OK, I can’t resist posting. I’ve been a good boy, done my day’s alloted work (OK, I should have phoned the VAT man, maybe tomorrow). The kids are asleep for their afternoon naps.

The News Du Jour is that a company called FON are starting a “user-sponsored” public WiFi network. I saw their pitch at the ETel conference, and you have to be impressed by their passion, if nothing else.

There’s plenty of places to go read the PR blurb and the blogospheric commentary.

First, the good news. This aligns with what I’ve been saying for a long time, namely that the locus of innovation in telecom will move to how networks are priced and financed. When the user and owner interests align (because in some respect they’re the same folk), nobody cares any more about capturing the consumer surplus of the stupid network.

Now the bad news. I think they’ve started with the hardest case first, which is consumers. The highest possible cost per added node, the lowest revenue per user. A more promising start might be enabling public-service workers to roam among localities, or companies to have reciprocal rights in business parks.

Sadly, it also highlights a screw-up in how almost all corporates set up their networks. Somehow, physical connectivity within the building is seen as a great way to ensure secure access to networks. (Hey, all the contract cleaners are trustworthy, aren’t they?) The sensible alternative would be Internet access everywhere in the building, and get people to VPN in. If you find that VPNs are too expensive, you’re buying your networking gear from the wrong vendor. This also avoid the frequent and ridiculous situation of visitors being unable to get Net access. Some of those folk are $’000s per day consultants you’re working hard to prevent from being productive. Anyhow, FON isn’t easy to do for corporated because they’ve embedded security policy in the access network, the exact opposite of what the end-to-end principle tells you.

So FON is a very risky venture, where unless they find some seed markets onto which to condense a critical mass of connectivity, you’re just left with isolated islands too disparate to justify the effort of membership. After all, our friendly open networks “Linksys” and “default” are pretty ubiquitous, too. I want them to succeed, but it looks like the kind of venture that you need to bung $1bn at to get it started. But as a way of Google kicking sand in the face of some telcos, maybe that’s an affordable budget.

PS - it’s cold enough here in Vilnius that the snow is just precipitating out of the air near the freezing ground — blue sky above! Was -19C when I arrived last night, and felt it too.

Martin makes trouble at Telepocalyse

Ebay

First off, Ebay finished buying Skype last week. Skype Technologies, S.A., is still a stand alone company, but Ebay owns all the stock. Just over a month from the announcement; speedy, neh?

Steve Dzemidzenka tips us to an ISP-Planet interview with a company that offers pay-per-call advertising on Ebay (vs. pay-per-click); a great read and with one or two insights into models Skype may enable. A related AP story: Online ads urge surfers to pick up the telephone.

Some folks don't like Skype

Skype is still banned on university campuses in France. (Thanks, Alain.) Verso is still selling a filter to block Skype traffic. (Thanks, Mr. Harvey.) Qatar is still blocking Skype software downloads and Skype purchases. (Thanks, Jeff) Can you suggest a reliable way to tell if my Skype traffic is blocked?

From the Skype Ecology

Ipevo launched a family of Skype Certified phones last week, shortly after Linksys and Skype announced a co-branded Skype-only mobile handset and base station. While Skype says the Linksys is certified (via SparkPR), you wouldn't know it by reading the Linksys product literature, the Skype news release, or the product page on Amazon. Everyone else pays dearly for the Skype Certification and brags about it mercilessly; why not Linksys?

Look2Skype, the Outlook plug-in, is upgraded.

Maintaining the key benefit of Look2Skype which is the minimal inteference with Outlook, whereby it doesn't cause it to crash, or slow it down. Some of the new features are:

1. Instant access to all skype contacts from Outlook.
2. Extract callto:// signatures from e-mail.
3. Auto-recognise of skype contacts from e-mails.
4. Free text entry of phone numbers or skype names for contacting. Stewart Bissett

Recovery 2.0

This disaster is in a war zone.

• Families in Kashmir prevailed upon Indian authorities' better natures to open up cross-border phone service, normally carefully scheduled and monitored for security reasons.
• Volunteers are setting up a QuakeHelp Relief Hotline using SMS. Skype was unable to help with a voice line this time (they helped in Katrina relief) because they don't have SkypeIn services in India. Good sources: QuakeHelp and the QuakeHelp blog.
• Pakistan banned public access to satellite imagery of the disaster zone. Security. In a fight-or-flight, clench or relax, response, one or the other response is better. Restricting geo information breaks the decentralized operation of the Internet. You want to open up resources and remove obstacles for the many thousands of online volunteers who can put that data to work. Fortunately, relief workers voices persuaded the UN to re-publish much of the imagery and data. A win for emergent organization.
• The term "Recovery 2.0" is a flexible set of online tools and behaviors that can help invidividuals and groups organize themselves around any crisis. I've proposed a few possible projects on the wiki (feel free to register and add your own):
  • Phone Bank Network; the telephone remains the dominant way people communicate. We need tools to deploy volunteer phone banks that scale rapidly and cheaply.
  • Emergent Relay Service; provide a framework for live interpretation for cross-language and cross-mode communications.
  • Wish I could take credit: Mesh-Networking Cellphones; Why aren't there ad-hoc battery-powered "cell towers in a barrel" that could be "bombed" or floated into disaster zones to turn the thousands of useless cell phones in people's pockets into a crisis mesh network?

Skype at Work

Enterprise Skype isn't even vaporware, but the need is real. For example:

I was wondering if there exists a Skype Proxy server for enterprise use? Essentially, all Skype traffic would flow through this edge device, but would also allow for Skype-to-Skype traffic to stay internal to an organization without having to contact SuperNodes. HTTPS Proxies don't really provide any control of Skype traffic since they blindly pass all traffic since it's so volitile.

Also, is there a product that will allow multiple Skype clients to connect to a PBX simultaneously? Thus, be able to make calls from a Skype client to any phone on the PBX. I've seen some hardware solutions, but they seem primitive and only allow 1:1 communication. I'm looking for large scale many:many.

Thanks, Joe Schwendt

Another case:

Hi guys, I run a 450 person company's IT department. Yesterday Verizon had a man-hole fire and cut our lines completely, so we were phone-less for the whole day. We're a financial services company so you can imagine how freaked out everyone was.

What I was thinking last night is, what if Skype had a great enterprise version, that we could purchase 50 accounts for, and get them set up, distribute mics to our top 50 offices and have a back-up plan immediately in effect

Help Wanted:

We're always glad to post job listings of interest to the Skype Journal community.

Hi. We are currently looking for an Asterisk developer who has experience in integrating Skype to an Asterisk-powered IVR.

Skype me and I'll pass along your interest.

Reader Jim Courtney referred me to Tom's Networking which reports on a new Cisco phone for Skype. Mark Evans obviously like the Canadian input too. We shouldn't be too surprised Mike Volpi of Cisco sits on Skype's board. Tom's suggest the retail price will be south of $100. That seems a reasonable guess. More importantly the connective wireless hardware is labeled with VoIPVoice. They are the ones behind the neat CyberphoneK Skype integration. My guess is we will see some surprises when this product releases in user functionality.