Network and Telecom Strategies Blog

Pandemic communications on telephone & cellular

Posted by: Eric Siegel

If you're planning on using the telephone system (PSTN, "POTS") or the cellular telephone system during an emergency or a pandemic, you may have some problems with congestion and lack of dial tone. This will probably be much worse for cellular than for the PSTN.

Also, the telephone system and cellular systems in residential areas are sized for residential traffic patterns; they may not have the capacity necessary when people are confined to their homes during a pandemic. There will be a high number of social calls during the day, and there will also be an unusual number of business calls. Plus, as recommended in my earlier blog about pandemic access, there may be an unusually high number of modem calls that tie up lines for hours.

If you absolutely need to ensure that your critical PSTN and cellular calls can circumvent congestion, you should investigate the U.S. Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) and Wireless Priority Service (WPS). These are available to commercial users that are crucial to national welfare; examples are financial institutions, food distributors, energy companies, transportation companies, and hospitals.

GETS users receive a calling card with a special access number and PIN. GETS calls are given emergency access and priority processing in the PSTN, with enhanced routing, exemption from any congestion control, and priority treatment at any queues. (They cannot interrupt ["preempt"] existing calls to seize circuits, however.) The charges are only 7 or 10 cents per minute.

WPS users dial a special code on their cellphones. Costs are a few dollars a month for the WPS service.

To investigate your eligibility for these services, go to the GETS and WPS websites:

http://gets.ncs.gov/

http://wps.ncs.gov/

Other nations may have similar services for the PSTN and for cellular; emergency services and telecommunications providers can furnish information.

The Latest Communications Link Failure

Posted by: Eric Siegel

OK, yesterday there was a major disruption of the communications links in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ten fiber optic cables, belonging to AT&T and to Sprint, were cut at four separate locations by saboteurs. (See, for example, The San Francisco Chronicle, "Sabotage attacks knock out phone service" August 10, 2009,and The Mercury News, "Phone service fully restored; AT&T offers 100K reward" August 10, 2009)

All Hell broke loose; telephones were down, ATMs stopped working; 911 calls went nowhere.

There were the usual articles talking about how this should "remind" everyone about link failures, et cetera, and about how everyone was so surprised at this.

There really shouldn't be any surprise. THIS is a major reason for having a truly remote data center! In any geographic area, there are only a few paths for communications links. They're typically next to railroads or other utilities that have a long, narrow right-of-way. It's just too difficult to negotiate with hundreds of landowners for a new right-of-way for hundreds of miles. The result is that most communications links, even from different carriers, end up in the same manholes and tunnels. (Remember the July 2001 CSX train derailment in a Baltimore railroad tunnel? It started a fire and melted the fiber optic cables in that tunnel, causing major problems for at least five ISPs. Or how about the December 2008 cut of a major undersea cable in the Mediterranean, one of many cuts, often caused by boat anchors? [See WIRED.com "Undersea Cables Cut; 14 Countries Lose Web -- Updated" December 19, 2008 ] There are hundreds of examples.)

The rules are:

If you have "redundant" access links to the service provider, using the same or different carriers, you must inquire very carefully about the routing of those links. They will usually share facilities at some point! Be sure each access link arrives at a major service provider switching node, with many physically divergent routes from that point, before it encounters any shared facilities with any other access link. Physical diversity will guard against a single physical event killing both access links into the massive service provider meshes.

Strongly consider using alternative media, such as satellite or radio links (see the Burton Group reports "Fixed Broadband Wireless Access Technology: Unwiring the Last Mile" and "The Wild World of WISPs" ), to connect to a service provider who will be outside the radius of any probable disruptions.

Ensure that your "backup" link is actually working. Share traffic across it, or test it very frequently.

And remember that loss of communications is a major reason for having a redundant data center!

Google is Building its own ___________?

