I am posting this from the SIA Lounge waiting to fly to San Diego for IETF #60. The main purpose there is to organize a “Carrier ENUM” mini-BoF with Richard Stastny on Wed afternoon. Carrier ENUM aka known as Infrastructure ENUM or Operator ENUM is a new way we notice carriers and operators starting to use ENUM to do “number resolutions” within their network or between carriers. It is quite different from what we envision how ENUM would be used in the first place (ie, individuals coming along and register their phone numbers) and many people expressed doubts whether ENUM could satisfy the requirements in the first place. It is going to be an exciting discussion.

Incidently, there is an interesting article at Telepocalypse regarding pay-and-keep settlement among US carriers in 4 years time. Such model is already been used in SMS but it could be pretty disruptive if carriers adopts it. Considering the operation cost to do minute-charging is more expensive then the settlement itself (due to falling prices in voice-calls), it does makes a lot of sense. More importantly, this will bring about a change in the business landscape in the voice market, one which could potentially bring more competitions to the market since carriers are not longer dictated by the most powerful incumbent termination charges.

It is also an inevitable development for the telecom market to transit from a 200B industry to 20B. Painful but neccessary.

ps: See my previous entry on how voice-termination are been done today.

I got AT&T Callvantage working now. Despite saying it is not able to registered my TA, apparently it works anyway (strange). I made some test call, including one to the AT&T service desk (a toll free number :-) and the sound quality is incredible clear! Woosh! I am impressed! :-)

Anyway, my US number is (650) 384-4515 so drop me a line if you like hear how it sound :-)

Phew! Just finish setting up my AT&T Callvantage, the new VoIP Voice Service. Actually I got the stuff on Monday but was too busy to do any setup until today. It isn’t difficult but I also took the opportunity to phase out my TV-PVR-DVD-Video-Stereo-Desktop Vaio I got from Japan 2 years ago. I also threw out a box of wires which I kept just-in-case-i-need-it (which of cos is never). I mean, how many power cables does one need as spare? I threw away 15 :P

Anyway, back to the Callvantage. It is IP Telephony service offered by AT&T and they are doing beta testing in some part of Asia. AT&T is offering it free-of-charge to beta testers in return for feedbacks :-)

They allow me to choose any phone number from any city in US (I choosen Menlo Park, CA) and they will route the calls over the Internet to my home!¹. Callvantage also comes with lots of interesting value-added services DND, Locate Me, Personal Conferencing! Really cool stuff!

Couldn’t wait to try this baby. So after putting them into my rack, sort out the wires, turn on the devices and making sure my broadband still works, oops, I left my registration info in office :-( Oh well…Definately by tomorrow cos I am leaving for IETF on Sat. It would come handy because this means I can call home from San Diego. :-)

¹ Actually I already have a Washington number from Kallfree but thats another story.

This is why Google is the invention of the Internet :-) (via MrBrown)

I feel quite bad to controdiact Vint Cerf in the open forum but my comment that whether to have IDN Top Level Domain is an ICANN issues and not IETF was well-received with an applause from the audience. So I am really glad that ICANN board passing the resolution to form a new President committee on IDN and gave acknowledgement to the RFC 3743 JET Guidelines ;-) I wish we could have more concrete action plan but at least this is a start. I believe we should also try to rope in the Arabic community, particularly those who are doing real work on the ground like GCC. I may not agree with everything they do (like the alt. Arabic root) but I respect them for doing work to move their community forward.

I stayed on one more day because Jonanthan from BBC World wants to do an interview with me on IDN issues (in my personal capacity of cos). We end up wandering various part of Chinatown in KL looking for interesting location shots. It is suppose to be shown 2 weeks from now and I wonder how it will look like…too bad I dont subscribe to cable.

Incidently, the corridors conversations, bar and dinners discussions clearly indicate the recovery of this industry. I feel I am back in the dotcom days with companies investing in new ideas. If the last ICANN is gloomy, this one certainly feel good!

