With  Phone.com being a small business phone service I have SMB’s on my mind a lot.  What I got from the announcements is that the iPhone 5s is absolutely the most important device of the year for companies in terms of security.  Every week I read or hear another story about how a company lost it’s secret work because some employee left his or her phone at a restaurant or in a cab and inevitably they never thought they would so even though their IT department or boss mandates they utilize the passcode on their phone they thought they knew better and did not.  

To let you in on the news if you haven’t read or seen it yet somewhere, Apple has put a fingerprint scanner on their new flagship device.  This will enable folks to avoid the delay in unlocking their phone associated with using a password.  Now they can just place a finger on the home button and the unlocking magic happens.

What’s important is that now the thought is that users will be much more likely to protect their phone by fingerprint protecting it.  The hope is that now all the employees required to lock their phones (plus the ones that are not) will lock their phones and keep their data safe.  A recent report found that 79 percent of small businesses experienced mobile security incidents much of this can be avoided if your phone is locked, it’s a deterrent for petty crime which is the most common in terms of mobile phone and in turn data theft.

My hope is that many small businesses will realize that when it’s time to update their companies cell phones they’ll purchase iPhone 5s’s and take advantage of this new implementation of security technology and get their employees using is.  Don’t allow your company to become a victim when it’s so easily can be avoided.

With almost half of the states in the United States now on the non-regulation bandwagon, the reason I’m keen on writing about Colorado is because this is where I live. Were Colorado to attempt any state regulation of VoIP it would thus directly affect me and my Phone.com account.

It should be first understood that, as of this moment, Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) does not regulate VoIP, nor has it any proposals before it to do so. But of course that could always change in the future, but not if the bills now in the Colorado Legislature are passed into law.

The first hurdle has been passed, with unanimous approval by Colorado’s House of Representatives of a bill that prohibits the PUC from setting any new rules, service standards of pricing regulations for VoIP, or for that matter any other service, which is carried over the Internet. The next step is approval by the state’s Senate, after which the governor has to sign it into law. No immediate roadblocks are known to exist to either happening.

The legislation “sends a message to the rest of the world that Colorado welcomes continued investment, new high-tech companies, and job growth from rapidly evolving Internet technologies,” state Democratic Representative Angela Williams, who co-sponsored the bill with Republican Representative Carole Murray.

As various states line up behind these sentiments, I think it is incumbent on me to point out that the issue is not VoIP regulation per se, but rather it’s what would happen if each of the 50 states had its own separate set of regulations. That could have a chilling effect on the VoIP industry, indeed could result in a few industry giants taking over from the highly innovative and competitive situation that exists today. That’s because of what would be a burdensome chore for a small company of complying with so many different regulatory regimes.

In other words, any regulation of VoIP needs to be at the federal level only, applicable to service no matter where in the country it occurs. I personally am particularly keen on the one issue of service standards – not regulations for VoIP companies, but rather regulations for Internet providers. As a small office/home office (SOHO) user of broadband and VoIP, I’m getting particularly tired of the phrase “up to” describing my broadband service. I’d be a lot happier if the FCC mandated that any broadband provider nationwide instead use the term “at least” when describing the speed they’re promising to sell me.

I’d also like the FCC to start dealing with the issue of nationwide revenue generation and distribution of funds for so-called “high cost” telephone service. Currently that comes from taxes on traditional phone service, but with VoIP rapidly displacing that service, the revenues are going down. In Colorado, for instance, there is a state fund that subsidizes rural landline phone service, but that’s going to decrease by $5 million annually as VoIP takes over, Colorado legislative researchers say. The only way out, it seems, is to increase the high cost phone service tax by about 10%, which no doubt will drive more users to VoIP, meaning up the tax again.

The solution … now why didn’t the FCC and Colorado government gurus think of this … is to stop providing high cost traditional phone service, and plow the money (while there is still some) into providing decent rural broadband, so those folks can benefit from VoIP.

Now don’t everyone rush out and think that it means anything the average VoIP user will notice, at least not yet.  But the stakes are big for the VoIP community as a whole, and if the bigwigs in Washington are convinced that the rules need to be changed it will, in my humble opinion (okay, I’m not so humble) signal both another nail in the coffin for plain old telephone service (POTS) and both decrease the cost and increase the reliability of VoIP.

