Analogue vs. Digital Audio

I've just read this: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/analog-versus-digital-music-is-there-a-difference/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=21294788. An interesting fairly well balanced view of Analogue vs. Digital reproduction of music.

I am not what I would call an audiophile, but I do appreciate the "quality" perceived or imagined of music. The emotional quality and as the Techrepublic article puts it the emotional response to placing the needle of the turntable on my beloved vinyl recording.

However to add my little bit to the debate, it has come to my attention that dynamic range seems to be the thing that has taken the beating. I even did my own experimentation with this and pulled an MP3 recording that seemed washed out and very difficult for the singer's vocals to be heard.

I pulled a dynamic range app (TT Dynamic Range Meter) from the Internet and also ended up here: http://dr.loudness-war.info/. It seems I am not alone in spotting that the music industry has been making music louder at the expense of what I feel is "quality". You need to hear the tinkle of the symbol and the bass of the drum and the full range of frequencies and loudness levels to get the "texture" of the sound.

You also (IMHO) need to have something decent to provide the reproduction of the source material, LP, MP3, tape, CD. I have to admit to having a very old circa early 80s Sony separates system, which still has its original Amp, Deck and an addition of a circa 1993 CD player.  Playing various sources, new and old Vinyl and new and old CDs, and MP3 via the AUX input from my phone, I can hear the difference between older reproductions where the dynamic range is wider.

That also takes me on to a recent discovery, not a complete revelation for some I am sure, but new and surprising to me. I recently tested a soundbar - Thank You Richer Sound for the week trial. I get fed-up with not being able to hear the dialogue from movies.

I have a very nice Logitec Z5500 surround system. Which I plug into my blueray/DVD player and we have a family movie night using a projector on the wall. The dialogue is loud and proud using this set-up and full on 5.1 THX certified sound a pleasure to listen to....... So with this as my baseline, I figured that the less than perfect speakers in my flat panel LG TV could be improved on with a soundbar. Now I didn't go top of the range, or the bottom - I thought lets shoot for the mid-range and one that has won a What-HiFi award.

Let's just say I was disappointed. Where was that Centre Dialogue - still not there!!! even using the Direct Digital input from the HDMI cable. So the soundbar went back to the store.

Last weekend we did a movie night but, not on the projector and DVD, but streamed from Amazon. I plugged my Z5500 into the Optical out of the TV and "WHAT!" where's the 5.1 audio gone? It seems the compressed audio format for streaming media required my Z5500 to be manually switched to decode in Dolby Prologic II. SOOO that explains a little of why unless you go with a soundbar with all the bells, you're still gonna get poor dialogue. Also to my surprise whilst looking at soundbars, there nearly all 2.1 - unless you pay a lot more and then well quite frankly - save your money and stick with a proper decoder like my old Z5500, half or a third of the price of a top notch sound bar and SOOO MUCH more sound for the money.

Dell Studio Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 (Free upgrade)

So did the Windows 10 upgrade - OK first impressions looks like what I know, but wait a minute - Dang my Bluetooth mouse isn't working...???

OK no Bluetooth in control panel... RUBBISH - deleted the drivers I only just put up there from Lenovo - so re-install... YEAH! Bluetooth back...

Hmm ATI Radeon drive - MS own flavour doesn't have the right mode to drive my LG monitor (1080p) via VGA connection... Hmm more work to do here....

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=6FDXJ

Re-installed these "old" drivers and rebooted, fingers crossed... Nope No luck - looks like I'm stuck with my Windows 10 default drivers - work fine on the inbuilt panel - 1920x1200 - so will have to do for now... Hmm HDMI port - might be a better choice - but gonna have to get the soldering iron out - this is not the most robust connection and mine is loose from repeated use.

Dell Studio 17 Windows 8.1 Broadcom Bluetooth solution

This post is as much for my own sanity as the community at large. Having taken the step back to Windows from my Mint desktop on my Dell, the Bluetooth driver from Dell failed badly and Windows 8,1 Pro flatly refused to detect my Dell 370 Wireless card.

Then I found: http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/720042-broadcom-bluetooth-370-minicard-in-windows-81/

Which led me to: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds034872

Downloaded and installed the Lenovo Driver and all working just great - Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard connected and writing this article with them!!!

Come on Dell!!! Easy fix if Lenovo could do it!

