NOTE:   These columns are written for telecommunications professionals only.

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

By Mike Sandman

• AT&T’s NEW PRIVACY POLICY
• VoIP PHONE SERVICE REVIEW
• I CAN GET ALL THE INFORMATION OFF YOUR NETWORK, TOMORROW

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.

AT&T’s NEW PRIVACY POLICY

It turns out that AT&T actually has a number of privacy policies, depending on which AT&T service you’re using, and whether they’re partnering with another big company on that service (like AT&T’s DSL with Yahoo’s whatever they do).

The government controls AT&T’s privacy policy relating to real phone lines. So far, AT&T can’t (doesn’t?) sell the list of calls you make to other companies (partner’s/AT&T family?). I’m sure that many companies would pay big bucks for lists of all the numbers you call because they’d know what kinds of companies you call, and that you’re a good prospect for buying things from similar companies. They’d also know your friends and family. I’m sure someone smarter than me would figure out what to do with that information.

You say that who cares who knows who you call? You hardly use the phone any more. You use the Internet for shopping, paying the bills, and socializing.

If you use AT&T’s DSL, the new AT&T digital TV service, or other AT&T Internet services, they know exactly what you do with your computer on the Internet. They know every web site you visit, every email address you send or receive email from, what you say in the emails, every piece of music or movie you download (legal or illegal), everything you buy, all of your credit card numbers, and essentially anything you type into the Internet. So what? Nobody is really going to know what you’re doing, or all of that private information. Right?

No. Not right. The privacy policy AT&T updated in June says that all of that private information is actually owned by AT&T as soon as you put it over their Internet connection. It belongs to them even if you’re just using someone else’s AT&T DSL connection to send or receive emails or browse the web. Once you or anybody else does it on the AT&T network, all that private information is now owned by AT&T. This is a quote from the new privacy policy (http://att.yahoo.com/privacy):

"While your Account Information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."

So far, no other company has changed their privacy policy to say they "own" your data and will do anything they want with it. I’m sure they’re waiting to see what happens with AT&T. While all of the big companies and the government say they’re "really concerned about your privacy," in reality they could care less. They hope you read the first part where they tell you they’re so concerned about your privacy, and you’ll stop reading. It’s like listening to a salesman. If you hear the same pitch repeated enough times, you begin to believe it.

Next month, I’ll talk about how AT&T is planning on charging web sites a "toll" if they want to have access to the users on their DSL service (Verizon and Comcast want to do the same thing with their subscribers). If Google or whoever doesn’t pay AT&T, you won’t be able to get to the Google web site (or you’ll be put on a slow connection to the site). Combine those tolls with their new privacy policy, and it looks like AT&T is big brother (but we gave them the money to go hire the lobbyists to buy the politicians).

VoIP PHONE SERVICE REVIEW

In a rather unscientific way, I’ve tested a bunch of "phone lines" from several VoIP providers: Verizon Voicewing, Vonage, Broadvoice, Packet8, Sunrocket, Viatalk and AT&T Callvantage. We used these lines in our office, and everyone had a pretty good idea of how good or bad they were right away. We only used them for outgoing calls. I wouldn’t recommend using any of these services for incoming calls at a business, or giving out the phone number.

Remember that if you get a phone number from one of these VoIP providers, you can’t take the phone number with you when you leave. If you port a number to them from a real phone line, and then leave, you can take that number with you.

It’s interesting using a line with unlimited local and long distance calling. There’s a feeling you get when you know the call you’re making is free, you can talk as long as you want, and it’s not going to cost you anything extra. Maybe it’s getting back at the Phone Company? I kind of feel that way when I look at the odometer in my van and realize that I’m driving a lot less than I did a year ago. I’m just not sending as much money to the Arabs as I could be - or to the US oil companies making 5 to 10 billion dollars profit every three months.

Even with the unlimited service, we still only used about 1,000 minutes in a month on a line. For a $30 unlimited line that means we’re spending about 3 cents a minute, more than if we got a $10 a month line with 500 minutes free, and paid 3 cents a minute after that. Before you decide on the unlimited line, figure out your approximate usage to see if it really makes sense.

