GOD’S LIVINGROOM
Again I failed to make good on my updates. (telecom) I keep saying that I have articles written which only need proofing and I could post them, then sit back and let all the critics have a field day. Like Christmas, they are coming, like all the music I want to make – it is coming. For now though……………….. As a quick filler, here is a bit of a disguised telecom rant. If some of you do not understand the technical bits, don’t worry, just read between the lines and you’ll live longer
So many times I have said it – ‘I am a telecom man’! Not through choice, but by necessity and I support all telecom companies just as any loyal employee would their own industry. Especially if the telecom company keeps paying me money. I actually get on very well with telecom people, but sometimes I want to shake some art and creativity into them.
Telecom companies have had their day though. Times are changing and the days of money by default cascading in – in the billions every second has gone. The monopolies have gone, soon the networks will be the only thing left, like rail tracks, used by thousands of small enterprises and all essential infrastructure will probably have to go back to governments as it was at the start. The likes of huge organisations such as British Telecom, AT & T and so many more all over the world, who actually ran countries at one time, will be diversified and people like me who stick by them and endlessly nag and try to give them diversifying ideas to adopt will be approached in panic and desperation, once the penny drops. Now they just dismiss us until their competitor ‘does it first’, but sooner rather than later, they will tend to their bruises and wish to hell they had been more adventurous, creative and dynamic.
I AM I SAID
Today I came across a strange site called ‘Who Am I really?‘ Who ‘he’ is really I don’t know, but he gets off on some close to home thoughts and I wanted to reply to his last post, but the registration email never came. So as Double Dutch as this post might seem, there is some definite ’6 degrees’ about it. Among other things, the ‘Who Am I’ chap questions whether our VoIP chatter ever goes into space. Yes, Voice Over Internet Protocol, a string of techy words which even granny will be uttering in her failing years.
Geek moment: VoIP is nothing but a giant digital router carrying it’s eventual analogue load which we as mortals can hear. As a protocol, VoIP is not really frequency dependent as such other than the higher the number, the more digits, the more addresses in cyber space.
To really understand some of this post, you’d probably make more sense of it if you read the ‘Who am really’ blog first. For those who cannot be bothered, he is talking about the ever life-overtaking VoIP. VoIP is how your telephone gets networked these days; it is how Skype manages to connect you and send your gob or pic down the net. Without the IP, the web wouldn’t work nor would your little home computer network, come to that. It is how you can switch on your house lights, cooker and so on in LA while you relax at your mistress’s house in New York and your spouse never knew you were away in the first place. But you all knew that anyway.
Don’t laugh, but Birth Certificates will be a thing of the past. All humans will be allocated an IP address. In time everything will be IP, even sex – somehow!
BIG HEAD THINGS FIRST
This week, I received a totally unintended innocent compliment, an observation that puts all frustration and often pent up anger to bed for a moment. A very discerning colleague who had no ulterior motive or even anything to do with production, audio, direction; not physically responsible within the creative arts per say, completely out of the blue suddenly said; ‘You can tell that you did the Designer Shaik telephone system Geg’. ‘You can? I asked in complete surprise. ‘I’d forgotten about that system, but anyway, how’? It was not quite the answer I expected. ‘Well, I just phoned the number and it is so immediate and upfront, so loud and clear and just your ‘no compromise style and voice direction’, where even the voices cannot recognize that it is them doing the reads – It seems the system is not completely active yet, but sure, that is so obviously your work’. Now I felt good.
True, I had forgotten all about it and the system remains in the initial stages at the moment and if I know Mohammed Al Asfoor, owner and Chief Executive, it will stay that way until I get off my arse and get him fully connected world wide via VoIP.
THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE VERY UGLY
To the point; a time will come when people from distant corners of the world will call the Designer Shaik call centre or main office and will hear exactly the same clarity, loudness and style (albeit VoIP strangled). Try City Bank or HSBC. It is cobweb sludge, condescending and disgusting, but they don’t care. Most airlines are the same, Emirates and Gulf Air to name a few. Worse still, the ones setting an example such as the telecom companies themselves are worse than all of them. I don’t know now because I don’t bother calling these days, because I cannot make out what is being said most of the time, with so many different voices, badly directed and just piss poor audio quality, slammed together with no consistency or standards. On top of all that, no account was ever made for VoIP in production. Worst of all, Advertising Agencies YES!!!!!!!!!!! ADVERTISING AGENCIES are being commissioned to sort these systems out as if they were doing the annual audit layout.
I’ve been experimenting for 25 years to get those secret clarity algorithms, so take a hike baby if you think that we are ever going to give that away cheap, just to complete with peanut monkeys down the road. NO WAY!
