Blogs

New Rule Requires Notification of Service Outages

In what surely seems a case of "too little, too late" to Phone Power customers who weathered the May 2nd service disruption, the FCC has finalized rules requiring VoIP providers to report service outages.

The FBI has listed VoIP as one of the new technologies it's desperately trying to keep pace with, and has petitioned the industry to allow backdoor access to spy on Americans who might be up to no good.

The "power" in Phone Power was missing on Wednesday, as the VoIP phone service provider suddenly lost connectivity. Phone Power customers were unable to make calls or contact the VoIP service provider, whose website was also down.

Luckily, the residential phone service has also tapped into the "power" (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk) of the Social Web — namely microblogging — and was able to get the word out via Twitter, posting this note about their status:

The Hype for Skype

The Intertubes are ablaze with rumblings (and ramblings) that Microsoft's Skype division might be planning a significant VoIP counter-attack to Google Voice, and more specifically Google+ Hango

I was going to link to a press release on magicJack's revenue before I saw the contents. magicJack is doing well, the title boasts. Congratulations to them and all that jazz.

Then I read the first sentence.

Congratulations! If you're reading this, you're probably an early adopter of VoIP phone service, at least in the US. Consider yourself one of the few, the proud, the adventurous.

We have an update on our VoIP scams blog this week. According to Huffington Post, scammers have used outsourced call centers to "defraud Americans out of more than $5 million over the past two years." If this doesn't startle you, perhaps it should.

I tried Bobsled Calling on Friday.

I didn’t get to keep my number. My mother thought I was a spammer from Illinois. Good times.

My mother also didn’t recognize my voice and I cut out here and there. The delay was long enough that I would stop talking and wait for her response to come in. However, there’s no WiFi where I called so I was using Sprint’s 3G.

Okay, I admit it. I haven't had a chance to try Bobsled yet. It's not my fault, though.* The T-Mobile app couldn't call out to landlines.

If there's one thing phone companies all have in common (besides phones), it's lawsuits. More specifically, patent lawsuits. Suits, countersuits, jumpsuits, you name it.

In the last five years, telecom has been trying to sue the pants off of competitors for alleged VoIP patent infringement.