We’ll be joined by Brough Turner to have a discussion on issues of broadband. Mr Turner has had a long history in telecom and network engineering. He’s currently at Netblazr Inc, a company which he founded, and which he describes as “a radically new form of wireless ISP.” You can find a more detailed bio on his blog.

Netblazr was one of the companies highlighted in StartupCamp4 Comms Edition at ITExpo West 2011. We will surely discuss Netblazr and what makes it special.

As the US federal governments “super-committee” just recently wound down the matter of spectrum use, licensing, auctions, etc has been more and more in the public eye. Brough recently posted a very interesting perspective on spectrum concerns called, “Valuing the white spaces above 3 GHz.”

All of this should make Friday’s VUC call very interesting indeed.

Allison is back with the latest news of her activities in the world of voice-over and voice prompts. If you’re not familiar with the name Allison Smith, I’ll tell you when I first heard it: on Free World Dialup circa 2003, yes, nearly 9 years ago!

If you’re lucky enough to be coming to Astricon this year, you’ll certainly have a chance to meet Allison, one of the nicest people I’ve met anywhere.

PBX in a Flash from Nerd Vittles, Tim Panton on using Open BTS at Burning Man and a bunch of other interesting stuff that comes up before we have film of it!

Links (Open BTS / Burning Man):

http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2011/08/video-how-to-communicate-at-burning-man-using-openbts-and-tropo.html

http://openbts.blogspot.com/2011/09/burning-man-2011-yes-we-were-there.html

Dan York brings some info from SpeechTEC. The mobile use of speech recognition is a specific focus we talk about. Also, the problem of the cloud and national data compliance, as in Europe, where data is not supposed to cross borders.

Lazboy and a few others give us a rundown about ClueCon.

Talk about Chrome Beta Audio without Flash or Java.

MRCP

We’re also using Google Plus to post threads you can comment on live. This leaves a nice permanent record.

In the aftermath of the big and controversial voicemail hack starring the NOTW… wait – “controversial”, does anyone think this was OK? Anyway it’s our topic and we hope to gather some knowledgable people to chat about it including Tim Panton, Humbug Telecom’s Boaz Bechar, Truphone’s James Body, Dan York of Voxeo and anyone else ready to “testify”. Be there!

Video of the talking heads is here

Give us a +1 for Google above!

eComm 2011 VUC Specials by VoIP Users Conference

Andy Abramson, Dan York and whoever else is able to function coherently (or not) at 7:45 AM USA Pacific Daylight Time will be on VUC in three special live breakfast sessions from eComm2011: Emerging Communications Conference, next week. Speakers at eComm are some of the brightest lights in VoIP, including Tim Panton, Dan York, Darren Schreiber, Johnny Diggz, Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor, Lee S Dryburgh, Digium’s Bryan M. Johns and many more.

Andy Abramson, Dan York and Tim Panton are joined by Alec Saunders, Erik Lagerway, Martin Geddes, Todd Carothers, “disruptive” Dean Bubley, Aaron Huslage and (more luminaries coming tomorrow) for a round table on the VoIP of tomorrow. This who’s who of VoIP is too hot to miss. No handsets were harmed in the recording of this episode.

Chris Matthieu on Tropo.com, great added comments by Tim Panton. Michael Graves, just back from NAB with a few notes. Karl Fife on WebOS (just kidding!)

Bad Wifi at the trade show, new Siemens Gigaset handsets and more DECT comments. Profiles on mobile devices, sharing books on Kindle, Nook, Android, iOS, etc.

IRC Transcript and, here are the index labels we spoke of, generated by Audacity (and me). The first column is seconds in to the recording after removing silences.

106    News of the World phone hackers
875     Foreign SIM cards, USA phone booths
1273    Is toll-free still relevant?
1581    Skype v5, and new linux version
1641    Security: Telepacific outage
1745   Security: attacked? Who you gonna call?
2250   Epsilon email db breach
2381    Comodo breach, bad DSL, bad
2631    Linphone, new versions including OS X and Windows
2775   g711, not that bad!
2887  iPhone SIP apps
3346   Lync USB phone
3957   Visio TV checking file system?
4964  Anyone using Google Talk VUC gateway?
5109    Index or transcript of VUC sessions
5442   IRC transcript of VUC

This month, many exclusive news items have been obtained by the VUC and we will be sharing these scoops with you this Friday.
photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Lots more discussion, 2 hours of it on various topics, continuing the chat about various platforms. Tablets, more Android, more on lag and latency (just guessing here, I went to dinner).

