March Cover Thanks for the provocative article (March Viewpoint, “The e-waste mess”). I’ve been in telecom for 31 years. I’m in favor of reliable lead solder connections, reliable high-current mercury-wetted relay contacts, clay-lined landfills, and lots more e-waste recycling plants in the United States. I think we can reduce the amount of toxins in electronics, without outlawing the materials that are most reliable. I wonder how long an RoHS-compliant telephone switch, DACS, microwave radio or SONET mux will last. Here in the utility world, we run telecom equipment for at least 10 years. That’s the amortization period. It’s got to run that long before it’s paid off.

- Jerry Goerz

UM not really new

April Cover Ken, nice article (April Viewpoint, “ The new friend”). I’m always amused at the musings of what was.

I was involved in and we deployed more functionality in “unified messaging” in the mid-1990s than people even talk about today. By 1999, we had integrated phone numbers, fax, cell, e-mail and OCR into our messaging server, e-mails to voice mails, voice mails to e-mails, presence technology, calls to and from aircraft (presence connection), scheduled multiparty conferencing, and tons more. We even offered encryption and spoofing (today’s term).

We presented all this, and more, at the various emerging telephony get-togethers. But, as was and still is the norm in new technologies, no one wanted to pay for it.

–J. Dabnor
Managing Partner
BDA LLC

Communications News welcomes your comments. Please send feedback to Editor Ken Anderberg at kanderberg@comnews.com.