Disruptive Telephony

As readers are probably aware, I've been a long-time supporter and advocate of the IETF's work on open standards, writing about it both here on Disruptive Telephony and previously quite extensively over on Voxeo's Speaking of Standards blog. In my new role with the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme, of course, I'm even more directly involved and am now regularly attending IETF meetings.

For those who aren't familiar with the IETF, I recently came across this great video that explains the basics of what the IETF does:

The IETF is a great organization that is truly open to anyone to get involved. All you need to do is sign up for one of the mailing lists for one of the working groups and start reading and then participating. You can also attend one of the face-to-face IETF meetings to get even more involved.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with the IETF, do check out this video as it is a great intro!

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Today at noon US Eastern on the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) Call for Friday, April 27th, the group will discuss the brand new "FreeSWITCH Cookbook"[1] published by PACKT Publishing. The four authors of the book, who are also leaders of the FreeSWITCH project, will apparently be joining the call.

While Asterisk generally gets most of the "open source VoIP" buzz, the folks at the FreeSWITCH project have been working away on their own solution. As they will say, FreeSWITCH performs a different role than Asterisk and is used in different contexts.

FreeSWITCH has become quite a powerful platform and I'm looking forward to learning more about what is going on with the project right now.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

As noted on the VUC page for today's call, the show will also be simulcast in video using Google+ video and YouTube. If you are interested in joining the video side of the call, please follow the instructions on the page.

[1] In full disclosure, this is an affiliate link with Amazon and if you actually purchase the book I receive a tiny amount of money. If you think this influences what I write here, you clearly haven't been reading my site. :-)

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internethalloffame.org

The Internet Gets a Hall of Fame (Including Al Gore!)

The inductees fall into three categories: Pioneers who were key to the early design of the internet; Innovators who built on the net’s foundations with technical innovations and policy work; and Global Connectors who have helped expand the net’s growth and use around the world.

Both the site and the Wired article are well worth a read. It's an amazing journey we've been on since those early days of the Internet... and it's great to see folks like those listed here getting the recognition they justly deserve!

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My friend Mark Headd passionately wants to open up government - and to do so through code. I've known him for years as the author of the VoiceInGov / Vox Populi blog where he has been writing about mashups and so many other ways to open up access to government information via telephony. Back in November 2010, Mark joined me and the others on the rocket ship known as Voxeo and did outstanding work for the Voxeo Labs and Tropo teams.

But just as my passions altered my career last fall, as of just a short time ago Mark is now the Director of Government Relations at Code for America and, with that, changing a bit about the way he is writing online.

His new site is civic.io, where he will be writing on "civic hacking, civic startups and the future of open government". He's brought over to the site many of his relevant older posts, so he's already got a solid amount of content.

The work he and the others at projects like Code For America are doing is incredibly important to help with keeping our networks open. I'm looking forward to reading more of what Mark is up to in the time ahead - and certainly wish him all the best in this new endeavor.

Oh, and of course you can follow him on Twitter at @civic_io.

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Want to learn about how voice and video calls will take place right in your web browser? WITHOUT a Flash or Java plugin?

The "WebRTC" initiative is making this a reality through efforts of the major browser vendors, VoIP industry companies and standards working groups within both the IETF and W3C. On the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) Call on Friday, April 13th, the group will have a discussion of what exactly is happening with WebRTC... and then some live demos from the Voxeo Labs and Phono teams who have been working on this topic for some time now.

This is, to me, an incredibly important area of work as we have the opportunity to really bake real-time communications (RTC) into the fabric of the tools we use every day to work with the Internet.

I'm looking forward to the VUC call ("tomorrow" as I write this, but probably "today" when most of you read it) and would encourage you to join in to listen and/or participate in the conversation.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

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• who is stringing new fiber?

Followed, of course, by "that's kind of a cool way to ride around town" (probably literally cool, today).

My initial thought was that it was upgraded wiring from either Fair Point Communications, our local phone company (who bought out Verizon's landline business up "he-ah"), or Time Warner Cable, who owns the cable franchise for Keene, NH.

It turned out to be neither, but rather someone new.

I walked out and met the crew up the street when they happened to be reloading connectors into the bucket. One of them said this was new service for "SegTEL". He said SegTel was a private company who had been recently bought out by someone and was planning to provide high-speed Internet access to businesses.

As I walked back to my house, my immediate reactions were:

• Cool! Will there be a plan I can afford as an individual?
• Will they offer IPv6?

To my surprise, SegTEL appears to have no functioning website! I did find that it has been acquired by Tech Valley Communications in New York, whose announcement of the acquisition completion in January included this bit:

segTEL was founded in 1998 and provides fiber optic telecommunication services to carrier, wholesale, and large enterprise customers throughout New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine. segTEL has unique and extensive expertise in providing customized fiber optic loop, backhaul and transport services to Top-25 wireline and wireless carriers. All segTEL staff will continue their current operational activities with the combined company.

SegTEL was/is apparently located in Enfield/Lebanon, NH, about an hour north of me. In reading through TVC's news page it seems TVC received a substantial private equity investment in 2010 that made all of this possible. A Business Review article adds a bit more context to the acquisition. They also have some interesting links on the TVC news page about the growth of fiber.

