Disruptive Telephony

What are you doing tomorrow, Friday, December 6, 2013, at 12noon US Eastern (1700 UTC)? Would you like to join in to what should be an excellent conversation about the future of broadband networks, IP communications, telecom, etc.? If so, make plans to join the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call happening live at 12 noon where the guest will be the ever-interesting Martin Geddes. The topic will be "Rethinking broadband and voice: Network Science and Hypervoice" and should prompt some vigorous discussion!

I've known Martin for many years now and have been a great fan of his analysis and writing ever since back in the days of his "Telepocalypse" blog. He's truly a great thinker in the space and is also quite an enjoyable and fun speaker to listen to. We know each other well from the early days of VoIP blogging as well as the conference circuit, and I regularly read his email newsletter and other great content he puts out. He's very active on Twitter as well.

Having said all that, I do have some fundamental disagreements with some of what he is advocating these days. I wrote about some of this disagreement last year and he and I had a good conversation both in the comments to that post and in some private exchanges.

Now, I very much agree with much of what he calls "Hypervoice" and where he sees voice going. Where we disagree is about the broadband component. This is the part that Randy outlines in the VUC page as:

He will outline some (controversial) answers that suggest we’re heading down a dead end and should consider a different technical and commercial approach.

It should be a fun conversation and I'm very much looking forward to the group discussion with Martin!

You can join the fun, too! If you want to just simply watch and listen, you can:

• view the event on the Google+ Hangout on Air Event page or on http://live.vuc.me (it will be both video and audio).
• listen to the audio stream only at Listen to MP3 stream at http://vuc.me/mp3

If you want to join in to the actual discussion, you can call in via:

• Skype audio: +990009369991484768
• SIP:[email protected]
• PSTN (phone) international numbers: http://vuc.me/voxbone

Regardless of whether you are just listening or planning to participate, it's always a good idea to join the #vuc IRC channel on Freednode.net. More info and a web interface to IRC can be found on the VUC site.

If you can't join in live, the session will be recorded in both audio and video form. You'll be able to find the archive on the VUC page and on the Google+ event page.

Please do join us! It should be a great conversation!

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Microsoft accomplished something today they haven't done for a while (at least in my memory) - they dominated the main page of Techmeme and had a great amount of the tech media talking about them.

The news, of course, is of Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's Devices and Services business and licensing of Nokia's patents and mapping services.

Is anyone truly surprised by this?

Consider:

• Microsoft is being beaten in the market by Apple and Google as everything moves to mobile. Their only hope was Nokia, who provided a hardware platform that would run Windows Phone.
• Nokia is being beaten in the market by Apple and Google as everything moves to smartphones. Their only hope was Microsoft, who provided a different mobile operating system for their devices that gave them a competitive angle.

Given those conditions, the marriage makes a certain amount of sense.

But... you only have to scroll down that Techmeme page (captured at 1:30pm US ET today) to realize how desperate a situation this is for both companies.

First, news is out that Apple is holding an event one week from today on September 10 where they are widely expected to announce new iPhones, including potentially a lower cost iPhone 5C. They are also expected to announce a release date for iOS 7 ... and who knows what else is in store.

Second, Google announced the next version 4.4 of the Android operating system, named "KitKat", along with a branding deal with Nestle, makers of the KitKat candy. The first link also points to a Google+ post from Google's Sundar Pichai where he states that over 1 billion Android devices have been activated.

Third, Amazon announced the 6th generation of their Kindle, and while it is not a phone, per se, it is a massively used mobile device. Amazon continues to learn and evolve their devices and has been rumored for years to be contemplating entering the smartphone space. Jeff Bezos thinks in the long term and so could easily be biding his time.

Meanwhile, Nokia sold a whopping 7 million Windows phones last quarter (per IDC).

Microsoft and Nokia need each other, if for no other reason then they don't really have a choice. They bet on each other... and it doesn't seem to be working out so well. Their only hope is really the "synergy" or whatever other marketing buzzwords you want to apply to the merged entity.

I agree with much of what Om Malik wrote today, "Why I think the $7.2 billion Microsoft-Nokia deal is a terrible idea", largely for the reasons I wrote earlier... while Microsoft and Nokia work to make this deal happen - and then the actual integration - Apple, Google, Amazon and others will be rolling out the next versions of their massively successful mobile devices.