Those of us who follow the telecom industry have no doubt heard the rumor that Google is going to build its own routers.  It was first reported in the SD Times who quoted a "super-secret" source.  Super-secret in this case is almost redundant; everything inside Google is super-secret.  But this isn't the first time one of the Google employees has leaked a tidbit about the operation, nor is it the first time Google has struck out on its own:

Google Builds its own Servers for Efficiency

Google's Secret 10GbE Switch

Google Builds its own Virtual Machine for Android

Google builds a CDN for its own content

Google Launching its own Navy

I especially like that last one.

I've spent very little time in and around Google, but it's obvious, even to me, that Google has both the money and the intellectual horsepower to pull something like this off.  Walking around their campus and looking at the nameplates on the doors is like a trip to  your favorite tech bookstore, only it's not the books that are on display behind the glass-lined offices, it's the authors themselves.  Can Google build a router, you bet. 

So, I may not know what goes on behind the doors at Google but I've been closely involved with router companies, close enough to know goes into building a high-end edge router:

The right people

$30-$50 million dollars 

12-18 months

Put these three things together with motivation (a winning idea, or a networking problem only Google could have) and just about anything is possible.  

For Google, $30-$50 million isn't really all that much money.  Even so, we might shave a few million dollars from that estimate if Google gets someone to provide the ASICs - they were rumored to be using Broadcom for their 10GbE switches.  Google may not be ready to fab their own silicon but they'll need custom silicon if they want to achieve the forwarding rates found in a modern router such as a Juniper (that is unless their developers are "other-worldly" - they're too far from Area 51 and I didn't see anyone with dark eyes and huge craniums in my visits).  We can shave off a few million dollars more because Google won't need marketing and sales to sell this new device, they won't be kneeling at the altar of Verizon and AT&T trying to get large telecom companies to take notice of their new hardware.   In other words, this is probably a $20-$30 million problem for Google and they have the ability to solve it themselves.

So, who cares if Google builds a router?  Well, their current supplier of high-end routers for one.  Is it really fair, however, to lay this 'failure' at the feet of Juniper?  Wall Street bounced Juniper a little bit on the news last week, but then, Wall Street has all of the macho of my 91 year-old grandmother these days.  No, Juniper isn't to blame, nor is this anything more than a short-term threat to Juniper's revenue (and it's hard to say just how much revenue, all we know is that Google isn't Juniper's largest reported client - Verizon Business is with 10% of reported revenue).  On a side note, it would have been interesting to see the market's reaction to this event if the supplier where Cisco, not Juniper.  

In the long term, unless Google has had this project under wraps for some time I'd be shocked to see a device in less than 12 months, and even more shocked to see Google get that device in place, tested, functioning and manufactured in numbers in less than 24 months.    Even at that, this device will never make it out into the wild, it won't be competing with the likes of Juniper or Cisco.  In each of the cases where Google chose to build rather than buy, the only effect has been to remove Google from the list of potential customers for servers, switches and now, perhaps, routers.  The server market didn't collapse, the market for 10GbE switches didn't collapse, the market for routers won't collapse either.  

If I were a betting man, I'd bet that Juniper will be fighting hard to stay involved with this project.  Google is a unique animal in this industry - so unique in fact that it may not be profitable to be their router or switch company.  That is not to say, however that it won't be beneficial to learn from what they're doing.  Juniper may be uniquely positioned to offer their silicon and in exchange, learn from what Google is doing.  It's all speculation, but if I had to bet on it, I believe it may be better for Juniper than first thought.  

The (not so) Perfect Storm

Posted by: Chuck Bessant

 

Did I learn my lesson when I purchased the new Volvo S70 in 1997 in the first production month? No. Warranty covered everything, but I had a lot of stuff replaced which takes time, my time, at the dealership.

 

Did I learn my lesson when I built a house this year and used a new model KitchenAid oven? No. After self-cleaning it this summer, a module burned out and the oven wouldn’t heat up for cooking. I discovered this “feature” when I tried to bake a nice Copper River salmon, well, it would have been nice. Had it fixed, under warranty, then cleaned it again on Monday (1-Dec), and it did the same thing. Appliance guy, “Oh yeah, they came out with an updated module. We didn’t install the new module? Your oven should be fixed by Christmas.” WHAT (on so many levels)!

