Disruptive Telephony

Should Skype open up it's network to other users? to other networks? Should Skype stop preaching about "openness" when it's network remains closed?

In the middle of last week, there was quite a little storm raised in the VoIP corner of the blogosphere after Andy Abramson published a letter from Gizmo Project founder Michael Robertson critical of Skype's openness after Skype continued to call upon the FCC to open the wireless network to applications. (See also here and this Skype blog post (and this one) for background.) Being at ITEXPO last week, I didn't have the chance to blog about this at the length I felt it deserved until today.

First, for some context, here are some of the blog posts last week:

• Andy in VoIPWatch: Gizmo Project's Michael Robertson Sounds Off
• Phil Wolff asks some pointed questions (of Michael) at Skype Journal: Michael Robertson says Skype should open to Gizmo Project
• Phil posts: Michael Robertson Responds where Michael responds to Phil's questions
• Andy responds: For the Record, Gizmo vs. Skype
• Alec Saunders had a whole cast of characters on Friday's SquawkBox, including Andy, Michael Robertson, Jim Courtney (Skype Journal) and a good number of others.
• Phil posts: A few thoughts on Skype interop tradeoffs

All of it makes for good reading. It's an important issue.

So I guess I'm somewhat of two minds on this issue.... while I agree with some of Michael Robertson's points, I guess I see the whole issue of "Skype openness" as quite orthogonal to the larger issue of open wireless spectrum. I'll write about both issues at some length below.

This is long. Don't plan on reading it on a crackberry or iPhone. Best get a cup of coffee and read it on a laptop or something like that.

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WIRELESS OPENNESS

To put it another way, I completely applaud Skype's letter to the FCC and think that the battle for opening up the wireless networks is probably the preeminent "battle" we who are advocates for an open Internet have before us. The wired carriers are well on their way to being commoditized big, fat, dumb pipes. The telcos started selling "data lines" and then soon the world of IP wound up increasingly removing them from the picture as anything other than a big pipe... and that's not the world they want. They are fighting (and will continue to fight) to retain relevance (and ARPU - Average Revenue Per User) but the IP train left the station a long time ago and the telcos are scrambling to catch up and stay on board rather than just being (some of) the providers of the track.

On the wireless side, not only do the carriers own the track, but they still own the train and they are still driving that train. They control who gets on and off... how fast or slow it goes... what color the train is, etc.

I, for one, don't want that. I want them to give us a solid set of tracks to use... but I want the train to be open to all. I want the wireless carriers to be big, fat, dumb pipes. I want choice. *I* want to be in control.

The carriers naturally don't want to relinquish this control. They see how they missed it on the wired side. They want to keep the wireless walled gardens for as long as they can.

The cracks are appearing... Apple's control over the iPhone and AppStore is a phenomenal crack in the telco walls...... although it ultimately really means exchanging the walled gardens of the telcos for the bright shiny walled garden based in Cupertino, CA. I'm not sure that ultimately is the best for all of us... but it does crack the telco walls. I think Google's Android has more potential... but we'll have to see later this month when those phones first come out.

So with that view, you can expect I applaud Skype's efforts to open up the wireless networks and allow consumers to have a choice of what apps they want to run. I want the *wireless* carriers to be big, fat, dump pipes... give me an IP address on the *mobile* Internet and let me do what I want with it. Sure, the carriers can offer their own services, and maybe if I like them I'll pay for them.... but I want the option to use other products and services - without degradation or prioritization...

To put it another way, I pay the wireless telcos for *dialtone* now. Once connected, I can call anyone and use any *voice service* over the PSTN. I could use someone else's voicemail if I want (like GrandCentral), although the carrier's offering may be more convenient (and is usually free). But I can call anyone on the PSTN and use any voice service I want. The carriers just provide me dialtone.

I want "IP dialtone". I want a Big, Fat, Dumb Pipe.

So... go, Skype, go!

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SKYPE OPENNESS

Yet having said all this, I agree with Michael Robertson that Skype's got its own issues with openness.

I don't like walled gardens. Period. End-of-story.

I don't like telco walled gardens. I don't like Apple's walled garden. I don't like Facebook's walled garden. I didn't like the walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Genie, etc. and I rejoiced over time when the open standards of IP tore down those walls and brought about the Internet (with all of its warts) that we have today. [Tangent: I do worry, actually, that we are retreating a bit back into the walled garden world with things like Facebook and Myspace... but that's another topic I've blogged about.] I can somewhat see some value in walled gardens during the early stages of a product or technology as it reduces the set of parameters/variables and allows the service to be stablized/fixed/improved. But at some point the walls need to be reduced/eliminated. As a security guy, I don't like monocultures... I don't like homogenous systems (where one virus or issue could wipe out the whole system)... I like diversity... heterogenous systems. I don't like single-points-of-failure. I don't like single companies (or small sets) in control. I don't like walled gardens.

I don't like Skype's walled garden.

The PSTN run by the telcos of today does not provide the rich communication experience we want. We need to bypass it and leave it behind and build the massive interconnect of IP communications systems. Players like Skype have a key role in my opinion in building that new infrastructure.

But if we exchange the current PSTN walled garden controlled by the telcos for a new walled garden controlled by eBay/Skype, have we really gained anything?

Sure, it gives us a rich, multi-modal user experience. Sure, it's nice and pretty. Sure, it gives us a central user directory. Sure, it gives us wideband and encrypted audio. Sure, it's cool and all... but it's still a walled garden controlled by a single company.

Ultimately, I would like to see a new voice infrastructure that consists of many different "clouds" all interconnected and able to communicate between the clouds. Skype is one cloud. So are the SIP clouds being run now by various carriers. So are the Voice-over-IM clouds like MSN, AIM, etc. (that try vainly to compete with Skype). So are the various systems being built by vendors all over the place (including all the Microsoft OCS clouds starting to appear within enterprises).

