Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs to […]
October 2, 2009
Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s to […]
September 27, 2009
Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of Hong […]
September 23, 2009
BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better be […]
September 23, 2009
Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, Shaw […]
September 22, 2009
The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s] proposal – to codify and enforce some […]
September 21, 2009
In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western Ontario […]
September 11, 2009
Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their investment […]
September 7, 2009
I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized by […]
September 1, 2009
In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good Alberta […]
August 31, 2009
A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from controlling […]
August 27, 2009
Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, checking […]
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Google Voice and its long distance calling service will be free for another year according to the company’s blog.
Do you have resources to show this impacts Google Voice or just calls from Gmail? The blog post linked only mentions calls from Gmail.
The Google Voice project and the Gmail Calling through Google Voice are treated the same by Google. Google Voice customers making calls through Google Voice effectively initiate them from a control panel either through Gmail or an app. Sprint customers can do direct 1+ dialing from Google Voice and some VoIP providers use Google’s calling service gateway for transparent outgoing calls. Google said earlier it would eventually charge something for its phone service, but not until its quality has improved. There is room for improvement in my experience. Don’t expect them to charge any more than their arch-rival Skype charges… Read more »
Even their blog post has a link to their advert for making phone calls from Gmail: https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3115553 I’ve been using Google Voice (voice.google.com) far before the feature was added to Gmail. While I agree they are using the same technology, and IF you are already using Google Voice with that Google account it will use your same GV number, I don’t think it’s always the same and I would doubt they would ever charge for calls when integrated with Android. Sprint customers have the option to have GV fully integrated as part of their service but any Android phone can… Read more »
Even if I got a Sprint phone, I wouldn’t let them tie it and GV together with the same phone number. It’s unnecessary, and obviously just a free-for-Sprint value-adder to keep you from switching providers. Just get your new Sprint phone working, and then use it’s number to apply for a separate GV number, with the Sprint phone being one of it’s extensions. Then, you can add and switch providers without losing your GV number along with it’s awesome features.
Yay! I’ve been using this since it was called GrandCentral. Since Google Voice dropped support for SIP through Gizmo5, I’ve run my own “PBX in a Flash” Asterisk server with several GV accounts used as trunks. The PBXIAF can also acquire service through multiple commercial SIP or AIX trunk providers, and is highly flexible. It’s capable of serving a simple household with multiple numbers and extensions, a small business with multiple departments, or even a call center. It’s all 100% free from the Nerd Vittles website. Some people don’t like using PC headsets with GV. The PBX allows my household… Read more »
Dang, that really sounded like an advertisement for PBXIAF or Nerd Vittles. I have no connection to them. I don’t even like Nerd Vittles’s style of “I’m-over-your-head-anyway” writing. I meant to emphasize how little it costs to get and make phone calls these days, and how much control we really do have over our options. It’s parallel to my observations concerning high-speed Internet, though we haven’t won a healthy choice of options there yet.