 

So, now I have a Blackberry Storm. I’ve learned a lot since 25-Nov.

 

·         The battery seems much better than the iPhone. The 480x360 color display is sharp. The SurePress touch screen operates well as long as you are not Andre the Giant. The SureType and QWERTY keyboards work OK. Lots of ring tones if you get board; I go for the Zen sounds myself. I was able to order it via the Verizon 800-number so no lines at the Verizon store. Broadband over Verizon’s EV-DO network, nice. GSM so it will work in Europe, very nice. Reception is great. This is all good.

 

·         SurePress action response is slow. When you press a key, there is a noticeable response delay that is very annoying. Navigation to the phone directory is a bit awkward. Once the keypad is up, and you want to Mute or go to Speakerphone it is a bit awkward. My Plantronics Bluetooth ear piece doesn’t stay synched very well, although it does with my Samsung cell phone. When physically turning Storm from portrait to landscape, the display doesn’t always rotate as advertised. Annoying? Yes - I’m getting a stiff neck.  

 

·         Verizon does not have their Backup Assistant applet for Blackberry, even though the instruction sheet from Verizon says to use it to download your directory. This feature on cell phones backs up your phonebook when changes are made to a Verizon server via a call. Seamless, fast, easy, automated, effortless. You can even access the phonebook by going to your wireless account on-line. Sweet! But for Storm, from what I’ve been told, and all Blackberries, sour. This feature does not exist. You can do an upload to Blackberry, or to Outlook via a cable to your computer. OK, I get that. Verizon’s response when I asked how to get my directory to Storm was “re-type or take it to a Verizon store”; I live 25 miles from the nearest Verizon store, and no one told me I couldn’t download my directory via Backup Assistant. I have got to believe that Verizon could provide a Backup Assistant to at least get your phonebook directory seeded to a Blackberry without going to a store, getting a number and waiting for help. All this great technology, wireless, EV-DO, yadda, yadda, yadda, and I still have to shag to a store. Boo, hiss.

 

I am new to the Blackberry, and maybe this is all normal. I expected Storm to be more responsive and a better first generation release than it is given RIMM’s reputation. This is not like Windows 3.0. Blackberry has been around for years. Verizon has carried it for years. The SurePress thing is new, granted. And so is Storm technology for Blackberry. Why is response slow? I have no idea, nor do I care, it is slow, I don’t like that so that is that – Sam I am.

 

I plan to return it. I’ll wait for Storm 2.0 to be released, or just maybe 2.1 so I can say I learned my lesson on new/major releases. Overall, the concept is excellent. I am just not impressed with v1.0, and having the user help fund the next generation release by releasing a device that should have been gang busters out the door.

Survival Guide for The Great Depression 2.0

Posted by: Chuck Bessant

I lived and survived the Dot Com Depression, and was a stronger person after the recovery. What can we learn that worked during the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000, and how can we be strong on defense? Companies that survived had good fundamentals, communicated openly and honestly with investors and had cash to weather the correction. Sure, stocks plummeted over several years, like Cisco from $84 to $7, and never fully recovered to their 2000 valuations, but they survived. Companies “down-sized” and realigned their businesses. Hardest hit were middle managers. Those positions were consolidated with other groups. Operations consolidation required engineers to do more than just one technology; they had to be “an inch thick and a mile wide”. Design engineers had to handle the work of 2 or more; the not so good engineers were laid-off. Managers were a dime a dozen, and without technical skills, work was hard to impossible to find. Those managers with skills found work, but not at the same salary they once had, but they were making money.

What can you do? You need to ask yourself honestly: Is my company solvent, and can it handle a long, slow recovery? Do I have the skill set to continue to be a valuable contributor? What can I do to make myself more valuable to the company? Is the work I’m doing of core importance to the company, or can the company move forward without the work I and my department do? Should I look for work someplace else that has good financial fundamentals? Should I just hope for the best? (This never works.)