What the FCC’s now mandated is a “a limited technical trial of direct access to numbers” by a cadre of VoIP providers. Just who those are is not relevant – they simply represent the entire industry. And what the trial does is allow them to go directly to the national number pool to assign phone numbers to VoIP subscribers (for this test the numbers will be from the mobile phone pool). That’s in contrast to current rules, where VoIP companies need to go to local incumbent carriers (i.e. AT&T, Verizon and Century Link, for the most part) to get the numbers they provide to VoIP users. Put another way, the three giants that dominate the industry right now can hold VoIP providers hostage, perhaps, and at the very least get a direct look at what level of business VoIP carriers are doing in their territories.

If that isn’t a competitive advantage, I don’t know what is./p>

The FCC trial also represents a potential end to the area code system as we know it, since VoIP is not physically dependent on where a phone wire terminates. As the FCC says in its announcement of the test: “The relationship between numbers and geography—taken for granted when numbers were first assigned to fixed wireline telephones—is evolving as consumers turn increasingly to mobile and nomadic services. We seek comment on these trends and associated Commission policies.”

I won’t go into all the niceties of the FCC action, which runs to well over 100 pages. It’s all there on the web for anyone interested, at https://www.fcc.gov/document/direct-access-numbering-nprm-order-and-noi.

And I’ll be watching over the coming months to see the outcome of all of this, and what it means to users of VoIP carriers such as Phone.com.

Many pundits have commented about what this means to both Google’s ambitions to become an ISP or to the competitive environment in the major markets it enters as a broadband provider. The competition will be the likes of Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-Verse or a major cable company like Time Warner in Austin and major cable-system operators Comcast, Cablevision and Charter elsewhere. 

One thing is certain: Our nation as a whole needs superfast gigabit broadband and will benefit economically from Google’s entry as a service provider that drives competition versus other providers.  Competition brings consumers and businesses more choices, spawns new businesses and causes productivity to rise. Washington knows that the value of bringing high-speed Internet to all corners of the U.S. will boost the economy and more broadband capacity will mean services providers of all stripe, especially those in the cloud, will see opportunities to offer businesses and consumers innovative alternatives to the major carriers.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see  what a new, uber-fast broadband ISP might mean to providers  that supply dial-tone and a host of value-added services.  Some might call these services “Over The Top” (OTT), but I prefer to think of these innovative offerings as value-added services, which is why the Google move to deploy broadband in many markets could have a positive impact on the growth and trajectory of OTT services and on the value-added providers that deploy and market them.

In the past, there were several debates, some of which reached the FCC or state regulators, addressing “fair play” when bandwidth owners – including Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and the like — could control and perhaps did control the quality of broadband for services that competed with their own. Most notably, these included voice over IP services, such as Vonage or even Skype.  The issue of “net neutrality” has also been discussed for many years and has been addressed to some extent, but I am not certain that the problem is really solved or over.  It all depends on whether Google decides to play the same game as the big traditional carriers, or if it forgoes the old monopoly mindset and truly competes against the old guard carriers and encourages new services to ride on its broadband fiber network.

So what does Google’s broadband mean to VoIP?  It certainly does not seem as though Google is going to supply its superfast broadband as a standalone service without TV and other services. The company is already offering Google TV in Kansas City.  Will it also become a phone service provider? Will it remain with its current voice, chat and video offering?

If Google will honor “net neutrality,” its network’s faster speeds and more bandwidth will spur greater demand and increased IP use and better quality IP.  For the OTT and value-added service providers, that means their services will work better and be “closer” to more households and primarily small businesses.  OTT / value added services bring a tremendous boost to small business. Different cloud-based solutions improve productivity and connectivity. Superfast broadband will just fuel the growth of such services even more than today.

The danger is if Google builds out this network and then starts acting like an AT&T or a Comcast – for example, if it offers full TV service as we know it today, or if it offers a commercial phone service and then makes network-design decisions to give higher-quality / more-accessible IP to its own service and hurts the competition, or if it attempts to charge OTT service providers as well as end-user customers for use of its broadband — then we are taking two steps back.

Like any technology for communication and commerce since before the turn of the last century, bigger is better: new roads, better ships, shorter trips, aviation and telecom etc. ; now bigger data pipes will contribute to the economy of the city. A faster and greener economy outlook will cause more businesses to open and OTT services can become more of the norm.

