TMCnet News
Tehrani: Southern Calif. Phone Outage Could Open Doors for VoIP ProvidersNORWALK, Conn. --(Business Wire)-- Oct. 18, 2005 -- As the VoIP industry prepares to meet and demonstrate many new IP-based solutions at next week's INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO at the Los Angeles Convention Center, a serious telecom outage hit the Southern California area today. All phone service, including 911, was knocked out in some areas. Hundreds of thousands of residential and business customers were affected. Sources indicate that the outage may be attributable to a Verizon DACS failure. "It seems historic that with all the talk of the FCC regulating VoIP and making sure our industry is secure from outages such as these, Verizon has an outage of its own," said Rich Tehrani, editor-in-chief of leading VoIP magazine INTERNET TELEPHONY, and chairman of the conference. "It seems the PSTN is not as perfect as we think. "Perhaps this is someone's way of telling us as an industry that we have alternatives to the status quo," Tehrani added. According to Tehrani, with today's distributed architectures, using VoIP is actually a more secure way to communicate as VoIP is IP-based communications and as such is able to easily offer the same levels of reliability the Internet gives us. The Internet, as Tehrani pointed out, was designed to be able to work during a nuclear attack. With properly designed redundant VoIP systems it is possible for VoIP to exceed PSTN levels of service quality. "I think of all the places for phone service to fail, the fact that it went down in Southern California is telling. I am looking forward to listening to Michael Powell talk next week at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO; I wonder if this topic will come up and if so, how it will be addressed. My, we live in interesting times," Tehrani added. Registration for INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO is now open. Anyone interested may register by visiting http://www.itexpo.com. Very limited booth space remains as well. Vendors interested in exhibiting at the show should contact Dave Rodriguez right away at 203-852-6800, ext. 146, or send e-mail to [email protected]. Press inquiries regarding INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO can be directed to Mostafa Razzak of 23-31 Communications: 646-442-3361, or [email protected]. About TMC(R) Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) publishes two print magazines: Customer Interaction Solutions and Internet Telephony; five digital publications: SIP Magazine, Speech-World, WiFi Telephony Magazine, VoIP Developer, WiMAX Magazine; and the online publications TMCnet.com, Planet PDA Magazine, WiFi Revolution, Alternative Power and BiometriTech. TMC also tests new products in its own on-site laboratories, TMC Labs. TMC also produces The VoIP Developer Conference, Speech-World Conference, IP Contact Center Summit and The Global Call Center Outsourcing Summit. TMCnet.com publishes more than 20 topical online newsletters. For more information about TMC, visit its Web site at www.tmcnet.com. |