As the FCC has increased penalties for violating CPNI, service providers are improving their policies regarding the requirement. Customer information such as name, address and billing telephone number, is known as "Customer Proprietary Network information," or CPNI. Additionally, service features, class of service, phone charges, billing and call records are considered elements of CPNI. The FCC has issued a requirement that all parties with access to CPNI must give the customer the option of disallowing the information to be used for certain marketing activates and certainly restricting its resell to third parties. The penalties are such that each violation carries a substantial fine. Over the next few weeks, Broadvox and its partners will be implementing new policies to maintain compliance with the FCC’s order regarding CPNI. Our customers will be given the option of allowing us to use their information to market additional features and services and provide the information to third parties.

Personally, I hope that they read the policy and take the time to appreciate its potential impact on how their CPNI can be used. In today’s environment of tell all, privacy seems to be losing out. Interestingly, although Facebook has over 500 million subscribers willing to share a lot of personal information, only 46% like doing so. Innately, they may understand that they are losing bits of their privacy and certainly gobs of their time, but they cannot resist.

 The August eNewsletter was released this week and is well worth reading to see what Broadvox is up to. However, it also contains a fun element. We are giving away hundreds of Metoo screaming monkeys to people who request them. You will soon be able to join a thundering horde of travelers that take pictures of Metoo in locations around the world. The pictures and videos we receive will be posted on Flickr and IPMAN Adventures.com.  One lucky photographer will receive a free Amazon Kindle, Compliments of Broadvox.

Work should be hard, rewarding and fun.

Have a great weekend and see you Monday!

The three-hour SIP Trunking session at VoiceCon drew over three hundred participants. That is SIPnormous. It demonstrates the growing interest in SIP by enterprises as they begin to supplement their intranet VoIP implementations with extranet SIP. While Broadvox was not invited to participate in those sessions, we did speak at a smaller breakout sponsored by AudioCodes. The message of that particular breakout was to understand some of the FUD associated with SIP Trunking and risk mitigation in transitioning to SIP.

Too often, when we discuss transitioning to SIP, we insinuate that the SMB or enterprise must go out and purchase an IP PBX or make drastic changes to their networking infrastructure. This is not necessary and in many cases would be the wrong thing to do. The transition can be done using a media gateway that preserves or extends the TDM based investment. AudioCodes refers to this as "Come as You Are". We even highlighted this message in an IP Man episode "SIP Trunking as You Are" where IP Man and Metoo save a distraught IT manager when he is at a loss in making the transition from TDM to IP communications. Using gateway technology can be the best way to address remote and branch offices allowing them to benefit from the new features associated with SIP and perhaps a new corporate IP PBX. This is a key risk mitigation approach.

The Broadvox message during the session was mostly on voice quality. I noted that while I have attacked the FUD put forth by some of the ILECs and CLECs regarding IP based voice quality and Bring Your Own Broadband (BYOB) strategies, I have neglected to share with you the study done on the subject. Broadvox is a BYOB ITSP because it has been shown that a proper broadband connection with minimal latency delivers exceptional voice quality. The G.711 codec Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is 4.4 on a scale where 5.0 is perfect. That compares with the same score, 4.4, for a toll call over a TDM network and 3.8 for a wireless or cellular network call. Interestingly even the use of compression with a G.729a codec does not marginalize the voice quality. That MOS score was an impressive 4.2.

You are probably wondering how a MOS score is established. I'll go over that on Friday.

Thanks to those of you that noticed I forgot to create the link to Monday's recipe. It has been corrected. You can now make Roasted Brussels Sprouts with my white seasoning mixture. Enjoy!