The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this past week announced the winners of its contest to find the best solutions to the endemic problem of robocallers, who these days take advantage of VoIP technology to ignore the law and “Do Not Call” lists. Those who follow this blog will remember that I wrote about the contest when it was announced last November.

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.

There’s change coming in the VoIP world, change that will potentially affect every VoIP provider and every VoIP user. Driving that prediction is a forthcoming change in the leadership of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), following the announcement last week by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that he is retiring after four years on the job. FCC Commissioner   Robert McDowell has also announced his planned departure from the board. That leaves two of the five seats on the board, including the chairman’s seat, up for grabs.

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.

According to leaks out of the FCC (hardly a surprise), there is some serious back-room discussion of allowing VoIP providers to directly tap into the national telephone numbers pool. The way things stand today, the numbers are still controlled by legacy “telephone companies” … i.e. local exchange carriers including AT&T, Verizon, Century Link, and well over a hundred smaller players. VoIP carriers have to get the numbers from those companies.

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.

With VoIP business phone service steadily taking over at companies of all sizes and at all sorts of government agencies, from the smallest localities to the federal government, hardly a day goes by that the announcement of yet another conversion to VoIP crosses my desk. Indeed there are so many of them that I can’t write, or even read, about 99.999% of those that come my way.

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.

Last week I interviewed the president of a firm that specializes in consulting for the cable TV industry, reviewing the message he was to deliver as the lead-off speaker at a cable industry convention. The message he had to deliver was startling.

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.