iPhone in India : An update

I had wondered yesterday as to when would iPhone be available in India. This article in ibnlive kind of answers all my questions including the one as to whether I can use the iPhone bought in US. Looks like it might available sometime end of this year. This might happen after all considering Blackberry was available in India months after its release.

Thanks to Vijay and Ram for answering some of my questions.

Two more Days to Go…

Just another couple for days for the famed iPhone release. I think the anticipation is much more than any other Summer blockbuster. Got to give it to Apple and Jobs for raising the bar on this one.

I am hearing rumours that some of the Indian cell phone stores ( like Univercell) is going to sell the iphone. This news is still unconfirmed. Anybody have news on this? Which leads me to the next question. Can a locked phone like iphone ( locked with AT & T) be used in India? Can I just buy the iphone in US and use it here by using the local SIM? Any ideas on that guys?

Guess I have to wait for Airtel to partner with Apple to use iphone . I would never switch a service provider for iphone. Even though there are no penalties for switching over unlike some western countries, I would never leave Airtel because even though I have had issues in the past with their service, they still are way better compared to others.

Telecom Professionals Group Meeting : Second Edition

The second edition of the TPG meet went off fine and some major decisions were taken from an administrative point of view.  It is getting more serious and structured and I see lot of exciting times ahead. The next meeting will happen soon ( I don’t think there will be any more long hiatus from now onwards) to decide the focus of our group and somehow I get the feeling that this is going to be the start of something big.

VoIP as usual was the center of attraction and Ram ( as he has mentioned in his blog remarked we were VoIP heavy 🙂 With more people from diversified backgrounds joining us, I think that will change soon. Ram has posted our group photo in his blog. I am not even going to try to capture what we discussed (on technology). Our discussions travelled through so many domains and you would need to be there to enjoy it.

Hope to see you guys soon for the next meeting.

Update* : Some more pics ( courtesy Vivek)

Vivek (left) and Chandra

Mahesh (left), Ram and Sharma

Venkat(left) and me.

What is Silicon Graphics Doing in Database space?

This is the first question that I asked myself when I heard that Silicon Graphics is organizing an evening event on High Performance Database.Silicon Graphice is hosting this event partnering with Oracle ( That answers my question 🙂 ) at Park Hotel, this Friday at 7.00p.m.  You can register for the event here

The release says

You are invited to join us for an exclusive event on high performance database, as SGI, in association with Oracle – the undisputed leader in database technology, comes to your city. You can interact with experts from both organizations, and learn how we can together take database performance to the next level!

	ItineraryMumbai | 26th June ITC Grand Maratha Chennai | 29th June The Park		Agenda        7:00 – 7:30 pm       Registration         7:30 – 7:45 pm       Welcome Note         7:45 – 8:15 pm       Presentation by Oracle         8:15 – 8:45 pm       Presentation by SGI         8:45 pm onwards Q&A followed by cocktail & dinner
FAX: Mumbai: 022 – 2852 6000, Chennai: 044 – 2473 4247   |   Email: hpd@endtoend.in

VoIP Security Video

Check out video on VoIP Security. Need to appreciate the simplicity and yet a comprehensive view on the security threats that the VoIP networks face. Seeing the ease with which a simple script creates havoc, it is not surprising that enterprises are wary of VoIP in general

D’Sean Sumwashe : An Eulogy

My close friend of nearly seven years, D’Sean Sumwashe passed away last Friday. He had some kind of an infection in his brain which affected his entire system. He had undergone surgeries for the last one month, but doctors were never optimistic and the result was inevitable.

D’Sean started of as a colleague but soon we became Brothers in Arms. We were in a startup and long hours mixed with common interests meant more time together and though we got on each other’s nerves quite a few times, there was always the sense of camarederie. We wrote our first SIP stack ( at that time it was 2543 and rewrote it for 3261) together.

I was thinking about D’Sean’s influence while I was driving to work, and he has left quite an impact. Indians in the US, generally tend to stay together as a flock and as a result are not exposed to the American culture as much as you would expect. I was like that for the first couple of years till I met D’Sean. He was an African American and introduced me to the world of David Chappelle and Bernie Mac. The two of us watched ‘Undercover Brother’ atleast five times and discussed the effects of the ‘Man’. D’Sean was mostly drunk during these conversations 🙂

D’Sean was a Techno addict and you could sense his arrival to work almost a mile away. His blaring music would make our office glass vibrate and you knew D’Sean had arrived. He was my foosball team-mate and our goal everytime would be to shutout an opponent but ended up trying to avoid a shut-out. We actually improved as days went by; I always played offense and he played ‘D’. I used to call myself the Kansas City offense and he was the Tampa Bay ‘D’.

