The purpose of this CXTech Week 21 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.
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Covered this week:
- How to monitor jambonz on AWS
- Multi-time TADHack Winner Looking for more Challenging Opportunity either Full Stack or Front End
- Python vCon Package
- Please Complete the Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2023
- Free and Open Source Software in Telecoms / Communications. Issues and Likely Development.
- OpenSIPS Summit 2023
- Are you jealous of Twilio?
- Disney plots flagship ESPN channel’s shift to direct-to-consumer stream
- Deutsche Telekom seals major fibre deal with housing industry
- Apple App Store Transparency Report
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
How to monitor jambonz on AWS
This is a great article, and I know it will help many people in getting VoIPmonitor running on AWS.
This article also got me thinking about an installation bot, there is just so much stuff you need to know to get software up and running these days. As a novice I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I do a cloud instance setup.
I think there’s an opportunity for an Installation and monitoring bot to request it stand up a package with specific functions and capabilities. It then goes into a Q&A for all the other stuff you need to decide on but only realize when you’re in the midst of set-up. Then runs through an optimization with some suggestions on for example instance types and trade offs. Then does the installation, monitors it, and makes suggestions over time on ways to optimize given actual usage.
Multi-time TADHack Winner Looking for more Challenging Opportunity either Full Stack or Front End
Software Engineer (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science)
- Develop web applications in .NET, C#, Javascript and maintain and develop pipelines in Azure. Currently working on various Billing and SMS applications.
- Test driven development in JUnit/NUnit, Selenium.CI/CD, Yaml pipelines, Terraform.
- Develop Front-End, Web-based UI interfaces for hardened cloud applications being used in a number of healthcare systems.
- HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, JavaScript, jQuery, Liferay Portal UI, Prime UI
Skills: Java, JavaScript, C, C#, .NET, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, React, Next.js, Typescript, TailwindCSS, jQuery, Node.js, MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Azure DevOps, Web3.js, Solidity, WebGL(Babylon.js, Three.js), Agile, Swift, Python, Terraform, CI/CD
Winner of more hackathons than TADHack 🙂
Contact me if you’d like an intro / resume.
Python vCon Package
Dan Petrie announced the release of the Python vcon package. A vCon is a proposed standard way to contain conversation (e.g. text, email, voice and video) data and its analysis (e.g. transcription, translation, sentiment, summary, etc.). The objective is to ease integration of communications analysis and protection of that data, by defining a standard container for the data and analysis results.
The Python vcon package is available from pypi via “pip install vcon”. The package provides both the vcon command line and package library for creation, manipulation and operations of the JSON based container (including signing, verification, encrypting, decrypting, transcription, etc.)
The vcon command line documentation is available at:
https://github.com/vcon-dev/vcon/blob/main/vcon/bin/README.md
The package API documentation is available via “help(vcon)” in an interactive python3 session.
A five minute overview of vCon is available at:
https://github.com/vcon-dev/vcon/wiki
The IETF Internet Draft for Vcon is available at:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-petrie-vcon/
Please Complete the Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2023
Yep, I’m going to keep reminding you until June 15th 😉
The purpose of this survey is to gather your experiences and opinions in using Open Source Telecom Software, and share an anonymized aggregate result with those that compete the survey. I’ll also present a summary of the results at TADSummit in October 2023.
This survey follows on from the surveys run in 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019, with the results presented here: 2022, 2021 2020 and 2019. Thank you for your continued support.
Thank you to Olle E. Johansson, Sandro Gauci, Dave Horton, Arin Sime, and Alberto González Trastoy for your support in creating this year’s survey.
Here is the link to the Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2023. Please complete the survey by June 15th, thank you. It should take between 5-10 minutes depending on how many questions you answer.
Free and Open Source Software in Telecoms / Communications. Issues and Likely Development.
This article was stimulated by a number of factors: Olle’s sadness at Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface (DAHDI) no longer being supported; I’m currently running an annual open source telecom software survey; and I was rereading the HBR article “The Digital Economy Runs on Open Source. Here’s How to Protect It“.