Microsoft's "Strategic Rationale" document lays out a glowing plan... let's see if they can execute on it - and whether it turns out to be too little, too late. I wouldn't completely count Microsoft out, as they do have great resources and capacity, but they are definitely far behind.

As a consumer, I definitely would like to have a third major ecosystem for mobile devices. The question is whether Microsoft/Nokia can emerge as that third ecosystem...

What do you think? Smart move? A yawn? Or the proverbial rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

P.S. The most entertaining take on today's news definitely has to be the "Dear MR NOKIA!" post written in the style of the emails probably all of us have received. :-)

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Ten years ago today, on August 29, 2003, a group of entrepreneurs and developers from Denmark, Sweden and Estonia unleashed a small software program that would fundamentally and irrevocably disrupt telecommunications and just communications in general. Everything would change. Skype has a 10th anniversary blog post out today that highlights some of those changes that have been brought about by Skype, although I personally find their 9th anniversary infographic a bit more interesting because it traced back the history of Skype.

Massive Disruption

There is a GREAT amount for Skype to celebrate on it's 10th birthday. The disruption that has occurred within telecom is truly massive:

• The cost per-minute of international phone calls has been commoditized to near zero. (Indeed, how many people actually make real "phone calls" internationally anymore?)
  
  
• Telcos - and governments! - who depended upon those per-minute fees have seen almost that entire revenue stream evaporate, or at least show that it is rapidly fading away. Economic disruption on a massive scale!
  
  
• Skype came to be a prime example of how "over-the-top (OTT)" apps could exist on top of the existing telecom networks - and take both marketshare and revenue from those networks.
  
  
• Skype introduced the masses to high quality audio and helped people understand that the "phone quality" they were used to was actually really poor quality and that they could do so much better... that they could have the experience of "being there" with someone else.
  
  
• Video calls, while they had been around for quite some time in many other apps and devices, were made available to everyone for free using the easy Skype user interface (and were helped by the rise of ubiquitous webcams embedded in laptops and mobile devices). An entire industry around video-conferencing was disrupted through the simple combination of Skype and webcams.
  
  
• Long-distance audio and video collaboration became extremely routine. Think of the thousands of podcasts that use Skype between contributors? (Such as my own Blue Box or the FIR podcast to which I contribute.) Think of the number of video news reports you have seen coming in over Skype... or the guests coming in to talk shows.
  
  
• Skype demonstrated that you could have secure, encrypted phone calls and IM chats, at least with the pre-Microsoft peer-to-peer architecture. They enabled those of us advocating for more secure phone connections to be able to go to other vendors and say "Really? You can't do secure calls... but Skype can?
  
  
• Speaking of that p2p architecture, it, too, was something new and fascinating... perhaps one of the most innovative things to hit telecom in ages... that showed that you could think differently about how to connect endpoints.
  
  
• Curiously, Skype also demonstrated the incredible power of persistent group chats in creating a system that enabled people to continually participate in conversations, even as they came and went from the network. Skype chats still to this day are better that most every other system out there.
  
  
• Skype showed the power - at least in their earlier versions - of focusing on creating an extremely simple user interface and focusing on the user experience. The simplicity of using Skype was a large part of why so many people started to use it. That and the fact that Skype "just works" from behind most firewalls and in most network environments.
  
  
• Along the way, Skype built up a massive directory of users... estimated at 300 million now. Most people I interact with do have a "Skype ID" and those names are exchanged at conferences, printed on business cards, listed on websites and generally made available.
  
  
• Skype became a verb. It's routine now to say: "Let me skype you.", "Can you skype me?", "Let's skype", etc. We don't "call", we "skype".

At a fundamental level, Skype rocked the world of telecom and enabled so much more communication to happen all over the world. As a frequent global traveler, Skype has been such an incredible means by which I can keep in daily touch with my family back at home.

Skype has indeed MUCH to celebrate on it's 10th birthday.

And Yet...

And yet as Skype turns ten, I find myself wondering what the next 10 years will be like... and whether Skype will remain relevant.

You see, that list of disruptions I wrote above is pretty much the same list I wrote about two years ago on Skype's 8th anniversary, just with updated numbers.

What happened in the last two years?

Last year on the 9th anniversary I was asking the "what comes next?" question and Jim Courtney was similarly saying "whither Skype?" Phil Wolff was asking "is Skype boring?", a theme I picked up on for my own post.

