Disruptive Telephony

Skype is experiencing another outage today... to what extent is not clear, but my own anecdotal experience is that it could be large. Skype, of course, is claiming that only "a small number" of users are affected in their only tweet on the subject so far:

They also posted this as a blog post on their Heartbeat site. On a side note, I completely agree with Robin Wauters at TechCrunch that it seems silly to say "a small number":

Companies always say only a small subset of users experience problems when they occur.

I have no clue why they insist on pointing that out like it makes a difference.

Customers are down... and unable to communicate. It doesn't matter if it is a "small number" if you are one of them!

But I digress... the reality is that this does seem to be a much wider outage than "a small number":

• the comments to an Engadget article this morning show people all around the world saying Skype is not working for them;
  
  
• a Twitter search on 'Skype' is FULL of comments of people saying that Skype is down for them;
  
  
• my own colleagues at Voxeo are down around the world (we've fallen back to a Jabber-based backup system)

As I've been writing this post, Peter Parkes at Skype updated the Heartbeat blog post with this news:

A configuration problem has meant that some of you have been disconnected from Skype.

We've identified the cause of the problem, and have begun to address it. If you've been affected, you should start to see improvement in the next hour or so. You shouldn't need to manually sign back in to Skype - it should reconnect automatically when it's able to do so.

We apologise for the disruption to your conversations.

We'll see how quickly we all come back online...

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Has a Russian engineer truly reverse-engineered an older version of Skype and made it available on the web as open source?

That is what Efim Bushmanov is claiming on his new site:

http://skype-open-source.blogspot.com/

Now, as he notes in his first blog post on the topic, his reverse engineering is based on an older version of Skype and so it's not clear to me how well it would work with the current Skype infrastructure. He claims, though, that it can send a message to Skype now.

How long the code will remain online is anyone's guess. As TheNextWeb notes:

It is against the Skype’s terms to reverse engineer its software but both US and European laws state that it is legal if it helps in terms of interoperability, if the technology is also not patented. Whether Skype will be able to force researcher to either remove the files or put pressure on the company hosting them is not fully known.

Meanwhile, I'm sure a good number of folks will be downloading the source code to see what they can learn...

P.S. The Hacker News discussion thread on this topic is also worth a read.

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How does IPv6 impact telecommunications networks? How will IPv6 affect the SIP protocol? If you work in telecom, what should you be aware of with regard to IPv6? With World IPv6 Day only a week away, if you have been wondering about these kind of questions, please feel free to join me live in a free session hosted by the US Telecommunications Association:

IPv6 and Telecom Networks
Thursday, June 2, 2011
1:00pm US Eastern

Registration is free and if you are unable to attend it will be recorded for later viewing. (And if you register now, you'll be notified when the archive is available for viewing.) The description of the session is:

The networks that make up the Internet and IP communications are in the middle of a sea-change with the transition to IPv6. What impact will IPv6 have on telecom and communications networks?

Join USTelecom and Voxeo for a look at the various challenges that telecom and broadband services providers face in keeping their communication services working while transitioning to IPv6.

I'll be explaining briefly why there is all the attention on IPv6 then getting into the basics of IPv6 addressing. After a brief overview, I'll then dive into how IPv6 affects the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and get into some technical detail. I'll then wrap up with some resources about how to learn more and get started with IPv6 and finish with a Q&A session.

If you attended the Voxeo Developer Jam Session I presented back in May on IPv6, I'm going to be covering basically the same material although with a vendor-neutral perspective (i.e. I won't be explaining and demonstrating how Voxeo Prophecy and PRISM now natively support IPv6). Obviously the live Q&A session will be new, too, and I find the questions around IPv6 always quite fun to discuss.

Please feel free to join us at 1pm US Eastern tomorrow. Registration is free - and if you can't join live the session will be archived and available for viewing on US Telecom's website for 90 days. With World IPv6 Day coming up on June 8th, it's a great time to learn about what is going on with IPv6!

P.S. If you are interested in IPv6 in general, you may be interested in the IPv6 Resource Page I put together for Voxeo at:

http://bit.ly/voxeoipv6

Lots of good links to tutorials, VoIP resources and more...

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