We need to build the interconnect.

Yeah, there are a TON of issues out there that we still need to address to build that interconnect. There's a whole host of security issues... there are billing issues... there are trust issues... there are network plumbing issues. Yes, there are all those issues. But if we are to succeed in ultimately bringing about the rich communication experience we want, we need to make this happen.

And for that, Skype's walls need to come down.... at least a bit.

What we need is that Interconnect from Skype's cloud out to the emerging IP infrastructure. Think about it... Skype right now has a two-way interconnect between Skype's cloud and the cloud we know as the PSTN. It's called "SkypeOut" and "SkypeIn" (or whatever marketing names they are being called now). If you dial my SkypeIn number, you can reach me on Skype wherever I am. From my Skype client, I can call anyone on the PSTN. The two-way interconnect is already there.

So why not offer the same on the IP side?

Because I work at Voxeo and we were one of Skype's original Voice Services partners, I already know that Skype has a massive SIP infrastructure on the backend to do the the PSTN interconnect. Skype users can even dial a specific +99 number and the call goes from Skype's SIP cloud over to Voxeo's SIP cloud... and it works beautifully.

So one half of the interconnect is already there - although only for limited numbers of partners.

But where Skype already has the infrastructure, why not look at making that capability more accessible? What if someone in Skype could just type "sip:[email protected]" and the call would go out from Skype's cloud to the service providers? This could be a new feature as part of the unlimited calling plans, etc.

How many people would use it right now? Probably only a tiny few... today. But suddenly Skype becomes an enabler of the broader post-PSTN infrastructure. New companies can get their services up and running knowing that they can promote them to Skype users and have Skype users get to those services.

Plus, Skype can now connect to all those enterprise VoIP systems being deployed everywhere... so for all those IT managers blocking Skype now but allowing SIP gateways for remote teleworkers using IP phones... Skype can suddenly be that remote softphone being used in the sense that it could connect in to other people on the corporate enterprise system - they just become "sip:" entries in my Skype directory. Skype still is my overall directory and user agent.

And what about the other way? Wouldn't it be great if someone out there on a SIP system could just call something like "sip:[email protected]"? The call goes from their SIP cloud across the Internet to Skype's SIP gateways and into the Skype cloud.

The SIP system user can do this right now... via my SkypeIn number... but they have to use the crappy PSTN. Why not ditch the PSTN and go directly across the IP infrastructure? Hey, maybe some user of a "HD Voice" Polycom phone could call Skype's gateways via SIP and actually wind up talking via wideband audio? (Yeah, okay, I'm probably dreaming on that since Polycom supports G.722 for wideband and Skype uses its SVOPC codec.)

I personally would probably wind up using my Skype client more for a simple reason that I have a SIP IP phone on my desk... but I'm not at my desk all that much. Wouldn't it be great if I could forward that to the SIP URI of my Skype client? (Which I can do now by forwarding to my SkypeIn # but again I'm going across the crappy PSTN.) Or better yet because I have a SIP URI for Skype it becomes one of the various phones I ring when someone calls that number (it's not, now). The number on my business card would then wind up actually going to my Skype client.

Suddenly Skype can be a player in the enterprise "unified communications" market. People don't need Skype-to-PBX gateways or sacrifice chickens and utter weird incantations to get Skype connections working with open source VoIP systems. Skype users can talk to Microsoft OCS systems... or Cisco IP PBXs... or Avaya's or Nortel's or Mitel's or ShoreTel's or... or... or...

What if... even... I could do a SIP invite to make a video call to another system? (Okay, so now maybe I'm really dreaming...)

Suddenly people (like Michael Robertson) have fewer reasons to complain. Sure, the Skype client still uses it's own proprietary protocols and codecs for communication within the Skype cloud... but you can interconnect.

Suddenly Skype is a leader in building the broader overall next-generation IP communications system. Skype's not a walled garden but rather a player in the larger picture.

Sure, there's a whack of issues involved with doing this. On the technical side, Skype has got to build SIP gateways that could deal with the abuse they would undoubtedly suffer by being exposed on the public internet (like any or all of the VoIP security tools out there). They have got to make sure such gateways don't become a way to inject spam/SPIT into the Skype network. Skype has got to figure out how to package it... potentially charge for it, etc. And they have to deal with all the glorious interoperability issues that come with SIP... as the protocol increasingly becomes an unmanageable accretion of all sorts of crap. (And I say that as an advocate for the SIP protocol.)

Ultimately, I think that's the kind of openness Skype needs.

Skype needs to provide the same two-way interconnect to the evolving IP communications infrastructure (that is almost all becoming SIP-based, for better or worse) just as Skype provides the two-way interconnect to the PSTN.

Build it and Skype would silence many of the critics of Skype's lack of openness[1] and give Skype a (much-needed, IMHO) hype-boost among the early adopter crowd who also plays with all the other emerging tools. It would be a bold move that would also help Skype gain some credibility and recognition within the larger industry. In my opinion, outside of the technical issues it would go far in so many ways in helping Skype grow - and helping the industry grow.

Will Skype get there? Good question...

[1] Not all critics would be silenced naturally because someone would still complain that they can't connect their particular client to the Skype P2P overlay network. Or that they can't connect XYZ hard phone to the Skype cloud, etc., etc. But it would silence many of the critics of Skype as a "walled garden".

Technorati Tags: skype, sip, net neutrality, open, openness, voip, voice, telecom, telecommunications, gizmo, interop, interconnect

As I note over in my Voxeo blog post, I'll be out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) this week in Los Angeles. I will be speaking twice. First on Wednesday morning I'll be talking about SIP Trunking and security as part of the Ingate SIP Trunking workshops from 10:15-11:15am. Next, on Thursday, I'll be speaking about "Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud", a favorite topic of mine these days.

