I spent my morning at Wifi VoIP Summit as I was given a slot to give a presentation about the APEET Trial.
When I told the audience that QoS is the last thing in our mind in our trial, one of the audience jumped and said something to the effect that 802.11b can only support 12 concurrent calls. Ha!1
Look, if I have already provisioned the wireless infrastructure to support 1000 clients doing web, email, streaming, file sharing etc, do you think handling 12 or more concurrent rtp is going to be a problem? Dewayne was around, told me not to worry about it – they just don’t get it.
After lunch, I went back to the Telecom Policy Summit which turns out to be incredibly useful.
There was a panel on alternative last mile technology and the consensus seem to point to nothing viable in the short term beyond DSL and Cable so it looks like we will still see duopoly in US for a while. There was also a little discussion on “naked DSL”2.
On social issues, it seems that everyone hated CALEC. No one question why it is needed but hated how it is been implemented. Law enforcement agency wanted information (e.g. timestamp 200ms) which is not possible with the existing deployment without huge investments and neither could they explain why they need such information.
Oh, another interesting point : Looks like people have stopped asking for deregulation and reversed to ask for some regulation particularly on interconnection (and termination charges and ensuring no LECs is blocking VoIP (Looks like I am on track :-)
1 Base station design, VLAN and handsets makes a huge difference.
2 DSL not tied to having phone service. I called it service unbundling.