An NTIA document refers to 10Gbps and 1Gbps Ethernet offerings (I'd take it!) and an FCC document from September confirms the transfer to TVC. It seems, though, that SegTEL and TVC both have been primarily targeting other service providers and large enterprises, not individuals. (Which does make me wonder why they were stringing the fiber through our very residential neighborhood.)

Sooo... given that a big fat fiber cable is connected to a pole that is literally about 25 feet away from my server, will I be able to play with a big pipe? Or will it be priced out of my range? (Probably!) And, important to my role, will it support IPv6?

And SegTEL or TVC folks, should you read this... you've got a willing beta tester for your new service offering! ;-)

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That's a pretty amazing milestone, given that some of us can remember back to when the concurrent user count was in the upper 20s (early 2011) or even way back to the earlier days when it was down in the low millions (2007). This time of day has historically been one of the highest times, so I expect that we'll see the count drop off for the remainder of the day and then hit this number again tomorrow around early afternoon US Eastern time.

Hudson Barton has an interesting trend chart showing the growth of Skype users over time:

The jump in the last quarter has been particularly dramatic - and probably has much to do with the expanded availability of Skype on smartphones and other devices.

Regardless of the reason, it's a rather amazing milestone. Congrats to the folks at Skype!

P.S. Skype now has a blog post up about this milestone as well.

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What about Radvision's SIP and H.323 stacks?

More specifically -

will Avaya continue to support and promote the strong usage of Radvision stacks by other vendors?

Of all the coverage I've seen so far, only Tom Keating touched on this in his brief post:

They also developed a H.323 stack used in hundreds of VoIP and videoconferencing products before SIP became the dominant VoIP protocol of choice.

Beyond the popular H.323 stack, Radvision's SIP stack has also been used in a good number of products out there - and Radvision also developed stacks for RTP, MGCP and many other VoIP protocols. Just follow the links off of Radvision's developer page at:

http://www.radvision.com/Products/Developer/

to see the wide range of developer solutions they have developed over the years.

For those not familiar with this topic, a "stack" in developer-speak is basically a set of libraries that you can incorporate into your products to enable those products to communicate over a given protocol. So if you want to "SIP-enable" your product, you can license a "stack" from a company like Radvision rather than developing your own stack or using one of the various open source stacks that are out there. Licensing the stack also typically gets you support from the vendor and the ability to request changes/customizations/etc.

Radvision has enabled a good number of companies out there to get into the VoIP world. They have been a supplier of stacks to companies all across the VoIP / UC space.

Now they've been acquired by one of the largest vendors in the VoIP/UC space.

Will Avaya continue to support the widespread usage of Radvision's various stacks by other vendors?

Or will they restrict or reduce the usage? Or increase the costs? If so, what will the other vendor's do?

Can the various vendors using Radvision stacks trust Avaya to continue the developer program? Particularly when they may compete directly against Avaya?

Will there be more attention paid now to other providers of SIP and VoIP stacks?

THAT is the question that I'm most curious about in the midst of this merger...

Other Articles

Some of the pieces worth reading on this topic include:

• Zeus Kerravala on NoJitter: Why Avaya Buying Radvision Makes Sense (Updated: Deal Is Official)
• Henry Dewing's Blog at Forrester: Avaya Acquires Radvision
• Carl Ford on TMCnet: Avaya Buys Radvision for $230 Million
• TechCrunch: RadVision Finally Finds A Home With Telecom Giant Avaya — For $230 Million
• eWeek: Avaya to Buy Radvision, Ramping Competition With Cisco
• TheNextWeb: Done deal: Avaya buys video conferencing tech firm RADVISION for $230m in cash (some useful links)

P.S. Hat tip to Forrester's Henry Dewing, too, for at least recognizing the usage of Radvision's stacks, although he did not ask the question I'm asking here.

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I swear I could probably count every hair in Jim's mustache!

The video quality was truly amazing (and if you click on the image above, you'll get a slightly bigger version - I was not viewing it in full-screen when I made the capture). Looking at the technical specs for the call, Jim was sending 1280x720 using the H264 codec. I was apparently also sending that level of quality over to Jim (although using the VP80 codec).

The audio quality was also excellent and we had a great call. Obviously, Jim's upgraded Internet connection worked perfectly fine! ;-)

Kudos to Skype for making this amazing quality of video calling available - for free - to all of us!

For those curious, here is the detailed technical info for our call:

P.S. If you weren't aware that you can get this kind of info, you need to first enable it on the Advanced panel of the Skype for Mac Preferences. Then you can choose "Technical Call Info" from the Window menu (or just press Cmd+5).

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Calling people using your browser - but without a Flash or Java plugin? That's been the mission of the WebRTC initiative for some time now with efforts underway in both the IETF and the W3C to standardize the work so that it can be broadly implemented.

I was very pleased to see the team at Voxeo Labs announce that the Phono SDK can now support WebRTC with the developer build of the Google Chrome browser. They outlined their work in a blog post and produced a video demonstrating the technology and also received a very nice writeup on TheNextWeb:

This is very cool as it has the potential once WebRTC is baked into more browsers to provide us with a very solid browser-based platform for building and deploying real-time communication apps. Kudos to the Voxeo Labs team for what they've done so far!

P.S. Some interesting comments about this topic over on Hacker News...

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