhere (you know, characters displaying as black diamonds with question marks). I quizzed one of them about it and he basically said that it was something to do with their not demoing it on a live site. Bull.

If you can’t get that sort of stuff right at a trade show, when you’re trying to sell products, what are the chances of actually being able to deliver?

Another provider, Netcat.biz, seemed to have the right idea in terms of sematics at least in their presentation at CeBIT, but a quick check of their own website reveals a lack of a DOCTYPE, despite their use of CSS for presentation and a not-too-horrible (or relatively easy to patch up) markup situation.

There’s still clearly a market for truly accessible content management, although I doubt many business customers would actually know the difference. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of it, and possibly why neither of these two companies (there were other CMS exhibitors, but those two stood out as most ‘impressive’, regardless as to the quality of their solution) have bothered to develop such a product.

Sigh.

Whilst I’m on a bit of a rant, the exhibition had a blatantly sexist culture happening. ATI and Sapphire were probably the worst offenders, employing lycra bodysuits to attract attention, but they were by no means the only ones. Short skirts were the norm for many female salespeople at the event — one has to wonder when the IT industry is going to grow up.

In all, however, the event was impressive — signage and event displays were wonderfully over-the-top, exhibitors, for the most part, knew what they were talking about, and free coffee abounded!

So, awareness/interest catalysts are there. I’d looked/heard about the Asterisk software some time ago, but sort of wrote it off as not quite worth the effort. More recently, however, we’ve been trying to get general ICT stuff sorted for the new place of residence, in a way that’ll let us cut costs a little.

Context: We’re a household of six, and about that many functional computers (give or take two depending on whatever) at any one time. We’ve got three mobiles (the siblings don’t, yet), and had one landline (there are two lines where I’m staying, one listed, one not — but that’s only temporary so it doesn’t count), which was used for voice and data. We’d had HFC TV/data cable run into our house previously, but didn’t use it for either CATV or Internet.

So Dad’s wanting to figure out a way to get rid of the landline, or at least cut the costs of having it there, seeing we’re going to be using Telstra Cable (and therefore don’t need the copper). Unlike the other major telco here in Australia, Optus, Telstra don’t run telephony over HFC even if it’s installed at the premises — most likely as a business decision (they’ve already made considerable outlay in installing and maintaining a copper network, which they’re going to try and make people think they continue to need for as long as humanly possible — they get line rental, LSS, DSLAM port fees and (from some customers) ADSL revenue all off the same single service!)

Dad’s idea: Use capped local call costs with mobile telephony provider, Orange, to eliminate need for copper. The limitation? Maximum 10 minute calls before we need to redial/pay standard rates, and inability to use data/fax (well, okay, not complete inability… but sufficiently difficult). Yeah, there are caps with other providers like Vodafone and 3, but even $59 caps would be more/about the same than/as we’d otherwise spend.

Josh’s idea: True VoIP (not softphone) hardware solution, with (at least one) DID line, running over HFC Internet. Dad had suggested VoIP previously, but I think I’d kind of assumed he was talking about doing it on the cheap (so, crappy desktop calling software — something like FireFly, which is fine just for fun, but not if you’re actually using it to make calls regularly) — and basically said “no” outright. Essentially this solution would either involve dedicated hardware or an Asterisk server connected to an Internet Telephony Provider IAX.

All this is fine. It’s all making sense. It’s just that there are waaaaaay too many new TLAs for my comfort — I’ve made an effort to use acronym markup on most new terms in this post, but it really needs a glossary at the end! If I can be bothered, I’ll do that when this post finishes…

Basically, everything is perfectly normal thus far. There’s no really difficult concepts to grasp — it’s just “plug in a Grandstream ATA, hit the web interface, sign up for an account with a provider and start making and receiving calls”. But you know, that’d be boring. That’d really suck. Why? Well, when you’ve got Cat5 coming out of your ears between rooms, you may as well use it.

Asterisk will manage calling, call routing, call waiting, voicemail, DND, hold music, diverts, CID and everything else under the sun. Even if there’s only one DID number, it’s still possible to have multiple incoming lines per number for a nominal fee (with ATP it’s $AU5.50 per month inc. GST), and there’s no limit (bandwidth aside) to the number of simultaneous outgoing calls that are possible (although, according to Dave, who is also on Telstra cable, things start to get painful above 4 calls). The easiest way to use phones with Asterisk is with VoIP SIP telephony devices, which plug into standard RJ45 network sockets and connect directly to the server using data. Why not do this? Well, for one, you lose all the functionality of any analogue telephony equipment you might have lying around.

