WCA March 2013

transition will mean for telephone numbers. (“In a World of Facetime and Kik, What Happens to the Phone Number?,” 1 st December). Theoretically, phone numbers would not be needed in an all-IP world in which everyone has the equivalent of a personal URL. But this single-method contact requires smarter services or parameters on the back end than are currently available from traditional telecoms that still see the service they provide as voice, data, or video. Accordingly, while the looming end of the circuit-switched network has revived talk of the fate of the 10-digit number, Ms Higginbotham believes that it is here to stay at least for another decade. She has inquired into how “digits will transition to the digital” over that period. According to Tom Steffans of iNetwork, the wholesale division of Bandwidth.com , (Raleigh, North Carolina), the phone number is slated for “upcycling” for use in new ways. The sixth-largest US telecom on the basis of the number of its telephone numbers, Bandwidth. com provides the IP platforms for such clients as Pinger, Google Voice, and Twilio. Some of its products are phone number-based, with iNetwork offering customers an API (application programming interface) and taking care of the legal and mechanical logistics of finding and managing the numbers. The clients utilise those numbers not for voice calls but, in the case of Pinger, for an over-the-top-texting service; or Google, which uses a phone number to deliver a voice service of its own. Or, wrote Ms Higginbotham, “for companies like Marchex and Flexicalls so they can pop a phone number on a website and use it for [customer] lead generation.” ❖ “It’s no longer Amy calling Jim, it’s two 13-year-olds texting each other or Jim calling Skype,” Mr Steffans told GigaOM (San Francisco), which provides analysis on new technologies and startups. “It’s advertisers putting numbers on the Web where the lifespan may be only two days. The dynamic, and who uses and consumes a number, has dramatically changed. But none of the old rules have changed.” As the rules change the question then becomes whether the traditional telephone providers are ready to offer services like those available from Bandwidth.com . Ms Higginbotham noted that, in the digital world coming into being, providing access is not the service: access is the platform on which the service is built. She wrote: “In an all-IP world the baseline is IP and a provider can sell that at bare-bones pricing or build up value by creating services on top of it. Bandwidth.com competes with some of its clients in a fashion, and that’s fine with it. Will AT&T, Sprint or Verizon be able to keep up? Do they want to?”

But fee-based Internet usage is also fairly transparently a pocketbook issue. An earlier Register article (21 st November) suggested that Google fears any “plan to make it pay for stuff.” Mr McAllister noted that, as far back as June of last year, the ITU had been at pains to deny any threat of an Internet takeover by the UN. In response to the European resolution, ITU representative Richard Hall blogged: “No proposals exist to give more power to ITU as an institution, which does not have any regulatory authority over any networks whatsoever.” But, according to the Register: “Those assurances have seemingly done little to calm those who see sinister motives in the ITU’s proposals, including such organisations as [the environmental group] Greenpeace and the International Trade Union Confederation. And, of course, Google. The ten-digit phone number may be on its way out, but reports of its imminent demise are probably premature Did AT&T’s 7 th November announcement that it wants to get out of the old-school telephone business and transition to an all-Internet Protocol (IP) network bring us to a watershed moment in telecommunications? Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOM thinks so. But, “for the millions out there who can’t tell circuit-switched voice from voice over the Internet (VoIP),” she suggested that a bigger issue is what the

Manufacturing

A wire products company in failing health saves itself with higher-tech wares – very much higher “What makes that all the more notable: It’s a manufacturer. In Baltimore.”

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Wire & Cable ASIA – March/April 2013

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