For those outside of the UK 999 is the UK Emergencies services number for Fire, Police, Ambulance and Coast Guard. Other Countries have selections of numbers with the most widely recognised in Europe 112 and in the USA 911. There is a nice little potted history on Wikipedia and an article in yesterday's Metro Newspaper, a capture of the printed article below.
Metro Newspaper article Friday 29th June 2012, Copyright Associated Newspaper Ltd
I have had the privilege to work on the technical implementation of the Operator Services and Emergency Services feature on the UK network, on three occasions:
The first in the mid-1980s in the Plessey Poole factory on the System X Operator Services Subsystem (OSS), with a talented team developing the technology for the core exchange and the Operator console and voice distribution elements.
The second occasion in the early 1990s with Mercury Communications Operator Services, implementing the OSS in the carrier network to handle all the operator services, from Directory Enquiries, Operator Assistance, and of course Emergency Services. This gave me a real insight and respect for those taking the calls from the public, their cool, calm and professionalism of the operators and emergencies services bureaux staff in handling customers at their most vulnerable. It also taught me respect for the service itself and I have to say a sprinkling of contempt for those members of the public who would misuse it making unnecessary calls for trivial and quite frankly stupid things such as asking for a taxi!
The third occasion I have been fortunate to be part of the very important standardisation process for the migration of the emergencies services handling to the VoIP world, with the UK independent standards body, the NICC Emergency Services Location group, and helped to produce the UK standard for this. This taught me another valuable lesson in the dedication and free contribution a number of very committed and talented people from around the world make to ensure the safety of the public.
This last week apart from the usual "day job" at News Int, I've been looking at Asterisk 1.8 and Apstel's DialPlan Pro. I took a look at this a little while back before it was quite as mature as it is now. I'm very impressed with the ease of creating dial plan logic and its ability to recognise the different flavours of Asterisk addons you may be running - such as Trixbox, AsteriskNOW or PIAF for example (FreePBX).
I opted for a Native install of Asterisk 1.8 on 64 bit Centos 6.2:
Asterisk 1.8.8.2 built by root @ apstelasterisk on a x86_64 running Linux on 2012-01-28 23:19:09 UTC
I've favoured Centos for my server builds for some time now and built a successful Asterisk and SER hosted telephony platform back in 2004/5 based on Asterisk 1.2 code using Centos 4 back then. I've swung to Ubuntu for my desktop builds and like many don't find the latest Unity interface to my liking so these days my desktop is Mint or XUbuntu, and of course my now constant OSX Lion desktop on my Mac Mini.
Back to the current project, I've got a customer who wants to built a telephony platform for a large-ish volume of callers who will be required to complete automated surveys (IVR) and both the survey results and in a number of the calls recorded feedback from the caller. There will be a fair number of prompts to record and playback too, with the Initial system starting with a single PRI (E1) worth of calls, and the platform requirement scaling to up to 8E1 of traffic. The customer needs to be a self sufficient as possible, building their own dialplans and IVR logic Apstel's Dialplan Profession and Integration Server is perfect for this.
Whilst Apstel's GUI hides the complexity and errors that can creep in to an Asterisk dial plan built using text editor, it can also lull the user in to a false sense of perspective of what is actually happing within Asterisk. This means that whilst Apstel's Visual Dial Plan Pro (VDP) application is a great tool, it is not a substitute for knowing how the Asterisk dial plan works. If fact you can end up with some very ugly and inefficient dial plans if you're not careful.
Using Apstel VDP, you still need to plan your dial plan and carefully understand your requirements and what you want to achieve before building the dial plan logic. Next time I'll take a look at VDP and go through the settings and some screen shots of how this application interfaces with Asterisk.
Wishing all Aeonvista's Customers, Colleagues and Friends Season's wishes for a restful and happy holidays. We hope you all enjoy a prosperous, productive and fulfilling New Year in this difficult economic climate.
I am looking forward to an exciting New Year back at my current position in News International. I hope all of you enjoy the next 12 months and lets hope we can all work towards pulling us out of the global recession.
Services are the way to reach customers, it pretty clear to me and the guys at IPL seem to agree too. Although I have to admit a certain bias towards the IPL comments as an ex-employee of IPL, I still have a keen interest and still have a number of connections to the IPLers.
Like most professional's inbox, mine fills with news, messages and sales pitches. Amongst this ever present background noise, every once in a while the title of an email or news item catches my attention. This week two items caught my eye:
[Special Report] Towards the New Intelligent Network, from V2M, sponsored by Cisco
TechRepublic: Microsoft conjures up the future of mobile productivity.
Below is direct extract from the overview of the Special Report.