Part 2: SIP Based Call Centres - 12 years on - Time for a light weight cloud approach to contact centre architectures

So what does a cloud architected contact centre look like? I guess looking at from an architectural requirements:

• No Single Point of failure
• NoSQL Database for "Big Data" based Agent and caller statistics (not mandatory but useful)
• Scalable transaction engine for orchestration of resources - linking customers with agents and agents and supervisors (We used to call this a queue and scheduler - or just the ACD)
• Media Relay/Anchoring so that recording of the session can take place.
• Light weight client applications (HTML5, CSS, Javascript, WebRTC).
• Elasticity on demand compute - to scale for more sessions, more agents etc. Or for that matter less.
• Some form of orchestration to be able to dynamically scale the platform based on either dynamic demand or customer requirements. Dynamic demand is an interesting one here as it implies the platform can "self-scale".
• Multi-tenancy, so we can accommodate multiple customers without them "bleeding" into each other.
• Support for SIP Signalling (to be able to connect to telcos using SIP trunking)
• Transcoding of codecs voice (& video).
• Conference bridge/RTP mixer, to make supervisor passive monitoring of agents  possible.

So that's the high level requirements out of the way.  How might you lego-brick build such an idea as a prototype? I'd start with Freeswitch and Kamailio/OpenSIPS, and I think I might even look at commercial SIP to WebRTC gateway like Genband's SPIDR.

For the Virtualisation piece I guess I would start with OpenStack and/or Xen hypervisors.

That's my shopping list. Next time some pictures of the components and glue-ing them together.

Online homework and social media pose parental dilemma - What!

Is it just me or do articles like this, on the BBC website make you annoyed too?

** Parents face online homework dilemma **
Parents feel unable to make children study by blocking internet access, as homework often requires online research, a survey suggests.



The problem here (IMHO) is education - not the children you understand, but the parents, there are so many ways to protect and inform children about the Internet, and most of them are free.


The best free tool around I have found is OpenDNS, this give parent control of not only every device in the house, but also allows you to protect friends children too who Bring Their Own Devices.


Windows and iOS have darn good parental controls too, its just about setting them up and discussing it with your children. - Even Google and YouTube - if you create an account can be set with parental controls too.


There are no excuses... BUT - we need to educate the parents.....

SIP Based Call Centres - 12 years on - Time for a light weight cloud approach to contact centre architectures

Back in 2001 - Wow that seems a long time ago now that I sit here in Oct 2013, I wrote a white paper which was published back then by the International Engineering Consortium in their Annual Review of Communications, called SIP Based Call Centres - A vendor independent architecture for multimedia contact centres and thanks to the Internet can still be found out there.

In the paper I sang the virtues of open standards and SIP for building contact centres capable of meeting the needs of a modern multimedia environment (voice, video and Instant messaging and presence). Since then (IMHO) SIP has become quite frankly bloated by extension after extension, and one SIP doesn't necessary work with another SIP, so SBC now have to mediate between different flavours.

I think its time to revisit signalling and communications in modern contact centre, after all the point is to let customers reach someone who can help them in whatever way best suites the customers need, in an efficient no frills way.

On reflecting on what I wrote 12 years ago and the current surge of interests in WebRTC and all things HTML and cloud, it struck me. Now is the time to rethink the way we build multimedia contact centres both for the customer and the business that uses them. Actually it wasn't too new a thought - I'd already put some top level architecture ideas together about a year ago when looking at a new approach to telecare with some colleagues over at Inmezzo. The approach for the next generation of contact centres means a much lighter footprint - no complex clients to use for the agents, no nasty plugins in the browser for customer, integration with the PSTN, voice, video and text chat from desktop or smart phone.

What doesn't change is the basic requirements for session queueing and routing, or the ability to present information about the contact.

So what does this new architecture look like.... Well I'll leave my thoughts on that for the next blog entry.

We are entering a new era of software defined communications

What now feels like a life time ago back in the dim and distant past ,OK - not so dim and distant 1980s, I was a young apprentice engineer with my training and interests firmly focused on Hardware (micro electronics more specifically). In 1987 I made the bold step towards software engineering as a choice, since it seemed, back then, that software was the way forwards to creativity and new solutions for communications. Having "converted" to software engineering by way of a degree in Computer Science at Aberystwyth University, I then continued in that vain becoming a professional software engineer. I still didn't forget the electronics that got me started, and this combined with software engineering put this to good use as a telecommunications engineer. Moving through the heady days of Nortel Passport Frame Relay Switches, Cisco AGS and MGS routers and Cabletron hubs.