I think you’ll find your phone company being more aggressive these days in their long-distance pricing. When I called AT&T (SBC) recently, they shot us some prices that were much better than what we’re paying Primus for long distance, including no per-line PIC charge. Unfortunately, I don’t believe anything their customer service people tell me. SBC got in hot water here in the Chicago area a few years ago for offering unlimited local service, but they forgot to tell the subscriber that "unlimited" actually excluded calls to modems (to connect to the Internet). Some people got big surprises when they got their phone bills. Who knows what surprises AT&T has in store for me if I were stupid enough to sign up for their unlimited deal? These guys are the king of fast talking the "fine print" at the end of radio commercials.

Some of the services offer minutes to other countries in their $30 or so unlimited plan. If you make international calls, you’ll have to check to see what other countries are included. From my testing, you can assume the quality of international calls will be much worse than US calls. My calls to Canada were pitifully bad on Sunrocket and Viatalk. They were fine on Callvantage. International calls are going to sound worse than US calls, even on a real phone line. We use Primus for LD on our POTS lines, and while US and Canadian calls sound fine, international calls are bad (and not cheap). If you make a lot of international calls, you can save some big bucks with VoIP even if you just use it for international.

All of these VoIP services offer some kind of 30 day return program so you can try the service. Return the thing right away if you don’t like the service! You should be able to determine if it will work for you within a week of plugging it in. Go ahead and order a few VoIP services to compare them. Get an RMA number and return it right away if you don’t like it. I’m still waiting for the refund from Packet8. You may have to do some fighting to get your money back, but that’s better than living with a crappy sounding phone line.

If you’re crazy enough to use one of these lines for incoming calls, I’d suggest you don’t route these calls to an answering machine, automated attendant or voice mail. Receiving DTMF digits can be intermittent, and the particular make and model of analog adapter you get may or may not have CPC (Calling Party Control), which signals the gizmo answering the line that the outside party has hung-up, so the line could end up locked-up. If CPC doesn’t work on your particular VoIP box, there’s a chance they can make it work if you call customer service (about the same chance your dog will graduate Harvard).

I didn’t test the talk battery or ringing from these devices, but they all worked on our old TIE Modkey 32 just fine. These boxes may or may not ring more than one phone. CPC worked on most of the devices, but not all. We could hear fine on all of the devices we tested. There were no volume problems, just garbled voice, hissing, cut-outs and echo from time to time. None of the boxes had these problems on all calls. Some of the calls sounded great, except Vonage which was always compressed way too much. The AT&T Callvantage box had essentially no voice quality issues in our testing.

Most of the services offer two prices for the exact same service. Something like $50 a month unlimited for a business, and $30 a month unlimited for a home user. $25 a month for 500 minutes for a business, $10 a month for 500 minutes at a home. In reality they all have a "magic number" of calls that if they’re exceeded… they’ll change you to the more expensive plan, or turn off your service. I’m pretty sure we’re talking thousands of minutes of use before that happens. Most of the VoIP providers seem to consider a home office OK for their home plans, and you can usually sign up for it with a company name.

If you’re only going to use 1,000 to 2,000 minutes a month, you should probably save your money and go with the much cheaper "home" plan. That leaves you a little money to add a second line for $10 to $15 a month with 500 minutes free, which would come in handy if there are two or more people making outgoing calls.

All of the VoIP services offer an analog adapter that gives you one or two POTS jacks to connect to your phones or system. You can usually get two lines if you pay extra. The second line never seems to be unlimited. It might be a good idea to get a second $10 a month line from a different VoIP carrier, so if one goes out you’ll have another choice. Most of the adapters come from Cisco/Linksys/Sipura (which are all the same company). The one from Callvantage looks like a cheap piece of Chinese junk, but it works the best out of all of them.

You absolutely need a battery backup for the VoIP device, your Internet cable or DSL router, and the switch or hub that this stuff is plugged into. You won’t have any VoIP phone service without power. A 500va battery backup from the computer store would work great to back all this stuff up, and they’re cheap (but the batteries need to be replaced every couple of years). Just don’t plug any actual computers, monitors or printers in with this stuff, or your run-time will go down to nothing. Test it every six months, before you really need it.

