On September 9, 2020 the FCC published their Second Report and Order Promoting Caller ID Authentication to Combat Illegal Robocalls. It’s 92 pages of legalese, so this article provides a summary of the key points for small independent service providers. Deadline extended by 2 years… The headline is that service providers with fewer than 100K… Continue Reading
When CenturyLink has an outage, do you follow?
On the morning of Sunday August 30, CenturyLink’s IP network was reported to be down for about 4.5 hours – probably focused on the part of the network that came with their acquisition of Level 3. From what I’ve read (simplifying greatly), a CenturyLink customer had requested that they block a certain IP address from… Continue Reading
5 translations best practices for a reliable network
How often do you have to update your switch translations or routing? Among our clients this varies from “every week” to “once or twice a year” – and every time a change is made there’s a risk of impacting service. With any network wide change you need to strike a balance between operating efficiently and… Continue Reading
Why we all need red telephones
There’s a popular myth that there’s a red telephone on the US President’s desk that connects him directly to the Russian President in Moscow. While that’s a nice idea for the movies, that’s not literally true – but since 1963 the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link between the Pentagon and the Kremlin has existed to allow… Continue Reading
All phone calls should be free
One of the basic principles of telecoms in North America is that local calls are free and you pay per-minute for long-distance calls. This is how things have always been, but frankly it’s time we moved on. Free local calls used to make sense Back in the early days, free local calls probably made sense…. Continue Reading
A 40 hour outage… and counting
If you’ve worked in telecoms for any length of time you’ll likely have some kind of psychological scars from dealing with an outage. Everyone tries to build a redundant network that is resilient to any problem, but even with the best of intentions outages happen. I’ve heard stories of human error – that time someone… Continue Reading