Fast-forward a year and the questions are still relevant. Skype is no longer the "bright shiny object" that so many of us were so incredibly passionate about. Indeed, for so many years Skype was the single biggest topic I wrote about here on Disruptive Telephony. There was a reason that my phone number became associated with Skype and I was getting all sorts of calls for Skype's corporate office.

And yet... how many posts did I write here on this blog about Skype in the last year since the 9th anniversary?

One.

Just one post... and at that a short and simple post about a new Skype version being available for the iPhone/iPad.

That's it.

Now, there's a larger issue that I'm simply not writing as much here on Disruptive Telephony as I used to, given that my energy these days is focused so much more on the worlds of IPv6, DNSSEC and Internet routing. But still... had something struck me as exciting or useful about Skype, I probably would have written about it.

I still use Skype each and every day - or at least every work day - and it is a critical part of my day when I'm traveling. But the reality is now for me:

Skype is just a tool.

That's it. A tool to be used. A tool to be expected to be there.

In one way, that's a massive success for Skype, in that millions of people now just expect Skype to be there and to be able to help them communicate.

But it's no longer anything to get excited about. It's a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.

In a chat earlier today about this feeling shared by a number of us, Phil Wolff, long-time editor of the Skype Journal, said this (reprinted here with his permission):

Skype is boring, like electricity. The BBC interview that came out today where Skype said they'd done proof-of-concept 3D video chat in the lab says it all.

They are busy working on customer acquisition (the next billion users), usage (more conversation per user per month),  and more Microsoft integration (% of MSFT products with Skype inside, a la Outlook.com).

They are busy getting more than 2000 employees to work together, nearly half on the job less than a year.

They are figuring out how to make money when the price of minutes - even international PSTN minutes - are falling faster than Skype can pick up share.

They are learning how to stay relevant in a universe where talk is a feature anyone can add to any app for free/cheap.

Bigger scale usually means innovation on plumbing moves faster than innovation on user experience. Skype hasn't offered up new experiences as shiny as "now with video!" in a long time.

Phil's second-to-last comment is particularly relevant as we think about WebRTC and how much it has opened up the world of voice, video and chat to so many more developers.

What Could Have Been...

Stuart Henshall, an original founder of the Skype Journal and someone promoting Skype for pretty much all of its 10 years, said something similar in a post today, "Skype’s First Decade – A Wasted Opportunity. He sums up rather well how I think some of us who were early adopters of Skype now feel:

Today Skype is a feature, part of Microsoft. While it may generate substantial dollars it isn’t the company it could have been. Skype was one of those once in a lifetime products that today could have been revolutionizing how the world evolves. It was once secure, outside the reach of the NSA. It had the network and the membership so it could have been a Facebook, or a Twitter. It had strong developer support in the early days and it’s own store. Most of us still use Skype some of the time today. It is still the most universal free calling solution. It works across platforms including the PSTN, PC, Mobile. And yet Skype today is a brand without a “soul”. That’s what you get when you sell-out one too many times and lose a passion for changing the world.

Ten years in, Skype went from being the scrappy, interesting, exciting underdog challenging the telecom infrastructure... to in fact becoming that telecom infrastructure to the point where they can't innovate as much as they once did because they do have such an enormous installed base.

Ten years ago, Skype was the disruptor - now the question is if Skype will be disrupted by all the new entrants. Maybe Skype still has some innovation in store and may surprise us... but I'm doubtful at this point.

There is a lot to celebrate in 10 years of Skype, but the question is really whether Skype is today coasting on the innovation of those earlier years and now the increased integration with Microsoft products.

As Stuart wrote:

In Internet years like dog years Skype has had a good run. Still it’s aged some and I know it’s no longer my primary communication method. If I had one wish I’d love to see another Skype P2P like system take root although this time on mobile resetting the rules for the telecom stack. That’s still something I could promote.

I, too, would like to see some system that was truly innovative and brought back many of those innovations of how Skype used to be - and did once again truly disrupt telephony as we know it.

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Want to learn more about the Opus codec and why it is so important? As I mentioned at the end of my last post about why Opus matters, there will be a special presentation about Opus as part of the IETF 87 Technical Plenary happening in about 2 hours starting at around 17:45-18:00 in Berlin, Germany (Central European Summer Time, UTC+2, 6 hours off of US Eastern time).