Most of the VoIP providers offer out-of-service forwarding. If their system can’t talk to your VoIP box because your power is out, your Internet connection is down, the whole Internet is down, or your box is broken or unplugged, they automatically forward incoming calls to the cell or landline number of your choice. I know Vonage’s out-of service forwarding works because their service and web site was unavailable for a while one day. Of course, if the VoIP provider’s computer that interfaces with the telephone network is down, forwarding won’t work.

All of the features available with these services are setup on a web site. Some services offer more features than others. Besides out-of-service forwarding, some of the VoIP services offer options for incoming calls and voice mail. If this stuff was more dependable, I’d say that’s a great idea. As it is, it’s fine for home use.

Some of the options are multiple phone numbers in different area codes, 800 numbers, ringing several phones simultaneously at the same time when a call comes in (like the VoIP line, cell phone, and home number), call blocking, distinctive ringing, listen to voicemails on the Internet, get your voice mail messages emailed to you, and lots of others.

We didn’t test their service for this review, but a customer told me about a neat feature he uses on Voicepulse (another VoIP provider). They offer a "filter" for incoming calls so you can forward only certain callers to an intercept that says the number is disconnected, and other calls go through. That sounds pretty neat!

I tested all of these services on a 1.55 SDSL line (same upload as download speed). You really need to be careful using more than one VoIP phone line on a DSL connection, since it takes around 128K of bandwidth to make the call sound good. If you have a 768 up and 384 down ADSL line, maybe you can make two calls if you don’t upload big files to the Internet at the same time. Your call won’t get cut-off if you use the Internet at the same time, but if you starve these babies for bandwidth the voice quality that the other party hears will be particularly bad, and you won’t know it… except that the other party keeps telling you that they can’t understand you. Because your pipe is bigger from the Internet than to it on ADSL, you won’t notice as many problems on your end, and you might just be thinking how wonderful the VoIP sounds - while the person on the other end is fighting to understand what you’re saying.

If your broadband Internet connection isn’t set up right, or it’s too slow, none of these services will work. If your local network has problems and the packets can’t get from the broadband router to the VoIP box correctly, none of these services will work. While it doesn’t test everything that can go wrong, this test will give you a general idea of how voice packets make it between a PC on your network and their server: www.testyourvoip.com

You can also run ping and traceroute tests if you have the actual IP address or server name of the VoIP provider. Lots of people have told me they thought they had a fast Internet connection, but in reality it wasn’t as fast as they were paying for, or it was fast one way and not the other. There can be problems on both DSL and cable company broadband. It might work fine for email and browsing the web, but the nature of voice means that everything has to be working perfectly for VoIP to work.

Some of the services let you choose how much bandwidth to use for a call. If you like your calls compressed so it sounds like a bad cell phone, most of them have that option (or they sound like that anyway). If you want to use the line for a fax or modem, most automatically allocate more bandwidth to every call. A modem or alarm system might not work reliably at anything but the slowest speeds with any of these. Some satellite and cable set-top TV boxes may work. Credit card machines might work.

Some of the VoIP boxes have "in" and "out" RJ-45 jacks, so you can plug other computers or VoIP boxes into them. Whatever you plug into the "out" on a VoIP box might run slower than if you plugged it in directly to your cable or DSL router. Figure on playing around with what comes first on your network when you get a VoIP box to get the best voice quality. That said, all of these VoIP services use the SIP protocol, and all worked immediately the first time they were plugged in. I didn’t have to open any ports on our router/firewall.

It makes a difference in voice quality if you’re uploading or downloading files while you’re talking. In our case, because we have a big pipe that’s the same size in both directions, I didn’t notice any difference with AT&T Callvantage voice quality no matter what we did on the network, or where we plugged in their box (it’s amazing). All of the other services seemed to have more burbles and blips when our connection to the Internet was being used to download a lot of stuff. Some of them didn’t work well when plugged into a switch on our network, rather than directly into a port on the SDSL router.