Then the Internet happened.......

SDN
For the telecoms engineers out there (like me), in my humble opinion (IMHO) SDN is the networking equivalent of softswitches? The OpenFlow API is what MEGACO/SIGTRAN is to soft-switching and the so-called Orchestration layer the Stored Program Control Logic from the switch fabric and routing fabric. The media gateway is the Hardware forwarding platform (L2 switch fabric being physical of logical vSwitch, Microsoft Network Virtualisation and Virtual Subnet Identifiers), not to mention MPLS enabled VPLS and the rest of the MPLS "family".

NFV
And now in the telecoms field we're getting all excited about Network Function Virtualisation (NFV - http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/nfv) . This is really about extending the Virtualisation platforms/techniques like those provided by VMWare ESX and Microsoft HyperV into the telecoms space and placing the Functional elements of the NGN network on these virtualisation platforms. As the ETSI White paper states:

"leveraging standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard, high-volume servers, switches and storage."

This allows the economies of scale that the enterprise networks are gaining through "cloud compute" to the telco space, by implementing these traditionally custom hardware based elements (such as media gateways, firewalls, SBCs, Routers, CSCFs) in standard (commodity Servers) architecture servers and a hypervisor layer, utilising the same virtualisation tools which enable flexibility of deployment of these elements in more standard environment, enabling features such as live migration of network functions under failure, multiple instances of a network function on the same hardware elements, and more interestingly (from my perspective) the ability to create multiple instances belonging to different customers (or even carriers) on the same hardware platforms.

Time to re-write the architecture rule book.

IPTV & 4G Apps (continued from previous post)

I've just been reading that Alcatel Lucent have received an Emmy for their Cloud PVR (tmcnet.com). Its a nice idea and the logical extension of the home based PVR, or the SlingBox, and their concept of placeshifting (aka watch anywhere).

The slingbox and the Alu Cloud PVR share the same idea - watch linear TV as you like it, time shifted and from any location on any device. These two are not the only kids on the block Virgin are offering similar service with their TV Anywhere pitch.

So what's the point and what's the link with these services and 4G. Obvious really 4G (LTE and LTE-A) gives the means of distribution and the data rates to do it. The roll out of fibre to the kerb and the home around the world (it FTTC in the UK mostly) gives the uplink from the Home to use your STB to consume content anywhere, LTE to pull it down. Tablets have provided the device to consume the content on. The benefit of the Cloud PVR is of course - no need for the high speed up from your home. The downside from the carriers perspective is they still need sufficient tuners in the network (head-end) to be able to cope with all the simultaneous channels customers want to record.

So the big question that's been burning in my brain: Why do we need IPTV combined with IMS? (Ala TISPAN standards), my current thinking brings me to the conclusion - We don't.

The future of the cloud enabled telco is on everyones hot topics at the moment and I think I can see a "continental drift" scale change happening in network architecture design, the move from circuit switched to packet switched was the start - so called "cloud" architectures will now also impact heavily the way we design and build future networks and hybrid architectures that build the best of both the older telco design principles and the more "Internet" view of design (centralised vs. distributed compute intelligence) are evolving.

The Network is the call(c)

Some years ago Sun microsystems had the the strapline the "The network is the Computer". I came up soon after that with the phrase "The network is the call"(c), at the time in reference to the migration from traditional TDM based telephony networks to Voice over IP (VoIP) or Telephony over IP (ToIP).

Having just discovered http://twelephone.com/neillw I think the phrase now has even more meaning when linked with Social Media and WebRTC.

In my previous post I started discussing Over The Top (OTT) services and their relevance and threat to the traditional carrier model, and whilst we (carriers, standards bodies and consultants - me included) think about how we maintain quality of service and preserve the five-nines nature of telephony networks, we miss the point. Interaction between people needs to be spontaneous, easy and unrestricted. In some instances the restriction is not a physical impediment such as ease of use.... Its money. I've just recently been hit by additional charges on my mobile phone that are greater than my "so called inclusive package". When I queried this, it was 0844 (PowWow) conference number from a couple of conferences I took part in. Having just suffered "bill shock", I will avoid using my mobile for these services and found the great app "sayno to 0870" and website of the same name.

