IT

I have seen some hype building up about ENUM (RFC 2916) recently, suggesting that ENUM will finally make Voice-over-IP (VoIP) leapfrog traditional telephony.

First of all, what is ENUM? It is simply a means for a VoIP program like Microsoft Windows Messenger or Apple’s iChat AV to find how to reach a correspondent from a phone number. First-generation VoIP programs required users to enter the IP address of their correspondent to call them, or to use non-standard or semi-standard directory services like Microsoft’s short-lived ILS. Since most people wouldn’t recognize an IP address if it bit them on the nose, this limited the market to geeks or incredibly determined penny-pinchers. With ENUM, if you know my phone number, say (415) 359-0918, or if you use the ITU-T E.164 international numbering standard, +1 415 359 0918, you would find the IP address of my VoIP phone/program by looking up 8.1.9.0.9.5.3.5.1.4.1.e164.arpa in the DNS. This is the reversed E.164 phone number, with e164.arpa tacked onto it, the way you can do reverse domain name lookup of the IP address 198.144.198.154 by looking up the PTR record corresponding to 154.198.144.198.in-addr.arpa. The .arpa is a legacy of the days when the Internet was bankrolled by the US ARPA, now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and cause no little grumbling from people who would rather have a more “neutral” root e164.int.

This is a clever hack, allowing VoIP clients to leverage the DNS infrastructure, rather than building new protocols or even leveraging existing ones like LDAP. Every modern computer from Palm PDAs to Windows PCs to IBM mainframes have built-in DNS clients (although few support the ridiculously over-engineered new NAPTR resource record introduced for ENUM in RFC 2915). LDAP client libraries are nowhere near as widespread. Implementing ENUM is thus relatively easy, in the order of a few days of work at most, assuming the underlying name client software is not hardwired for IP address resolution only. In a similar way, a few years ago a group of young turks unsuccessfully proposed the ITU set aside an international country code for VoIP calls (the decimal IP address would be encoded as a 12 digit phone number). The old ITU proposal addressed the issue of getting conventional phones to reach an IP address, ENUM addresses how to reach a conventional phone number from an IP phone.

That said, while ENUM simplifies some of the logistical issues of managing a federated namespace or numbering plan, the bulk of the effort in transitioning to VoIP lies elsewhere:

• Making IP phones as convenient as traditional phones (waiting 5 minutes for Windows to boot does not quite qualify).
• Providing the same level of resiliency as the old network, for instance in case of power failure (when I was in Telecom school, one of our teachers always insisted on the fact when phones fail, people can die because emergency services are not dispatched any more).
• Providing gateways between traditional telephony and IP telephony, and finding a sound business model to pay for it.
• Figuring out how billing and compensation will be handled
• Increasing competition by allowing direct calls when both users are VoIP capable, without having to know this explicitly beforehand.
• Improving the ubiquity of IP connectivity, specially residential broadband and wireless.
• Improving IP network quality of service, since Quality of Service approaches do not scale and end up being even more inefficient than the old network.

ENUM does not address the chicken-and-egg syndrome that is slowing VoIP adoption. A significant proportion of telephone calls is now carried over IP, for instance AT&T and MCI have both declared their intent to migrate over half their voice traffic to IP by 2005. But that is invisible to end-users, and not accessible – you won’t be able to dial an AT&T user by the IP address AT&T uses internally for them. AT&T will not give it to you because then they would not be able to bill you for it the way they can bill other telcos with interconnect agreements.

As the global E.164 numbering plan is controlled by the ITU and delegated to Telcos, ENUM will not by itself make it possible to create new phone numbers that are not controlled by Telcos. A competitive service provider could petition to obtain a number range, the way Vonage obtained US phone numbers for its VoIP service, but telephone billing has assumptions on the structure of phone numbers deeply embedded within it, probably inextricably. After all, it has taken carriers over ten years to learn to bill calls towards mobile phones in Europe differently by detecting they have a leading 6 digit.

Conceivably, the ENUM NAPTR resource records could be served from any domain name, not just one under e164.arpa. One could imaging that in the future, instead of giving a nineteenth-century style phone number (the first Strowger automatic phone exchange was installed in New Haven, Connecticut in 1891), you would give out a domain name (“call me at fazal.majid.info“) or something that looks like an email address. But that is not what ENUM offers (today), in part by design.