So if Google keeps everything neutral, those customers will have a chance to enjoy OTT services as one of the best and more cost-effective business phone services, at a fraction of what they used to pay.

On the other hand, if Google’s service ends up being just a faster version of the incumbents’ broadband, then eventually it and the incumbents will end up competing with one another.  Personally, I would like to see companies like Google enter the market for faster broadband not to offer their own “everything” but rather to serve as a super utility and allow startups and other new offerings to flourish without the threat of the incumbents changing the playing field.  Google should stand to benefit from such an open market.

Yes, Google can offer its own video conferencing and its own chat and its own many other apps and services, but if it  focuses on doing everything just like the current broadband  incumbents, then I don’t see the greater good.  Google will fall into that same trap of being no different than the big telcos and cable companies.

Also, what is still missing from this new Google service is the mobile aspect. Google is already offering free Wi-Fi in some citie,s but that is not the big picture. I would anticipate that the focus on Gigabit fiber could impact the efforts on the mobile front, but mobile uses spectrum, a resource that is limited, while adding more fiber strands brings more capacity to where wireless can’t always. Another reason to stay away from the “offer everything” approach.

Overall, I welcome superfast Gigabit broadband. America needs it. It is not cheap and whoever provides it needs to get paid for offering it. I believe the model has to be different from the ones the current incumbents offer. That will bring more openness and many great value-added services that are both business changing and life changing.

Intrigued by the headline, I read on, and soon discovered that the guy was basing his theory in part on the fact that he had been using a cell phone as his only means of communications. For him POTS was a new discovery! He went on to rave about its stability and security in comparison to wireless communications.

VoIP did get a mention … but just barely. No notice that the U.S. Army, as I’ve recently written, is busily switching over to VoIP. Indeed, gone are the days that any high school hacker could listen in on their neighbor’s VoIP conversations if they were both on the same cable television broadband loop. The new rival technologies used by traditional cable and phone companies are, for the record, secure. At least the U.S. Army thinks so, and who am I to argue with the U.S. Army?

And of course if the security is good enough for the government, I dare say it’s more than good enough for small business VoIP users. For enterprise VoIP users too.

Also getting short shrift is a discussion of the fact that, for the large majority of small office – home office (SOHO), small business, and residential VoIP users the infrastructure to deliver the broadband for VoIP is the precise same infrastructure used to deliver POTS (or, in the case of cable subscribers, the same as used to deliver video service). We’re told that, because the technology used to deliver that broadband is evolving, VoIP isn’t a clear choice.

Now wait a minute. Let’s remember the old mechanical switches that were the backbone of the POTS network. I was actually present when the first computer-based phone switch was unveiled. POTS technology evolved constantly (anyone remember Millie the operator and the old plug boards?) and nobody questioned that, so why question VoIP just because broadband technology is evolving.

Bottom line: POTS may hang on for a bit longer, through inertia, but I think some folk may be surprised at just how soon it is going to go away. Put another way, remember the old American Telephone & Telegraph Company (i.e. AT&T, or Ma Bell)? Well, it’s the new AT&T who last year went to the Federal Communications Commission asking for permission to pull the plug on POTS as the “fall back” communications network in the United States.

Oh, and by the way, the opinion piece appeared on what’s now just a web site called Byte. I remember the days when Byte was formidable multi-hundred page magazine, one against which I occasionally competed. Back then the gurus thought it could never die. Simply unthinkable. Just as its unthinkable to some that POTS will soon die.

But die it did, in 1998, at the tender young age of just 23. Reincarnation came with a web-only offering, launched in 2011. And just as the once glorious age of print publications have migrated to the Internet, my prediction is that our young guru is going to be stunned at the speed at which telephony similarly migrates to the Net.

Since then it seems things have been hopping. There were more than 800 entries for the FTC to sift through before choosing the winners, who are … ta da … Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss, who share the $50,000 top prize, and Google, which as a large corporation gets a certificate of honor but no money.