All of the VoIP services that I tested had hiss (white noise) in the background on some calls, except Callvantage - where I never heard any noise. White noise doesn’t sound like a terrible problem, but it really wears on you if you have to be on the phone listening to that all day. I got to the point where I just didn’t want to make calls on the Vonage line since most of the calls had hiss. I was just plain tired after talking business while listening to that hiss. None of the other VoIP services had hiss as often as Vonage. Some of them seldom had it.

There was only one service that I tested where I didn’t get a box with a POTS port with the service. Broadvoice offers an analog adapter, but I decided to do a little experimenting with their service and got a Zyxel Wi-Fi (cordless) phone, and an inexpensive Chinese industry standard desktop VoIP phone.

Broadvoice’s voice quality isn’t great (about the same as Vonage), but OK for home use. I forced Donna to use the cheap VoIP phone with Broadvoice for a couple of days to make all her outgoing calls. She makes a lot of outgoing calls, and wasn’t too happy with me. The cheap phone I made her use had no sidetone (you couldn’t hear yourself speaking in the receiver). I wanted to see if I’m the only one who hates that. She hates it too. Add the burbles, blips and garbled speech from Broadvoice, and she just wouldn’t use it after a while.

I disconnected the desktop VoIP phone and programmed the same Broadvoice phone number onto a $190 Zyxel P-2000W V.2 tiny Wi-Fi (cordless) VoIP phone. It worked right away, mainly because of the excellent instructions on the Broadvoice web site. It had the same garbled sound from time to time. I drove over to the local Burger Biggie to see if I could make it work on their free Wi-Fi service, and I got it working pretty quickly. It still didn’t sound very good. The Zyxel P-2000W V.2’s battery dies within a couple of hours whether you’re talking or not (the phone is warm even when idle). It’s definitely not ready for home or office use unless you keep charging it up, and don’t mind garbled voice quality quite often. Keep in mind that we’re all test pilots at this point because VoIP is very new and a work in progress.

If you’re getting paid T&M for screwing around with this stuff at a customer’s site, I guess it’s a good thing. If you’re forced into messing with it under warranty or contract, it’s not so good. Generally speaking, if you’re putting a VoIP line from one of these boxes into an analog or digital phone system (TDM), there’s nothing you can do to effect the voice quality. Whatever you get out of the box is it. If you’re putting one of the lines into a VoIP phone system, you may be able to fix echo and DTMF problems, but not garbled call problems. If you’re having a CPC problem, you can probably fix that.

Most of these companies have offered various boxes with their service. Most used to give you a four port router with two analog ports. Now most of them give you a tiny box that just has one or two analog ports, and sometimes has an "out" RJ-45 so you can plug the box "between" another Ethernet device and the router. They all have their own unique problems. Different versions of the same model can have different problems. In general, you don’t have a choice which box you get. They send you whatever they want, and if your box breaks, they may send you a different make/model of box that won’t work in your application, even though the old one worked.

None of these companies care whether you like or can use their service. None of them will help you get a box working in a certain situation (although you may luck out and talk to someone knowledgeable who can actually help you). They’re all going for the low-hanging fruit. They’re looking to get as many boxes out there as possible while providing as little support as possible. All of them will work with a single 2500 set. As long as you go into this knowing that they’re not going to help you, all you have to decide is whether to return the box within the 30 days.

Vonage is the best known VoIP service around, and one of the oldest, so you’d think they’d be shooting for good voice quality and customer service. They failed on all counts. The voice quality was never great, sounding more compressed than any of the other services I tested. Their customer service is just plain terrible. They don’t have a clue, and when you want to cancel they make it very difficult (because they recently went public?). It can take hours to cancel the service. The customer service people are obviously in another country, and could care less. You can make and receive calls on Vonage most of the time. They don’t sound good, but it’s usable for a home. There was more hiss (white noise) on Vonage’s calls than any of the other VoIP service providers that I tested. Just because they do a lot of advertising doesn’t mean the service is good.

Packet8 had good voice quality. They don’t seem to compress the voice much. I’d say it was almost as good as Callvantage, but it was garbled on some calls. While their customer service was probably the best of the bunch in terms of taking the calls quickly, they were clueless. They gave us an 847 number, even though our area code is 630. When I called to get the number changed, the guy insisted that he couldn’t change the number since my area code is 847 in Roselle, IL. Wrong. It took two more calls and a couple of emails to cancel the service, but they usually answered the emails and phone calls quickly. Who knows if I’ll ever get my money back?