I bought a Sony Clié UX50 PDA a few weeks ago. I started noticing that every time I restart my PC (admittedly, not something I do all that often), an incredibly annoying Windows Explorer window set to C:\Program Files\Sony would pop up at the end of the boot sequence.

After a little analysis, it turns out the Sony installer created a registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Palm MulitUser Config with the value C:\Program Files\Sony Handheld\Configtool.exe. Enclosing that in double quotes using Regedit (insert obligatory admonishments about the dangers of Regedit here) fixes the problem. Click here for a screenshot of what it should look like.

Without the double quotes, Windows is thrown off by the space between “Sony” and “Handheld“, and assumes you want to run the command C:\Program Files\Sony with the command-line parameter Handheld\Configtool.exe. As there is no such command C:\Program Files\Sony, Windows just runs the default action for that object, which is to open it in a Windows Explorer window.

I wouldn’t have gone in such excruciating detail about this issue, except:

• Somebody else annoyed with this bug might find this resolution via Google
• It shows how sloppy Sony is about testing its software installers (in passing, note the typo “MulitUser” instead of “MultiUser“)
• That registry folder is where all the startup items that aren’t in the Start menu reside. You might want to have a look at it to see what odd junk resides there, such as obnoxious system tray items like RealPlayer.

Update (2004-01-12):

Sony has an official fix for this problem: PDTREGISTRYUPDATE.EXE.

I switched my long-distance telephone provider to SBC earlier this week. On general principle, I would rather avoid funding incumbent monopolies, but their $49/month unlimited local and domestic long-distance package is very attractive, and the competing alternatives like MCI’s The Neighborhood are not available in San Francisco yet.

The main factor leading to flat-rate plans is a series of FCC regulations named CALLS that entered in effect in July 2000. Prior to these rules, the local phone companies would skim 6 cents per minute in “access charges” from the long-distance company, which would have no recourse but to pass the cost on to consumers. This is why long distance prices were on a plateau of 10 cents per minute for such a long time.

The previous regulations entrenched the concept of cost per minute in the economic structure of telephony, even though it is almost entirely a fixed cost activity. Joe Nacchio, former CEO of Qwest, famously boasted that “Long Distance is still the most profitable business in America, next to importing illegal cocaine”. CALLS slashed these access charges, removing the main impediment to flat-rate pricing.

Former AT&T researcher Andrew Odlyzko has made a compelling argument for flat-rate pricing, noting that most people prefer it to metered plans, even if they pay more for it, flying in the face of most economists’ conventional wisdom (that says more about how disconnected from reality economists are than anything else).

I have managed a large telecoms billing system project, and an interesting point, seldom made, is that billing for metered services is in itself very expensive. Collecting all the traffic information, storing it, rating it, calculating the bills, invoicing, accounts receivables, dunning and handling customer complaints involves huge IT budgets and systems so complex that over 70% of new billing systems projects fail. For example, France Telecom spent almost half a billion dollars on its would-be next-generation billing system, Fregate, before pulling the plug. Most Baby Bells are still running CRIS, a creaking sixties-seventies mainframe-based billing system they inherited from Ma Bell.

There is clearly a point at which services become too cheap to meter, or more precisely, metering becomes too expensive. We may have reached that point already for voice, even if the dinosaurs don’t realize it yet. The only thing that is keeping per-minute charges alive is customers’ inertia, never a factor to be underestimated, to be sure.

HP introduced a new line of printers recently, with one model starting at $40, or barely more than the ink cartridges for it that cost $21. A British consumer magazine has exposed the deceptive and price-gouging practices of inkjet printer manufacturers. No wonder most of HP’s profits come from their printing business, their computer division being a mere hanger-on, and they have adopted King Gillette’s “give away the razor, sell the blades” business model with a vengeance.

Printing photos on an inkjet paper is particularly expensive since most of the paper surface is covered in ink, unlike conventional documents where the ratio is only 5% of so. If you are a digital photographer needing to make prints, you should look beyond the low purchase price for these printers, as there are far better options available.

