Your Chance to Invent Payphone 2.0

You remember the payphone, don’t you? Before the era of cellphones, payphones were ubiquitous. There was almost one on every corner and endless lines of payphone booths in airports, train stations and bus terminals. Now that everyone is mobile, you might think that payphones have gone the way of horses and buggies and, soon, the analog landline. Well... not so fast.

Public payphones can still have an important role to play in telecom infrastructure mix. Consider the recent hurricane Sandy that devastated New York and New Jersey. Cell towers went dark and people scrambled for any way to communicate. How about VoIP? No. Broadband was down too. Surprise! The long ignored pay phone still had dial tone. All you had to do is pick up the handset, drop in your coins and make your call.

Why did old school technology work when the latest and hottest technologies went dead at a critical time? The answer is in the simplicity and ruggedness of the design. The original phone system designed by Bell and refined by Ma Bell (AT&T) was intended to be a lifeline, not just a way to chat among family members. The phones themselves never connected to the public power grid. Yes, the very early ones installed at farmsteads had batteries for voice transmission and crank generators to creating the ringing signal. Very shortly after that, all phones got their power over the phone line itself.

Amazingly, if all you want to do is talk you need very little power on the line. Those small diameter phone wires that go for miles work perfectly well with milliamps of current at 45 volts. All of those heavy black phone sets that you rented from the local phone company were passive devices. There was no electronics at all inside until touch tone dials became common. So, why do the phones you buy now plug into the AC? It’s because of the heavy electronics content, mostly for cord free operation. In the old days, if the lights went out you could still make a phone call. Now, when the power goes out everything goes out.

Payphones are a leftover from those earlier days when the line powered the phone and it worked in emergencies. The line power comes from batteries at the phone company backed up by diesel generators to keep them charged when the AC drops out. This isn’t something we want to lose because when disaster strikes, a working phone is the most valuable piece of technology around.

Still, payphones continue to be removed and scrapped because in normal times people just aren’t using them. Is there something that can be done to bring the traditional payphone up to date so that it is in demand again? Could you be the one to invent what amounts to payphone 2.0?

Here’s your chance. Mayor Bloomberg has launched a competition to re-imagine and reinvent the 11,412 payphones that are left in New York City. The current vendor agreements expire in 2014, leaving only a short time to come up with better ideas. The design challenge started on December 4 and runs until March 5, 2013. You register on the challenge website and submit digital files presenting your prototype by February 18. Up to 15 prototypes will be selected as semi-finalists and invited to demonstrate to a panel of judges. The top 3 winners will be then be featured on the City of New York’s Facebook page for a public vote.

Just what will the judges be looking for? Connectivity is really important as you might imagine. You’ll need the ability to connect New Yorkers and enable communication, including for safety and emergency purposes. Creativity will be judged on originality, innovation, and quality of idea. Visual design includes visual appeal and user experience. Functionality will be based on flexibility, versatility, scalability, accessibility and sustainability. Finally, community impact will be evaluated based on support of local residents, businesses and cultural institutions.

Have you got an idea for a better payphone or are simply a budding inventor who likes a challenge? Maybe you’d like to integrate a WiFi hotspot or cell phone charger or connection to the payphone’s wireline. Maybe you just want to get your tweets or email by stopping at a payphone for a few minutes. Whatever cool ideas you have can be that little something extra that makes your entry stand out from the crowd.

Are you up for the challenge to reinvent payphone for New York City? If so, get the official rules and other information at the Official Reinvent Payphones site and register as a participant. Good luck!

Business Telephone Systems Hosted VoIP Advantages

Companies looking to replace or install new business telephone systems have more options today than in recent years. Small companies can pick up a system that supports only a few outside lines from their local office supply store. Medium size companies typically bring in a contractor or VAR (Value Added Reseller) to install a key telephone system or small PBX. Large companies needing hundreds or thousands of handsets often have their own telecom organizations that build sophisticated in-house telephone companies. All of these companies, from small to large, should now be looking at hosted VoIP as a cost savings alternative.