Anintelligentnetworkcan be a platform fornewbusiness models and differentiators, by enablingnetworksegmentation, partnerships with content partners andthecreation of personalized services. This is especially important in a landscape that has seentherise of content, applications and devices as havingtheprimary relationship withthecustomer from a brand perspective. Driving intelligence inthenetworkistheprimary strategy for mobile operators looking to architect forthenext-generation business model.
This report includes:
TheIntelligent Mobile Broadband Imperative: Why Intelligence Matters
TheNetwork as Profitability Engine
A New Approach to Analytics
The special report as you can see from the description above showed promise, and service design and "intelligent" services is a bit of a pet interest of mine, started when we tried in the early nineties to crowbar out the control logic from the stored program controller functions of the TDM switches in to a centralised execution engine (called a service control point - SCP). We've moved on from this with IP networks now dominating over traditional TDM and even a short life for ATM (I know its lasted in the mobile space - and oh yes its still heavily present in ADSL networks).
Alas I was disappointed by the content, admittedly I should have spotted the Cisco sponsorship of the paper, but the focus of the paper was on network traffic flows, rather than the actual services and how to make the best use of infrastructure to support these.
This is the comment I emailed to the editor at V2M:
I've just picked my way through the "Special Report", and I have to say I found very little new material or real content of value. It could have been written 10 years ago, in fact I think there was better material around 10 years ago about the challenges facing both fixed and mobile operators by the Internet's growth and the Telco's challenge of not being just a bit pipe provider.
Having worked in the telecoms industry for over 20 years now and seen the analogue exchanges replaced with TDM switching and the usurping of the traditional telco model by open source VoIP, I feel the challenges telcos face are far greater than the material you have put out.
Traditional telecoms operators are having to face the challenges of services which no longer rely on centralised telco controlled (walled garden) network architectures. IMS, EPC and LTE architecture just prolong the pain for operators who cling to this centralised control model. If telco's don't adopt a decentralised collaborative approach to services, rather than build their castles on an old and frankly out-dated model for services, they will fail and become what they're most afraid of stove-piped carries of traffic with no share in valuable content and services it contains.
Discussions of traffic shaping and understanding customer trends and usage and traffic flows will not make network operators "rich" look at the richness embodied in modern applications, the report mentions facebook, but misses the point of what the APIs to services like facebook offer by discussing traffic patterns. Facebook's value to organisations looking to increase revenue is about the relationships and activities the "friends" on facebook are engaged in. Glue-ing the richness of the applications with the network operators "crown jewels" - ubiquitous access is where the gold mine lies.
The tech republic blog entry was actually slightly more enlighting and the video from Microsoft, if a little "Minority Report" (as pointed out by one of commenters on the tech republic blog) was actually quite refreshing and potentially close to a future communications and office environment. It was yes full of gloss, but looking beyond this at some of the underly technical considerations for this future view of communications and it's all pretty plausible from flexible OLED 3D display technologies, with the Xbox motion detection (Kinect) built in to interactive displays augmenting touch gestures. For near and remote comms between devices we have ZigBee and bluetooth and LTE and HSPA.
If you view the Microsoft video whilst thinking about my views on intelligent networks. Whilst I fully support the views in the V2M paper on capacity and flow management (this is really important since this addresses the scarce resources of the service provider), if you view the video, think about the value to the customers of the network providers, its in the content and services they're using. The key single element that mobile operators in particular have the advantage - Ubiquitous access. Mobile operators by offering access and taking note of the services their customers are using, can use this to personalise each customer's experience - both of the underlying network, but also the services themselves.
Yes - just about everyone is mourning the passing of Steve Jobs, but less public fervour has been made of Dennis Ritchie's recent death.
Just about everyone who has learnt to programme at University will have been introduced to the C programming language in the seminal text, know affectionally as Kernighan & Ritchie, I have my precious copy still in near mint condition with a sticky-backed plastic cover on to strengthen it, alongside it sits my other precious book, The UNIX programming environment by Briane Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of whom have paid their very personal respects to Dennis Richie.
This is my small thanks to the contribution that Dennis Richie has made to the world of computing, without his work I would have not had the C programming language, UNIX operating system and my career as a software engineer. Thanks and God bless. Wired puts the contribution he made much better than I could.
This post is a brief moment to capture the fact that time has traveled on since the last post and at times has felt that little progress has been made. But on reflection a lot has been done.
I've busied myself in the day job working my way through various installation and user guides for Woodwing's Enterprise server and working my way through installing the software under Ubuntu and Centos 5.6, together with a number of builds of iPad Reader software and a couple of versions of Android.
Combine this with a number of evenings collaborating on updating the Wraycastle VoIP course notes, with friend and colleague John Timms.
And finally reviewing and writing up the High level design for a multi-VLAN bladed data centre environment for Sensee's new CosmoCom system.
Plus a couple of ad-hoc sessions on tele-medicine design work with Inmezzo, and I've just realized where the last 2 and half months have gone!