There are many processes to produce prints from digital originals. You can use inkjet printers, dye-sublimation printers, Fuji’s Pictrography, and digital minilabs. Color laser printers are relatively economical, but are best used for office documents rather than photos as their output is not particularly vivid. Inkjet printers have vivid colors but their results fade very quickly (apart from a handful of pigment-based ink models from Epson in their 2000/2100/2200 series). Dye sublimation printers have excellent smooth colors, and last longer thanks to their protective overcoat layer, but are usually expensive to run and have limited paper size options. Fuji’s Pictrography process is a true photographic process, but both printers and media are expensive, and it is most suitable for professional photographers who need to produce in-house proof prints for clients on a deadline, but cannot afford a $175,000 digital minilab.

This leaves what is in my opinion the best option for obtaining prints, digital minilabs. These are machines that expose conventional (silver) photo paper with lasers or LEDs. The key players are Fuji with their Frontier system, Noritsu (Kodak’s partner) and Agfa with their d-Lab. All of these systems will yield excellent, smudge-proof and durable prints, and are invariably far more cost-effective than the alternatives. You can get 4in x 6in (10cm x 15cm) prints made for as low as 20 cents each online or at many places like Costco. In many cases, you can just insert a memory card or CD in a kiosk system like the Fuji Aladdin, select your pictures, crop and adjust contrast, and they will be sent to the minilab to be printed within an hour.

Digital minilabs are usually limited to 8in x 10in or 11in x 14in prints. For larger sizes, you need to use a professional lab that uses high-end large-format machines like the Cymbolic Lightjet or Durst Lambda, which use lasers as well, but operate on large rolls of photo paper for advertising and other high-end applications. I have had a 4in x 100in panoramic print (yes, you read that right) made on a Lightjet by Pictopia.com, with excellent results. These services are usually more expensive, about $10-15 per square foot, but use higher quality professional grade paper rather than the consumer-level kind (usually thinner and not quite as durable) used by mass-market shops.

I installed Mozilla Firebird today. As I am encouraging my father to migrate away from the stale IE (since Microsoft obtained near-monopoly status, that browser hasn’t been updated to include such vital features like tabbed browsing), and I have already switched to Safari on my Mac, I also decided to have a new look at Firebird (I had tried an early version of Phoenix, 0.3 I believe). Firebird (formerly Phoenix, soon to be renamed Mozilla Browser) is based on Mozilla, but is less resource-intensive because it does not try to be all things to all people and is just a browser (and not a HTML editor, email program, newsreader, IRC client, dessert topping and floor wax). Firebird will be the official Mozilla browser, replacing the current Mozilla suite in the medium term.

The core rendering engine is the same, and it uses the same XUL cross-platform UI toolkit, so migrating from Mozilla is relatively painless. Bookmarks are compatible. You can even copy over saved passwords, albeit at the cost of removing strong cryptographic password protection on them. To do so, reset the Master password to empty, uncheck the “Use encryption when storing sensitive data”, and copy a file called XYZ.s from your Mozilla profile to your Firebird profile, where XYZ is a random series of digits, for more information see this article.

First impressions:

• It certainly loads faster.

• It honors the Windows default mail and newsreader settings, so when a mailto: URL is encountered, it starts Outlook for me as I would like it to, not the half-baked Mozilla mail client. Big plus!

• The toolbars are customizable

• It does not yet have the DOM inspector and Venkman JavaScript debugger, both very useful for web development, but they will eventually be available as extensions

• No annoying download manager to clean up, instead, a simple download box like IE and Netscape 4

• With a few simple changes to the config files, ads and popups are blocked without having to install a blocker such as WebWasher.

• The “Add bookmarks” command opens a dialog with the complete bookmarks folders hierarchy flattened into a single list (as opposed to a Tree control in Seamonkey). When you have a bookmarks hierarchy as large and complex as mine, this is unusable. I could use the bookmarks sidebar instead, but a more efficient way is to drag-and-drop into the menu, in a way reminiscent of how the Windows Start menu can be rearranged. Neither method is as efficient as Netscape 4’s “File as” functionality, but this comes close.

• The tabs don’t quite look as nice as Seamonkey’s. You do not have the ability to add a group of tabs as a single bookmark, but you can add them as a bookmarks folder, and all bookmarks folders havean “Open in tabs” option. Gain some, lose some.

• Bookmark keyword searching is amazing. For example, I can search IMDB for Hank Azaria by just typing “imdb hank azaria in the URL bar. Admittedly, Seamoney had that capability as well.

• Bookmark separators can have names, which makes for cleaner organization of bookmarks when subfolders are overkill.

I will try it a little bit longer, but I think I might well migrate to Firebird as my primary browser.