The two individuals who won “both focus on intercepting and filtering out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to ‘blacklist’ robocaller phone numbers and ‘whitelist’ numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls,” the FTC explained in its press release announcing the winners (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/04/robocall.shtm )

Google, meanwhile, took honors for a “Crowd-Sourced Call Identification and Suppression” solution designed by Daniel Klein and Dean Jackson. The Google solution, particularly, is hoped to spell an end to the infamous “Rachel from Card Services” robocalling scam. Reportedly, the FCC has been receiving an extraordinary 200,000 complaints per month complaining about that scam.

I think it’s only fair that I note that it is not only scammers who use robocallers. There are some putatively legitimate businesses who also do, but they cross the line with their sales calls and are usually relatively easy to shut down.

The big question that remains, though, is whether the newly minted solutions that won the FTC contest will actually work. And, even if they do, I fear it will be only a matter of time before the scamming community figures out some other nefarious way to circumvent the system.

In the meantime, as I’ve mentioned before, Phone.com subscribers do have a way to block most robocalls, and at no extra cost. One simply uses the menu system that’s a standard feature on every Phone.com service plan, both for business phone and home phone use. If calls all go to a menu, instead of ringing directly to an extension, Rachel and her cohorts are stopped dead in their tracks.

It’s not clear just what the change will be, although many gurus are predicting that the new FCC board, whoever it consists of, will be taking a hard look at revenue-generating regulations for VoIP, to replace the billions in tax revenue being lost with the slow death of traditional land-line telephony. It should be remembered that, in various places, the tax on a single landline can exceed $10. In general, none of that tax is levied on a VoIP line.

The good news for VoIP users is that, while a reformulated FCC may try to increase taxes, and its regulation of VoIP, the overall cost structure of VoIP phone service is such that the bottom line cost is still going to be a lot less than traditional telephony. In my estimate, the very worst case is that bills will be half of what we once paid for phone service.

And there is also a good argument made for FCC regulation of VoIP and, in general, the Internet. It means that the FCC can mandate quality of service (QoS) levels by the broadband providers that deliver the VoIP services from companies such as Phone.com. Today, as I’ve written many times, broadband providers have no legal requirement to maintain QoS levels for small and medium-size businesses or households (large companies, in contrast, may have QoS guarantees written in to their broadband contracts).

In any case, there’s now intense crystal-ball gazing in the halls of power in Washington as to just whom President Barack Obama will nominate for the soon-to-be open FCC seats. One leader for the chairman’s post is Jessica Rosenworcel, who is already an FCC Commissioner. A group 37 Democratic U.S. Senators have just sent a letter asking President Obama to appoint Rosenworcel to the post. Her appointment would avoid the need for what could be a messy confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate.

But in the other corner is Tom Wheeler, a former representative for the cable TV and wireless industries who raised $246,000 for the 2012 Obama campaign. And then in the third corner there is Mignon Clyburn, who is also an FCC Commissioner and the daughter of Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina. And in the fourth corner … well, there are actually more candidates than there are corners being touted by various political pressure groups in Washington.

Bottom line is that advise all my fellow small business phone users to keep an eye on the situation, and if you have strong feelings about what’s happening don’t be shy in letting your elected representatives, all the way up to the President, know how you feel.

The leaks, first reported by web site Politico, hint that the FCC is considering a rule-making action that will change all that.

The obvious question is what does that have to do with the average VoIP user, what difference does it make to me? Well, for those whose phone service is provided by Phone.com or any other VoIP carrier, the difference may be great.

That’s because in this day and age we have something called a “virtual phone number.” In other words, in VoIP technology, the number is not physically tied to switchboard and locality. You can live in California and have a New York phone number, or one from London, or most other places. But the truth is, the number is really tied to a physical location – one still owned by the legacy phone companies. That’s what area codes are (or at least used to be) all about.

But if those legacy phone companies – middlemen, if you will – are cut out of the picture, then a layer of complexity in the network is removed. It doesn’t take a Geek to figure out that the less complex, the better the VoIP phone service can become.

“Allowing VoIP providers to obtain telephone numbers directly, and not through intermediate providers, as is generally the case today, has the potential to fuel innovation and promote competition, at the same time we ensure calls are routed reliably and efficiently, protect public safety, and guard against exhaust of limited numbers,” Politico said that it source, an FCC official, wrote in an email.

