We have to assume that when distance communication consisted of drums, smoke signals and flags, the ancestors of today’s nerds were devising ways to steal or reroute the signals.  Even this football season, the New England Patriots were caught stealing hand signals (for which they seem to have finally been punished).  The impulse seems irresistible whether for gain or mischief.

It is only within the last 200 years that we have moved into electronic signaling.  Benjamin Franklin flew his kite in 1752.  By 1825, William Sturgeon presented the electromagnet.  Ten years later, Samuel Morse had adapted the magnet into the telegraph.  In 1844, he sat in Washington and telegraphed the question “What hath God wrought” to Baltimore.  By 1861, you could telegraph across the continent.  The American Civil War became the great proving ground of telegraphy as both sides strove to build and protect their own networks while disrupting those of the other side.  The war also introduced electronic eavesdropping which has become a subject of such great controversy today.

We usually forget that we started with a data network and that Alexander Graham Bell’s work for the deaf was overlaid on existing telegraph technology to produce the telephone.  Patent fights started immediately and, in 1879, a settlement effectively separated voice and data for the next 84 years.  Data transmission across the voice network became possible when the Bell System introduced the Bell 103 modem in 1962.  Who knew that the Era of Convergence had begun at 300 bits per second?

Meanwhile, those with the phreak/hacker gene had other things to tinker with.  The Wright brothers flew; Fermi perfected the distribution of alternating current; the automobile absorbed a lot of energy and curiosity.  By the 1920s, crystal radio sets had people in New York sitting up into the wee hours to pick up commercial signals from Pittsburgh.  This morphed into ham radio.  Soon you could detect the techno-freaks by the presence of shortwave antennas on their homes.  Broken glasses, pocket protectors and high-water pants had yet to become fashion statements. 

The telephone network did not become attractive to tinkerers until the 1950s.  After World War II, most households in the United States had telephones but direct dialing was limited to local calls.  Starting in New Jersey in 1951, the Bell System introduced Direct Distance Dialing that permitted calling unassisted between states and cities.  They started with 11 cities and built out the service over the course of the decade.  By the 1960s, the national telephone network was worthy of a phreak’s attention.  It was large and complex enough to provide intellectual challenges and the services were expensive enough to attract larcenous impulses.  As the population became more and more dependent on the network it became a target for mischief and vandalism. 

And along came Joe Engrassia.  Joe was blind from birth and he became fascinated by the telephone before he could read.  He is also reported to have had perfect pitch and, in the late sixties, he discovered he could whistle the tone that the Bell System used to identify a call as toll-free.  This gave rise to “blue boxes” that could generate any number of tones that the network used for control.  In case you are tempted, the system is digital now and no longer uses those tones.

Things did not go well for Joe.  In those days, the Bell System was a state within a state; and one not subject to constitutional restraints or many scruples.  They hounded Joe, refused him service and got state authorities to confiscate his equipment.  While they were busy chasing Joe, two other phone phreaks were using “blue boxes” to get their start:  Wozniak and Jobs of Apple fame.  Joe eventually retreated into permanent childhood and gave himself the name Joybubbles.  He died last August.

There was a sad whimsy to Joybubbles and there was still a certain Robin Hood panache to foiling the overbearing monopoly of the Bell System.  But that was in an era when most people’s personal communication was limited to one or two, leased, Western Electric, telephones in their homes.  Touch Tone was an extra-cost luxury.  Things would get much more complex in the coming decades. 

Today an average American can be expected to have a phone, a cell phone, cable television, Internet access, email, instant messaging and other tools.  We can be in touch with anyone, anywhere, any time.  The opportunities for productivity or self-indulgence seem endless.  But the flower-child phone phreak has been replaced by the hacker.  Stealing someone’s identity is more rewarding than making a free long-distance call.  The victim is no longer a large, faceless organization; it is the individual.

There were no good old days.  As my barber, Rocky, explained to me 30 years ago, “The only thing good about the good old days was I was younger.  Other than that, everything was worse.”  But I will indulge myself in a moment of nostalgia for an era in which I did not need to buy anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-spyware to protect myself from Joybubbles.

Dave O’Connell is a Senior Support Specialist for smplsolutions.  His career has included installing central offices at the World Trade Center, sales, marketing, engineering and consulting.  He has never climbed a telephone pole; he does have some dignity.

In the last ten years, business telecommunications have burst out of their geographical restraints.  Today, it is entirely reasonable for a worker to expect to set up shop almost anywhere and function as if sitting at a desk at corporate headquarters.  You can sit at the car wash and be connected to your company’s PBX, email server, corporate databases and instant messaging. 

You may be more or less enthused about all this.  Telecommuters enjoy commuting “down the hall” to their home offices.  Road warriors enjoy being able to work from airports and hotels.  Civil libertarians bemoan the disappearance of privacy.  Psychologists are concerned with heightened stress levels.  The vacationer next to you on the airplane does not want to listen to you argue with your boss. 

My concern is a little more basic.  I do not want to make a 911 call in Phoenix and be answered by a policeman in Minneapolis.  As dutiful and considerate as he might be, it is unlikely that the ambulance will arrive in time to do me any good. 

911 has been with us since 1968 when AT&T announced it as the universal emergency number.  Things were simpler then, at least technologically.  Telephone lines were analog copper circuits that extended from the phone company’s building to your home or office.  It was easy to identify the location from which the emergency call originated.  Today, telephone service may come from the phone company, your cable TV provider, Vonage or any number of other sources.  To further complicate matters, users may access that telephone number locally, from a networked business system or from an IP telephone that can be anywhere in the building, anywhere in the country or anywhere in the world for that matter.