Challenge the owners of these very bad IVRs and VoIP systems as I frequently do and they are instantly intimidated. Just blame telecoms. It has NOTHING to do with telecoms, it is the amateur. incompetent, careless dingbats they employ, who possess not a gram of art and look for the very cheapest way to do it and consequently milk it. In fact, those same dingbats, don’t know the difference anyway, so to quote them our price would scare them witless. But they are not to blame. Right at the TOP is to blame for allowing their image to be tarnished so instantly and easily.
Yes, I did initiate the Designer Shaik system with the voices we had available, both directed to the style I suppose they call ‘Geg’. It is not a showcase by any means, but just a simple start and the fact that it has my recognizable indelible stamp on it, makes me very satisfied and even proud. I do Zain Bahrain, Zain Sudan and win awards in Kuwait with Gulf Bank. These are the professionals. Voice ability and sweetness apart, I like it, I think ALL systems in the world should be like it, but unfortunately 99.99999% are absolutely horrendous and the companies concerned see absolutely nothing wrong.
GEORGE ORWELL (Not really)
Many of you reading this might have a Cisco or Avaya telephone system or something similar in your office. (Good luck if it is Huawei). Certainly, the telecom companies use one or the other to implement their Call Centres. The whole company is connected by VoIP. From inter office to the complete telephone network, the transition to VoIP is pretty much complete.
Skype is not the only thing that goes via the Internet. EVERYTHING is now via the INTERNET.
‘VoIP’ a misnomer really. The word is freely on the tips of everyone’s tongue these days as if VoIP is actually a video or audio signal. The other day I read a couple of (so called top professional) voice over artists Face Book page comments where were just so way off. I have never heard such a crock of BS in my life. Trying to be right up there and up each other blowing smoke and ‘in the know’, one says to the other; ‘Are you on VoIP?’ In itself a completely ridiculous thing to say. ‘I got so many gigs here in Hollywood, I am in big demand, I am sending out VoIP segways all day these days”. …………….WTF? But if it makes you sound good and hip and the other ego ear laps it up then go for it.
As for our friend on ‘Who am I really’; wondering if VoIP is or is not reaching to the universe, or as he puts it; ’Being rarely transmitted over radio waves’. But that is not quite kosher. Of course, 3.5G and the pretence at the so called 4G GSM is already with us big time and is carried across telecom cells by the zillion gazillion as I type. All that radiation at those frequencies go straight-line to God’s living room as well as to your little mobile phone.
Skype is a different fish because it is not airborne.
Yes, as merely a carrier, VoIP routed audio might well be proprietary re-encoded on say a Huawei or Nokia/Siemans, Verizon, Ericsson blah blah protocol, but decoded it is still generally the ‘encoded’ Mu-law or A-law compressed audio form factor having been VoIP’d.
(Non geeks, don’t dwell if you are confused now, just move on, or you really will not live very long).
So just what would sophisticated Aliens make of the awful audio quality? God is probably being sick and decides to stick to listening to CDs. (If so, another question; how did they get there and no doubt bloody boring U2 got in first)
UNSQUEEZE ME O ONE CHILD PER FAMILY
The problem is; the likes of the somewhat dubiously very Chinese quality Huawei who ARE with their VoIP taking over the world and squeezing the tripe out of the bandwidth just because they ‘technically’ can and as if another 100 billion people are about to join the population within weeks – all with mobile phones. This must be a cultural thing rather than technical and a natural fear of mass over population. The others follow suit because telecom companies do nothing but copy each other and are NEVER original.
Hence, I don’t know about you, but as an audio engineer- telecom whore and maker of VoIP material every day, I complain, shout and blog that there is ‘ABSOLUTELY NO NEED’ to squeeze bandwidth further to traverse telephone lines, even below 3K which they still TDM (Time Division multiplex). Non geeks keep on moving, or you really are gonna die sooner.
Telecom companies make the money honey and give us facilities, but no quality. Now we are all subject to the dumbed down syndrome; ‘Oh nobody will notice – MP3 at any coding is great quality audio’. Like anything else thrown at us these days, we all numbingly except it. No matter it might be transmitted over EHF or fibre in the ground which has bandwidth beyond imagination.
Does anyone agree that with each advertised network ‘upgrade’, the call quality often seem to degrade. Actually, it is frightening and getting worse by the call? Connection times are much much slower as well. It is important to note that these telecom companies boast 3G or now they will be calling it 4G, but same towers, same coverage and half the time you are back down to GPRS or EDGE because 3G over air has NEVER been solid. We really do have to wait now until 5G surfaces and if Nostradamus was on the ball, none of us reading this will EVER live long enough to see it.