Karl give us the skinny on his new Palm Pre 2 phone and runs through the features of WebOS. They do sound great, but is there a futre? Will developers get on board or is this another OS/2?

Thanks to @sollostech for bringing Bufferbloat to our attention!

Much more background is here: http://www.bufferbloat.net

What is Bufferbloat? From Jim Gettys’ explanation:

Bufferbloat is existence of excessively large (bloated) buffers into systems, particularly network communication systems.

Who is Jim Gettys? In his own words:

“As a quick synopsis, Bob Scheifler and I started the X Window System; I was the editor of the HTTP/1.1 proposed and draft standards, co-founder of handhelds.org and the revised X.org, and helped out on freedesktop.org.  I also worried a lot about the software for the OLPC XO-1. And a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to astronomy.”

More details on Jim Gettys and his many projects and challenges on Wikipedia. We’re very pleased to have Jim as a guest and I know we’re anxious to hear more about Bufferbloat!

Dave Täht, who will also be joining us, has been involved in Linux and VOIP since 1993 and wireless networking since 1996. In addition to early work on asterisk and the
sofia sip stack, he worked on several early embedded asterisk devices. In 2006 he “retired” to Nicaragua where he worked on the OLPC, IP04, and mesh potato, in addition to surfing a lot.

After observing the (sad) state of the wireless networks and the internet itself, there, he :assumed: that the core problem was wireless
spectrum and started developing the wisp6 5.8 ghz wireless mesh network.

He was in the middle of the first test deployment this past spring and got beaten by both the arrival of the Survivor TV show… and bufferbloat (not realized until December of this year) , which forced him to return to the US. Upon arrival… He slowly realized that the
problems he’d had in Central America were also appearing in the US.

It wasn’t until December that he got a handle on it with Jim Getty’s series of postings on bufferbloat.

He is now spending all his spare time working on beating bufferbloat.

VUC, our international user group meets every week at 12 Noon EST. To see the time in your area, visit Permatime. This week, some of the regulars were called away but most of us did make cameo appearances. This week we spoke about mobiles and mobile data plans and access.

Our Google Group and Mailing List welcomes your membership. Be sure to give a brief intro, just a few words about your interest in technology.

Join us any Friday, we’re happy to answer questions and discuss tech topics of all kinds.

Linkedin: http://vuc.me/linkedin

Facebook: http://facebook.com/voipusers

Twitter: @VoipUsers

Asterisk SCF is a framework that will allow developers to move beyond voice and also create open source video and text that can be used for anything from embedded applications to enterprise and carrier solutions, according to Digium. It is delivered as a system of distributed components that can be deployed in clusters on a single system or on many systems, and will support pretty much all real-time IP communications including video, wideband audio, chat and desktop sharing.Asterisk SCF seeks to meet four requirements for businesses looking to deploy open source communications solutions:

• Performance
• Scalability
• Fault tolerance
• Extensibility

Live from Astricon (well it was when we recorded it), Kevin Fleming, director of software technologies at Digium joins us at talk about the big Digium announcement.  This discussion was made possible  by Tim Panton and Michael Graves. Kevin, Tim and Joshua Colp were in a room, surrounded by John Todd’s tie-dyed shirts.

and boy, are my arms tired! But wait! It gets better!

Part 2 may be an acquired taste, but some people really like to listen to these, so here it is.

My advice? Be there. Join us every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern Times, standard or daylight, which ever is in force that day. There is a permatime link to know when the next session is in your very own time zone.

On the vuc.me web page during the live conference there is a link to the new experimental streaming URL and a widget that allows you to call VUC from a browser. We’re in IRC channel #vuc on Freenode.net.

If you’re reading this (and I know you are!) make a note to call sip:200901@login.zipdx.com or skype:vuc.me next week. Why? Because we don’t record the last 5 hours of the VUC. We might be talking about you.

