CXTech Week 6 2023 News and Analysis

The purpose of this CXTech Week 6 2023 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech?  The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email. Please forward this on if you think someone should join the list. And please let me know any CXTech news I should include.

Covered this week:

  • FCC Threatens to Disconnect Twilio for Illegal Robocalls
  • What can GPT do for your business right now?
  • WebRTC Trends for 2023: Has WebRTC Reached Enlightenment?
  • Thank you Nikki for posting on TADHack Open, 25-26 March
  • Google Fi Data Breach
  • FOSDEM Videos
  • Radisys “Let’s Engage” podcast: Programmable Communications
  • Looking for an alternative to Mavenir’s Telestax?
  • People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

FCC Threatens to Disconnect Twilio for Illegal Robocalls

I’m surprised how long its taken for this headline to appear. The FCC recently sent a robocall cease-and-desist letter to Twilio. They received a letter much like other cease-and-desist letters from the FCC: stop the illegal robocalls within the next 48 hours, or be disconnected from the rest of the US comms system.

We have determined that Twilio Inc. (Twilio) is apparently originating illegal robocall traffic on behalf of one or more of its clients. As explained further below, this letter provides notice of important legal obligations and steps Twilio must take to address this apparently illegal traffic. Twilio should investigate the identified traffic and take the steps described below, including blocking the traffic if necessary, and take steps to prevent Twilio’s network from continuing to be a source of apparently illegal robocalls. Failure to comply with the steps outlined in this letter may result in downstream voice service providers blocking all of Twilio’s traffic, permanently.

FCC

The FCC’s cease-and-desist letter to Twilio can be found here and the press release explaining how the FCC responded to MV Realty’s robocalls is available here.

Rather than blather about STIR/SHAKEN, the FCC is pushing for all communication service providers to KYC (Know Your Customer). At TADSummit Gerry Christensen, VP YouMail, gave a great presentation on “What Everyone Needs to Know about Protecting the CPaaS Ecosystem from Unlawful Robocalls.” Here are the Slides and Video.

What can GPT do for your business right now?

A great piece from Rob Pickering on what ChatGPT means to most businesses. I’ve avoided commenting as the hype has left me rather bored / ranty on the topic. DALL E2 for me was much more exciting and I reviewed it here, CXTech Week 23 2022 in the Delft Blue Stormtroopers. Here is a great quote from Rob on ChatGPT,

The reality is that when you give ChatGPT a question, it will give you an answer which is basically a composite of the median answers found on the HTML Internet and other public domain sources for that topic. Work has been done to improve this by weighting data to tune it towards authoritative answers for selected topics which is probably why it produces such prescient results for popular queries.

Rob Pickering, What can GPT do for your business right now? Feb 2023

The web is surprisingly inaccurate, most of the content is marketing, and it has a short memory so can not position things within a broader context. Also it’s rather Western / North American centric, I could go on with the limitations of the data set.

I do are fair bit of market research, when I tested it on a few topics: it claims materials are confidential that are publicly available on the company’s website. Now, of course, those numbers are marketing… It lists competitors for categories, yet has significant gaps for smaller companies and those based in Asia. It can not relate different services as being competitive. So the life of an analyst is still safe.

Personally, Wikipedia, going direct to the companies’ websites, industry expertise built from years of experience and talking with people are not yet at risk from ChatGPT. But if you want some plausible marketing blurb that does not require any critical analysis, it’s definitely a handy tool, as Rob points out. Does it transform conversation intelligence beyond the solutions already available today, in my opinion, no. There’s an old adage, GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Check out Surbhi Rathore’s, CEO & Co-Founder Symbl.ai, presentation “How to best maximize the conversation data stream for your business?” Here are the Slides and Video. And Ben Waymark’s, Chief Technology Officer Webio, excellent review “CPaaS Conversational Platforms and Conversational Customer Service – The Experience Gap?”. Here are the Slides and Video.

Chris McLellan also did a nice post of ChatGPT:

Denis Rotham also did a nice post:

WebRTC Trends for 2023: Has WebRTC Reached Enlightenment?

Arin from WebRTC.Ventures asks the question, “Has WebRTC Reached Enlightenment?” It’s a great discussion. For me, WebRTC has always been a multi-headed beast, initially an open source project and a browser API. But now the capabilities keep being extended where I wonder is it necessarily part of WebRTC, or an implementation feature. The argument for standardization is always interoperability. But I wonder if we’re approaching a limit for the standard?

As Jayne Mast, Engineering Manager for DevRel at Daily, raised in the TADSummit panel discussion ‘Future of WebRTC and Web3‘, webRTC is still too complex for most developers. I agree with Arin’s position that we are reaching the slope of enlightenment, as long as you’ve got someone holding your hand 😉

Check out Arin’s TADSummit presentation on the important trend of scaling, Architecting your WebRTC application for scalability Here are the Slides and Video.

