NOTE:   These columns are written for telecommunications professionals only.

IN THE PHONE ROOM – The•Mart Magazine - September 2006

By Mike Sandman

• AT&T’s PLANNED INTERNET TOLL CHARGES
• AUTOMATIC LAPTOP ENCRYPTION FOR $35

If you have tips that you’d like to share, give me a call at 630-980-7710, or e-mail me at mike@sandman.com. If your tip is published, it will be attributed to you, and you’ll get a FREE "Word Ad" in the classified section. To get your free "Word Ad," call The-Mart at 1-800-864-1199, and ask for Joy Brookshire. Opinions expressed in this column are strictly my own.

In last month’s VoIP phone service provider review, I mentioned that Sunrocket gave me an 847 area code – even though I’m in 630. That prevents me from being able to do 7 digit local dialing, even though Sunrocket is one of the companies who do offer it (some don’t). When I complained and said I wanted a 630 number, they said they’d get me one within a week.

That never happened. Sunrocket got back to me and said that the only 630 number they could give me is in a different rate center, so if they made that my primary number, when I dialed 911 it would go to the wrong police department. Instead of just canceling the Sunrocket service like I asked them, they made me jump through hoops to get rid of it.

As I said last month, the FCC’s decision to force VoIP to work with E911 - even though a user can plug a VoIP device into any broadband connection in the world and make a phone call immediately, is out and out stupid.

When Vonage forced me to choose an E911 address, I decided to use the FCC’s headquarters address:

445 12th Street SW
Washington, DC 20554

Vonage told me that I couldn’t have that address for E911 a couple of times, and then they went ahead and changed it (I don’t know why). If everybody in the world setup their VoIP service for that address, the FCC may get the concept behind VoIP - as police cars raced to their headquarters all day long in response to 911 hangups in Afghanistan and Bolivia.

The E911 dispatch center in DC had better hire more foreign speakers. They have broadband in New Guinea these days, where a local cannibal might dial 911 for a witch doctor because they got sick eating an enemy’s innards? Don’t lose your VoIP adapter while traveling! You never know where someone will be when they use it.

AT&T’s PLANNED INTERNET TOLL CHARGES

Maybe this should be called "Why is phone company DSL so cheap?"

Last year, the FCC deregulated DSL so that phone companies can charge whatever they want to any competing broadband provider using the phone company’s copper. Until then, the rates were regulated so that there would be some competition between the phone company and other DSL providers (two big ones, Northpoint and Rhythms, went bankrupt pretty fast, leaving primarily Covad).

It's apparent that the phone company (mainly AT&T and Verizon, but who else is there?) has lowered their prices for DSL to very low (giveaway?) rates, like maybe $13 a month for the first six months. Cable companies have similar specials. In some cases, it’s difficult to find out how much that broadband will actually cost per month after the super low six month special price.

Maybe these broadband providers are offering you a great price because they like you? Uh, no. They'll know there won't be much churn (switching between broadband suppliers) because it's pretty much the phone company, Covad (a DSL competitor who rents pairs from the phone company), and the cable company. So what if everybody keeps switching between the phone company and cable company every year or two? Once these few broadband providers have just about everybody, the rates will zoom up. But wait, there's more...

The phone and cable companies actually don't care about your monthly DSL charges. At this point, it looks like they’ll make truckloads of money even if they gave you the broadband for free (which might be what happens). They're looking at a much bigger picture. They're actually looking at charging web sites, music and movie download services, and VoIP services to use ''their'' network to get to you. Essentially a toll that companies will have to pay if you want to be able to see that particular web site on your DSL or cable connection.

Is that possible? Yup. If you want to look at a Google page, Google will have to pay off the phone or cable company to allow their packets through to your computer. The phone company might take pity on us, and let us access Google in a much slower way through a crippled network (purposely slowed down), unless Google pays the toll.

Is that really possible? Yup. Cox Interactive, a cable company, blocked their subscribers from getting to Craigslist’s web site (a free classified advertising web site) for months. Cox initially said it was a bug in some security software they use, and then the said Craigslist’s web servers were to blame, having the wrong coding. That seems odd, since Craiglist worked everywhere else in the world.

Well, maybe not so odd. It turns out that Cox also owns newspapers. Craiglist has been killing expensive newspaper classifieds all over the country by offering  free local classifieds. The competition wasn’t a problem for Cox while they blocked Craigslist, since Cox cable subscribers with broadband just couldn’t get to Craigslist on the Internet to see the free ads.

Once you're a DSL or cable subscriber, that cheap broadband service is going to mean you can only access web sites, or download stuff from companies who pay a fee to your broadband provider. Sure, you don't have to pay it directly. The big bucks the phone and cable companies are going to collect from all of the companies with web sites that you want to visit has to come from somewhere - and I'll bet one way or another you're going to pay for the privilege of visiting those sites.

Just to make sure you understand how easy it is for any ISP to block a site, they simply type a range of IP numbers into a router (like 192.168.1.0 through 192.168.1.255), and traffic from any of those web sites or email servers is blocked permanently. Nobody has to actually visit routers all over the country to reprogram them - it's all done through software from someone sitting at a desk somewhere.

Some people refer to this as a tax from the phone and cable companies. Some people call it a toll. Some people call it protection money.