Viatalk shipped their box very quickly. Their voice quality is fine for a home, and OK for a business most of the time. They don’t seem to compress their calls much, so when the calls sound good, they sound like a land-line. Maybe 20% of the calls have echo or are garbled, 80% sound fine. They originally gave me an 847 area code, but they switched it to 630 when I complained (it was all done remotely, I didn’t have to touch anything).

Sunrocket shipped their box within 10 days, and gave me an 847 number. I didn’t want the 847 number, and called customer service. They had an IVR with speech recognition that worked badly. When I said s**t, it tried to transfer me somewhere (the bathroom?). I finally got a real person who said he’d give me a 630 number within a week (Note: It never happened). Their voice quality is OK for a home when their box is plugged directly into the DSL router, but not very good on a switch on our network. There were garbled calls either way I had their box plugged in, but 70% of the time the calls were fine. They do have some incredible deals like $300 a year unlimited to the US and a bunch of foreign countries. That’s a heck of a deal!

When I called our office to test with some of these services, the Caller ID often said Unknown for the name, and one said Cellular Call for the name. I think these companies get phone numbers from whomever they can. I doubt what the Caller ID says is a big deal to most users, but if it is to you I’d check it as soon as you get your box.

Some of the companies have a limited number of area codes available. I personally couldn’t use a service that gave me a different area code, since I’d have to dial the area code for local calls. If the area code or 7 digit dialing is important to you, check it out before you order.

The FCC has forced all of the VoIP providers to offer E911 service. The people at the FCC are out and out morons. The nature of VoIP is that you can plug it in to a broadband connection and use your phone anywhere in the world – a direct contradiction to the idea of E911. If the FCC ran the FAA, they’d make a rule that says airplanes can only take-off and land from the same airport so nobody has to go looking for them if they crash.

You have to affirm that you understand E911 might not work on your new VoIP service from all of the providers. AT&T Callvantage is the worst, which routes your calls to some kind of IVR after the power has been removed from their box. You have to push a button to swear to them that you haven’t moved the box to a different location. Most people aren’t used to lying, but it looks like you’re forced to if you have VoIP. If you tell them you moved, they check the address you say you moved to and if E911 isn’t available, they just turn off your service. There’s nothing you can do about it, except lie. Thanks FCC.

The bottom line? Only AT&T’s Callvantage gives you a business quality phone line. The others range from being pretty bad - to fine for a home, but embarrassing at a business. AT&T’s Callvantage was absolutely amazing. There was a little blip here or there, but nothing like on the other services. The voice quality was unbelievably good, even on International calls which the other services seem to compress more than US calls. The worst part of Callvantage is that you must dial the area code on local 7 digit calls, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn voice mail off and let the phone ring. We forwarded it to a 1KC tone to fix that, but I think we’ll cancel it since I don’t want to dial the area code for local calls.

If you’d like to hear what it sounds like before we shut it off, call us from a land-line phone between 8:30AM and 5PM Chicago time, Monday through Friday, at 630-237-2522. While it normally goes to a 1KC tone, I’ll put it in our incoming trunk group for a while for testing.

The worst of the bunch is Verizon’s Voicewing. After about a month we never received their box, so we couldn’t test their service. I had to deal with their customer service more than any of the other VoIP providers. Verizon uses a contractor to provide sales and customer service for Voicewing. I guess it’s good that they’re outsourcing to a US company, but they’re horrible. That contractor must send their customer service people to India for training.

Most of the Verizon people I talked to were obviously trying to screw the customer around. The only reason I can think of to screw their potential customers is that they really don’t want to eat their children. For every Voicewing line they activate, there’s a pretty good chance that a copper Verizon POTS line or their new FIOS phone service gets turned off. Verizon obviously doesn’t care about VoIP, they don’t make any money with this junk, and they’re doing it just to say they have a VoIP offering (VoIP is supposed to be sexy these days).

