telephone

It has come time to consider a phone system. While most of the company clan uses mobile phones for personal calls, we do have sales and support that do need real phones, with voicemail, multiple simultaneous dialtones, etc. We tried the Vonage thing, but that had too many "can you hear me now?" moments for a business to suffer, so we went to the multiple Qwest lines, which required little in equipment investment but is far too costly each month -- not to mention every time we move or want to add a line.

Last week we got a pitch from Qwest reps. The part that probably does make sense is doing a T1 with dynamic bandwidth allocation and integrated access, opening up some channels and handling all the phone switching from a box. (Not sure if Qwest is best choice for that, but I'll reserve judgment for now.)

The part I'm less sure of is the Oracle Cisco box they are bundling with the service package. They are going to put some numbers together but my hunch is that it's going to be just a tad more expensive than we are wanting (or even able) to spend.

It's also a closed-source solution, which gives me pause. Any time I'm plunking down a good chunk of change, I want to know I have ownership of the future. While I don't figure on Cisco going away anytime soon, past experience has shown that a company doesn't need to go under to EOL a product line.

There is Asterisk, which is open source. It even has a Drupal module for integration with Drupal (maintained by fellow Boulderite hunmonk). I plan on giving Chad a ping to see what kind of insights he may have. And Matthew has some measure of experience with it.

But just because it's open source doesn't mean it's enterprise-ready. This phone system realm is completely alien territory for me. Any recommendations? Warnings? Happy tales with flowers and dancing cats?

[update: TechDirt has picked up the story.]

[update 2: Now the Washington Post and the normally quick-on-the-uptake Valleywag have picked up on it, too. Will this story get the attention of consumers? How much will Verizon Wireless customers appreciate this new "service"?]

Via Slashdot, we see that Verizon Wireless is planning on sharing their subscribers' private calling information.

What?

Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)

Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”

But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”

I don't believe I've received this notice yet. I've been squeamish about using Verizon to start with, given their opposition to things ranging from Net Neutrality to municipal wi-fi initiatives, but their coverage area has beaten all others, in my experience so far.

Yet I'll be damned if I want to have myself and those people I have called, or who have called me, end up on some phone spam list.

The fact that they treat this as an "opt out" rather than an "opt in" is also telling of their own corporate values.

And maybe opting out of Verizon Wireless' spam plan won't do anything anyway:

"If you do not want us to collect, transmit or use such information about you for the above purposes, you should not use the services; by using the services, you expressly authorize us to use your information for these purposes."

My subscription ends on Halloween. Time to look to alternatives, I think. Too bad for us that they all pretty much stink.