Applications of WebRTC such as the twelephone are a great example of how a service can change both my "traditional" view of communications and my behaviour. Even without all the heavy overhead involved in solving a QoS problem which (even on the Internet via my ADSL) isn't there.

I'd like to thank John Gage for "The Network is the Computer" and hope my version "The Network is the call"(c) helps to change other people's view of how telecommunications now is being shaped by the "Internet generation".

IPTV & 4G Apps in an IMS Core - what next for App Store and IPTV?

I was recently reading the Netflix view of the future of television and it set me thinking, as these things often do. Netflix's opening gambit in their "Long Term View" is that Linear TV's days are numbered. For those who aren't familiar with the terms, Linear TV is where you watch a set of channels with a broadcast schedule - i.e. programming follows a linear timeline, once a programme's allotted slot (in time) has gone, you missed it. This represents pretty much what all of us currently experience as terrestrial or satellite TV, without the use of a Personal Video Recorder (PVR).

How a lot of us consume TV now is a mixture of linear programming - augmented with a PVR so the linearity is - well none-linear! For those hooked on reality TV and more than that live reality TV the linear model still works - IF you add interaction from the audience, not to mention of course sporting events - that are probably the mainstay of linear broadcasters. So whilst I have to agree with Netflix's view about the decline of linear TV (heck most of us using a PVR aren't linear any more anyway), its difficult model to break especially in the UK where we have a pretty good terrestrial broadcast TV network.

The terrestrial broadcast TV model when the coverage is as good as it is in the UK is a difficult one to break.... Or is it? With the advent of Digital Video Broadcast - Terrestrial (DVB-T - Freeview/Saorview/La Télévision Numérique Terrestre (TNT) - or whatever it is called in your part of the globe), we get the same originally channels and guess what even more to watch (well if you can find a programme worth watching - then you'll probably record it!) Think about this for a moment.... What do we actually have here..... A nationwide Digital Broadcast medium capable of transmitting multiple video and audio streams, simultaneously with the customer requiring nothing more than a relatively inexpensive roof (or loft) mounted antenna, and receiver capable of translating that in to the image we see on the screen. What's more - the way the channels are transmitted (a MUX/virtual subchannel/bouquet as it is called), means we now have multiple programmes/stations per frequency, more than this - these "channels" are also capable of carrying data in the form of MHEG-5 or the Java based Multimedia Home Platform (MHP). Combined with faster internet access for a "back-channel" uplink communications path for these Xlets (Set-Top-Box Applets), in theory you have a recipe for Set-Top-Apps........... Which vendors of STB and DVD/Blueray players are starting to adopt.

Well almost of course we now See Internet enabled TVs. Blueray players and STBs, with embedded apps for Netflix, Lovefilm and the linear TV programmer's Apps (Like the BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and Demand5 and the like). These use HTTP streaming to create a none-linear model for consumption of content, built on the success of their Internet (PC/Mac/Browser and Tablet) variants. The limiting factor for these "apps" is available bandwidth from the Broadband connection. Whilst this is steadily improving, its still not what it could be everywhere (that's a whole other discussion right there!) The point I am moving towards - is better integration of these apps within the STB with the DVB data service and channel guides, and of course core network services.

We've long discussed (in the telecoms industry) the utopian view of telecommunications services that are fully integrated with our Diary and calling behaviours and to some degree we're there - well at least the technology is getting there to support it with the IMS-OSA Application Servers standardised and a Java Specification for device interaction with the IMS (JSR180 and JSR281). JSR281 as an interesting specification - designed as part of the embedded Java platform - Which MHP is exactly that - in an STB! So we have a mechanism for interacting with IMS services from and STB or "Internet TV", this allows us to initiate a multimedia session, combined with the DVB-T broadcast capability for distribution of video content nationally (at least) we have a recipe for building interactive services. However.... Carriers are still deploying or are "to" deploy IMS for mobile environments and are currently still in transition or at best mixed network environments for fixed, not to mention this disparity of xDSL provision in a competitive market and the mobile operator's current fixation of LTE rollouts. Some carriers are rolling out IPTV services combined with DVB-T receivers to combine, Linear, Near Video-On-Demand (NVoD) and Video-On-Demand (VoD) services.