Voxeo will also have a booth and I expect to be there. I'm also doing some video interviews and other media work (actually on both sides of the camera). I'm looking forward to catching up with a good number of folks out at the show.

If you read this blog and are out there at either the Communications Developer Conference or ITEXPO, please do come by and say hello. I posted the schedule of talks over on Voxeo's blog site. You should be able to find out more about where precisely I am through either twitter.com/danyork or twitter.com/voxeo.

Technorati Tags: conferences, voip, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference, los angeles, dan york, voxeo, danyork, cloudcomputing, sip, sip security, voip security

Are you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders' daily "Squawk Box" conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion
• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support
• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies
• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine

The call will take place using Alec's company Iotum's "Calliflower" conferencing/collaboration application. To join in to the call, you simply need to go to either of the following links to "join" the call and receive a PIN and call-in number for the call:

• Calliflower Facebook application - If you are a Facebook user, simply go to:

  http://apps.new.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to add the Calliflower Facebook application and then will receive the call-in information.
  
  
• Calliflower.com site - If you are not a Facebook user or just don't want to add another Facebook application, you can go to the Calliflower.com site at this URL:

  http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to create a free Calliflower.com user account if you have not already done so.

Both links are live today so you can go right now and RSVP to attend the call tomorrow. If you do so, you should also receive a reminder about 15 minutes prior to the call tomorrow morning.

When you join the call tomorrow, you can also use the Calliflower web interface through either of the links above to see who else has joined the call and also to participate in the "live chat" area during the call itself. Typically Alec will ask a series of questions of the guest and then open it to others who are participating in the call. If you'd like to learn more about what is up with Voxeo and/or ask questions of our CEO, tomorrow's a great opportunity for you to do so.

It should be a fun time and we're looking forward to the conversation. Please do feel free to join in!

NOTE: If you are not available to join the call, it is being recorded and will be made available through Alec's Saunderslog.com site sometime later tomorrow. We'll post an update here on this blog site as well.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, squawk box, jonathan taylor

Last week was a truly extraordinary week for my employer, Voxeo. Here's a bit of what went on:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion - In these economic times, it's incredible to be part of a company putting out information like this.

• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support - To our knowledge, this is first commercial telephony voice application platform to be available on Mac OS X (as well as Linux and Windows). While our customers might not deploy production servers on Mac OS X, this means that their developers using Macs can now even more easily run our application server. Additionally, we've developed some new graphical management interfaces that are pretty incredible (and useful, too).

• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies - With this acquisition of a company based in Beijing and San Jose, we've added a strong SIP Servlet (JSR 116/289) platform into our portfolio and we've already started integrating that into our core platform. Developers will now have even more ways to build VoIP applications on top of our platform.

• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine - We received an award at SpeechTEK last week in New York from Speech Technology Magazine for the best "Speech Self-Service Suite", which, when you read through the text, basically means the best voice application platform. We were pleased by the recognition. My colleague Dan Burnett also received an award as a "2008 Speech Luminary" recognizing his many years of contributions to the speech industry.

Combining all of those announcements with the crazy pace of activity at the SpeechTEK show in New York definitely made for some long days and long hours. It's certainly fun, though.

I think it goes without saying that I'm rather pleased with where I wound up last fall! (We are hiring, too, although right now only in the UK.)

Technorati Tags: voxeo, applications, voice, voip, speech, speechtek, prophecy, sip

What if we could design SIP-based VOIP systems... but without any servers? What if we could have SIP endpoints just communicate with each other and "self-organize" into networks? What if we could essentially build an open standards-based version of Skype? How would it work? Who would use it? How would we secure it?

Those are all questions we discussed in the Squawk Box podcast / interview I did with David Bryan on July 10th. David is the co-chair of the IETF's P2PSIP Working Group and also the CEO of SIPeerior Technologies. It was a great interview where we covered all these questions and much, much more.

P2PSIP, to me, represents one of the most exciting new directions for SIP research and is something I'm definitely following closely. I wrote about my interest in P2PSIP clouds (and connecting them to larger clouds) at some length over on Voxeo's Speaking of Standards blog... it's all about clouds of SIP communication... and how we weave them all together. It's a fascinating time.

If you'd like to understand what P2PSIP is all about, please do definitely check out the Squawk Box podcast... and then, if you are so inclined, head over to P2PSIP.org to find links to learn more and download code...

Technorati Tags: sip, p2p, p2psip, telephony, peer-to-peer, voip, ietf, dan york, david bryan, squawkbox, sipeerior, cloud computing, clouds

Twelve days ago I asked the question, "Do I cut the landline cord and move my new home phone number into the cloud?", and the responses have been great to read. Today, I can write the answer...

No, I will NOT cut the cord.

Around noon today my landline in Keene should be installed by Fairpoint Communications (who recently bought all of Verizon's landline business in Maine, NH and Vermont).

Why did I finally give in and get a landline installed? Four reasons:

1. FAX - Unbelievably to me, perhaps the primary reason for keeping a landline is an old archaic technology that I absolutely can't stand... fax. This was brought home to me during the process of closing on the purchase of our Keene home and the sale of our Burlington home. As much as we may hate it, there are still some transactions that require fax. There were documents that had to be faxed to the bank. Documents that had to be faxed to lawyers. Documents that had to be faxed to real estate agents. To contractors.

   To a techie like me, it was unbelievably annoying not to be able to simply use email. But in many cases, it came down to this:

   Documents required our signatures.