NOTE on 9/9/07:  It's interesting that when a customer orders Verizon's FIOS service (over fiber), after the FIOS is working the installer removes the copper wire to the premise, so that premise is locked into FIOS forever. Strange, but true!

If that’s the case, AT&T seems to have a different way of looking at it. They shipped their Callvantage box quickly, it worked as soon as I plugged it in, and the voice quality was unbelievably good whether I plugged it directly into the DSL router, or into a switch on our network with all of the PCs. I tried to contact AT&T to ask them why it’s so good, but after a day or so of being transferred around (because nobody knew what Callvantage was), I gave up. I might try their media relations department, but in the past they’ve never returned my calls.

NOTE on 9/9/07:  The voice quality of Callvantage is much worse than it was before. I'm guessing that like Verizon, AT&T noticed that they were eating their children for every Callvantage account they sold. Callvantage was a product designed by "the old AT&T," before AT&T was purchased by SBC. "The old AT&T" didn't really offer local service, so they were competing with SBC and the other RBOCs. "The new AT&T" now owns most of the RBOCs, so by offering Callvantage with good voice quality, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Strange, but true!

When some bigshot at SBC (AT&T) reads this, he’ll spend a few hours trying to find the guy from AT&T who runs Callvantage, and fire him. You can’t just go out and offer good service at a reasonable price that competes with a more profitable service from the same company.

You need a lot of patience to deal with any of these VoIP companies. While only AT&T and Verizon are big enough to not care how they treat their customers, none of them have stellar customer service (but what company does these days?). If you hear "Yes sir, I can help you with that sir" from a customer service person, you might as well hang-up. That seems to be Indian or Filipino for "Screw you and your goats."

I CAN GET ALL THE INFORMATION OFF YOUR NETWORK, TOMORROW

We’ve all seen the crooks who use social engineering to get us to go to a web site that looks like our bank or maybe Paypal to enter our login and password, so the crook can clean out our account. Even with all of the publicity about pfishing and identity theft, thousands of people a day fall victim.

A company who specializes in network security was hired a few months ago by a credit union to assess the security of its network. The security company decided to try a unique method to break into their network.

The security company got a bunch of cheap USB thumb drives, and scattered them around the credit union’s parking lot at 6AM. When the employees got in (they were the first in the parking lot), they found most of the thumb drives and brought them inside. They immediately plugged them into the computer on their desk. Uh oh.

The security company had their programmer write a Trojan that would install itself on the user’s PC automatically. The Trojan simply gathered all the data it could, and used the Internet connection to send all of that private banking information to the security company’s server. Game over.

I’m positive this would work at just about any company in the country. If the employee didn’t plug the thumb drive into their office computer, they’d plug it into their personal computer at home (or their laptop), and all their personal data would belong to a crook. This really comes down to human curiosity, something that may be impossible to control. I wonder what I would have done if I had found a thumb drive before I read this? Looking at it on a MAC or Linux PC would be pretty safe.

This wouldn’t work at our company since the USB ports are disabled on all of the PCs. The PCs on our user’s desks don’t have Internet access (we have dedicated PCs to get to the Internet that aren’t on our regular network), and the floppies are disabled. We don’t have CD/DVD burners on user’s machines, but just about every machine has a CD drive that can be used to load a CD someone finds in the parking lot. I guess I have to disable them too, but without Internet access from that machine a Trojan can’t do much damage.

These security measures may sound like overkill, but they’re not. They should be standard practice at every company in the country. Our personal and business data is spread out on computers at every company we’ve dealt with. An Interconnect company’s customer list is the most valuable asset they have when it’s time to sell the company.

Next month I’ll talk about a $35 program you can put on your laptop that will automatically encrypt the data on your hard drive, thumb drive or CD/DVD. You put in a password when the computer starts up, and the data is accessible just like it’s on its own drive (you’d put your documents in s:\my documents instead of c:\my documents). You store your documents, database and email on that new drive letter. I didn’t notice any slowdown at all. When you shut the computer down, all of that data is encrypted so that it would take years for a crook or the government to decode it if they find/steal the laptop. Why aren’t all those big companies and the government using this software?