What does the above paragraph mean? Well at the moment the market is at best fragmented and the current winners are the Over-The-Top (OTT) providers, the likes of the BBC, Lovefilm and Netflix. These providers are "piggybacking" on the Mobile and Fixed provider networks (data) and delivering content using STB apps. The IMS and OSA App Server and JSR281 mechanism may well be a redundant set of standards...... Is there a future for IPTV and IMS marriage as proposed in the TISPAN standards... I'm going to stick my neck out here and say "NO". In my humble opinion (IMHO) that horse has bolted - so to speak. OTT applications as cited above are in my mind more likely to succeed.

Note: OTT is clearly on Genband's mind too: 
http://www.mobilitytechzone.com/topics/4g-wirelessevolution/articles/2013/09/13/352903-genband-goes-buying-aga-with-purchase-fring-voip.htm

Offering the Fring white label service to carriers is an interesting step.

Is Linear TV and more specifically DVB-T services dead... Not yet, and IMHO I think have a life beyond the Set-top box - why - because they're (compared to Internet TV) cheap to distribute programming in infrastructure terms. Whilst we can rollout IP Multicast to "trim" the distribution of media streams, Linear plus PVR wins easily.

(More to come -whilst I chew on this topic a little more in my head) 
Next the question of IP Stores for Set-Top-Boxes and Internet TVs. Google (Android) and Apple (Apple TV) and Microsoft want to own this.... What about the Network Operators rolling out LTE data services... They'll want piece of the actions too............ Maybe even WebRTC is the answer?

SIP trunking - interesting how much is involved when you sit down and think!

I've recently spent a little over 3 days working on a new set of training material on SIP Trunking as part of my Wraycastle work. It amazing how much you hold in your head about topics. It's only when you start to put "pen to paper" so to speak that you realise there's a lot more about a topic than you superficially had in the front of your mind.

It turns out 33 slides later there is actually a great deal more than the SIP Forum's SIPConnect 1.1 specification when you start to consider all the facets of SIP trunks in their broadest sense, i.e. both Carrier to Carrier - Network to Network Interface (NNI) and Carrier to customer - User to Network Interface (UNI).

From a customer /Enterprise view-point I can see two main scenarios playing out:

Existing TDM PBX where the customer doesn't want to upgrade to a new IP-PBX, so chooses the media gateway route to terminate a carrier SIP interconnection with their TDM PBX.

And Scenario two where a customer has invested in the IP-PBX or Unified comms platform and builds a separate network and connection for their voice infrastructure.

I then went on to consider the following areas:

•Why SIP Trunking
•Brief market look at SIP trunking – why customers are moving from PRI to SIP trunks
•Carriers Perspective Why SIP trunks make sense


•Customer Scenarios

• E-SBC and IP-PBX Interconnect
• VoIP Gateway to Traditional PBX (AudioCodes, Sonus, Cisco CUBE)
• Multi-site
• IP-PBX or Microsft Lync
• Contact Centres (Queue-ing – SIP Response 182 Call Queued)
• Emergency Services access

•Carrier Scenarios

• Example TalkTalk Business & Virgin Media Business, BTWholesale IPVoice and IPExchange

• Emergency Services Provision

Technical standards and overview of delivery
•What a SIP trunk in technically (SIP Forum Standard – SIPConnect)
•Design Options from a carriers perspective
•Authentication (IP address based vs. SIP Registrations, SSL SIPS and SRTP)
•Transcoding, Codec Support
•Session Management
•SIP interworking with ISDN (Q.931, Q.SIG – RFC4497 - rfc4497)
•QoS monitoring

Gotchas – 
Fax,
Point Of Sales devices,
Franking machines 
and Alarm systems
Multisite and Bursting
CAC and capacity planning
Optimal Routing (REFER and 302 Redirect, vs 486 Busy and 603 Decline)
Site Failure (detection) 
and redirection (SIP OPTIONS messages)
Security Considerations (SPIT – SPam over IP Telephony)

If anyone is interested in knowing more about any of these areas - or even the whole course, then contact Wraycastle - you'll find them at: www.wraycastle.co.uk

WebRTC - LTE - Over The Top (OTT) services and disruption - or opportunity?

I've recently been looking hard at IMS and LTE - as both these technologies are finally gaining traction in the market place with Carriers upgrading their networks to 4G with VoLTE to follow very soon - within a year or so for many.

I've also been closely following the rapid rise of WebRTC and its deployment in browsers, Firefox and Google Chrome on you desktop now support WebRTC APIs and very soon it will be on your smartphone (http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/chrome-beta-for-android.html).