So how do you get this kind of equipment to work? This is where the more confusing and difficult to remember acronyms (at least for me) set in. Asterisk can interface with standard PSTN lines, functioning as a non-VoIP PBX system with the requisite hardware installed — namely, FXS and FXO modules. Standard analogue equipment (phones, fax machines, etc.) plugs into FXS ports on the PBX, whilst PSTN lines connect into FXO ports. Digium, principle sponsor of the Asterisk project, have a great explanation of the relationship between the Asterisk PBX and FXS/FXO modules, complete with diagrams.

We’ve only really got one analogue phone worth keeping, which is a Uniden cordless thing with two handsets (base station and separate charger for the second handset), and that’s what I’d interface via an FXS to the PBX, as well as a second FXS for a fax machine. I’m a tad uncertain as to how well fax data will work over VoIP, but that’s a question for the FaktorTel support team when it comes to actually signing up for stuff.

There is only one other hesitation surrounding VoIP, and that’s the issue of emergency calling (“000” in Australia, “911” for US… I don’t know about the rest of the world, sorry). If there’s a power failure or the Internet goes out, how do we make calls to the outside world in the event of an emergency? Well, logic prevails — in a household with three mobiles on two different networks (three if you’re counting roaming), chances are that at least one of them will be working fine in the event of an emergency… and if they’re not, then the telephony networks in Australia are probably so stuffed that even if we were calling over a PSTN line, it’d probably not work either!

So there’s an essay about VoIP for you. And what I sort of want to do with it. I haven’t forgotten about the acronyms, by the way: here’s a list of terms for you…

Glossary

ADSL

Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line

ATA

Analogue Telephone Adapter

CATV

Cable TV

CID

Caller Identification

DID

Direct In-Dial

DND

Do-Not-Disturb, the ability to disable ringing on a certain phone/line

DSLAM

Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer

FXO

Foreign Exchange Office, a port into which PSTN lines are connected.

FXS

Foreign Exchange Station, a port into which handsets and analogue equipment is connected

HFC

Hybrid Fibre (over) Coaxial

IAX

Inter-Asterisk Exchange

ICT

Information and Communication Technology

LSS

Line Spectrum Sharing, service required to run telephony and ADSL over the same copper

PABX

Private Automatic Branch eXchange

PBX

Private Branch eXchange, generally a contraction of “PABX”, as manually switched exchanges are related to dinosaurs.

POTS

Plain Old Telephone System, also PSTN

PSTN

Public Switched Telephone Network

SIP

Session Initiation Protocol, an IETF standard protocol for initiating connections for interactive platforms, including VoIP

SSH

Secure SHell

VoIP

Voice over I.P. (“Internet Protocol”)

If you’ve already got Skype installed, you can skype me.

Later: Josh has calmed down, and commences writing a rant about the issue. The long turnaround is because I was out last night/this morning, not because I took that long to calm down. Still annoyed, though…

I read with some amusement, mere minutes after receiving a phone call from Freetel, a post on Slashdot entitled “Spam Over Internet Telephony (SPIT) to Come?”, which points to an article by NewScientist, “Move over spam, make way for “spit””. The scenario detailed in this article is one which I’m yet to experience in that form, as a by-product of my failure to yet adopt VoIP telephony solutions, however this kind of marketing is hardly new.

Do you want to discuss the cost-saving benefits of this over conventional telemarketing schemes? I’m sure that data is far cheaper in this day and age than the ridiculous “circuit-switched” (and you have to wonder how much of it is, anymore) pricing schemes of the telco organisations around the world. Not in dispute. I’m also (fairly) sure that in most of the world, it’s cheaper to have a computer sitting there making phone calls, rather than a person. Additionally, you’re just as likely to hit people sufficiently impulsive and/or stupid enough to buy your product. Don’t believe me? A study released earlier this year revealed that unsolicited bulk email actually WAS effective, simply because the returns only had to be minimal to cover the even more minimal cost. People spam, people do telemarketing — There, case for VoIP marketing.

And what about a combination of the two technologies? We all know frogs go… I mean… we all know that VoIP takeup in this continent at least leaves a fair bit to be desired, so far as extensive telemarketing potential audiences are concerned. And that said, those who have adopted here are most likely those who wouldn’t respond so well to telemarketing anyway — indeed, telemarketing may have been one of the reasons behind their moving away from conventional telephony services, so they can use VoIP gateways to automatically screen callers based on CID information, and other things… I’m not going to go too geeky at this point, but it’s been discussed at length in the past.