There are three options for watching and participating live:

• using a WebRTC-capable browser (latest editions of Chrome and Firefox) and connecting to: http://www.meetecho.com/ietf87/tech_plenary
• listening to the audio stream at for either Potsdam 1 or Potsdam 3 (the plenary is in the combined room and I don't know which stream will be used)
• watching a video live stream at: https://new.livestream.com/internetsociety/ietf87techplenary

The technical plenary begins at 17:40 but there are some other reports before the Opus section. The agenda can be found online and includes:

1. IAB Chair Report
2. IRTF Chair Report
3. RSE and RSOC Chair Report
4. Technical Topic: Opus Codec

a. Introduction
b. Overview of Opus
c. Testing
d. History of Opus in the IETF
e. Opus Deployment Panel
f. Future Work

5. Open Mic

I suspect that the Opus session will begin closer to 18:00 local time, but you can tune in around 17:40 to see the start of the session.

It should be quite an interesting session!

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What makes the Opus codec so interesting? Why is there such a buzz about Opus right now? If you are not in telecom or doing anything with audio, why should you even remotely care about Opus?

In a word...

Innovation!

And because Opus has the potential to let us communicate with each other across the Internet with a richer and more natural sound. You will be able to hear people or music or presenters with much more clarity and more like you are right there with them.

Opus can help build a better user experience across the Internet.

You see, the reality is that today "real-time communication" using voice and video is increasingly being based on top of the Internet Protocol (IP), whether that communication is happening across the actual Internet or whether it is happening within private networks. If you've used Skype, Google+ Hangouts, any voice-over-IP (VoIP) softphones, any of the new WebRTC apps or any of the mobile smartphone apps that do voice or video, you've already been using IP-based real-time communication.

Dropping The Shackles Of The Legacy PSTN

Part of the beauty of the move to IP is that we no longer have to worry about the constraints imposed upon telecom by the legacy Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Chief among those constraints is the requirement to use only part of the sound frequencies we can hear. You all know the "sound" of the telephone - and you hear it in any movie or TV show when someone is using the phone. It's that certain "sound" that we are all used to... that's what the "phone" sounds like.

In technical terms, we call this "narrowband" audio and it has a frequency range of only 300-3400 Hz.

There are historical reasons for this limitation in telecom, but moving to IP-based communications removes those limits. With VoIP we can use what is called "wideband" audio to have a full rich sound to our voice or video call.

Have you had a really good Skype connection with someone where it sounded like they were almost right there in the room with you?

That is wideband audio.

The Codec Problem

Now, for voice or video over IP to work, you need to use something called a "codec" to translate the sound of your voice to digital bits and carry them across the network (and to do the opposite for whomever you are speaking with). There are MANY audio codecs out there and they come in all sorts of flavors and with all different kinds of capabilities. The problem has been that there hasn't been a codec that:

1. is optimized for interactive Internet applications;
2. is published by a recognized standards organization; and
3. can be widely implemented and easily distributed at little or no cost.

In particular that last point about the cost of licensing, especially for wideband codecs, often caused developers to shy away from giving us the rich voice quality that we can now have with IP. Or, in the case of companies like Skype or Google, they went out and bought companies who created wideband codecs so that they could use those codecs in their products. (See my story from 2010 about Google buying GIPS.)

Now there are free codecs out there that developers can use. For narrowband, there has been the ubiquitous G.711 which provides an IP version of "PSTN audio". There have been many others, including notably Speex.

But the struggle has been that there hasn't been a widely accepted "G.711 for wideband" equivalent that developers can just bake into their products and start using. Instead there have been a number of different, incompatible codecs used in different products.

Enter Opus...

So to address these points, back in 2010, engineers within the IETF got together and formed the CODEC Working Group to come up with a codec that could meet these requirements and become the ubiquitous wideband codec used across the Internet. Skype was involved early on through contributing their SILK codec. The folks at Xiph.org contributed their CELT codec. People from many other companies got involved and there were huge technical discussions on the mailing lists and at IETF meetings.

And it worked... the Opus codec was standardized in RFC 6716 in September 2012.

You can read all about the codec at:

http://www.opus-codec.org/

The key points are at the beginning:

Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but is also intended for storage and streaming applications.