Will the wifi hold up? We’ll see on Friday when we try this live version of the VUC at the usual time.

AMOOCON 2010 will, as always, be interesting and fun in and of itself. It’s great to meet people in person and talk about what they’re doing.

We’ll be talking to the people who offer Blink, a free OS X g722-capable SIP client (and much more) and longtime VUC regular Tim Panton, who among other things is the reason we can connect to the VoIP Users Conference  via Skype. The Skype bridge is provided by PhoneFromHere.com.

Blink is offered by AG Projects. Read more info about Blink. or download it here. AG Projects CEO, Adrian Georgescu was our guest in previous sessions. Phone from Here’s Tim Panton was recently involved in the “Telephony Island Adventure“.

We talk about several topics in part 2 including Skype, USB connections for VoIP, new devices like the Gigaset One, a cellphone gateway. Lots of talk about NAT with Asterisk and SIP. The usual chatter from friends around the table in our weekly “club”.

Among the participants Tim @steely_glint, Neil from IdeaSIP, Karl @karlfife, Michael @mjgraves and Graves on SoHo VoIP, David Frankel from ZipDX who furnish our great wideband conference facilities, Dave @DaveMichels from Pin Drop Soup, Pascal from Media5.

Welcome to a very old friend of mine, Bob from Future Video. The VUC encourages new people to be a part of our weekly talks. Please join us so you can chime in, ask questions and generally have a great time.

Tim Panton and David Burgess describe the project to deploy the first GSM phone system to the small island nation of Niue.

The system consists of OpenSource software and (largely) commodity hardware. The project uses OpenBTS, Asterisk and USRP. Tim will try to describe (with help from OpenBTS‘s David Burgess) the technical, regulatory and logistical challenges that we faced before we could make the first call. See also David Burgess’ presentation at eComm 2009.

David Burgess, last minute tweaks

VUC regular contributor Tim Panton has been a software developer and consultant at Westhawk Ltd more than 25 years, working on a diverse range of projects, from chemical plant simulation to tourism web sites. He is also a contributor to open source projects, in particular GJTAPI a framework for implementing JTAPI (The Java Telephony API) and Westhawk’s Java SNMP stack. In recent years Tim has been predominantly involved in Asterisk development and implementation, working closely with key industry players he has been championing innovative integration of voice technologies . Tim is also the technical director of PhoneFromHere.com Ltd.

LINKS from the discussion.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-330735.mp3|titles=Part 2 March 5 2010]

Tim Panton reports in via satellite from Nuie where they were installing an open mobile phone system.
Voipathon plans world domination with a 24 hour live Internet conference.
Randal L. Schwartz chats with us about language choices, perl, python, FORTH, PHP, Squeak Smalltalk.
“Violent” arguments about port knocking and how to protect SSH by using less obvious ports, etc.

Session 1: [audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-306531.mp3|titles=best and worst of 2009 and future of VoIP]

Andy Abramson (VoIP Watch), Tim Panton (PhoneFromHere.com), Michael Graves (Graves on SoHo VoIP), David Frankel (ZipDX.com), Ward Mundy (Nerd Vittles), Dave Michels (PinDropSoup.com),  Randal Schwartz , Dave Chan and others discuss the year 2009 and VoIP and the usual digressions.

At the end of session one you can hear the New Years Greetings from listeners and participants.

Session 2:
[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-308412.mp3|titles=Part 2 of VUC Jan 1 2010]

[audio:http://voipusersconference.org/wp-content/uploads/amoocondiscussion.mp3|titles=AMOOCON 2009, Tim Panton, John Todd, Russell Brand, Kevin Fleming...]

Although I managed to herd a great group of people into the speakers’ lounge and record a wide-ranging discussion, the first part was lost due to a software glitch on the recorder. It seems that the low battery level shut things down and ditched the file. The part posted here is only the second hour (heh) but there are some interesting things to hear.

Topics covered include codecs, video, Skype for Asterisk, teleconference robots, “robot Mark”, presence, stereo codecs, and lots more. One side (Zoa, Diana Cionoiu etc) rags on the iPhone, the other side says “get used to it”.

MP3 DOWNLOAD LINK