   Because we still haven't come up with an agreed upon "digital signature", we as a society rely on good old hand-written signatures.

   Now in some cases I was able to scan in those documents and email them off. But not everyone would accept those documents by email. Some of the folks I had to interact with needed them by fax. There were also times when fax was admittedly faster than scanning in the doc and attaching it to an email message (and perhaps I need a better scanning solution). Just put the pages in the document feeder, punch in the number and hit send.

   Now I know there are solutions like eFax (which I use for inbound faxes) but I haven't yet found one that works in the way I need it. I've also seen that fax over VoIP lines doesn't always work well. So for the few times a year when I need fax, I seem to need a landline. (And the problem is that typically when I need to fax something, I really need to fax it for some critical reason.)

2. 911 - As was mentioned in the comments to my original post, "guaranteed" access to 911 is certainly a consideration. Not as much for my wife and I as for our daughter or visitors/guests. My wife and I can pick up our cell phones and dial 911. But if something were ever to happen to one of us, I want our daughter, or anyone else visiting us, to be able to simply pick up a phone and dial 911 and have the emergency services come.

3. DSL - My choices for Internet access in Keene basically come down to Time Warner Cable or DSL. Since I've been using them since the early 1990's back in the dialup / uucp ages, I'm going to be going back to using local ISP MV Communications (who is even now still handling all my personal email) for DSL access. The thing is that getting DSL is easier with a landline. The MV folks said they can do a "standalone" install without an actual phone line that I'm paying for (as I understand it, they would basically have the link they need installed) and if the reasons above didn't enter the picture I'd probably pursue it.

4. The Cloud isn't quite ready - After writing my last post, I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out how I could get this to work. How could I build my "abstraction layer"? Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my last post, the only service I could find today that gets you most of the way there is GrandCentral, but it still has problems. For instance, I have this perhaps archaic desire to have an area code 603 phone number and GC doesn't have any. I also don't want to have to press "1" to accept a call on a given phone. I just want to answer.

   So it seems like I would have to build my own. Now the pieces are certainly there. I can get phone numbers from any number of SIP providers (although perhaps not my desired 603). I can get call-in numbers for services like Skype or Yahoo (or AIM or MSN or Gizmo). Heck, I can build much of the abstraction layer using Voxeo's app platform (and I probably will as an experiment). Write some CCXML scripts and away we go.

   But the question is - in the midst of everything else I am trying to do - do I really want to be building and *maintaining* a phone number abstraction layer for my home phone? (And the equally important corollary: do I really want to be responsible for it when it inevitably breaks when I'm off on a business trip and suddenly my wife can't get calls at home?)

   No, I don't.

   Now maybe there are other services out there that I don't know about (feel free to pitch me in the comments if you offer one), but for the moment I think I'll let the cloud evolve a bit more. We'll see... maybe in six months or a year there will be better options out there.

So that's the scoop. For the moment, I've got a landline. We're paying the extremely basic rate plan (where if I make any long distance calls on it they are at 12 cents a minute!) and we'll see how it goes.

Fun, fun, fun...

Technorati Tags: phones, phone numbers, voip, sip, telephony, telecommunications, grandcentral, google

UPDATE - May 21: Today I posted my answer to the question...

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In our new home, do I get a land line?

Or do I move our home phone number into "the cloud"?

We're closing on our home in Keene, NH, next Thursday and as we get set with the utilities that is one of the key questions on my mind. Do I actually "cut the cord" and NOT sign up for a land line with Verizon/Fairpoint?[1]

On one level, we don't need it. My wife and I both have our cell phones. Our daughter is six and isn't yet at the age to make phone calls. I work in the world of voice-over-IP and can certainly get a solution there.

Why should we get a land line?

ADVANTAGES OF A LAND LINE

In thinking about this, it seems to me there are the following reasons to get a land line:

1. 911 - UPDATE: As PhoneBoy reminded me in a comment, the overarching reason for having a landline is 911! A landline is the only guaranteed way to dial 911 and have emergency services arrive at your house. Precisely because it is tied to your geographical location it does indeed provide this critical function!

2. SECURITY/AVAILABILITY - Even when the power is out, your land line still works. VoIP solutions are tied to your Internet connection - which requires power. Okay... but how often does your power really go out? Or... how often does the power go out and your cell phones aren't available?
   
   
3. NO BATTERIES/CHARGING - Similar to the above, landlines (at least, the wired landline phones) don't need batteries and are always available. Cell phones need recharging.
   
   
4. LOCAL DIRECTORY LISTING - Your landline is listed in your local phone book. It's in the "411" directory. If people in your community want to find your number, they can dial 411 or look in the local phone book. With cell phones or VoIP, you aren't in those directories.
   
   
5. LOCAL PHONE NUMBER - Your landline is tied directly into your local exchange and so you have a phone number with an prefix that is "known" in your local community. Neighbors will "expect" that your phone number has one of the local prefixes. With cell phones or VoIP, your number may be somewhere else (and even have a different area code). However, in this era of "10-digit dialing" here in the US, and even more so with people simply programming numbers into their cell phone directories, does having a local number even matter?
   
   
6. LOCAL DIALING CHARGES - One point of having a local phone number is that others in your neighborhood (maybe only a few) may still have dialing plans from Verizon/Fairpoint that cost more if you dial outside your "local" area and so it may cost more to call you. However, in this era of "unlimited calling plans" these local charges are pretty much nonexistent for the vast majority of users.
   
   
7. MULTIPLE HANDSETS - How many times in your household in the past did multiple people get on the same call through using different handsets? (Or in how many households did someone eavesdrop on a call by silently picking up another handset?) A landline gives you this option where a cell phone does not (easily, at least). Still, how many times do you actually do this these days? And with the increasing quality of speakerphones, even on cell phones, is there really the need for multiple handsets? (And yes, you could do this with a VoIP solution.)
   