Open, highly-versatile... and royalty-free.

At that site there is some great information, including:

• examples of Opus compared to other codecs
• a comparison of Opus to other audio codecs with a variety of charts and graphics
• a presentation by Jean-Marc Valin that dives way down into the technical details
• documentation and sample libraries

There is also a FAQ and many other great pieces of information.

So Why Does Opus Matter?

Opus matters because it lets developers focus on creating a high quality user experience and not having to worry about codec incompatibilities and licensing issues.

Opus matters because it lets developers easily create applications with high quality audio. They can just start using available libraries and communicating with other applications and devices using a common wideband codec.

Opus matters because it can work in very low-bandwidth environments enabling real-time communications across Internet connections that might not previously have supported such communications. As we start to get more Internet connectivity out to the 5 billion people not yet on the Internet, the ability to work over different kinds of connections is critical.

Opus matters because it can help foster innovation in applications and the user experience. Opus is the default audio codec for WebRTC, and so all the zillion new WebRTC-based apps and startups are already beginning with a far superior audio experience than we've had before.

Opus matters because it will enable even more ways that we can connect with family members or friends and have the experience of being "right there". It can help musicians collaborate better across the Internet. It can help podcasters and journalists deliver higher quality interviews across the Internet. It can, in the best conditions, give us that rich audio experience we get when we are right with someone - even though we may be thousands of miles away.

Opus can help us deliver on the potential of the Internet to create more powerful user experiences and to help us better communicate.

THAT is why Opus matters.

Learn More At Monday's IETF 87 Technical Plenary

To understand more about the current status of Opus, who is using it and where it is going, the IETF 87 Technical Plenary on this coming Monday evening in Berlin, Germany, will have a special segment focused on Opus that will include a number of people involved with the Opus work. The agenda for the session can be found at:

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/iab/trac/wiki/IETF-87

It is happening from 17:40-19:40 Berlin time, which is Central European Summer Time, which is currently UTC+2 and 6 hours ahead of where I live in US Eastern time. If you can't be there in person, there are several remote options:

• using a WebRTC-capable browser (latest editions of Chrome and Firefox) and connecting to: http://www.meetecho.com/ietf87/tech_plenary
• listening to the audio stream at for either Potsdam 1 or Potsdam 3 (the plenary is in the combined room and I don't know which stream will be used)
• watching a video live stream at: http://new.livestream.com/internetsociety (Look for the "Technical Plenary" event)

If you are unable to watch the meeting in real time it will be archived for later viewing.

The first option above to listen to the session using the Opus codec (and WebRTC!) is a very cool one. The panel also includes people who have actually implemented Opus including people from Google and also Emil Ivov from the Jitsi softphone. Their insight into what they did will be great to hear.

What's Next?

So if Opus is so great, how do you get it?

Well, if you are using any of the WebRTC apps popping up all across the Internet, you are already using Opus. As I noted above, the Jitsi softphone supports Opus. In an interesting bit of synchronicity, I noticed that Michael Graves wrote today about the Blink softphone now supporting Opus. More and more communications apps are starting to implement Opus.

If you are a developer of communications apps or services (or a product manager), you can look at how to incorporate Opus into your application or service. There is documentation and software available to help with the process, and many people are out there who can help.

If you are a user of IP-based communications apps or services, ask the company or vendor behind those services when they will support Opus. See if you can get it on their radar as something to implement.

And regardless of what you do with audio, let people know that this new way of communicating exists - help spread the word about Opus - let people know that audio across the Internet can be even better than it has been to date.

As you can tell, I'm excited about the potential - and very much looking forward to seeing what happens as Opus gets more widely deployed.

What do you think? If you are a telecom developer, or a vendor of such services, have you implemented Opus already? Are you thinking about it? (and if not, why not?)

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Do "smart" parking meters really need phone numbers? Does every "smart meter" installed by electric utilities need a telephone number? Does every new car with a built-in navigation system need a phone number? Does every Amazon Kindle (and similar e-readers) really need its own phone number?

In the absence of an alternative identifier, the answer seems to be a resounding "yes" to all of the above.

At the recent SIPNOC 2013 event, U.S. Federal Communications Commission CTO Henning Schulzrinne gave a presentation (slides available) about "Transitioning the PSTN to IP" where he made a point about the changes around telephone numbers and their uses (starting on slide 14) and specifically spoke about this use of phone numbers for devices (slide 20). While his perspective is obviously oriented to North America and country code +1, the trends he identifies point to a common problem:

What do we use as an application-layer identifier for Internet-connected devices?

