Matthew Gamble's Blog

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telecom

Supporting legacy 4 digit dialling in Microsoft Teams

Migrating an organization's communication system to Microsoft Teams represents a pivotal shift, particularly for large enterprises rooted in established dialing practices. Unlike traditional telephony systems, which rely on extensions, Teams emphasizes user identity for calls, enabling users to rea

Flanker brands are killing independent ISPs

Recently a relative of mine moved and needed internet access.  Having not shopped for residential internet service in a long time, I was shocked to see that Virgin, the Bell "flaker brand" was selling 50/10 VDSL service for $40/month with no install fees and a Wifi-enabled DSL modem included.  Yes,

Caller ID Spoofing with Microsoft Teams and Calling Plan

Microsoft Calling Plans for Teams [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/calling-plans-for-office-365] are a great way for Teams users to enable the telephony features of Microsoft Teams without having to deploy any of the infrastructure required for Teams Direct Routing [https://learn.m

The CRTC once again fails Canadians

As you may have seen in the news recently, Canadian merchants are starting to charge processing fees for credit card transcations [https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/canadian-businesses-can-charge-credit-card-fees-starting-oct-6-1.6096370] .  The history of this goes back to 2018, when class action law

Brief Summary of the Rogers Outage RFI

Late last night the CRTC posted the reply from Rogers to the request for information [__GHOST_URL__/static/Rogers-CRTC-RFI.pdf] (RFI) it sent last week.  In the RFI, the CRTC asked Rogers to respond to 55 questions about the multi-day Canada-wide service outage that started early in the morning of J

The cautionary tale of the $5000 pop-up window

It started with a pop-up window on an old Windows PC indicating there was a problem with the computer.  The user needed to contact Microsoft support via an 800 number for assitance to resolve the error.  Innocent enough, right? That single popup message kicked off a harrowing multi-hour odyssey duri

Canadians deserve service based competition

In my talk a few weeks ago [https://mgamble.ca/a-kafkaesque-nightmare-the-history-of-stir-shaken-in-canada/] at RAG New Orleans I ended by saying "Or maybe the situation is worse. Maybe the regulator fails to see that smaller players – who function without large scale facilities - are legitimate st

The CST-GA is "SHAKEN" down small carriers

If you've been following by blog, you'll know that equal access for all telecommunications providers to participate in the SHAKEN/STIR call authentication framework has been one of the causes I have been most passionate about.  In late August, smaller Canadian telecommunications service providers (T

The Canadian PSTN needs Next Generation Routing

Last week wasn't great for the Canadian Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).  Two of Canada's largest competitive carriers suffered outages - Iristel was victim of a DDoS attack that lasted over 24 hours, between November 15th and 16th.  At the same time, Thinktel experienced issues related to