   
8. COMMON IDENTITY - Until recent years, it's been the norm that a family has had one number that was their identity. "Oh, yes, you can reach the Yorks at 660-9675." There was one number that would reach your household. Today in the era of ubiquitous cell phones, this concept is going away. It's not "you can reach the Yorks" but rather "you can reach Dan York at.... " and "you can reach Lori York at..." It's not "our phone is ringing"... it is "your phone is ringing".

DISADVANTAGES OF A LANDLINE

It is also easy to highlight the reasons not to get a landline:

1. EXTRA COST - FOR WHAT? - Why should I pay my local carrier for a phone I almost never use? I simply don't call as many people any more, even for business, and very often make those calls on my cell phone. Who do I call on my home phone right now?
   • local vendors/contractors when I need to get something fixed
   • local stores to find out their hours or if they have something
   • delivery of pizza or Chinese food
   • family members usually once a week (but we've moved much of this to cell phones because of the "unlimited" plans)
   • very occasionally friends (but we've moved more to cell phones, IM and email)

   Who calls us?

   • family (but they'd call whatever number we gave them)
   • friends (but they'd call whatever number we gave them)
   • political campaigns and charites
   • people responding to Craigslist postings (but they'd call whatever number we gave them)
   • other parents of kids at our daughter's school (from the number in the school directory or from the phone book)

   That's about it... so outside of the people in our community (like the parents) who might look up our number, most other folks get our number from us. So they would use whatever number we have.

   I'm already paying for my cell phone - why should I pay for another phone that I seldom use?

2. LACK OF MOBILITY - The landline is by its nature locked to our house. If a call comes in and I'm outside, I have to run to get the phone - or carry a wireless handset. But if I already have my cell phone with me, am I then carrying two handsets? And if I'm traveling, I can't get the phone calls to my home number (unless I've forwarded it).

Those are really the key factors. My cell phone is almost always with me. Now currently at home I leave my cell phone in my office at night, so if a call came in while I was sleeping I wouldn't easily hear it. But with one change of habit I could simply bring it into the bedroom and have it there to receive calls.

So do we need a home landline?

BUILDING AN ABSTRACTION LAYER IN THE CLOUD

Perhaps of all the advantages I outlined above, the one of most interest to me is the "common identity". I like having a single number that family and friends can call and reach either my wife or I (or, we know will soon be the case, our daughter). If I cut the cord and drop the landline, can I maintain that identity?

The reality is that in this era of VoIP it is possible that I can maintain that common identity through a very simple action:

Push the phone number up into "the cloud".

Move the phone number that you give to everyone up into the VoIP cloud. Think about it... with a service like GrandCentral (now Google-owned) or similar services, I can give everyone one number that rings:

• my cell phone
• my wife's cell phone
• my SkypeIn number
• any VoIP handsets I have in our house (if I actually get around to installing Asterisk or any of the other IP-PBX systems (or my employer's Prophecy app server))
• any other phone numbers I want to have it connect to

In fact, I can phase this in and add/remove numbers as I evolve services. Start out with my our current cell phones. Change that as we get new cell phones. Add the VoIP handsets when I set something up. Remove them if I change the system around.

I have incredible flexibility if I move the number up into the cloud.

CHALLENGES WITH THE CLOUD

There, are though, some challenges with this approach:

1. AVAILABILITY - The PSTN has been around 100 years now and the folks who run it have a pretty good clue about how to keep it running. Even as our landlines pass from the age-old world of Bell (now in Verizon) to a new company, Fairpoint, it's still all in the world of telco solidity. On the other hand, the cloud has a certain amount of inherent fragility. Networks break. Computers fail. Routers get clogged up. Packets get dropped. DO I TRUST THE NEW "2.0" COMPANIES TO GET MY PHONE CALLS TO ME?

2. BUSINESS STABILITY - For that matter, do I trust the new companies to be around? The telcos that run the PSTN and provide landlines aren't going anywhere. Due to regulations, legislation, emergency services, etc.... as well as certain (usually older) parts of the population that will never part with their landline... due to all of that the telcos will be here probably as long as we have phones. (Perhaps smaller, or amalgamated... but still here.) Can the same be said of the "2.0" companies? It sure looks like Google will be around for a while, but will they keep their "beta" GrandCentral service around? Who wants to bet on the long-term viability of Vonage (another option)? Look what happened to all of the SunRocket customers...

3. TRUST - Do I trust these new companies with my data? The telcos have all sorts of legislation regulating what they can do with my data... both my identity (address, phone numbers, etc.) data and also my call detail records. The new companies really have no such limitations, do they?

4. LOCAL NUMBERS - While the whole notion of "area codes" here in the US is fading into irrelevancy with the rise of "unlimited" calling plans, I still have this perhaps quaint and archaic desire to have a "603" number if I'm living in New Hampshire. To those of us who have grown up with area codes, there is still a geographic connection that is of interest. Some of the "2.0" services can get phone numbers in your area code... others can't. (For instance, Grand Central doesn't have 603 numbers right now.)

5. LOCAL NUMBER PORTABILITY - With the PSTN and the telcos, I do have a degree of portability of my phone number. I can move my telco-assigned phone number to another service (but not always back). But it's not at all clear to me that I have that with the 2.0 companies. If I have a number with GrandCentral, can I later move it Vonage (or vice versa) or to SkypeIn or to Gizmo or somewhere else? From what I've seen, that's not likely to be an option (you currently can't move a GC number). I don't like lock-in. I want to be able to move to another provider if I don't like the current one. I want to be able to take my number with me! It's part of my "identity". I want to control it.