So, there’s no market worth touching in VoIP marketing in Australia as yet. That doesn’t mean EvilBusinesses™ can’t capitalise on the cost-cutting benefits of using computers to make phone calls, instead of people. Qovia, an Internet Appliance/VoIP monitoring equipment provider, has developed a system to send out 1,000 calls every five seconds, according to this CNET News article. And they’re the good guys. (So, they’re not selling that tech to anyone… big deal. Think conceptually, that’s far more important.)

There is a perfectly legitimate application of this technology, of course. My local library uses an automated calling system to notify and remind members of overdue books, which is excellent. I’m sure that this could be applied in many other spheres, too — not the least of which is any sizeable consultation business, specifically thinking of those in the medical field. Administration times could be cut, if calls were automatically made to say “Good [time of day], [name]. [Business name] is calling to remind you of your appointment tomorrow, [date], at [time]. If you believe this time is incorrect, contact us on [callback], or press [key number] to speak to an operator.”

That’s a concept, of course, but one which could be very easily and readily implemented (heck, for all I know, it probably has been)… the point stands, there are “good” applications for this technology, which I wouldn’t object to at all. That said, Freetel aren’t applying this in a “good” manner.

I don’t know if they’re using a VoIP/POTS gateway, or what. More to the point, I don’t care. I’m vaguely curious, but only because I have a vague ambition of doing something to break it. Technically, if I were really interested, there are people I can speak to about how this stuff works… besides, Google has most of the answers, anyway.

A company with whom I have had no previous association or foreknowledge of, Freetel, called my landline telephone number (ADSL line) yesterday afternoon. I don’t recall the exact details of the call, so to avoid accusations of libel at a later time, the following version of events is that to the best of my recollection. I say this, because it was impossible for me to record the call in a more definite manner, by means of recording device, or manual transcription, seeing I wasn’t expecting a phone call of this nature. So if you wish to sue, please, make my day. I haven’t got money for lawyers, but meh. Oh, I’m sorry, I published content of a questionable nature on my personal website, visited by close friends and a few others. If it makes you feel any better, I would have probably slandered your company’s good name to them in other personal correspondence by the time you read this message. All good? Excellent. Continuing.

Upon answering the phone, the manner and ambient noise (or lack thereof) distinguished the caller instantly as a recording. So that was stupid. The voice-actor responsible performed poorly, and the post-work on the recording was equally unimpressive; both should be shot. First suspicious element? I think one of the earliest words spoken was “congratulations”. I had, apparently, been selected as one of one-hundred (that number I recall with clarity) lucky people in “my area” (what they define “my area” as remains unclarified… I tend to think “my area” may have been the one-hundred numbers immediately above and below my own, but this is speculation) to receive this amazing offer of FREE phone calls! Wow!

You have no idea how stoked I am at this point. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited by a telemarketer. Now, maybe I’m just lucky, but I don’t think I’ve ever been hit with a telemarketing call which sounded this genuinely dodgy. For example, I’ve never been offered a free set of steak-knives, or anything else for that matter, whilst on the phone. Possibly something extra for no additional cost, but certainly not just outright “free”. So that was stupid. The copy for this recording was poorly prepared, and the copy writer responsible should be shot.

I’m holding the phone, still, although shaking somewhat. I’ve realised, this is the first electronic phone-spam I’ve ever received — far from being a historic moment, I’m furious. This is not an experience I’d like to become commonplace, as I hold the telephony medium in some esteem for its’ direct, peer-to-peer nature, in which instant feedback is possible. I’m reading a book at the minute, entitled “Alphabet to Email”, by Naomi S. Baron, a Professor of Linguistics at American University. In it, she has a chapter entitled “Why the Jury’s Still Out on Email”, which begins with two quotations, reading

It might help to consider the [email] message as a written verbal communication rather than real writing.¹

[Computer conferencing is like] writing letters which are mailed over the telephone.²

^1. Shapiro and Anderson 1985:21
^2. Jim Girard, quoted in Spitzer 1986:19

I’d disagree. I think that approaching an electronic medium such as email in that manner restricts it, and isn’t true to the significant differences the medium holds to others — telephony being the pertinent example here. The inside-cover recto page of this book contains an expanded blurb. Get this:

Many children who seldom spoke to their parents at home now communicate with them through email.

