September 2007 Archives

September 19, 2007

Connectivity Requirements List
_______________________________________________

Must be Ethernet RFC compliant media

Must include sufficient bandwidth for G.711 codec with 15,000 endpoints

Must scale to include 200% of the purchased bandwidth between the vendor’s PoP and Penn State’s call management server clusters, thus allowing for fail-over between the clusters while preserving 100% of inbound and outbound delivery capabilities.

Must be distributed on diverse fiber paths to buildings where core servers and gateways are located

Should contain options for alternate node routing of inbound calls

Should enable the option of co-locating Penn State’s core servers and gateways in vendor premises

Service Requirements List

_______________________________________________

Must accept E.164 outbound number delivery utilizing PSU station ID

Must provide CLID and Name on inbound calls, when available

Must provide 911 phase one compliance (ANI / ALI)

Must provide unlimited, non-metered, local calling within the State College MSA.

Should provide an unlimited CONUS calling package

Should provide Enhanced 911 (E911) service for registered subscribers

Should provide call detail containing PSU station ID information with date/time/duration information.

May contain translation of E.164 numbers to Penn State IP addresses, with ENUM or similar.

You may have already been nearby during one of my informal soapbox talks on open communications and implications of the Internet model on services in general. Every once in a while I read an article which offers not only an interesting analogy but also serves to capture the issue in a what I think is a unique perspective.
If you missed this month's issue of Von Magazine, then you probably did not see Bob Frankston's column. Here's the link to one of my favorite authors most recent diatribes:

http://vonmag.com/editorial/columnist/voip-visions-a-fine-way-to-run-a-railroad-but-not-an-internet

I like a strong challenge. Though I'm not always the standout who tends to offer one. As I continue my development it is clear that I want to rely upon past experiences and my gut-feel to maintain reassurances and control. Having been in the organization for more than a dozen years, I routinely offer a verbal challenge to what I label as "legacy thought". Upon further examination, I find that quite often my direction looks quite a bit as if it is following a similar path.

Finding new paths often means hiking in new areas. Proving the zest for challenge exists becomes the new paradigm with such a change. I'm interested in finding value in achieving validation with my new peers and gaining more confidence in the idea that long term institutional significance can be achieved for those who seek to drive change.

Communications are crucial to moving forward and I've learned that being a leader and succeeding means many things. Not always leading, trusting your folks to do what they think is correct and taking criticism as a constructive by-product of communications have all played an important part in my development to date.

I possess good analytical skills and have had success as a facilitator in complex projects. I'm a good listener and have a solid understanding of several levels of organizational function. Not surprisingly I harbor opinions on how to achieve change and seek others to commiserate with to make it so.

From talking with others who have attended ITLP I have come to expect this program represents an opportunity to help me realize how to see beyond some of my less useful assumptions and learned behaviours. I'm interested in participating and hopeful to help develop the group dynamic towards both learning and fun.

I was fortunate to be included in a most useful discussion with RhondaB, JimmyV and key folks from OSTN. We were together to finalize the last few technical steps toward activation of the OSTN channel on the Portal. We're very close and need to take a breath while the agreement makes its way up the chain.

The current OSTN offerings are multicast or unicast using MPEG-4. Offerings plural, as OSTN offers a set of services and is actively developing new ideas on how to further leverage network capabilities for video sources. The new stuff promises to be open source and seeks to improve an already robust and affordable means to stream video.

The future offerings will require multicast (yeah!) be in place for end user networks to successfully receive streams and will have a much broader set of options for locally created content as well as specialty video content such as foreign language channels, Al Jezeera and other notable sources.

I'm keen on working with OSTN to better understand their direction and how we can be participants in testing our collective ideas. In one of our next IPTV meetings we will include OSTN folks to discuss our ideas and directions prior to planning for some cycle time for actual testing.

--Phil