Carrier vendors such as Genband and others are all ready with their implementations of App servers capable of providing WebRTC.

There is plenty of support in the Open Source community with Asterisk, Freeswitch and Kamailio and OpenSIPs support SIP over websockets and OverSIP (http://oversip.net/) and the sipML5 HTML5 (Javascript SIP/SDP stack)... Not to mention MobiCents Open source IMS app server's support for it (http://www.slideshare.net/johntel/crocodile-launch-mobicents-html5-web-rtc-and-sip-over-websockets).

More Interesting on this front as well is the recently announced Project Clearwater (http://www.projectclearwater.org/) IMS in the cloud.

It seems to me there is about a 1 year opening for the Over The Top providers (OTT) to get in on LTE and capitalise on the carrier's reluctance to use VoLTE. Its not to say there won't be issues - carrier's LTE implementations will probably be restricted to a single Data service offering for this first year, offering Dongles and WiFi Personal hotspots (MyFI) over a none QoS bearer service, which might not be the best for offering voice and video services (but that doesn't stop most of us using Skype!)

From the carriers perspective it might also be worth considering their position with respect to partnerships to enable OTT providers or deep packet inspection technologies to block the OTT vendors from utilising WebRTC applications. Partnership in my mind is better for both. It gives OTT providers the opportunity to get a QoS bearer service for their applications (QCI 5 and QCI 1 EPS Bearers) and potentially a custom APN to support this. For the Carriers innovation has not historically been a carrier's strength - partnership brings the opportunity to gain revenue from innovative services with little or no cost of development, and prevents them from the constant fear of becoming a bit-pipe provider only.

Whilst thinking about QoS/QoE it also struck me that its going to be a bit more tricky (not impossible) for 3rd party QoS/QoE software probes to monitor the Quality of Web RTC traffic, on two counts, 1) its peer to peer - unless forced to be otherwise (media anchoring); 2) the media and RTCP is "munged" (technical term) together into a single UDP stream to improve on the chances of successful NAT traversal. And on a third count - the media may also be encrypted.

VMWare of Microsoft HyperV - Free or Licenced?

Whilst considering the design requirements of a hosted contact centre solution, one of the requests has been to consider which elements can be considered for virtualisation. The products in question for consideration are Oracle CallCallCenterAnywhere (CCA) and Cosmocom Call Universe (CCU).

Oracle CCA is officially end of life and now in extended support from Oracle - this doesn't stop people using it though and both my self and a number of consultants are still supporting this platform, testament to the guys at Telephony@Work who created this great product and shame on Oracle for end-of-life for the product. Fix Pack 10 supports Windows server 2008 - 32 bit only officially however the small print in the release notes indicates the executables have been tested to run on 64-bit Linux. This means there at least is the potential to support both HyperV and VMWare hypervisors.

That said the Cosmocom Call Universe product is now the only real alternative for multi-tenant host (Carrier scale) Contact Centre platform and thanks to the continued support and development fully support virtualisation. (footnote: I'm hoping for big things from Genesys Labs with their new cloud offering in this space).

Both CCA's and CCU's architecture support redundancy in their design, which means technologies such as live migration/vmotion are redundant in some respects for per data centre availability. However with 2 data centres the option for "WAN" live migration opens up the potential for a higher availability of the elements. This point requires careful consideration of the options. Since the other options open to is is just databased replication across the WAN to keep items in sync.

Having spent some time assessing VMWare vs. HyperV and product support of these hypervisors from Cosmocom - VMWare wins. Primarily on known to work on ESXi hypervisor, since CCU is currently only tested on Windows server 2008 with HyperV role. And secondary consideration is the footprint of the hypervisor with the the VMWare being a real light weight at around 512 Meg RAM!

Wow... Its been a bit mad this year, since finishing a contract at News International, its been all go hitting the books again teaching with Wraycastle. I've spent February and March travelling back and forth to Holland, Southern Ireland and around the UK, teaching TCP/IP, VoIP/IMS and MPLS courses.

I've been working hard upgrading my Cisco Lab and added 6 3725 routers, 2x 2950 switches (one which seems to be a survivor of a skip dump!) and a Cisco Catlyst 3550 layer 3 switch. This lab together with GNS3 and 8G RAM on my laptop and Mac Mini has helped me craft some pretty cool lab set-ups for demonstrating and teaching OSPF, BGP, MPLS, MPLS VPNs, Ethernet Over MPLS (and VPLS) and MPLS-TE.