What can your company do? Focus on core projects that have a fast ROI like less than one year. Investing in more efficient processes may cost $1-million but over the course of the year savings may be $2-million, and I don’t mean just layoffs; your best investment over the years has been in staff gaining the wisdom of how your company functions. If downsizing is necessary, care must be taken to ensure talent isn’t be sent to the competition. Expanding services may not be the best bet at this time or rolling out new products unless they can help other companies improve their efficiency. Retooling existing platforms and adjusting server and network architectures may be in order. Running more efficiently and cost effectively may be the best investments to be made at this time. Replacing aging servers with new servers that are less likely to fail (increased MTBF), use less energy (cost savings) and can handle more capacity will save money in the long run. In a data center that has standardized on a few server models and has 500+ servers, maybe self hardware maintenance is the way to go. Dropping expensive hardware contracts and buying replacement parts and full platforms will reduce OpEx costs. For every 10 servers, have a spare platform as a replacement. For every 10 server NICs in use, have a spare NIC; same for disks, memory and CPUs. As more servers are needed, pull them from the stock pile, and replace the stock room with new ones so spares remain fresh and ready for use.

You’ll need a good CMDB to keep track of inventory being used and available for use. This is not so bad, you’ll be better organized at the end of the day. This type of self-hardware maintenance will require new processes and procedures, and good logistics people and engineers who can perform the work. Vendors who get 17% on maintenance contracts won’t be happy, but business is business.

Aging PBX systems - maybe it is time to move to VoIP if the network infrastructure can support QoS and VoIP. Vendors will be hot to make sales with deep discounts. PBX maintenance contracts on old systems are expensive. While it appears that holding onto what you have is temping, now may be the best time to buy. If you’ve stayed current with your network architecture, you’ll have the components and proper wiring in-place that you’ll need to make this happen. If your architecture needs work, now is the time to review and update. It takes time to update architectures, sometimes several years to implement and phase in a new architecture. I do architecture for three to five years out, with tweaks along the way. This way I can plan and change as needed. The economy will grow again, and I’d use this time to shore-up so I’d be ready and able to adapt when the time is right.

Updating architecture doesn’t mean buying new switches and servers. It means planning and preparing before the need to buy new hardware becomes a requirement. Preparation and ground work. Lock and load, and ready to move when demand is on the upswing.

While the Great Tech Depression 2.0 will be difficult, make the best of it by preparing for better times ahead. This is not a time to chant, “Bring out your dead – CLANK! Bring out your dead – CLANK!” It is a time to prepare, plan, organize, get lean with cost saving moves with fast ROIs, become more effective with your processes and be ready to outdo your competition while they belly-moan and layoff staff they’ll wish they had in the future when the credit Phoenix rises from the ashes.

- Chuck

Phone Line Hell

Posted by: Dave Passmore

I needed to migrate my business phone line from an office location to my home residence.  How hard could that be?

After 13 years (and under 3 different company names) working out of the same office park in Sterling, Virginia, it was time to move. We at Burton Group decided to close our Sterling office because all the local analysts in the DC metro area -- including me -- preferred to avoid the traffic and work out of our homes, as virtually all of our other analysts in other geographies do.

For nearly the past decade at this location we’ve used DSL.net (formerly TalkingNets) to provide an IP Centrex service with Cisco 7960 Ethernet phones, bundled with DSL.net’s T1-line Internet service.  We were very early adopters of voice over IP (VoIP), and were generally pleased with the service.  But with the office closing, it was time to install a new business line to my house and port my Sterling office phone number to that location.

