NJ Business Magazine Profiles Emerson

Smart Ventures: The Quest to Make VoIP Safe. April, 2009. When Harry Emerson thinks of
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP),
he shakes his head thinking about
the millions of telephone users who
give up security for inexpensive calls.
And once multimedia phones, which
combine voice, video and web browsing,
become popular, he thinks of the
intensified crime waves hackers, cyber
criminals and terrorists will bring to
communications.
Emerson, however, is not standing
on the sidelines waiting for all of this to
happen. He is a technological superhero
in the making, hoping that his secure
VoIP system, dubbed IronPipetm,
will address identity theft and the risks
of spying, hacking and even service
interruptions by integrating the secure,
established public switched telephone
network with the rich media content of
the Internet.
With 25-years experience behind
him – working in various management
and strategic planning capacities at
AT&T – Emerson and his company,
Flanders-based Emerson Development
LLC, are ready to convince the major
telephone companies and equipment
suppliers that IronPipe is what they
need. “It’s waiting there like an apple
ready to be picked from a tree. They
just need to understand the opportunity
… that’s my goal, to create industry
awareness.”
When IronPipe handles a multimedia
call, the set-up transaction uses
digital messages between the caller
and the local telephone company
central office. It then goes across the
private data network that connects
all telephone central offices. “So the
central office can send that (Internet
Protocol) information to the central
office of the remote party, and ask
if the remote party has multimedia
capabilities. If the answer is yes, then
the central offices send messages to
both devices causing them to establish
multimedia communications over
the Internet,” says Emerson. “When
an Internet connection is established,
the system will encrypt the Internet
portions of the call. However, all the
key parts of it, all of the management
and control, the billing information and
various account information, are all
protected behind the wall of the PSTN
(Public Switched Telephone Network).
With IronPipe, you can think of the
telephone companies as being the giant
firewall to protect you from anyone
with malicious intent.”
IronPipe would be a service offered
by telecommunications providers selling
multimedia phones. It operates on
both wired and wireless systems.
Part of Emerson’s plan in selling
IronPipe is educating people on the
dangers of VoIP. “Part of my mission is
to help the world community understand
that even though VoIP is cheap,
it’s dangerously insecure. It’s insecure
because it utilizes all of the technologies
that the Internet uses, and we all
know there are thousands of hacking
attempts every day,” he says. “Think
of the malicious things they are doing
over the Internet; stealing identities,
customer lists and disguising websites
and luring people on false pretexts – all
of those things are possible with VoIP
and will be possible with multimedia
phones.”
Working with Emerson is partner
Bill Grywalski. The two men also operate
SurferNETWORK, one of the leading
Internet streaming services used
by radio stations across the country.