It is a conundrum. Likewise, I am not sure Digital Terrestrial TV will survive or if not still born because there is little sense in it. Satellite is so prevalent with a bigger footprint commercially for less bucks. Even then, channels are still VoIP routed across networks.
Shamefully, ‘radio’ is considered the forgotten prodigal and now especially with the Internet fast enough in most places to stream it – albeit crappy quality.
DAB or Digital FM radio is a funny old boy. It should be everywhere now, but it isn’t and Satellite radio should also be everywhere, but it isn’t and to make matters worse, I cannot see it ever really happening. What is the point of digital FM when we have WIMAX? Tell that to the average telecom executive and it will go straight over their heads. They know what you are saying, but just can’t put the two together.
Satellite radio struggles and only really works in the States, but there were better
ways. Probably greed, ignorance and bad fish guided the authorities to only allocate
public access at Extremely High Frequency (EHF) blocks through mobile phone operators instead of a ‘forced’ new spectrum and format for ‘Audio’ which really takes up such little space. ’Sure you can have it’, says the authority, leave it to the mobile operators as VAS (Value Added Service) – OH NO PLEASE! This is the death knell of creativity.
However, it does/would makes sense, we can use their towers, so the flower power people among us wont complain about more radiation or being zapped from space. However, as I have blogged before; life as we know it Jim is in the hands of the telecom companies, but they don’t recognize it themselves, or let’s just say they are oblivious to it as “minutes and seconds” are all that concerns them.
ARE YOU SIRIUS?
Now, If a telecom company were told that they had a ‘monopoly’ and could make oooodles of billions by also transmitting 20K FM radio over their cells – would they? Yes, if they ‘were’ a monopoly, as this is the mentality; nothing to do with enhancing the arts or indeed having a passion for it. Then you tell them that they have to do it, independent of a cell phone by giving us all a free $20 box to receive this EHF in the car or kitchen – they would probably refuse as it would not compute.
Telecom companies make most of their money from misery (panic, war and sadness) and consider ‘entertainment’ to be VAS revenue such as muffled, distorted ‘ring tones’ which the masses blindly pay for. Again, each telecom company will do it because the other does.
WHAT’S APP DOC?
I doubt they will be open to admission, but most mobile operators make their bucks these days with SMS revenue. (I’ve said it before in earlier posts). Now we have ‘Whats App’. This is serious stuff and the telcos are sweating. It is better than SMS by far and of course so much cheaper as it only eats into your ‘data package’ which is getting cheaper all the time, or should. Watch out! There is a finite line, just like LCD monitors and Blue Ray DVD players became cheaper and cheaper, there is a point when it will ‘rigidly’ level off. You watch as all potential revenue is diverted through such data packages as technology progresses.
Already I mentioned in earlier blogs a few years back about little old Bahrain and no doubt a million other places. Wifi, Wimax, 3G becomes available everywhere on pocket devices and you can make equally good quality Skype calls these days, from literally anywhere in town for no cost other than your data package charge, compared to your GSM which is stunningly high in places, especially the obscene roaming charges. The latter is just very greedy opportunistic practice between operators.
It all goes back to the lowest common denominator, whether you look at mathematics or public awareness and perception. Few will pay for quality audio or entertainment, so perhaps the telco’s Ring Tone mentality is right and besides, what they get over the Internet is stutteringly acceptable to this low denominator.
Ironically most radio station web streams are maintained by robbing revenue from their associated commercial advertising on their FM terrestrial outlet - and which is NOTHING to do with VoIP. There is very little or no interest in wider bandwidth, higher quality and the telecom companies can’t see past their nose to explore possibilities and MY GOD.. believe me, they have the bandwidth with oodles to spare.
Wimax is different and offers incredible potential but bureaucrats in government only see black and white. If you decided to sell fried egg sandwiches, having cooked the eggs at the base of a Wimax antenna; the civil servant will fine you simply because on the piece of paper he or she has – which documents your license, it doesn’t say anything about using the incidental generated heat at the transmission point for anything other than passing a a radio frequency which contains VoIP traffic. Now like Star Trek, if we could atomize a human and transmit it over Wimax, our civil servant wouldn’t care less as long as it was somehow VoIP.
Comments
2 Responses to “GOD’S LIVINGROOM”
Leave a Reply
Interesting thought: every human given a unique IP address!
Just to confirm, there are still some out there who recognize and appreciate audio quality.
There is hope yet.
Yes and that will be IPv6 address. IPv4 is almost gone.
No seriously just think, the year is 2020 and every new born, at the time of issuing certificate, the father has to visit the local TRA Office for a new IPv6 address.
The way things are moving this could be a reality.
I better book mine….to the ICANN Office ..