No More Copper
The first complication started a month ago when I decided to migrate my home (non-business) phone, Internet access, and television service to Verizon FiOS --replacing a Verizon POTS line, Cox cable broadband, and DirecTV satellite services.  This “triple play” service would not only save money, but provide a better-looking high-def TV picture, and had the potential of unlimited Internet speeds made possible by fiber optics run all the way to my house.  Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

But I told the Verizon salesperson (who actually visited my house) that I would also need to add a business phone line, and wanted to use the existing copper twisted pair wiring for that service, billed separately.  Deep in the woods where I live we’ve had multiple power outages because of trees falling on powerlines, and our copper phone lines continue to work even after loss of electrical service.  In contrast, FiOS voice lines depend on battery backup when the power fails (since optical fiber can’t conduct electricity like copper phone lines), with only 8 hours of service – an important consideration when we’ve experienced power outages that lasted for days.  Our cellphone coverage back in the woods is marginal, so landlines are a necessity for emergencies.  I also have an issue of the phone lines entering the opposite end of my house from where the co-axial cable (and now optical fiber) enter, making it much easier to install a copper phone connection.  When this was all described to the visiting Verizon rep, I was told “No problem – get the FiOS installed first, and then order a business line to use the copper.”

FiOS is now up and running to my house, and has thus far met service expectations.  So last week I called the Verizon business office to order a business phone line.  As soon as they found out I lived in a “FiOS service area,” they redirected my call to a different customer service agent.  First they checked to see if I could port my pre-existing phone number (which I gave them).  After a few minutes of waiting while they checked their database, the answer was  “Yes.”  So far, so good.

But you can imagine what happened next when I requested they use my pre-existing copper circuits for phone line installation: “I’m sorry, but we can’t do that.  If we place an order for a business line in your service area, the installers only know how to provision a new phone line over fiber.  There’s nobody left who knows how to install copper phone lines in your area.”  What?!!! “I’m afraid you should have had us install the business line first (using copper), and THEN installed FiOS for your residential service – then we would have left your copper business line untouched.” I pleaded with the agent to for a copper line, but he claimed to be powerless to change the situation.

The unspoken reality was that Verizon is discontinuing use of copper twisted pair wiring to keep competitors from offering local phone service.  FiOS gives Verizon the perfect vehicle to stifle competition from other carriers who might offer telecom services (e.g., voice, DSL) based on resold copper phone lines.

Foreign Service
After I came to the realization that I’d have to put up with battery backup and considerable in-house rewiring to get a 2nd phone line installed via FiOS, I called Verizon back to place the order. This time I got a different FiOS-area customer service agent, who again had to put me on hold while she checked Verizon’s number portability database.  When she came back, she offered both good and bad news: The good news was that my office number could be ported to my home.  The bad news was that it would cost an extra $154 per month -- every month!! – for my old office number to ring a phone at home.

Here’s why:  My home in Great Falls (about 6 miles from the Sterling office we’re closing) is served by a Verizon central office in Herndon, VA.  The office phone number I was trying to port was a SIP-based VoIP line from DSL.net and hence wasn’t actually handled from any phone company central office.  However, if it were actually served by a Verizon central office, then based on the 3-digit “742” phone exchange, it would be associated with Verizon’s Fairfax/Vienna CO.

So to port my number to my home address (served by the Herndon CO), Verizon would charge me an extra $154/month for an FX (foreign exchange) line.  In the old days, this would have paid for my rental of an actual physical phone circuit between the Herndon and Fairfax/Vienna central offices. All inbound phone calls would have first been routed to Fairfax/Vienna CO based on the first 3 digits of my phone number, and then (using the last 4 digits) forwarded to the Herndon CO for switching to the copper pair serving my house.