I cover the impressive success of FOSS over the past 2 decades. However, its a two-edged sword with amazing strengths, but there are also issues which we can address. I review how the proprietary software moats for communication software have disappeared. Leaving FOSS for communications / telecoms in a strong position. We know that as a fact in programmable telecoms, but what about traditional telecoms? Telcos and their network vendors have a tight relationship, which will mean for telco services FOSS continues to nibble around the edges, while the gap between traditional telecom services and programmable telecom services grows.
OpenSIPS Summit 2023
And here’s an excellent example of how the community supports an open source project.
OpenSIPS is one of the most used Open Source SIP Servers in the world. It’s routing millions of calls across the globe each day. It has been 100% Open Source and has been backed by a robust community for over 16 years.
For the 9th edition, an US edition of the Summit, the community decided for the beautiful city of Houston as a place to engage and learn about all the newest developments in OpenSIPS. Although the lineup of speakers and topics change with each year, all those attending walk away having captured important knowledge and insight into how OpenSIPS can be, and is being, used in some of the top companies in UCaaS and RTC. Experiencing first hand presentations on complex end-user deployments, high throughput infrastructure components, and the latest improvements to OpenSIPS is undoubtedly a “can’t miss” experience for employees of carriers, telcos or ITSPs.
Check out all their fun on Twitter.
Are you jealous of Twilio?
Danielle Royston, TelcoDR, kicked off a fun discussion on programmable communications / telecoms. Check out the discussion, lots of old chestnuts like: ‘RCS is a zombie’, “no its not there are 1B users” (meaning Google Messages which uses its version of RCS), ‘carriers are exposing RCS’ (but it’s a PITA to work through all the carriers), etc. Lots of conflation of CPaaS, APIs, programmable telecoms / communications. I did an article on that here Programmable Communications and CPaaS are Different.
My contribution was:
This is a fun discussion!
Programmable communications has been around for a couple of decades. BT, and many other telcos, exposed APIs before Twilio. They failed because they are not technology companies. Here’s a review across 30 years of why service innovation in programmable communications has been difficult for telcos: https://alanquayle.com/2023/05/service-innovation-in-programmable-communications/.
Google messages uses Google’s flavor of RCS, think Google’s version of WhatsApp. It’s not SMS 2.0.
Carriers are repeating the errors of OneAPI, a carrier standard that history left behind, with OneAPI 2.0 (CAMARA).
Twilio is programmable comms. They generally use Syniverse as their PSTN aggregator. Explained here: https://alanquayle.com/2021/02/programmable-communications-model/
Twilio’s stock dropped from $400 to $40 over the past 2 years.
50% of Twilio’s revenue is linked to SMS, and carriers are raising prices. Flex is growing, however the customer comms market is noisy, so many bots and inflated expectations.
And I’ve not even mentioned the critical role of FOSS in programmable comms: https://alanquayle.com/2023/05/free-and-open-source-software/ 🙂
Alan Quayle’s contribution to the discussion
Disney plots flagship ESPN channel’s shift to direct-to-consumer streaming
I remember wishing for this day in 2011, the NFL has just increased the fee to ESPN by 70%, and that would ripple through into a higher basic cable fee. Paying for a service we never used was one of the reasons I cut the payTV cord in 2012. And since then we’ve had 11 years of joyful advert free Netflix and Amazon TV viewing. Most recently watching The Night Agent, and now rewatching Squid Game.
As predicted in the TV Delivery Evolution Report written in 2010, content owners would in time go direct to consumer, across the TV delivery ecosystem content power is critical. The questioning we see across PayTV providers on their role was predicted in this 13 year old report.
Brian Kline’s post on the WSJ article on the ESPN move has a great discussion. I explained the subsidization of ESPN was one of the reasons I cut the cord. As a sports fan Brian thanked me for my subsidization. What I found interesting is all the sports content available over streaming, and the sophistication of its consumption.
Netflix has 5M MAU on the ad-supported tier, with the target of 40M
Shares of Netflix jumped 9.2%, when it announced it had signed up almost 5 million customers for its ad-supported plan in the first six months and that more than 25% of new signups are on the advertising tier.
I hate advertising, if they every forced advertising on me, I’d cancel my subscription.