6. EASE OF USE - For all its faults, the PSTN has one thing going for it - it's insanely easy to use. Pick up the phone. Talk. No buttons to press (with typical wired phones). Cell phones have certainly added complexity, but we do seem to be doing okay with that. Adding a cloud-based abstraction layer has the potential to add more complexity.

   For instance, GrandCentral rings the range of devices you have indicated and requires you to press 1 to accept a call on that device. So when my cell phone rings, I have to:

   • Take my phone out of my belt holster (or potentially find the phone if it's not on me).
   • Press the green "talk" button to accept the incoming call.
   • Listen to know if this is someone calling me directly or a call coming in from GrandCentral.
   • If a GC call, press "1" to accept the call
   Now, GrandCentral requires this "press 1" stage presumably so that they can hold on to the call and ultimately route it to messaging, but it's an annoying step and one that has caused numerous GC calls to go to voicemail by the time I find the phone, figure out it is a GC call and then press 1.

   Now in fairness maybe there's a way in GrandCentral to configure it differently, but I couldn't find it. I just want to accept the call on the end device of my choice and as soon as I "accept" the call on that device - whether it's picking up a handset or pressing the green button - I want to start talking to the caller.

7. MESSAGING - So if you can ring a whole bunch of phones on different services, where do your voice messages go if you don't answer the phone? Today we have a home "answering machine" where we get all our messages. We walk into our kitchen, look at the machine, see how many messages there are... and start listening. When we first moved to VT in 2005 we tried the Verizon voice messaging service that effectively moves messaging into their cloud. You picked up your landline and if you heard a quick set of tones you knew you had messages. It was nice, in a way, that if you were on the phone and someone else called they would automagically go to voicemail. The thing is... we usually forgot to check for messages. Especially after we were on a call with someone. It is not intuitive to hang up a call and then immediately pick up the phone again to see if you have messages.

   I think you do need some kind of message waiting indicator. That's largely why we dropped the Verizon central voicemail and went back to a home answering machine. When we get a message there's a blinking light (in fact, it blinks on all our wireless handsets).

   So how does this translate into the "2.0" world? Going back to GrandCentral, because they retain control of the call, they can route it to your voicemail box there at GC and then send you an email saying you have voicemail with a link back to the message. With my Blackberry 8830, this works out rather well because I just click the link in the email message, confirm that I want to "Open" the link and... ta da... the audio file is downloaded and played on the 8830's speakerphone. (Paying Verizon for the data download, naturally.) It works out well because I get the message in several places (it actually goes to a Gmail account that is then pulled down to my MacBook and also sent to my Blackberry, so I can read it wherever).

   Is an email enough of a message waiting indicator? I don't know. Can I configure it to send the email to both my wife and I? (Sure, if not directly through GC then through setting up an alias somewhere.) If I set up some voip phones at home could I somehow configure them with an MWI? I don't know.

8. TRANSFERS - In the world of the landline, a "transfer" to someone else involves handing someone a phone or having them pick up another handset. With an abstraction layer, you are answering on different devices on different systems. Obviously you can still physically pass the phone to someone. I remember hearing of a service that let you press a number and essentially park the number and pick it up on one of the other devices in your account... but I can't remember what that service was (GrandCentral does not seem to list this as a feature if it was them). I don't know that I'd realistically ever need this feature, but it's interesting to think about.

9. LOCAL DIRECTORY and 411 - One detail with a number in the cloud is that it won't be listed in the "yellow pages" directories that are passed out by the local telcos. Nor will it be in the 411 directory or probably in any of the online phone number directories. Now maybe this is fine. From a privacy perspective maybe it's good to not be in the directories. And anyone entering my name into Google can quickly find a page of mine with a phone number on it. (This happens to work for me because of my prolific writing and public life. Someone less prolific/public would have a harder time being found.)

10. COST - In end, what's a cloud-based solution going to cost? Today, the cost can be free (GrandCentral), $35-ish per year (Skype or Gizmo call-in number, which could be redirected to other phones), or $25/month (Vonage and friends). Plus, naturally, the cost to accept and make calls on the different devices. But we'll already have cell phones with essentially unlimited calling (at least, for the amount of calling we do). Will the cost stay this low? I don't know.

CONCLUSIONS (such that they are)

Are these challenges surmountable? Can I truly "cut the cord", not install a landline and push my home phone number out into the cloud?

I don't know yet. It seems like an interesting experiment to at least try (I can always get a landline installed later). I like the idea of building an "abstraction layer" in the cloud that lets me control the devices associated with my phone number.

I still get concerned about the challenges #1 and #2 that I outlined. Can I trust companies like GrandCentral to always get my phone calls to me? Can I trust that they will be around for some time?

My next step I think is to dig into a bit more what options there truly are out there for pushing my number into the cloud and building an abstraction layer. GrandCentral is obviously one option. I could build my own using some of the VoIP application platforms out there (including that of my employer). Are there other services that compete with GrandCentral? I need to investigate a bit more. (Suggestions are welcome)

What do you think? Should I do it? Or should I get a landline? Or should I just stick with multiple cell phones and forget about the "common number" concept?

In the end, I look forward to the day when we're done building the IP interconnect and we can purchase phone numbers just as we can domain names today. Why shouldn't I be able to do so? I can go to any of a zillion registrars and spend $10/year for a domain name that can point anywhere. I can move it between registrars. I can change where it points. I remain in control of that domain name.

Why shouldn't I be able to that for a phone number?

(And maybe I will be able to for some other SIP identifier that is not a "phone number", per se, but can be reached by other phones... but that's a subject for another blog post some other day... (and one that I saw *some* other VoIP blogger writing about but I can't for the life of me find that post!))