Thank you Nikki for posting on TADHack Open, 25-26 March

As soon as Vivienne nails the alphabet, I’m advancing her to functions, commands, and variables. 💻

“Researchers in a gender-blind study discovered that code written by women was approved at a higher rate (78.6%) than software code written by men (74.6%). Proof if it were needed that women not only make great coders, but they outperform their male colleagues.” (Learning People)

Happy to see that the largest and longest running (10 years) hackathon focused on programmable communications now has an event focused on increasing the influence that women have in building the technologies that shape our culture and change our world. ♀

TADHack Open is March 25-26 in Orlando and online, and registration is open at https://tadhack.com/2023/.

Google Fi Data Breach

Guillaume gave a good review of the Google Fi data breach:

Google Fi has fallen victim to a data breach as a result of the T-Mobile network attack. An unknown quantity of records, including SIM card serial numbers, have potentially been exposed, leaving Google Fi customers with more than they bargained for. You see where this is going, right!?

The T-Mobile data breach, which took place between the last months of 2022 and early 2023, was identified as an API scraping exploit that allowed the attacker access to 37 million records of customer information. This included basic contact and profile information such as name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, account number, and plan features.

BUT!… little caveat, the Google Fi breach included additional information that T-Mobile did not reveal in their breach disclosure, such as SIM card serial numbers. This development is particularly concerning as it could lead to SIM swap attacks, a concern that we have already attracted attention to in the past.

The extent of the impact on Google Fi subscribers is unknown, as the company has kept subscriber numbers private and has not disclosed how many customers have been affected.

The information taken in the Google Fi breach also presents a potential risk for targeted phishing campaigns, adding to the already concerning possibility of SIM swap attacks.

Here’s the CommsRisk article on the breech, Google MVNO Privacy Breach Leads to SIM Swap Takeover.

FOSDEM Videos

Since 2000, the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.

FOSDEM is held annually, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium.

Most of the videos are online, some of the sessions I watched include:

Radisys “Let’s Engage” podcast: Programmable Communications

I’m on the Radisys “Let’s Engage” podcast with Al Balasco talking about Programmable Communications.

  • Why the market for programmable communications is so popular, and what aspects are gaining the most attention?
  • How is the battleground for programmable digital engagements emerging, especially concerning the API economy?
  • What are some of the coolest and most interesting applications that have been created using programmable communications in recent hackathons?
  • How can communication service providers leverage their data better using programmable communications?
  • What innovations were seen in the most recent Hackathons, and what can be expected in the upcoming hackathons?

Don’t forget to register for TADHack Open, March 25-26, 2023, sponsored by Radisys.

Looking for an alternative to Mavenir’s Telestax?

I’ve provided many of these intros in the passed 2 weeks. I’m just helping people get to the answer they seek faster with this post, to save me another intro. If you’re looking for an alternative to Mavenir’s Telestax (I’m not commenting on why you may be looking), check out jambonz from Dave Horton.

There are alternatives such as Fonoster, Inc. from Pedro Sanders, FreeSWITCH, #asterisk, Pion from Sean DuBois, and many many more, it depends on your needs. For example you may want something shrink-wrapped like Radisys Corporation EDP (Engage Digital Platform). If you want to spend some $$ to understand what is right for you, then let’s talk 😉

The Jambonz community is very active on Slack, Dave has been doing programmable comms for decades, and is a really nice person. Check out this video from TADHack last year to get to know Dave.

He’s been part of TADHack and TADSummit for years, even sponsoring TADHack several times. Yes, an open source project spending marketing $$$. That tells you something…

People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff

Shannon Chevier is now COO at Evolve Cellular. We first met a decade ago discussing IMS.

Aleksandra (Uvalić) Banduka is now Enterprise Sales Operations Analyst at Mitto

Immanuel Baskaran is now Associate Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase & Co. He’s also a TADHack 2018 winner: Immanuel Baskaran, Darius Pop: Matrix Whisper Bridge, A bridge between Status blockchain chat and Riot.

Carrie McManus is now Senior Marketing Manager at Argano. I’ve known Carrier throughout her time in Oracle, which she joined from Metasolv.

Frederik Bijlsma is now Vice President – EMEA Sales, Vmware Tanzu at VMware.

Bjørn Andreas S. Wentzel is now Leader, Strategic Engagements and CDA at Cisco

Wooyong Choi is now Head of Cloud Governance at SK Telecom. We first met discussing IMS and then NFV.

Eugen Mikocszy is now Senior Lead Architect – Software Networking Sales – Products and Solutions Portfolio Innovations at IBM. I’ve known Eugene since his time at Slovak Telekom.

 Paulo Glórias is now EMEA Enterprise Sales Director at BitSight. I’ve known Paulo for over a decade, since his time at WIT Software.

Billy Trujillo is now VP Change Management at Texas Capital Bank. I’ve known Billy since his time at MetroPCS.

Yogesh Desale is now  new position as Consultant at Atos.

Prabhat Gautam is now Project Manager at Tecblic.

You can sign up here to receive the CXTech News and Analysis by email.