How is it possible that one solution can handle the needs of the smallest to the largest operations and still be cost effective? It’s not a single one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a technology that readily scales to handle whatever demand is thrown at it. That’s hosted VoIP, also called hosted PBX or telephone in the cloud.

The cloud metaphor gives it away. What you are really dealing with is large data center set up to specifically handle business telephony for many clients. The characteristics that make this a cloud service are enormous scalable capacity and virtualization that keeps various clients isolated from each other. Billing follows the cloud model of pay-as-you-go. The service provider makes all capital investments in infrastructure plus the operational expenses in operating and maintaining the service. Clients pay by the seat by the month for the service they use.

Typically what you get with hosted VoIP is a suite of telephone services very similar to the most advanced PBX systems you could buy and install yourself. You pay a single price for your call switching. That includes in-house, local outside calls and domestic long distance. Overseas calling is extra, like it is with any calling plan.

One thing you get easily with a hosted solution is the ability to tie together multiple business locations. You can do this in-house to avoid paying toll charges to the phone companies for calls that go between your branch offices or back to headquarters. However, the solution involves you converging your network and running your own SIP trunks between PBX systems. If you want to avoid the telephone companies, you have to become the telephone company. Your service area is the various locations owned by your company.

Hosted VoIP providers maintain a cloud that contains the virtual PBX. You connect to that cloud from each of your locations, or back to HQ on your own network and then off to the cloud for call switching. Either way, the cloud doesn’t care where the handsets are located. They are simply network devices that can be connected at will. Connect a bunch of them together and you have a conference call.

What hosted VoIP providers are offering now is a way to share outside lines among all your remote locations. Remember that in-house calls don’t touch the public phone system. They are all “on-net,” so to speak. It’s only when you have to call outside the company that you need the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). In the past, each of your locations would have its own PBX with its own outside lines. Some locations could have people waiting to use a line. Others could have a dozen lines vacant. With a hosted solution, all PSTN trunks come into the cloud and can be used by whoever needs them. It doesn’t matter which “branch” you happen to be at. Not all providers do this, so if it is an important feature for you then be sure to specify that you need this as a cost saver.

So far we’ve seen that hosted VoIP has the advantages of offering nearly limitless capacity on a pay as you go basis, with no capital investment and no need to maintain equipment yourself. It also easily connects multiple business locations with a complete set of the latest PBX features. Many providers can now integrate mobile phones so that your smartphone has access to the system as easily as your desk phone. Some providers even go so far as to provide you with new desk phones with the cost rolled into your service plan.

Can hosted VoIP make sense as your next phone system. Get prices and features for competing business telephone systems with hosted VoIP and see what makes the most sense for the size of your company.

Fiber Lit Towers Improving Rural Broadband

Anyone situated beyond the city limits knows the frustration of living in a bandwidth-free zone. Consumers and small businesses may be near enough to a cell tower to get 3G wireless and certainly two-way satellite is an option, but with severe download restrictions on both. Business sites and farmsteads can probably get T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps and maybe bonded T1 lines to improve a bit on that. How about high bandwidth wireless? Forget it. Fiber optic Ethernet connections? Are you nuts?

Rural America is truly at a disadvantage compared to the telecommunications resources found in cities and suburbs. The best options are found in the core of large metropolitan business districts. Move downtown in a big city and you’ll find such niceties as Gigabit Ethernet and even 10 Gig E connections. You may even be able to get Ethernet over Copper at 100 to 400 Mbps. Fixed wireless services easily deliver 50 to 100 Mbps bandwidth. If a shared bandwidth solution is OK for what you are doing, it’s hard to beat the Cable MSO prices.

Why the big discrepancy between metropolitan and rural service options? It’s all about infrastructure - the infrastructure that was never installed. Well, that’s in the process of changing right now. Level 3 Communications, one of the premier international telecom carriers, has established a program called EON or Extended On-Net sites. What they are doing is building out 500 additional access points to their fiber optic network. They are mostly in small and rural markets where there are few service options available. This is a wholesale, rather than retail, service intended to give local service providers access to high bandwidth carrier services.