[1] Fairpoint Communications bought Verizon's land line business up here in northern New England.

P.S. And yes, I could do all of this running Asterisk or something like that on a server in my home network - but I don't want to do system administration! I don't want to set up a server. I don't want to maintain and upgrade a server. I don't want to deal with security issues on a server. I don't want to have to deal with connectivity issues to that server. I just don't want to deal with servers, period! I'll pay, if I need to, to make those sysadmin/security/reliability/availability problems someone else's problems!

Technorati Tags: phones, phone numbers, voip, sip, telephony, telecommunications, local number portability, grandcentral, google

Does accepting SIP connections at your SIP proxy constitute an "API"? Does providing SIP termination services to the PSTN constitute an "API"?

Those were the questions I found myself asking after AOL announced yesterday their "Open Voice API" (also see CNET article). Since I work with voice application platforms, I'm always interested in new voice APIs and naturally had to check it out.

WHAT IT IS

I have to admit it took some time to figure out what the "Open Voice Program" really is, even after reading the program page and the accompanying blog post. Largely I think the issue was that I was looking for something more.

So here's what is going on. As part of their "AOL Voice Services", AOL has a service called "AIM Call Out". This allows a user of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to make outbound calls from their AIM client to the regular phone numbers on the PSTN for competitive rates (under 2 cents a minute here in the US).

From a network topology point-of-view, what happens with the call is that the call goes from your AIM client to the SIP gateway on the edge of AOL's network across some SIP trunks provided by some SIP Service Provider (one of the carriers probably) out to the PSTN. Picture it something like this:

Now what the "Open Voice Program" does is allow you to use an external SIP client to connect to AOL's SIP proxy and make outbound calls. So for example, if you had one of the following:

• a SIP softphone like X-Lite on your laptop or PC
• a SIP "hardphone" on your desk or any of the many WiFi SIP handsets
• a SIP softphone on your dual-mode handset (such as those from Nokia) that would let you make connections over WiFi

you can use the service to make outbound calls using your AIM Call Out connections and minutes. The picture would now look like this:

The SIP phone connects to AOL's SIP gateway, logs in with your username and SIP password and makes the outbound call. You now do not have to be at your PC and can make calls from another device that may be more convenient (like your dual-mode phone or a WiFi SIP handset). In fact, you don't need to be logged into AIM or have the AIM client running anywhere. The SIP device makes calls completely independently.

CONFIGURATION

The process of configuring your SIP phone to work with AIM Call Out is relatively straightforward. (Assuming you have an AOL/AIM "screenname". If you don't, you need one of those first.)

1. Go to the AIM Call Out page and click the Sign Up Now page.

2. Once in the "Dashboard", buy some Call Out credit (I bought $5 for the sake of testing) through a process that is not exactly intuitive but involves:

1. Choosing Billing->Payment Method and setting up a credit card.
2. (the non-intuitive part to me) Clicking the "Add Credit" link in the upper right corner of your screen and then going through that process.

3. Still in the Dashboard, assign a "SIP device password" on the Settings->SIP Clients page:

4. Switch to your SIP device/phone and configure it with this information (along with the possibly the STUN server found on the config page).

5. Start making calls.

Like I said, it's a relatively straightforward process.

You naturally have to agree to their Terms of Service whose main point (made repeatedly) can be summarized as "This is not a telephone replacement for emergency purposes."

INITIAL USAGE

After configuration it worked fine (once I remembered how to configure X-Lite to use the correct microphone and speaker devices) and I made several calls with no problems. I actually wound up calling into today's Squawk Box podcast (where we discussed this AOL Open Voice Program at some length) using the service. It all worked well.

AOL is to be commended for their support of open industry standards like SIP!

While my initial experience was positive from a user point-of-view, there are to me a few problems.

NO INBOUND OR PC-TO-PC CALLS

First, the service is outbound-only. You can make calls from the SIP device, but you cannot receive them. While AOL is very clear about this on the Open Voice Program page, it still is a disappointment. Now, AOL does not appear to have a "Call In" program like Skype's SkypeIn or Yahoo's PhoneIn that ties a PSTN number to your AIM account, so you can't get inbound calls from the PSTN. (I thought they did at one point but I can find no sign of it on AOL's Voice Services pages.)

But you also can't receive inbound calls from other AIM users! It seems to me that if the idea is to make it more convenient to use AIM's voice services, you ought to be able to receive calls from other AIM users on your SIP device. Perhaps this is a future development. (So from a technical point-of-view, they are currently not operating a SIP registrar. Your SIP device does not register with AOL's server.)

NO SIP-TO-SIP CONNECTIONS

My second disappointment was that it did not appear to support direct "dialling" of SIP addresses. I tried both Blue Box comment lines, "sip:[email protected]" and "sip:[email protected]" (with and without "sip:") and the result in both cases was a message "Sorry, that number cannot be dialled":

Now, granted, maybe 0.01% of the public out there actually has an interest in direct SIP-to-SIP dialling, but that is the world in which I move... both with Voxeo's platform and also the work I do with the IETF. If we are to ultimately build the massive interconnect that let's us have an IP-only network, we need to have services and devices that let us do direct SIP connections.

(NOTE: I fully admit that I may not have used the X-Lite client correctly in calling these SIP URIs. I believe I did, but if someone else can get this to work, I certainly am open to my failure being operator error.)

SECURITY?

Given my background, you can't NOT expect me to say something about security, eh?

The good news is that they do have you use a "SIP device password" that can be different from your regular AIM password (assuming you set it to be different). Smart move. Well done. (if people use different passwords)

Per the the Open Voice Program page, AOL supports RFC2617 Basic and Digest Authentication and I confirmed with a packet trace that they are, in fact, using Digest authentication. While that isn't incredibly secure (it basically involves a MD5 hash of a password and a server-supplied nonce), it is pretty much what the industry is using right now.