[Update 31st July: Jonanthan informed me the radio session is now available on BBC Webcast]

[Update 10th Aug: the TV interview is also available online]

Khaled Fattal, CEO of MINC gave an presentation of MINC yesterday on MINC. A very nice presentation with a nice story, about involvement of local community, respects of different culture, one that is difficult for people who believe in the bottom-up process to dispute. But he never managed to answer my question what has all of these do with multilingualism at all because he sound like he is talking about general Internet Goverance instead. And I certainly dont remember MINC’s charter covers Internet Goverance issues. Vint cut short our debate but gave a wonderful analogy of cow-cart vs rocketship and asking him to start building his own rocket instead :-) Amadeu Abril i Abril also went up to the mike at the end of the session and make an excellent speech, much better then I could.

Most of today was spend in the UNDP-APDIP Internet Goverance discussion. Since this is kind of the first meeting, most of it are in doing some high-level overview of things. But of interest, most support the effort, requesting to create some framework to raise issues from the AP region to the WSIS. Adam contribution on the issues to be address like spam, interconnection, security, internet crime, etc was a excellent one but unfortunately most of the people around the table arent ready to discuss it yet.

I am back in KL today for the ICANN IDN Workshop. Yes, I am one of the unnamed speaker for the morning session chair’ed by Sharil and Vint Cerf.

John Klensin basically took over the stage giving a tutorial of the higher level problem, the Internationalization or more accurately the multilingualism of the Internet. John noted at that this is either a risk or opportunity. Do it well and we will bring Internet to the next stage and do it badly, we risk fragmentation of the Internet. I was asked to give a tutorial on the IDN standard but really, IDN is only a small piece of the bigger picture.

The afternoon was more of series of presentations of updates from different countries and experiences of IDN deploymnet. I gave a presentations on the JET Guideline in this session. Interesting stuff in this session includes (1) Japan is getting their mobile browsers to support IDN (2) Korea domain names registration shot up t0 70k almost overnight (3) Verisign already migrated their IDN registrations to standards.

I am waiting for an exciting deployment experiences from Arabic world (I recommended Prof. Al-Zoman to be included in this session) and also the next step discussion by Vint….more of it later :-)

Jonathan Schwartz points out that video over IP will stress today’s network infrastucture (via Kevin Werbach)

“When it’s put onto DVD, the movie will size up to something like 5 Gigabytes. Requested by 250,000 technology executives (or more likely, their kids) on a quiet evening – for display on their new IP TV’s or mobile handsets, or through their set top boxes – that’s going to put some burden on the network. Big data (5 Gb), relatively small compute (decode, check for authorization, etc.). Caches will help, but it’s a classic parallel throughput problem.”

But you know, we are already doing it. This is why we have distributed p2p file transfer like BitTorrent and site like suprnova.org. In fact, latest statistics shows that P2P traffic account for 50% 66%¹ of the Internet traffic and we haven’t witness any breakdown…yet.

¹ See http://www.isp-planet.com/research/2004/cachelogic_data.html (Thanks Dewayne for the correction :-)

when a “bluetooth-enabled mobile phone peer-to-peer social network service” (is there any more hype-word you can use?) known as BEDD is launch in your own country (ie. Singapore) carrying their news in Reuters syndicated to ITU (no local newspaper?).

But surprisingly, you have no idea of the service and no one you know knows about the service which claims to be the biggest thing in town. (huh? what do you mean you never hear of it?)

And it certainly doesn’t look good when you work for a telecommunication regulator who is supposed to be aware of all the new stuff in the market. So either it is a pure BS or someone here is not doing their job (luckily I am not incharge of mobile-wireless :-)

Damn, I really wish there is such a service…It would be cool if it is real and not just as a press release.

ps: btw, if you know them, please ask them to contact me. I would be happy to put them in touch with the right people.

[Update: 29th July: Thanks to MrBrown, I got a contact to them now :-) Look forward to meet up with them.]

Press Release about Formation of APEET

Singapore, July 19, 2004 – [CNNIC] (China Network Information Center), [JPRS] (Japan Registry Service), [KRNIC] (Korea Network Information Center), [SGNIC] (Singapore Network Information Center) and [TWNIC] (Taiwan Network Information Center) today announced the formation of Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team (APEET), an informal technical project team formed to coordinate and synergize ENUM activities in the Asia Pacific region.

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