In a subsequent conversation, Henning indicated that one of the area codes seeing the largest amount of requests for new phone numbers is one in Detroit - because of the automakers need to provision new cars with navigation systems such as OnStar that need an identifier.

Why Not IPv6 Addresses?

Naturally, doing the work I do promoting IPv6 deployment, my first reaction was of course:

"Can't we just give all those devices IPv6 addresses and be done with it?"

The answer turns out to be a bit more complex. Yes, we can give all those devices IPv6 addresses (and almost certainly will as we are simply running out of IPv4 addresses), but:

1. Vendors Don't Want To Be Locked In To Infrastructure - Say you are a utility and you deploy 1,000 smart meters in homes in a city that all connect back to a central server to provide their information. They can connect over the Internet using mobile 3G/4G networks and in this case they could use an IPv6 address or any other identifier. They don't need to use a telephone number when they squirt their data back to the server. However, the use of IP addresses as identifiers then ties the devices to a specific Internet Service Provider. Should the utility wish to change to a different provider of mobile Internet connectivity, they would now have to reconfigure all their systems with the new IPv6 addresses of the devices. Yes, they could obtain their own block of "Provider Independent (PI)" IPv6 addresses, but now they add the issue of having to have their ISP route their PI address block across that provider's network.

2. Some Areas Don't Have Internet Connectivity - In some places where smart meters are being deployed, or where cars travel, there simply isn't any 3G/4G Internet connectivity and so the devices have to connect back to their servers using traditional "2G" telephone connections. They need a phone number because they literally have to "phone home".

While we might argue that #2 is a transitory condition while Internet access continues to expand, the first issue of separating the device/application identifier from the underlying infrastructure is admittedly a solid concern.

Telephone Numbers Work Well

The challenge for any new identifier is that telephone numbers work rather well. They are:

• easily understood - people in general are very comfortable with and used to phone numbers (assuming they have access to phone networks)
• ubiquitous - phone numbers are everywhere and are available globally
• well defined - they have a fixed format that is well known and standardized
• easy to provision - they can be entered and configured very easily, including via keypads, speech recognition and more

For all these reasons, it is understandable that device vendors have chosen phone numbers as identifiers.

The Billing / Provisioning Conundrum

The last bullet above points to a larger issue that will be a challenge for any new identifier. Utilities, telcos and other industries have billing and provisioning systems that in some cases are decades old. They may have been initially written 20 or 30 (or more) years ago and then simply added on to in the subsequent years. These systems work with telephone numbers because that's what they know.

Changing them to use new identifiers may be difficult or in some cases near impossible.

So Why Change?

So if telephone numbers work so well and legacy systems are so tied to those numbers, why consider changing?

Several reasons come to mind:

1. Security - There really is none with telephone numbers. As Henning noted in his presentation and I've written about on the VOIPSA blog in the past, "Caller ID" is easily spoofable. In fact, there are many services you can find through a simple search that will let you easily do this for a small fee. If you operate your own IP-PBX you can easily configure your "Caller ID" to be whatever you want and some VoIP service providers may let you send that Caller ID on through to the recipient.

2. OTT mobile apps moving to desktop (and vice versa) - Many of the "over the top (OTT)" apps that have sprung up in the iOS and Android devices for voice, video or chat communication started out using the mobile devices phone number as an identifier. It's a simple and easy solution as the device has the number already. We're seeing some of those apps, though, such as Viber, now move from the mobile space to the desktop. Does the phone number really make sense there? Similarly, Skype made the jump from desktop to mobile several years ago and used its own "Skype ID" identifier - no need for a phone number there.

3. WebRTC - As I've written before, I see WebRTC as a fundamental disruption to telecommunications on so many different levels. It is incredibly powerful to have browser-based communication via voice, video or chat... in any web browser... on any platform including ultimately mobile devices. But for WebRTC to work, you do need to have some way to identify the person you are calling. "Identity" is a key component here - and right now many of the WebRTC systems being developed are all individual silos of communication (which in many cases may in fact be fine for their specific use case). WebRTC doesn't need phone numbers - but some kind of widely-accepted application-layer identifier could be helpful.