Of course phone networks haven’t worked that way for years.  A 30-year-old technical development called Signaling System 7 (SS7) long-ago permitted phone companies to route phone calls by computer via a database lookup, breaking the relationships between COs and phone exchanges.  None of my phone calls would EVER need to be routed to the “foreign” Fairfax/Vienna CO.  SS7-based computers would route inbound calls directly to the Herndon CO, and no phone line would be needed between the two.
So while technology has moved on, unfortunately the TARIFFS by which Verizon (as a regulated local telco) can charge customers, hasn’t.  Verizon can still stick customers with expensive FX line charges, even though they don’t actually provision foreign exchange phone lines between COs anymore.  The carrier has managed to resist efforts by regulators to get rid of this artifact of ancient telephone network architectures.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I told the Verizon rep that I’d have to be nuts to pay that much money for number portability, and she agreed with me.  So much for getting my business number ported to a Verizon phone line…

Juxtaposition
OK, so what else could I do?  Fortunately my local cable company, Cox Communications, was now advertising that it offered residential and business voice phone service.  Where I live, Cox provides this using frequency-division multiplexing of a voice channel over the same coax cable also used for delivery of cable TV channels and cable modem Internet access, i.e., old-fashioned circuit-switching rather than voice over IP.  And…they claimed they could port my business phone number.  How bizarre would that be – getting phone service from the cable company (Cox), while getting cable TV service from the phone company (Verizon with FiOS)?

But then I ran into a snag.  Cox’s phone service comes with most of the value-added services I had become accustomed to at Burton Group’s Sterling office, such as the ability to control the service via a web-based portal (e.g., call forwarding, the ability to send voicemail messages as WAV sound files to your email, etc.).  But the only way Cox lets you access the web-based portal to control your phone line is via their own broadband Internet service.  In other words, unless I signed up for Cox’s Internet access service, I couldn’t control their voice phone service!  Since I already had FiOS Internet access from home, it would be silly to pay for another Internet connection.  So scratch Cox as an alternative…

CallVantage
So if I couldn’t get a facilities-based voice circuit installed to my house with the ability to port my old office number, I was left to consider voice over IP.  I could sign up for one of the many VoIP providers like Vonage, which would permit routing of phone calls over my FiOS Internet connection.  The VoIP provider would ship a media gateway box that would connect via Ethernet to my home network, and provide one or more RJ-11 outlets to which I could plug in an analog phone.  VoIP can work over any broadband Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth, which makes it location-independent, and hence there are many VoIP provider choices.

So being the telecom analyst that I am, I started researching all the VoIP services to see which ones were highly rated by customers.  I’d heard too many “horror stories” from people who had tried these services with poor results.

The consensus reached by many reviewers and users on message boards was that AT&T’s CallVantage has the best VoIP service quality and customer service.  But, I also found out that AT&T had stopped accepting any more new CallVantage customers at the end of August 2008!  No reason for this unusual action has been made public, but it may have something to do with AT&T plans to transition CallVantage customers to it’s U-verse service in the former SBC territories -- but this was just a rumor.  At any rate, I couldn’t sign up for CallVantage.  Bummer.

Verizon offers its own VoIP service called VoiceWing, and interestingly they could port my old business number with that service.  But the customer reviews of VoiceWing service quality were not very encouraging, and I wasn’t crazy about using Verizon after the ridiculous FX fee they tried to charge me earlier.

BroadVoice
So I kept looking, and stumbled on a really interesting VoIP service provider, BroadVoice.  As with other VoIP providers, BroadVoice supplies their customers with media gateway boxes to convert VoIP packets to analog voice to work with regular phones.  But they also have an intriguing option called “BYOD” (bring your own device.) What made BroadVoice’s BYOD service even more attractive is that one of the BYOD devices they support is the Cisco 7960 Ethernet phone running SIP.  As you may recall, this is the VoIP phone I’ve been using for many years, and I really like its high quality speakerphone.

7960s (and other Cisco phones like 7940s) are hard for individual users to install, because they must get their software load from a separate TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server located somewhere on the IP network.  Whenever the phone is powered up or rebooted, it goes out on the network to grab its software and configuration file from the TFTP server.  This is just fine for large enterprises where the IT department can centrally control all of their phones via TFTP files and enterprise-owned servers.  However, the last thing I wanted to do was to maintain a TFTP server in my house just to be able to use a single Cisco 7960 phone.

So when I learned that BroadVoice supported 7960s, I also found out that they provide the requisite TFTP server as part of their VoIP service.  All you have to do is “point your 7960” to the IP address of BroadVoice’s TFTP server out on the public Internet.  This looked promising.