I'll get around to posting some lab work hopefully in the next couple of months.. One that would be great to get going Pseudo Wire carrying an E1 (30 channel) voice circuit.

More anon......

BEA Weblogic and my CCA install - this one caught me out

IT & Telecoms are full of rat holes as an old colleague of mine described them. Some, as Mick described them, are Mink lined - they're the best and hours can be wasted foraging around in them. My latest rat hole wasn't that much fun, but none the less provided an hour of fascinating diversion from the job in hand.

The actual task was to look at setting up and validating scheduled reports in Oracle CCA Fix Pack 8 (you can appreciate already why a rat hole would be very attractive at this point). Task in hand I opened up a browser and logged into my VM CCA environment, navigated to the advanced reports section of my test tenant (Aeonvista of course) and clicked on user login/logout - nice easy one - went through set-up and all looked got - including the schedule tab and email details entry... .So far so good.

OK to the test client (Supervisor Java App) login, select reporting and click on the login/logout report .... and crash - well error .... Hmmm.

Back to the Admin screen, click view report, Java Error in the page:

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError:org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64.encodeBase64String

Now this was a surprise - my test environment is pretty clean - and I was sure this was working before... Then I remembered I'd done an upgrade from FP5, Hmmm .... surely there wasn't an old library included in the new release - that would have been rubbish.

Warning --- Rat Hole --- Warning --- Rat Hole --- Warning --- Rat Hole --- Warning

So now I had a problem to investigate, which was much more fun than the original task. A quick search turned up a stackoverflow post, with someone with a similar issue. So to find the offending library.

A quick look in the WEB-INF/lib folder showed commons-codec-1.6.jar - OK looked like the latest version - should contain the Base64 encode method required. To the AdministrationManager/report code folder, the JSP page is cr_choose_period.jsp and the offending lines:

<%@ page import = "org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64" %>

.........

String credentials = Base64.encodeBase64String(sbCredentials.toString().getBytes());

The second line was were the error was appearing and the first showed me the library was being included - so - what's going wrong? To work on a bit of JSP hacking - now its been almost 10 years since I even touched any JSP - some serious cobwebs to clear out of my brain cells for this one... Quick hack at a debug version of the offending JSP file and I had cr_choose_period.debug.jsp, with:

<%@ page import = "org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64" %>

<%@ page import = "java.util.*" %>

.......  
  <% out.println("Hello World"); %>
  <%out.println(request.getRealPath("/")); %>
  <%out.println(Base64.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation()); %> 

The pop-up dialogue (window) now showed me it was pulling a defunct (outdated) 1.3 library from: 

C:\bea\user_projects\domains\base_domain\servers\AdminServer\tmp\_WL_user

So stop the BEA Weblogic service, delete the contents of the tmp directory, restart weblogic. Check the debug page - excellent now pulling the correct library from the WEB-INF/lib directory. 

C:\bea\user_projects\domains\base_domain\servers\AdminServer\tmp\_WL_user\TAW\qaiheg\war\WEB-INF\lib

Re-instate the correct cr__choose_period.jsp code and - HEY PRESTO - the dialogue (window) now has the date time chooser in there.

Rat Hole End

Now I was back on track setting up the scheduled reports.

Happy Birthday 999 - 75 years today

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.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY - 999!

Investigating Asterisk 1.8 and Apstel DialPlan Pro

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.

Merry Christmas, Prosperous and Productive New Year

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.

Neill.....;o)

Someone shares my vision for Operators

I was flicking through my linkedIn notices and news items and spotted this great entry on the IPL Blog:
http://blog.ipl.com/telecoms-media/the-shop-sells-more-if-its-doors-are-open/#more-1750

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.

Future communications networks and services

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.

An intelligent network can be a platform for new business models and differentiators, by enabling network segmentation, partnerships with content partners and the creation of personalized services. This is especially important in a landscape that has seen the rise of content, applications and devices as having the primary relationship with the customer from a brand perspective. Driving intelligence in the network isthe primary strategy for mobile operators looking to architect for the next-generation business model.

This report includes:

• The Intelligent Mobile Broadband Imperative: Why Intelligence Matters
• The Network 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.