4. Global applications - Similarly, this rise of WebRTC and OTT apps has no connection to geography. I can use any of these apps in any country where I can get Internet connectivity (and yes, am not being blocked by the local government). I can also physically move from country to country either temporarily or permanently. Yet if I do so I can't necessarily take my phone number with me. If I move to the US from the UK, I'll probably want to get a new mobile device - or at least a new SIM card - and will wind up with a new phone number. Now I have to go back into the apps to change the identifier used by the app to be that of my new phone number.

5. Internet of Things / M2M - As noted in the intro to this post, we're connecting more and more devices to the Internet. We've got "connected homes" where every light switch and electrical circuit is getting a sensor and all appliances are wired into centralized systems. Devices are communicating with other devices and applications. We talk about this as the "Internet of Things (IoT)" or "machine-to-machine (M2M)" communication. And yes, these devices all need IP addresses - and realistically will need to have IPv6 addresses. In some cases that may be all that is needed for provisioning and operation. In other cases a higher-level identifier may be needed.

6. Challenges in obtaining phone numbers - We can't, yet, just go obtain telephone numbers from a service like we can for domain names. Obtaining phone numbers is a more involved process that, for instance, may be beyond many WebRTC startups (although they can use services that will get them phone numbers). One of the points Henning made in this SIPNOC presentation was the FCC is actually asking for feedback on this topic. Should they open up phone numbers within the US to be more easily obtainable? But even if this were done within the US, how would it work globally?

7. Changes in user behavior - Add to all of this the fact that most of us have stopped remembering phone numbers and instead simply pull them up from contact / address books. We don't need a phone number any more... we just want to call someone, the underlying identifier is no longer critical.

All of these are reasons why a change to a new application-layer identifier would be helpful.

So What Do We Do?

What about SIP addresses that look like email addresses? What about other OpenID or other URL-based schemes? What about service-specific identifiers? What about using domain names and DNS?

Henning had a chart in his slides that compared these different options ("URL owned" is where you own the domain):

The truth is there is no easy solution.

Telephone numbers are ubiquitous, understood and easy-to-use.

A replacement identifier needs to be all of that... plus secure and portable and able to adapt to new innovations and uses.

Oh... and it has to actually be deployable within our lifetime.

Will there be only one identifier as we have with telephone numbers?

Probably not... but in the absence of one common identifier we'll see what we are already seeing - many different islands of identity for initiating real-time communications calls:

• Skype has its own proprietary identity system for calls
• Apple has its own proprietary identity system for FaceTime calls
• Google has its own proprietary identity system for Hangouts
• Facebook has its own proprietary identity system used by some RTC apps
• Every WebRTC startup seems to be using its own proprietary identity system.
• A smaller community of people who care about open identifiers are actually using SIP addresses and/or Jabber IDs (for XMPP/Jingle).

And in the meantime, Amazon is still assigning phone numbers to each of its Kindles, the utilities are assigning phone numbers to smart meters and automakers are embedding phone numbers in cars.

How can we move beyond telephone numbers as identifiers? Or are we already doing so but into proprietary walled gardens? Or are we stuck with telephone numbers until they just gradually fade away?

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RELATED NOTES: Some additional pointers are worth mentioning:

• The Internet Society (my employer) has a team focused on the broader subject of online privacy and identity (beyond simply the telephone numbers I mention here) and the links and documents there may be of interest.
  
  
• There's a new Internet Draft out, draft-peterson-secure-origin-ps, that does an excellent job on the problem statement around "secure origin identification" as it relates to VoIP based on the SIP protocol and why there are security issues with what we think of as "Caller ID".
  
  
• Chris Kranky recently argued that telcos are missing the opportunity of leveraging telephone numbers as identifiers in the data world.

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You can listen to an audio version of this post on SoundCloud:

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Want to hear the sound of Google further disrupting the world of telecom? If you have a Google Voice number and also use Google+ (as I do) with the Hangouts feature enabled, you'll soon be hearing this new sound if you haven't already.

An Unexpected Ringing

Yesterday a random PR person called the phone number in the sidebar of this blog to pitch me on why I should write about her client. This phone number is through Google Voice and I knew by the fact that my cell phone and Skype both started ringing simultaneously that someone was calling that number.