Also like most of the industry, they are not encrypting the SIP with TLS and they are not encrypting the voice with SRTP. Just plain old unencrypted SIP and unencrypted RTP. Given that almost no one else in the industry is doing this, I can't exactly fault them.

SO WHO IS GOING TO USE THIS?

In the end, though, I still do have to wonder who will use this. (And that was part of the Squawk Box discussion today.)

If you already use AIM as your primary IM service and are an existing AIM Call Out customer - and are a techie enough to own and configure a SIP device - then this may be a great way for you to make cheap calls using another more convenient device. (Although some have pointed out there are cheaper services, but again it's the convenience of already living inside of AIM.)

I do like the fact that you can use any SIP device. This is a stark contrast from, say, Skype, which requires either that the device be connected to an always-running PC, have Skype embedded inside of it, or use another software program like iSkoot that essentially proxies your Skype connection. AOL's program lets you use any device you want - and you don't need to be logged in to AIM. So for folks more comfortable with a "hard phone", they can use any of the SIP hard phones out there.

The detail here, however, is:

How many AIM users are actually using AIM Call Out?

Especially when there are competing services from Skype, Yahoo and Microsoft that offer similar rates as well as inbound calling. How many users will actually be able to make use of this?

Perhaps AOL is hoping that this will attract users...

On a different note, it is not entirely clear to me how developers might use this. The AOL blog post from Mark Blomsma in the AOL Developer Network talks about how developers can use this new "API", but I'm still missing... for what?

Essentially it seems to me that all you could really do is create an application that uses AIM Call Out for SIP termination to the PSTN - with the AIM account providing the authentication and also billing/charging. Perhaps that will be useful. I'm not sure.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I am, though, intrigued by one line of the AOL blog post:

Part of the Open Voice program is AIM Call Out.

So are we just seeing the beginning of this program? If so, that's not at all clear - from what I read - anywhere on the pages.

Overall, it's great to see AOL using SIP and it's great to see them opening up their infrastructure in some small way. I'm not sure I'd call this an "API", exactly, but let's hope that this is just the beginning and that they will do more in the months ahead. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I've still got $3.84 of calling time to use...

What do you think about this service? What's in it for developers? Is there value in having access to the AIM credentials for authentication? Or is this ultimately just yet another SIP termination plan?

P.S. For those curious, my 55-minute call into Squawk Box today cost $0.94 or about 1.7 cents a minute.

Technorati Tags: aol, aim, aim call out, aol open voice, open voice, voip, sip

Given that I write on Voxeo's blog site, I tend not to write much here about things we are doing at Voxeo.

But I thought I'd mention here one specific post I put up recently called "Skype-ifying your voice applications" which talks about the intriguing ways in which you can use our hosted platform to make voice applications accessible through a number of different mechanisms.

As shown in the diagram to the left, an application that you write and is hosted on our platform can be called into over the PSTN, over a direct SIP connection or via Skype or FWD. Likewise calls can go out to PSTN numbers or to SIP endpoints.

This flexibility is one of the many things that intrigues me about the platform (of which I knew nothing about prior to joining the company in October).

Anyway, more information is in the full blog post. I just thought I'd mention it here. (By the way, if you'd like to try it out yourself, developer accounts are free.)

Technorati Tags: voxeo, skype, sip

Nortel and "open source telephony"? Huh?

That was admittedly my thought when I received the list of who was going to be on the panel I moderated last week at VoiceCon on open source telephony. The other two panelists were obvious choices: Bill Miller was from Digium (makers of Asterisk) and Raza was from 3Com who have recently announced that they would be reselling a version of Digium's Asterisk Business Edition. Both Bill and Raza made sense to me. But Tony Pereira of Nortel? Nortel does not leap out at me as a company working with open source telephony - what in the world are they doing with it, I wondered?

It turns out that the answer is... "quite a bit!"

As Tony Pereira outlined in our panel as well as in conversations afterwards, Nortel is in the process of launching their "Software Communications Server 500" (SCS 500) targeted at small businesses and built using open source telephony software!

Interestingly, though, it does NOT use Asterisk.

Instead Nortel is using the "other" major player in open source telephony, the "sipXecs" product from SIPfoundry.org. (Previously called "sipX" but renamed "sipXecs" about a year ago.) I've not written all that much about sipX here but it certainly has been a product I've known of over the years. It started out as a PBX product from Pingtel which they then released as an open source version ("sipX" and now "sipXecs") and also had a commercial version called "SIPxchange". sipX garnered perhaps its most attention back in October 2006 when it was announced that Amazon.com would be using it for their internal phone systems (see the links on the SIPFoundry.org site). At a fundamental level, sipX provides similar functionality to Asterisk but where Asterisk is focused on being a "platform" for telephony that can work with a wide range of protocols, sipX is focused exclusively on SIP and also provides an extensive GUI management tool. (Pingtel provides a (obviously biased) comparison of sipXecs vs Asterisk on their wiki.)

From what I learned at our panel, Nortel is essentially creating their own supported version of "sipXecs" that they will sell as the "SCS 500". It will have full commercial support from Nortel. Target market will apparently be "small" businesses. No info really available on Nortel's site yet, although glimpses are visible through support documents (such as here and here(although this appears to be about an earlier 1.0 version last year)).

All in all it's to me a fascinating move by the folks at Nortel and I look forward to learning more about the SCS500 product over the next weeks and months as they launch it. It's a rather nice boost for the whole world of "open source telephony", too, to have Nortel making this move as well.

Technorati Tags: nortel, open source, asterisk, sipx, sipxecs, pingtel, voip, sip