COVID-19’s Aftermath for Enterprise Communications
For the half a dozen decades that I have lived we have debated whether the world will evolve so that there is no need to commute, where we can all sit at home and do our jobs while being linked…
TikTok, WeChat, Trump, and an Upcoming War
A friend of mine asked me about the TikTok/WeChat situation between the US and China because I spend so much time in Asia and do so much business with the Chinese. My answer was: “It’s complicated”. POTUS Trump has signed…
Footnotes & Facts: A Coronavirus Update
Currently there are 95,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 3,252 deaths. 51,156 are confirmed recovered individuals. If you prefer visuals, here is a chart from Johns Hopkins: So what does this tell us? In China the number of new coronavirus…
CoronaVirus: Get Over It
I just got back from China. I changed flights in a desolate Hong Kong airport – the vast majority of flights were cancelled. Why am I traveling during a global crisis? Let’s look at the data objectively. Wuhan China has…
1-(700) Killed Tie
Tie-lines were operated by every major company in America by the 1970s. They were bypassing the long distance network, are costing the Bell System vast amounts of money, and had become very costly to install and manage. By some estimates,…
More Screen-Share Please
My wife and I are flying together side by side in nice, comfortable business class seats. And, we would like to watch a movie during the 11 hour flight. Let me clarify: we would like to watch a movie together…as…
No Power
It’s winter, a time when there are increased power failures. What can you expect? Comcast sells battery backups for your VOIP service. The battery provides about 8 hours of backup. But those eight ours are pretty worthless. We just had…
Verizon Delaying #5G Internet
I thought I would assist with the interpretation of this recent news story: Verizon is delaying its home 5G internet rollout again Verizon has just realized that 5G frequencies can’t travel very far, as in, they can go about a…
Phone Repair
One thing that we don’t see much of in the United States are shops that actually fix smart phones. Yes, there is the occasional, rare kiosk that can replace broken screens. But that’s about the extent of it. In other…
The Early History of the Touch-Tone Dial
Most history books will describe how the Touch-Tone dial was introduced in 1962 at the Seattle World’s Fair. But they are a little wrong. In 1958 the Bell System already had trials running with pushbutton telephones. Morris, Illinois was the…
Multi-Carrier on an iPhone 12 Max Pro
Imagine a cellular plan where your phone roamed to the best, closest cellular tower, without regard to what carrier owned it. Well, I have achieved that. My phone naturally is on the T-Mobile network. (I recently switched from Verizon because…
Dial 9 for Atomic Weapons
All major companies had tie-lines bypassing the Bell System PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) by the 1970s. Sprint was selling “bypass” where you could dial a local 7-digit number, then an authorization code, and then your long distance number for…
Is It Necessary To Have A Hostile Work Environment?
I’ve been asked a number of times whether it is necessary to have a hostile work environment to produce quality products. That is, so I think that it is a trade-off between harmony and quality. Elon Musk is highly effective,…
When will We Get Realistic About 5G?
For five years now I have been skeptical of 5G. I am an outlier on this, but then I have an attribute that fewer and fewer people have: I can do math. I am now hearing in the press every…
McApple
25 years ago I had an opportunity to meet with some executives at McDonald’s. They took me to the employee lunchroom. What impressed me most was a mural that went from one end of the lunch room to the other….
Thoughts on Google Fi
Should you switch to Google Fi now that it works on both Android and iPhone? It’s an enticing option: Pay a minimum of $20* a month and a maximum of $80* a month for “unlimited*” <cough cough> phone*, text*, and…
Our Dark Future is a Re-run
Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat the past. History used to be my least favorite subject. I thought it was useless. But I learned an invaluable lesson: history repeats itself. It repeats because we forget learned experiences…
Fe Google Fi Fumble
This is a disaster story about Google Fi. My wife has been a T-Mobile customer for years. They are great EXCEPT for international data where they offer S-L-O-W data. It didn’t used to be so slow. When T-Mobile’s Legere first…
Putting the Fi Out
It was with enthusiasm that I decided to switch to Google Fi. It turned into a nightmare, with my iPhone being hosed no matter what SIM I subsequently used. I installed the Google Fi SIM that arrived in the mail,…
SHAKEN/STIR is Harmless
Carriers are rolling out the new framework to stop spam. It is based on SHAKEN and STIR (they must have a James Bond thing going on here.) The SHANEN/STIR framework is vary complicated, and it uses a variety of authentications…