One hitch was the BroadVoice requires a recent SIP firmware load for 7960s, and our Sterling office 7960s were many years old.  So it took a bit of work to find the right firmware and get it loaded into the phone, figure out the new unlock codes, etc. (a detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this already-too-long blog post).

After this, I took a 7960 phone with the newly-updated firmware home, signed up for BroadVoice’s BYOD service on their website, and configured the 7960 with the required configuration parameters according to directions provided by BroadVoice.

Lo and behold, it worked on the first try!  Not only that, but it works well.  The call quality over Verizon’s FiOS fiber Internet to my home seems to be every bit as good as what I had previously experienced over a T1 line (with QoS turned on at our Cisco router) at the Sterling office.  I’m getting all the goodies, including the ability to simultaneously ring my cellphone (i.e., the simultaneous ring feature), the sending of voicemail messages to my Burton email account as WAV files, caller ID, call waiting, and the message waiting light actually lights up on the phone.  BroadVoice uses the same Broadsoft feature server and hence has a web portal for controlling your voice service that’s nearly identical to what I had been used to with DSL.net.  And the total cost for all these features with unlimited minutes to 35 countries is only $35/month.

So have I finally found voice service nirvana?  Perhaps.  But I’ve got one more step to go.  When I signed up for the BroadVoice service, I “temporarily” established the service using a new phone number, so I could test the service quality and features.  Now I need to see how well BroadVoice’s number portability feature works.  Got my fingers crossed on that one…

- Dave Passmore

Is a femtocell in your future?

Posted by: Chuck Bessant

A defect in a computer is called a bug. Why? In the late 1940s Admiral Grace Hopper found a moth in a relay in computer she was working on.

The first computer memory use to be called flip-flops. Why? That is how memory worked in the early days of computers – relay circuits that flipped on and off.

Disk drives: not rotating memory or a Roswell, but disk as that is what it looks like.

An 802.11n wireless device is an access point (AP), and it is called such.

Routers route or send data packets on networks and pass them to the next proper device. (Or “rooters” as our English counter-parts pronounce “router”. My terriers root around for mice, my router routes data packets, not mice.)

PC – personal computer. How an apple was associated with a computing device is as likely an association as the UNIX verb grep is to searching text; VMS had it correct with Search.

At least bugs, flip-flops, disk, AP and PC all mean something as an engineer would call them as see them - they truly describe their function in nuts and bolts terms. However, apple is to computer as femtocell is to access point base station. Femtocell - I think a better name would have been cell phone router (CPR).

I live in the rolling hills along Colorado’s Front Range making cell phone reception a bit of a challenge – the same Front Range that John said to Martha while they were plodding along in a covered wagon for hundreds of miles across Kansas and the eastern plains of Colorado only to plod up-to the mountains and state, “Screw it Martha, we’re staying right here”, and so Colorado Springs was founded at the foothills of Pikes Peak, before Zebulon Pike named it after himself, and declared it “unclimbable”. We now have the Pikes Peak Marathon where people run UP (not down) the mountain in August, our hottest and driest month, starting at a 6,500 foot elevation base to the top at 14,000+ feet. So much for being unclimbable. I’ve digressed but I’ll come back to this in a bit.

In essence, a femtocell provides a locally based “cell phone tower” device the size of a TV Guide magazine in a home or office to provide access to the cellular provider’s network via the Internet. The femtocell accepts/connects calls from/to registered cell phone numbers programmed into it just like a cell tower. The main difference is calls are connected to the cell provider over the Internet with the femtocell passing cell packets to the Internet via a local DSL or cable connection, along with the rest of the local IP Internet traffic. Packets are packets.Cell reception reflections and blockages created by the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range are no longer an issue – instant cell phone tower in your home or office.

The transmitting power associated with a femtocell is obviously much lower than a cell tower. However, it is powerful enough to handle calls in your home without interference from obstacles that can distort cell phone reception, like foothills. And, it can handle multiple cell calls at a time.