Though he did his college in Florida, Gainesville, his heart was with the Seminoles ( Florida State). And everytime FSU played Miami, it was heartbreak time for D’Sean. The wide lefts and wide rights (you need to have followed Seminoles-Hurricanes college football games to know what I am talking about) used to leave him furious at the end of these games. We all knew not to talk football after the FSU-Miami weekend.

Talking about football, it was D’Sean who roped me first into Fantasy Football. Till that time, Football was just another game. After that it became a religion. It was so addictive that even after I came back to india, I still followed the games online all night long.

Though I returned to India, four years ago we were in touch regularly and this is a big personal loss. Buddy, we will all miss you, but be rest assured, you will be in our memories. So long pal..

Chennai Telecom Professionals Group Meet

The second edition of the Chennai-TPG meet has been scheduled for this Friday at 6.00 p.m. Venue has not been fixed yet. To know more about this group go here.

Anybody in the Telecom space who wants to join, leave a note here and I will provide further details. Hopefully this time around I will summarize the discussed items. From what I see, there are going to be quite a few administrative challenges which we would need to address.

Will Miss Feed Stats

WordPress has retired its Feed Stats page as of today. Though the official release says that it has just been shelved for the time being, I suspect this project might never see daylight again.

Personally, I thought it was ok, though I wouldn’t bet my life on its accuracy. It was too random for my liking.  There were too many spikes which I never understood. Having said that, I surely used it as one of the indicators for regular readers and will sorely miss it from that angle. Need to start looking for something similar and more reliable. Ideas, anybody?

Bharti Airtel leads the FMC way in India

This has been promised for quite sometime now. But finally there is an official announcement that Airtel is going to launch FMC for its subscribers.

Time for me to start looking at dual-use handsets :). Wireless is still not as pervasive in India as much as in other countries and that might be one major reason why FMC might not be a huge hit with the majority. This might be restricted to people working in IT companies, but then again security compliances like BS 7799 might prevent an allout acceptance.

They are promising a rollout by end of the year and hopefully I am looking forward to be one of the early users. ( Airtel is my landline, mobile and broadband provider, So my transition should be pretty seamless). The news item says that Airtel is looking at various initiatives like giving out wireless routers etc. Hey, Airtel people, if any one of you is reading this post let me know how to be part of your early adapters program.

An IP Contact Center : In every sense of the Word

Cisco’s IPCC Solution ( now called Unified Contact Center) naming ( or should I call it misnomer) used to get me curious. What makes a solution ‘IP’ enabled? Does any solution become IP compliant if the endpoints are IP devices ( in this case Cisco IP phones/ communicator)? If the communication between the switch ( Call manager) and the end devices are on IP backbone, does it entitle it to be a IP solution?

Personally, I don’t accept this naming convention. I will say a solution is really an IP solution when the customer who dials into the contact center ( this can be through any of the multimedia channels, voice,video,email or web) is also on IP. What we have today is an hybrid solution with the customers dialing into a contact center via TDM and then using a Voice Gateway to convert it into packets. I had briefly touched upon this last month when I wrote about NMS solutions in IP contact centers.

This according to me is not IPCC. Customers have to be on IP and they reach the contact center agents through IP. I had not seen this kind of a contact center till couple of weeks ago when I went to Malaysia. As part of official business, I had to interact with one of the leading ISPs in Malaysia and when they walked through their contact center architecture, I finally got to see an ‘IPCC’ solution in every sense of the word.

It is not surprising that an Internet Service Provider is the one offering this kind of a solution. Thinking about it, who else has a better backbone to do this? So how this works is , as part of their broadband offering, this ISP provides a SIP based softphone ( I think it is X-lite but am not 100% sure) to its consumers and provides IP centrex features as well using Netcentrex.

Now their contact center uses Cisco IPCC and a specific number has been configured on the Call Manager for the IVR route point. This route point is translated as a 1800 number in netcentrex and if the SIP softphone user dials in this numner it directly hits the IP IVR for self-servicing and transfers to the IPCC agents if need be. As you can see, there is no TDM involved here at all. IPCC in its purest form 🙂 I believe they have NICE for their call logger functionalities. This ISP is going to have issues when they move for mobile agents ( Read this post as to why they would face problems).

It is quite possible that there are much more of these setups around the world ( and I am going to go on a limb and say that these are mostly ISPs controlled contact centers). But it was kind of exciting to see one in person. Malaysia certaintly seems to be leading the way here atleast in the APAC ( Asia-Pacific) region.