Netflix Basic With Ads launched in the U.S. on Nov. 3 at $6.99 per month (30% less than the the regular Basic plan without ads, at $9.99 per month). The ad-supported package is available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. $3 less for less content, lower resolution, and worst of all ads! Well, 5M shows there’s a market out of Netflix’s 233 million subscribers.
Worryingly for me, for the first quarter of 2023, Netflix said its U.S. ad-supported tier generated more average revenue per member than its standard $15.49-per-month subscription plan. That suggests ad revenue per user was greater than $8.50/month, with even more upside potential with better targeting and flexibility on the frequency and duration of ads.
Tony Jamous posts on Musk’s Laptop Class rant.
Tony is the founder CEO of Oyster, creating a more equal world by making it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere. Naturally, he’s a remote work advocate. He posted just after I’d commented on the dissing of WFH by the UK Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, at the British Chambers of Commerce’s Global Annual Conference; as well as Elon Musk’s comments. Both were opinions only.
I advised people in his post to follow Tony Jamous for a counter view backed by data.
Deutsche Telekom seals major fibre deal with housing industry
This is an example of a deal which has a significant impact on DT’s business success and customer experience.
Millions of tenants in Germany are to receive a fibre connection more quickly: With this goal in mind, the umbrella organisation of the housing industry GdW and Deutsche Telekom have agreed on joint positions on fibre network deployment.
We keep focusing on technology, while people and processes can have a much more significant impact.
Apple App Store Transparency Report
Apple has released its first-ever App Store Transparency Report, marking a significant step towards increased openness and accountability. This report comes as part of the company’s agreement with developers in a lawsuit settlement regarding the scrutiny faced by apps on the App Store in 2021.
In 2022, there were 1,783,232 apps available on the App Store. Throughout the year, Apple received a total of 6,101,913 app submissions from developers.
The app review process led to 1,679,694 app rejections, performance and legal accounted for about 1.5M of them.
Of the 1474 apps removed by government requests, 1435 of them were from China.
There are 282M customers, and Apple prevented last year $2B in fraud through the app store. My only experience with identity theft was with Apple, someone lost their phone and the thief pretended to be them asking for Apple Gift cards. Because they had access to all the phone owner’s conversations, the request was within context of previous conversations. However, the English was not perfect, I asked a question to confirm the identity, and it was clearly a thief.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Adding to the long list of the Telestax team who have joined 1NCE, George Vagenas and Ahn Dao Duy. In addition to Maria Farooq, Despina Ypsilanti, Henrique Rose, Fernando Mendioroz, and Jaime Casero. It’s so nice they’re able to continue working together, its a world-class team.
Stefan Cukovic is now in Carrier Management Team (CMT) as Director of Operations at Vonage. Stefan is an expert in SMS aggregation, its complex, constantly shifting, and relationships matter.
Camilo Segura is now Estrategic Dynamics Vicepresident at AESS Unicauca. He was a TADHack winner in 2018 with: RM5— Juan Daza, Camilo Segura, Mauricio Maca —app to capture student marches, document abuses and connect people with legal help. Here is a great weblog by the team describing their hack. The Dnuncia Platform that won the Status Global Prize. Yet another Global winner from Popayán
Olle’s company Edvina has become a member of the cybernode.se project. It aims to foster innovation in cyber security and is spearheaded by VINNOVA and NCC-se. We are participating in the secure software supply chains group.
Miguel Monforte Nicolas is now VP of Telecom at OXIO.
Houria Tair-Chauvin Sales Management Lead – SA Core Network at Ericsson.
Maurizio De Paolo is now enior Project Manager – Edge Computing and 5G network.
Daniel Chalef is building with Sharath Rajasekar: Zep – long-term memory for AI / LLM apps. I’ve known Daniel since KnowledgeTree. He was also part of SparkPost, bought by MessageBird.
Matthias van der Vlies ia now Founder/Tech lead at Real Time Telecom B.V.
Navaid Khan is now Principal Solutions Architect at Elastic.
Mike Bromwich, CEO Stacuity, has his family assembling the IoT developer SIM packs.
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