The payback for the cellular provider: the call connection to their central office (CO) to complete the call to the remote party is handled by your Internet connection, which frees up their cell tower infrastructure capacity, or helps to mitigate the need to expand their access capacity and cell towers. They also get a free ride on your Internet connection for only the fixed cost, and shared by you, of a femtocell device.

Cell towers are expensive to install, maintain and provision, not mention they typically have to lease the location on a monthly basis where the antennae or tower is installed. Femtocells: cheap and easy, no monthly reoccurring cost, no insurance, no weather related issues, repairs are cheap and easy (they send YOU a new one and YOU replace it – you are now part of their tech repair crew, without the phone pole potato digger boots that Jethro Bodine use to borrow from his Uncle Jed in “The Beverly Hillbillies”.) Maintenance and administration should be as simple as the current crop of routers (wireless and wired) for home use.

When femtocells are released later this year or early next year, they’ll be sold and registered by the cellular provider to their network, or if you are able to buy your own, will need to be approved by and registered to your cellular provider just like cable modems are today. The potential power of these little gems is amazing. Maybe you can get good Internet access but no cellular service - a femtocell has you covered.

Ideally, you’ll be able to acquire an all-in-one device to save on knots of wiring and AC adapters clogging the plug strip sockets: femtocell + DSL/cable router + 8-port 1GbE switch (listen up vendors, 8-ports are needed more than 4- or 5- port switches for today’s network access) + 802.11a/b/g/n wireless AP + a set of Ginzu knives. If you are an audiophile and have a preference for a separate amplifier, pre-amp and tuner, certainly a stand-alone femtocell device should be available too, although probably solid-state without the option for vacuum tubes that audiophiles crave.

How many cell numbers should a femtocell be able to handle: 16 would be a good number to cover the parents, kids, and office numbers, assuming they are all on the same cellular provider. Multi-cellular providers would be a probability for a later release but not too soon as cellular providers will want to GENTLY encourage users in a household to use the same cellular provider. And, if you use a femtocell, your rates should be lower as you are using less of the cellular provider’s facilities; keyword is SHOULD.

How about a 2:1 minute plan where for every prime-time minute a call is placed over a femtocell the account would be debited .5 minute (of course rounding to the next higher minute when the call is completed)? Now you’ve double your minutes if all calls are made via the femtocell. Or, would we see plans like: 3,000 Femto minutes; unlimited weekend and evenings minutes between 9PM and 6AM, and 500 minutes for all other connections for the same cost as your 1,400 minute plan? It will get a little nutty trying to know how many Femtos you’ve used v. how many cell tower minutes you’ve used.

And, the power will be low enough so neighbors can’t share a femtocell, although apartments, dorms, etc will probably work around this walled garden. Femtocells will have accounting that should fix this problem. For security, the femtocell will encrypt cell packets to/from the cellular service provider.

Applying the femtocell to a SOHO (small office/home office): Small businesses should (keyword) be able to secure excellent rates with a cellular provider (think real estate office where realtors already have a phone implanted in their brain stem ala the movie “Saturn V”), and reduce the need for POTS (plain old telephone service) lines or even VoIP (voice over IP) services, or maybe use the femotized cellular service for long-distance to bypass the metered long-distance service.

Now the cellular providers have an even better inroad to the office, as the competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC or Ma Bell) loses more ground to wireless technology, with what was once their proprietary “last mile” strangle hold on phone service. As long as the Internet connection is good (2+ Mbps), who needs phone lines? And should the Internet service experience a problem, and as long as a decent cell tower is near by, there is the back-up service.

A potential hazard: ISPs might decide to block femtocell packets or restrict even more the “unlimited” number of bytes you can send/receive over your cable connection. I’m sure for more money, you'll be able to increase your “unlimited” service and available features.

Femtocells will more than likely be as common in homes and SOHOs in just a few years as the PC and “rooter” are today.