Bang? At any rate, there are significant differences between the two mediums, and, as far as I’m concerned, neither of them encroaches on the space of the other. Telephony provides potential for immediate feedback (at least, in the conventional approach taken to it), whilst email permits time for greater consideration and response. The likening of email to “written verbal communication” is the result of narrow-minded people who have adapted to, rather than grown with, technology, failing to view it as being directly analogous with another medium, and thus drawing loose similarities in bold lines, to make themselves more comforable with a “different” media form. No, I haven’t got a degree in this stuff. Yes, I want one. In this instance, however, I like to think that I’m right, and they’re confused. This isn’t Wagner’s mixed-up world of magnificently combined multimedia — I’m sorry. Mediums are separate, and that’s how they’ll remain in some instances. They don’t have to be “the same” as what came before, not even similar. Think outside the square.

Yes, outside the square. That’s what these computer-powered telemarketers seem to be doing — applying a medium proven effective by mass application, rather than relative effectiveness, and (theoretically) benefiting from it.

Well, I’m sorry. That doesn’t appeal to me. You know what? If your product will filter out voice-spam calls, then I’m happy. I’ll buy it… if it displays value for money compared to what I’ve got already. Oh, yeah, and if your initial contact isn’t so dodgy that I wouldn’t consider following it up to purchase. And if you think you do anti-evil-call filtering, then wake up — you’re not Qovia (who, incidentally, have already filed for patent on this one), so get over yourselves. Meanwhile, I’ll just sit here, white-faced and shaking, every time I receive a phone call from a computer. But, you know what makes all of this worse? The system behind it was evidently poorly developed, even from a user perspective. A few kilometers up this rather lengthy blog post, I discussed the potential of this technology for appointment reminders, using customisable elements as part of a voice-call macro.

Ideally, Freetel would have utilised a similar method, such that when the phone number was skimmed from a database (presumably from White Pages/Telstra/Sensis’ directory on CD, or similar), the name was also recorded. Hence, it would be possible to initiate the call with “Good [time of day], [gender title] [last name]. I am calling from a telemarketing sc… erm… Freetel” — note that not even a time-greeting was included.

The reason I’m commenting on this at all is not simply because I believe it’d make the system more personable, but because they’ve failed so miserably at making any attempt to do so. Example? Okay. The first stage of the recording concludes, and the user is given a single prompt. Yes, that’s right. It’s perfectly linear — there is no alternative, but to hang up; something that people may do at any time of their own volition even without prompting — and yet the user is still presented with a “choice”. The prompt goes something like “Press 1 to find out how to take advantage of this amazing offer.”, and then a recording gives a message. From a usability point, this is stupid. This has been discussed (on Web Standards Group, amongst other places) more than a few times with people who deal with human/machine interaction systems, and the conclusion we always seem to wind up at is that programmers don’t give users enough credit, in most instances. This doesn’t mean don’t code systems without usability in mind, but it does mean you needn’t put in extra pointless steps to “explain” things to users. So, the human interaction specialists should be shot.

After this message, the user is told to leave their name and phone number after the tone. In hindsight, I wish I’d left a longer message — I said something along the lines of “Hi, I’m the person you just called. Go jump.” Now, regardless as to the call cost, I was tying up a POTS line somewhere… that’s one less other call they could be making at that time. I was sufficiently abusive, I think, but in retrospect I’m wishing I had left my name and website address… as it stands, I’m going to have to now chase them up, find contact numbers, and then point them in the direction of this post. If you’re reading this, hi guys… you should be shot.

Oh. My. Goodness.  That’s cheaper than my current plan, and better geared towards my bandwidth usage patterns!

And, at only $3 a GB if I go over, it doesn’t matter either way (well, not much).

Ahhh!!  Dilema!!!  iiNet are just on the brink of announcing more DSLAM rollouts, with semi-unlimited upload speeds… I guess I’ll wait for that list to be unveiled before trying to make any further decisions on this one.

What exists in Sydney in the way of consumer (i.e. not business) VoIP gateway services?  And can you use fax over VoIP?  I’m so ready to ditch the phone line and go over this entirely:  currently, we’re paying $25 for line rental, and $60 for ADSL a month.  I don’t know what we’re paying in calls, but it’d be enough.

This would be $0 in line rental, $45 for internet access, and some amount of telephony costs — if nothing else, we’d save massively interstate/long distance and international.  Even if voice usage consumed large-ish amounts of bandwidth, I can’t see it using more than a GB per month (so, add $3 to telephony costs) — that’s based on the fact that if I stream a 192kbps stream for 8 and a half hours, it only uses about 900MB — and it’s safe to presume that VoIP won’t be anywhere near that sort of quality!

Meh, can’t think about it now… still got this stupid assessment unfinished, must keep working.  More to post, but that actually requires thought, not just techno-babble, so it will come in a while…

EDIT: More has been posted, and backdated to when it actually SHOULD have appeared.  See article 106, “A feast for sore eyes” for more!