Even with fiber optic gateways in the boonies, you still need a way to get the signals to the businesses and consumers without having to spend a fortune creating the remainder of the needed infrastructure. One technology that makes excellent sense for thinly populated areas is fixed wireless. WiMAX is an example of wide area coverage with significant service speeds. What you need, then, is access to the carrier-class fiber bandwidth plus a tower to transmit that bandwidth wirelessly to users scattered far and wide.

This sounds like a perfect opportunity for a combined effort and such a deal has been made. 52Eighty, a provider of tower infrastructure, has entered into an agreement with Level 3 to create 200 new wireless tower access sites situated near Level 3’s EON gateways. 52Eighty will take care of tower construction. Level 3 will provide transport and services that include private line, Ethernet and wavelength services. EON also offers backhauls that include Internet, VPN and voice services.

If this sounds a lot like what has been called the rural broadband initiative, it’s because that’s exactly what is going on. Level 3 is a key “middle mile” provider in bringing high speed network access to rural areas where local service providers can connect. They were awarded $13.7 million this summer through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and matched it with $4.2 million of their own funds to create dozens of middle mile connections in rural California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Tennessee and Texas.

Does this mean that relief is coming to disconnected consumers and businesses in Rural America? It’s certainly on the way. In fact, many carriers are expanding their wireline, broadband and fiber bandwidth services to garner new customers. If your ISP or business has been unable to get connectivity in the past, now is a good time to check availability and prices online for fiber optic lines to 1 Gbps, plus T1, ISDN PRI and other bandwidth services. You may be surprised by what has become available recently.

Ethernet Over Fiber Needed By Business

We’ve all heard that fiber optic bandwidth is the future, but are you sure it isn’t the right service for the present?

Most business telecom services have traditionally been copper based. It starts with the binder cable that gets installed during building construction. All those twisted copper pair provide the multi-line telephone service that is as standardized in business as the metal file cabinet. Copper pair are also used to bring in ISDN digital trunking for PBX phone systems and T1 lines for broadband Internet and linking business locations point to point.

For many small and medium businesses, this is the telecom infrastructure. It’s been that way for decades. Why should it change?

To get an idea about where network speeds are going, take a look at the broadband services offered to consumers. Both DSL and Cable left the 1-2 Mbps download speed is the dust years ago. Consumers now expect at least 3 to 6 Mbps, and many clamor for 10, 20, 30 or 50 Mbps. Cable is getting to these levels with new DOCSIS 3.0 modems. Verizon is offering double digit broadband as a matter of course over it’s FiOS fiber to the home service.

If consumers are getting used to high bandwidth Internet services, some using fiber optic service, it should be no surprise the pressure on business users to expand their network bandwidth is increasing. It’s not just the businesses generating bandwidth-demanding content for the consumer market. Business applications are getting more sophisticated to improve worker productivity, including audio, video and interactivity. They’re also headed to the cloud. Processes that always put demands on company local networks now put those demands on the outside connections.

Once you get beyond 10 Mbps or so, in becomes increasingly necessary to bring in fiber optic service. Ethernet over Copper can work up to 50 Mbps in special situations, close to carrier points of presence. That’s the limit, and it only works for a minority of business locations. What you want and need is fiber optic service that is almost bandwidth unlimited.

But what about the cost? This is where the newer Ethernet over Fiber services have become the high bandwidth solutions of choice. Ethernet is generally less costly than traditional telecom bandwidth on a per Mbps basis, sometimes dramatically less expensive. Scalable bandwidth options are readily available, once you have the fiber connection. That means you can start off with 10 Mbps Ethernet and easily upgrade to 20, 30, 40 or 50 Mbps as long as terminal equipment will support those port speeds. The fiber itself will take you to Fast Ethernet at 100 Mbps and on up to Gigabit Ethernet or GigE, perhaps even to 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 10 GigE. Don’t roll your eyes. The days of needing those bandwidth levels are not that far off.

Are you frustrated with your WAN network connection speed? if so, it’s time to be looking into fiber optic solutions. It may be much less expensive than you think. The way to find out is to check Ethernet over Fiber prices and availability for your business location.