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Germany unsure about whether Kamailio will survive next winter
by abalashov＠evaristesys.com April 1, 2023

April 1, 2023

For immediate release: ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2023)--The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy of Germany was forced to disclose today that it has been tasked with assessing whether Germany will be able to operate its Kamailio through the next winter. This initiative comes amidst considerable uncertainty, shared in some other EU member states, about whether the enormous fossil fuel energy footprint of Kamailio is sustainable after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Pioneering Atlanta energy market analysts Evariste Systems were tapped to assist with forecasting whether German strategic natural gas reserves and liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports could keep Kamailio's enormous turbines spinning under a variety of stress-test scenarios outlined by regulators, including SIPP and SIPVicious. Alex Balashov, Evariste's principal, said in a news conference earlier this week: "Simply put, the political leadership wanted a dispassionate, technocratic kind of analysis, data-driven and the rest, free of the inflection of ideological bias and tendentious policy angles in charged German domestic politics. Whether it's the centre-right or the Greens, there are strong ideas about what to do with energy-greedy megaprojects like Kamailio." Florida-based energy turnaround vet Fred Posner, parachuted in to assist with the fast-tracked study, agreed: "It's well-understood that the German GDP is almost a perfectly linear function of gross annual SIP packets routed. The Nord Stream 1 shut-off situation in September only exposed Germany to further Kamailio-related energy vulnerabilities." At issue are the basic physics of SIP message routing in Kamailio. Due to a fixed-size worker process pool, Kamailio routing consumes about 1500 BTUs per packet-kilometre travelled. While 1500 BTUs/packet-kilometre is efficient in distance terms as compared to a typical automobile, which consumes roughly 3800 BTUs of fossil fuel energy per passenger-kilometre travelled (at typical load factors), the dizzying number of SIP packets routed through German territory in a typical business day greatly outstrips passenger-kilometres travelled. Balashov noted that sometimes, the activation energy requirement can be higher than 1500 BTUs when INVITEs with large SDPs are launched toward the next hop, though this varies with the altitude of the destination above mean sea level, wind direction, weather and other factors involved in ballistics. "It's a bit of a fool's errand to play these guessing games with averages. The energy budget can vary enormously depending on whether there is DTLS, video codecs, PASSporTs and other stuff. I find it helpful to think in kilowatt-hour terms: sometimes it's less than half a kWh, so like US $0.20 if you're counting the beans, and sometimes it's more like $0.38, we just don't know. The Bundestag always wants these big, round numbers, but if you've ever looked at the TM module, you know that's not how this works." A milder-than-expected winter, a 9% year-over-year increase in US LNG exports (to about 300 million cubic metres per day) in 2022, dependable imports from Norway and the Netherlands, and other favourable factors gave German SIP regulators a reprieve. Despite energy market volatility, premium LNG spot prices, and occasional 408 Request Timed Out scenarios, the country dodged a widely-feared Kamailio energy crisis. However, it is difficult to say whether energy market conditions will be as propitious next year. "Then there's the whole climate change goals thing. Nobody even wants to talk about that, especially for the WebRTC gateway side," says Posner. "There's a persistent fantasy that we can just power Kamailio with solar or wind if we just had enough generating capacity. I think that's really missing the forest for the trees. The worker processes stay running whether you need them or not, it all depends on how many listeners you have set and what the children config value is. Either way, I've got two words for you: base load. Even if we completely ignore that the energy density is just not there per hectare of solar or wind installation, how do you provide the constant power to the child processes?" Past feasibility studies published jointly by Balashov and Posner support this assessment. One such study, initiated in 2018 and concluded during the COVID-19 global pandemic, found that an area equivalent to the size of the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia would need to be devoted to batteries, even using the latest lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) technology. "But wait, there's more!" says Posner: "Show me the amperage." "The packet forwarding mechanism is similar to a railgun, at least if you're doing stateful. Where are you going to get the millions of amps? It's either setting up huge banks of capacitors god-knows-where, or the pulsed power system that's undergirded by the original OpenSER turbines. I think we already know the answer to that." Balashov noted that, even beyond the political and economic challenges that Kamailio downtime would introduce, there are other tightropes to walk. As the most economically dynamic, export-oriented EU member state, Germany is prone to flirt with SIP proxy privatisation schemes in its national discourse, all while messaging a stronger Euro to the ECB. "There is a vocal minority," says Balashov, "who push for research into more modular, regionally sited SIP gateways. They're always talking about sclerotic, unresponsive federal regulations and listless, bumbling Brussels bureaucrats and making it all smaller and leaner. Listen, I'm all for the Invisible Hand, but setting the Request URI and adding custom headers requires a truly integrated, national-scale infrastructure. It's the stuff of public-private partnerships and megaprojects. Even if you're a market zealot who is not sold on basic INVITEs as a public good, think about Presence or IMS. You really need the full capacity of a nation-state on deck for that." If devolution to smaller, more numerous SIP routing sites is not feasible--at least, at the unit cost and reliability level demanded by advanced economies--then excessive complexity offers a cautionary tale from the opposite extreme. In a particularly notorious example of technical and policy failure, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), following the guidance of northern Californian advisors Unicorn & Moonshot, attempted to scale down traditional Kamailio turbine blades into newer, so-called Kubernetes "Pod" chasses to increase exhaust recapture. This made for a much more intricate installation with an exponential growth of moving parts, telemetry and site support skill requirements. This proved unmanageable, and the now-famous explosion that followed the deterioration of the site led to unprecedented casualties in US history. Furthermore, it also resulted in the long-term humidification of large expanses of East Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and southern Alabama, rendering most of these areas uninhabitable. These events discredited the Unicorn & Moonshot approach in the eyes of most industry analysts. While it will take some months for Evariste to reach a conclusion regarding the resilience of the German Kamailio through the winter and beyond, and it will take still longer to issue policy recommendations, one factor is universally agreed upon already: this prolonged test of Germany's resilience is part of a Russian strategic calculation. A conservative MP from the CDU/CSU faction of the Bundestag, speaking on condition of anonomity, offered this summary: "The Russians think they can wait this out. They are waiting for us to fold and switch to an OpenSIPS reactor, knowing full well this will keep us busy with troubleshooting and diminish our ability to support Ukraine militarily." -- Alex Balashov Principal Consultant Evariste Systems LLC Web: https://evaristesys.com Tel: +1-706-510-6800