People fighting these tolls are for a concept called ''net neutrality,'' which means that traffic from anywhere gets routed to anywhere else on the Internet for free, without slowdowns or restrictions. That's pretty much what we have today, but with all of the lobbyists the phone and cable companies have, I'm not thinking it will be that way much longer.

While net neutrality seems like a good, fair idea for the Internet, it turns out that it will hurt some things that are getting popular on the Internet - like VoIP. Everybody was hoping that at some point QOS (Quality of Service) would be implemented for voice packets, which would make VoIP calls over the Internet sound better. Right now, without QOS, there are little blips and cutouts from time to time because all of the packets aren't received in time or in the right order (so they can be put together to make the words sound natural). Packets received late or out of order are just thrown out, which is why VoIP sounds pretty crummy over the Internet.

Even though it's really useful, if you prioritize voice packets because telephone conversations don't sound very good without QOS, that goes against the idea of net neutrality - where all Internet traffic has an equal chance of getting to the other end. Some other packets will be slowed because the voice packets have priority.

To make VoIP sound like a real telephone conversation, maybe users with VoIP traffic will have to pay more to have their packets prioritized so they'll receive them in order and on-time? With most of the stuff on the Internet, it just doesn't matter what order the packets come in, or if they're a tenth of a second late.

Like phone conversations, video and audio conferencing is real time and two-way, and every packet is pretty important. As energy costs rise, video conferences may get even more popular.

Now spread the toll concept to movies and music, which are currently downloaded by most users but which may be streamed in real time in the future. Movies and music will take a lot more data to stream than telephone conversations. Like telephone calls, streamed movie packets need to arrive in order and on-time, but they can be buffered for a few seconds to try to make it work since it’s one-way.

AUTOMATIC LAPTOP ENCRYPTION FOR $35

We’re hearing about it all the time these days. Big companies are losing their customer’s personal data when employee’s laptops are stolen. I’ve been wondering why they aren’t using a simple $35 program to protect the private data.

Whether it’s other people’s data, or your own company or personal data, it can’t be a good thing for that information to be in the hands of a crook that steals your laptop. Even if you simply leave your laptop at a customer’s site, if you have private data on it, your personal data can be compromised and company information that should be a secret, won’t be a secret any more.

At most Interconnects, the most valuable asset is their customer list. Just about every Interconnect is going to be sold some day, and traditionally the value of an Interconnect has been based on the number of customers. If another company gets that list and starts whittling it down by selling the stolen customers new systems or MACs, the value of the company drops.

I tried a program called SafeHouse from PC Dynamics. The $35 program works as advertised. You download the program, install it, choose a password, and it creates a new drive letter for you to store data that you want to encrypt.

Then all you have to do is move the files from where you currently have it on the C: drive (or wherever) to the new drive letter that was created. Don’t forget to delete the unencrypted directory. When you open a program, you have to remember that the files are no longer on the C:\mydocs directory, they’re in the e:\mydocs directory (or whatever directory you choose).

The new drive that’s created is actually just a file that’s encrypted. It can be a huge file, plenty big enough to hold all your data. When you start the computer, you enter your password and SafeHouse simply decodes the encrypted data out of that file, on the fly as you need it.

SafeHouse never decrypts all of the data at once, only as you need it. If everything was decrypted when you put in the password, if the PC crashed all of that data would no longer be encrypted.

I tried a couple of encryption programs a few years ago, and they were slow as molasses. There’s no way anyone would use them. I was really surprised when I couldn’t see a difference in speed opening a file from the C: drive or the E: drive. It must be a little slower, but I couldn’t tell while using the PC.

Other than putting your password in when you turn on the PC, and keeping your data on a different drive letter and directory, there is no change from how you use your computer today. Your data is safe as soon as you shut down your PC – unless you write the password on a piece of paper and tape it to the front of the computer.

If you use Notepad or a text editor to look at the big encrypted file that SafeHouse makes, it’s just a bunch of seemingly random characters. You can’t see anything that makes sense. They say the 128 bit encryption would take billions of years to break.

You can make an encrypted area on a hard drive, thumb drive, CD or DVD. When you backup, you simply copy the encrypted file (don’t enter your password when you start the computer) to a CD, DVD, tape or another drive. To see the data in the backed up file, you would need the SafeHouse program installed on the computer you want to see it on, and you’d have to know the password that was originally used – unless you had a couple of billion years to spare.

For companies worried about what their users are doing, the program lets you create a second password that will work just like the regular password, called a "back door."

Although the company says SafeHouse works with Windows 98, I had no luck with it on a 98 laptop. I put it on and took it off of a 98SE laptop a few times, reformatting the drive each time. I tried it on an XP machine, and there were no problems at all. That said, make sure you backup your PC before you start playing with any program like this.

PC Dynamics said they haven’t had any other reports of SafeHouse problems with 98, and I couldn’t find anyone saying anything bad about their product on the Internet. It looks like they’ve been around a long time. According to our server statistics for last month, fewer than 3.5% of the people visiting our web site are still using Windows 98, so it looks like 98 isn’t much of an issue these days.

So just what is wrong with all those big companies (and the government) that aren’t using this cheap and simple method of protecting their customer’s data on laptops laying around everywhere?