The solution to date has been E911 (Enhanced 911) which requires that the call going to the emergency services center be accompanied by identifying information sometimes referred to as CESID (Caller Emergency Services ID).  Today, CESID is in the form of a valid North American telephone number.  In the future, it may include global positioning information.  Upon receiving the CESID, the Public Safety Answering Position (PSAP) uses it to query a database of locations that can include street address, floor number, building number, suite number, etc.   Armed with this CESID, the emergency personnel can respond accordingly.

So how does my Phoenix CESID get to a police station in Minneapolis?  Let’s assume that I work at a Phoenix based branch office of a Minneapolis HQ based company.  In this example the branch office makes voice connections across the Internet back to the Minneapolis HQ and then all public calls go out through Minneapolis phone lines.  Unless I make specific changes, 911 calls will go to Minneapolis as the “origination” of the call.  One solution is to pay the phone company $25 a month for a line in Phoenix specifically for 911 calls and to configure the Phoenix system accordingly; another might be to implement E911 services on the Minneapolis HQ system.

Even within the same town, you will need to be careful.  Consult local regulations.  Talk to the telephone company about how and where it will deliver your emergency calls.  Make test calls periodically to make sure everything is working.  Make sure your location information in the PSAP database is accurate.  Consult your lawyer.  Consult your technology provider.

Your business may go decades without a single 911 call, but when that one happens everything must work.

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–Scotty

Let’s say that you have an impressive sales office downtown, your administration and warehouse are in an industrial park in the suburbs and you have retail outlets in the better malls in the area.  Wouldn’t it be nice for all of them to be served by a single telephone system with one voice mail and one receptionist?  The arrival of high-speed internet access and the maturity of Voice over IP (VoIP) have finally made this possible at a fraction of the cost of only a few years ago.

Toshiba has been leading the way in the Small-to-Medium Business (SMB) segment.  The Strata CIX offers robust private voice networking, Strata Net, as part of the Toshiba family of telecommunications products.  Based on QSIG, an international standard, Strata Net allows multiple Strata CIX systems to share voice mail systems and attendants, have common features and a coordinated numbering plan, and route calls simply and easily throughout the business.  Toshiba has had the foresight to port its mature, QSIG-based networking to VoIP with the same feature set and interactions.  This allows you to create a single, seamless network even if you need to mix internet and ISDN technologies.  For each location, you can choose the best technology for bandwidth, voice quality and security without having to abandon any of your investment.

Using the internet to transport voice between locations is sometimes seen as “free”: close but not quite.  The internet allows you to eliminate costly dedicated circuits between locations: leased by the month and by the mile.  Instead, you provide each location with high-speed internet access and the telephone system provides the intelligence for one system to find and communicate with the other systems across the internet.  Unlike dedicated circuits whose bandwidth is unavailable even if no conversations are in progress, VoIP only consumes bandwidth as needed.

The internet is inherently unmanaged, meaning that the end user can exercise no control over prioritization, routing or bandwidth control.  With a large number of calls, voice quality can deteriorate.  This is less important for conversations between employees than it is between your customers and your employees.  In recent years, managed wide-area technologies like MPLS (MultiProtocol Label Switching) have emerged to allow you to control quality factors and still not require dedicated circuits.  They are more expensive than high-speed internet but still less than dedicated circuits.  Older offerings like Frame Relay operate on virtual dedicated circuits that impose arbitrary restrictions on the various locations’ ability to communicate with each other.  For occasional calls between employees and for voicemail retrievals, the internet is usually quite adequate.

Toshiba has taken all this a step further and uses the same hardware that supports Strata Net to support VoIP telephones.  This allows you to use any excess hardware capacity to support at-home workers or road warriors with the same phone service they would expect in the office. 

The good news is that the technology is here and we at smplsolutions know that it works.

Technology is displacing itself at an accelerating pace.  Your VCR and cassette players are gathering dust while you watch DVDs and listen to your iPod.  Toshiba thinks a little differently.  Their Telecommunication Systems Division (TSD) is one of the few companies that have made a commitment to preserving existing equipment while providing the latest capabilities.  Their current VOIP system, the Strata CIX continues to support telephones and components like PDKUs and DKT2010s that were developed for the Strata DK system in 1989: nearly two decades.  Toshiba’s “Leave no phone behind” attitude is one of the main reasons smplsolutions became a Toshiba dealer in 2000.

This type of investment protection is important when considering your next telephone system.  Technology has gotten to the point where almost anyone with a server and some talented programmers can offer telephone services.  Some of their ideas are very clever and have great appeal but there is no track history to say whether the company or the product will last and, if it does, whether the next version will completely abandon the product you buy today.

There should be no need to completely abandon your current system to enjoy things like VOIP, Strata Net private networking, Unified Messaging, and a modern call center (ACD).  Toshiba remains committed to this migration strategy.  A Strata CIX100 and its digital telephones purchased today should continue to serve you well into the future.

You should also be comforted that the core of your telephone system is based on proven technology.  The phone system will continue to work when the data network goes down, when the mail server takes the afternoon off, even when the lights go out.  The comfort is in knowing that your business will continue to function and that you will be able to call for help.  When the lights are on, the network is up and the mail server is back, you can enjoy all the newest toys and productivity tools.

Welcome to the smplsolutions weblog.  Here you’ll find new information as to how new technologies can improve your business and Return on Technology.