One small detail, of course, is that area codes become even less meaningful than they are today. An obvious result is that long distance charges simply don’t have any reality any more. Of course Phone.com users on any plan don’t pay for long distance anywhere in the U.S., but legacy carriers by and large still do try to exact a toll, if only an add-on fee for “unlimited long distance.”

At this point there’s no indication of exactly when the FCC might act, and of course it should be remembered that there’s some pretty heavy lobbying by the powerful local exchange carriers against changing the rules.

But this past week one such missive did catch my eye. It seems that the U.S. Army’s Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, has decided to convert to VoIP.  Fort Leonard Wood is where I did my Army basic training, so any mention of the place (which many of we veterans to this day call ‘Fort Lost In The Woods’) brings back memories. I won’t say all of those memories are pleasant, but some of the things that they taught me there did keep me alive in combat, through two wars.

The government is spending $14.1 million to put in the VoIP system at Leonard Wood, which at first will be equipped with 25,000 ‘right to use’ (RTU) licenses – i.e. up to 25,000 VoIP phones or other digital and IP devices on the network. The system is being built with the ability to expand to 36,000 RTUs if needed. At the same time, the government is decommissioning an old Nortel SL100 PBX – part of a family of non-VoIP PBXes based on technology first introduced in 1975, although much evolved since then. Replacing it is an Avaya Communication Manager 6 (CM6) unified communications system, being installed by Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary LGS Innovations.

But the technicalities of the exact hardware involved isn’t the real news, although LGS and Avaya would love it to be. The point is that a key U.S. Army base, designated ones of the Army’s Centers of Excellence, where 85,000 to 95,000 military (and civilians) are trained each year, is entrusting its communications to VoIP.

That implies confidence in a level of service and security for VoIP that should reassure any business, from the smallest one-man operation on up, that choosing VoIP business phone service is a rational decision which has come of age. And interestingly, looking over the array of VoIP-based services being promised to the military at Leonard Wood, the list bears a striking resemblance to the list of features available from Phone.com to even the smallest business.

Basically, it was that the future of that industry isn’t in content – TV shows, if you will – but rather in building the biggest and fastest and best broadband network possible. Put all your effort into putting more optical fiber into the ground was his message. Earn your living primarily by selling capacity on the broadband pipe, not from trying to sell content.

While his missive was aimed at the cable TV industry, it also has reverberations – positive reverberations – for the VoIP industry. The reason should be obvious: the better the broadband available to VoIP users, the better the VoIP phone service that providers such as Phone.com can provide.

The message to the cable industry will also echo through the traditional telephone industry, since what we’re talking about here is good old competition. After all, if cable companies are evolving to be primarily broadband carriers, telephone companies are also moving in exactly the same direction as they lose more and more traditional phone users to Internet-based phone service, and businesses increasingly opt for the economies represented not only by lower phone bills, but also by the savings from virtual PBXes and other VoIP business phone services.

In the end, both industries will look pretty much the same, providing the pipe over which VoIP is carried along with video content and data. The fact that phone carriers tend to use DSL technology, and cable companies use DOCSIS to deliver broadband, is irrelevant to VoIP, since VoIP can work over any pipe that supports IP.

Hopefully, as the competition continues between the cable and phone companies to provide broadband, the competition will also stress better network quality of service. That’s a tricky sell to the consumer market, though, since it takes some technical knowledge beyond simply bragging about how fast service is. Indeed for VoIP, the speed race isn’t all that relevant, since VoIP uses fairly little bandwidth, but business VoIP users should be cognizant of the technical aspects of the service they are buying. Indeed, larger businesses often get service that comes with a guaranteed level of quality of service, a promise from their carrier that ensures the stability of their business VoIP service … or the carrier pays a penalty.

As a very small business I don’t get such guarantees, and looking at my quality of service, from Century Link, for the past month shows there’s still a long way for the industry to go. The average latency on my broadband service, for instance, was 52.26 ms, well above the 40 ms that’s supposed to be the standard level. Even worse, at one point my latency reached 2,586.35ms. That’s high enough to ensure that a VoIP conversation was impossible. Similarly, while average packet loss on my broadband lines was just 0.21% (Century’s Link’s service level standard is a maximum of 0.5%), at one point packet loss on my line spiked at 62.12%. From reports I’ve read about broadband service in general, from both cable and telco, my results aren’t unusual.