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3cx
by b.turnbow＠twt.it March 31, 2023

March 31, 2023

Hello everyone, I know a lot of people use/sell 3cx, a lot of our customers do.. So am posting here to advise everyone https://www.3cx.com/blog/news/desktopapp-security-alert/

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Ai voice fraud
by tknchris＠gmail.com March 30, 2023

March 30, 2023

https://youtu.be/V6_jCGzR020 Not that surprised to see this but I have a feeling this will be the new ransomware in the future. :( Curious how well voice print like the banks use holds up against these types of attacks. Anyone actually seen it in the wild? Any cool tech you've seen related to this? Chris

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Peerless issue?
by dovid＠telecurve.com March 29, 2023

March 29, 2023

Anyone else getting calls from Verzon Mobile and T-Mobile to Peerless numbers in the NYC area?

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TF number ported out/re-assigned without authorization
by caalvarez＠gmail.com March 23, 2023

March 23, 2023

This is a huge problem, so while I?m waiting for thinQ to tell me what they can do, I thought I?d check with my other resources. They gave us a small block of TF numbers some time back, and we assigned them to one customer. We tested them in March of 2022. One of them was not put into use as it was for a pre-planned project this year; the customer needed to physically publish the number on posters, via letters, and by email. Now it?s time to start the project, and we find out that the number has been given to Telnyx. We were told by thinQ that it was part of a bad inventory load, but that can?t be possible since it did work. And we also have working numbers from the same batch (for now?that?s worrisome too). Currently the number goes to a fax tone, and we don?t know who owns it. I have not tried sending a fax. I?m not sure how I?d start that conversation. This seems like a massive failing on thinQ?s part. The end user is a regional government authority that has spread the number far and wide. In fact if you google the number, you get the government agency?s info. What can we force them to do? The project was to go live on Monday.

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Landline vs Mobile Lookup
by ctaloi＠gmail.com March 23, 2023

March 23, 2023

Hey All, Looking for an API or data source that will tell me if numbers are mobile or landline. Bonus if it tells me who the mobile carrier is. I used opencnam years ago but it looks like they've been acquired by Neustar. Any recommendations? Cheers, Chris

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911 Records of Inbound-Only TNs
by voiceops＠ics-il.net March 22, 2023

March 22, 2023

Are you setting up 911 records for all numbers assigned to customers or just ones that would be dialing out? We pull customer numbers all of the time that served no original purpose other than for a legacy operator that needed to put a phone number on every line a customer had. We keep them because people likely saved those ancillary numbers in their contact lists, and it's just easier to port it than to fight "Billy can't reach me because he saved an old number that YOU canceled" tickets. However, no one will ever call out of that number - it's inbound only. We're trying to figure out what to do with all of those numbers from a 911 perspective. If no one would ever call out of that number, there's no technical need to have it. I'm not sure what would legally or best practices required of it. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com

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Level3 / Centurylink / Lumen Contact?
by shawn＠rmrf.us March 22, 2023

March 22, 2023

Is there anyone on here from Level3 / Centurylink / Lumen ? We're getting a lot of complaints about their clients not being able to call us. Unfortunately, telling them to open a ticket with their carrier that they cannot call us generally falls on deaf ears. Hoping to find someone that can check their routing to our switch. Thanks Shawn

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How to port out a google voice number from a locked Gmail account
by neimanpinchas＠gmail.com March 22, 2023

March 22, 2023

Hi My sister asked me where I could help her with the following situation. She ported her landline phone to google voice a few years ago, and forwarded it to a cell phone, as well as provided the google voice number as the account recovery phone number. Some time in between (that was long before COVID, she lost access to the google account in questions, when some is try to log in google says that we locked your account due to suspicious activity, although the username and password are correct (and the same computer is being used) its asking to receive a SMS on the recovery number==the google voice number locked within the account. Basically left the keys in the car.. Although Google does not have a process to restore such an account, I am thinking since this number came originally from a landline and the bills are still available, if it's possible to force Google to port out the number against their policy through some legal process. What would be the process, if any -- *Pinchas S. Neiman* Software Engineer At ESEQ Technology Corp. 845.213.1229 #2

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Rate Center Geodata
by calvine＠gmail.com March 20, 2023

March 20, 2023

Is there an authoritative source for rate center latitude and longitude? Is there a free source for this data? I'm aware that BIRRDS/LERG has the Switch CLLI coordinates, but I don't know if the rate center virtual coordinates are also there. NANPA said, "NANPA doesn?t have this information. We suggest you check with a vendor who creates rate center maps, but we can?t recommend one." Is rate center data centralized, or invented by carriers and 3rd parties?

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