WCA March 2013

48 / 64

46 Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2013
But fee-based Internet usage is also fairly transparently
a pocketbook issue. An earlier Register article (21st
November) suggested that Google fears any “plan to
make it pay for stuff.” Mr McAllister noted that, as far
back as June of last year, the ITU had been at pains to
deny any threat of an Internet takeover by the UN. In
response to the European resolution, ITU representative
Richard Hall blogged: “No proposals exist to give more
power to ITU as an institution, which does not have any
regulatory authority over any networks whatsoever.”
But, according to the Register: “Those assurances
have seemingly done little to calm those who see
sinister motives in the ITU’s proposals, including such
organisations as [the environmental group] Greenpeace
and the International Trade Union Confederation. And, of
course, Google.
The ten-digit phone number may be on
its way out, but reports of its imminent
demise are probably premature
Did AT&T’s 7th November announcement that it wants to get
out of the old-school telephone business and transition to
an all-Internet Protocol (IP) network bring us to a watershed
moment in telecommunications? Stacey Higginbotham
of GigaOM thinks so. But, “for the millions out there who
can’t tell circuit-switched voice from voice over the Internet
(VoIP),” she suggested that a bigger issue is what the
transition will mean for telephone numbers. (“In a World of
Facetime and Kik, What Happens to the Phone Number?,”
1st December).
Theoretically, phone numbers would not be needed in
an all-IP world in which everyone has the equivalent of a
personal URL. But this single-method contact requires
smarter services or parameters on the back end than
are currently available from traditional telecoms that still
see the service they provide as voice, data, or video.
Accordingly, while the looming end of the circuit-switched
network has revived talk of the fate of the 10-digit number,
Ms Higginbotham believes that it is here to stay at least
for another decade. She has inquired into how “digits will
transition to the digital” over that period.
According to Tom Steffans of iNetwork, the wholesale
division of Bandwidth.com, (Raleigh, North Carolina),
the phone number is slated for “upcycling” for use in
new ways. The sixth-largest US telecom on the basis
of the number of its telephone numbers, Bandwidth.
com provides the IP platforms for such clients as Pinger,
Google Voice, and Twilio. Some of its products are phone
number-based, with iNetwork offering customers an API
(application programming interface) and taking care of the
legal and mechanical logistics of finding and managing the
numbers. The clients utilise those numbers not for voice
calls but, in the case of Pinger, for an over-the-top-texting
service; or Google, which uses a phone number to deliver
a voice service of its own. Or, wrote Ms Higginbotham,
“for companies like Marchex and Flexicalls so they can pop
a phone number on a website and use it for [customer] lead
generation.”
❖ “It’s no longer Amy calling Jim, it’s two 13-year-olds
texting each other or Jim calling Skype,” Mr Steffans
told GigaOM (San Francisco), which provides analysis
on new technologies and startups. “It’s advertisers
putting numbers on the Web where the lifespan may
be only two days. The dynamic, and who uses and
consumes a number, has dramatically changed. But
none of the old rules have changed.” As the rules
change the question then becomes whether the
traditional telephone providers are ready to offer
services like those available from Bandwidth.com.
Ms Higginbotham noted that, in the digital world coming
into being, providing access is not the service: access is
the platform on which the service is built. She wrote: “In
an all-IP world the baseline is IP and a provider can sell
that at bare-bones pricing or build up value by creating
services on top of it. Bandwidth.com competes with
some of its clients in a fashion, and that’s fine with it.
Will AT&T, Sprint or Verizon be able to keep up? Do they
want to?”
Manufacturing
A wire products company in failing health
saves itself with higher-tech wares – very
much higher
“What makes that all the more notable: It’s a manufacturer.
In Baltimore.”