But as I was deciding whether or not to actually answer the call, I realized that there was another "ringing" sound coming from my computer that I had not heard before. Flipping quickly through my browser windows I found my Google+ window where this box appeared at the top of the "Hangouts" sidebar on the right:

Now, of course, I HAD to answer the call, even though I knew from experience that most calls to that number are PR pitches. I clicked the "Answer" button and in a moment a regular "Hangout" window appeared, complete with my own video, and with an audio connection to the phone call.

The PR person and I then had a pleasant conversation where I rather predictably determined quickly that she'd probably never actually readthis blog or she would have known that I've never written about her client's type of software. Be that as it may, the audio quality of the call was great and the call went on without any issues.

A subsequent test showed me that I also had access to the dialpad had I needed to send any button presses (for instance, in interacting with an IVR or robocall):

The only real "issue" with the phone call was that when I pressed the "Hang up" button I wound up still being in the Hangouts window with this message displayed:

The irony of course is that that phone number was never in the "video call"... at least via video. Regardless, I was now alone in the video call with my camera still running. I needed to press the "Exit" button in the upper right corner of the Hangouts window. Outside of that, the user experience for the phone call was fine.

The Future Of Google Voice?

Like many people interested in what Google is doing with Google+, I had read the announcement from Google of the new streams and Hangouts features last week and had gone ahead and installed the iOS Hangouts app onto my iPhone to try it out (marking Google's entrance into the OTT VoIP space). But nowhere in there had I seen that this connection was going to happen between Google Voice and Hangouts. I'd seen speculation in various media sites, but nothing direct.

So it was a bit of a surprise when it happened... particularly because I'd done nothing to enable it. Google had simply connected my Google Voice number to my Google+ account.

I admit that it is a pleasant surprise... although I do wish for the sake of my laptop's CPU that I could somehow configure it to NOT launch myvideo when I get an audio-only call. Yes, I can just go stop my video, but that's an annoying extra step.

It seems, though, that another feature removed from Hangouts, at least temporarily, was the ability to make outbound phone calls. Given that all signs of Google Voice were removed from Google's interface and replaced by "Hangouts", this has predictably upset people who used the service, particularly those who paid for credits to make outgoing calls. There does seem to be a way to restore the old Chat interfacefor those who want to make outgoing calls so that is at least a temporary workaround.

Google's Nikhyl Singhal posted to Google+ about the new Hangouts featuresstating these two points:

1) Today's version of Hangouts doesn't yet support outbound calls on the web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We're working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.

2) Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.

I'm sure that won't satisfy those who are troubled by the change, but it will be interesting to see where they go with Hangouts and voice communication.

(Note: the comment thread on Nikhyl Singhal's Google+ post makes for very interesting reading as people are sounding off there about what they'd like to see in a Hangouts / Google Voice merger.)

Will Hangouts Do SIP?

Of course, my big question will be... will Hangouts let us truly move beyond the traditional telephony of the PSTN and into the world of IP-based communications where can connect directly over the Internet? Google Voice once briefly let us receive VoIP calls using the SIP protocol - can Hangouts finally deliver on this capability? (And let us make outbound SIP calls as well?)

What do you think? Do you like this new linkage of Google Voice PSTN numbers to your Google+ account?

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UPDATE #1 - I have written a follow-up post about XMPP support in Hangouts and confusion over what level of XMPP/Jabber support is still in Google+ Hangouts.

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Audio commentary related to this post can be found in TDYR episode #009 on SoundCloud:

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In about 15 minutes, at 5:30pm US Eastern At around 6:00pm US EDT, Henning Schulzrinne, CTO of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be speaking on "The End of Plain Old Telephone System (POTS): Transitioning the PSTN to IP" at the technical plenary of the 86th IETF meeting happening this week in Orlando, Florida.  You can listen or watch here:

• Audio stream – either Caribbean 3 or Caribbean 4
• Jabber chat: [email protected]
• Meetecho conferencing  (webinar)

Henning's slides are also available for download.

It should be quite an interesting session!

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This week the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative passed a HUGE milestone in adding a real-time communications layer to the Web with achieving interoperability between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Google and Mozilla celebrated with a pair of blog posts:

• Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling!
• Hello Chrome, it's Firefox calling!

They also published the video I've embedded below. On the surface, the video doesn't appear terribly exciting: two guys having a basic conversation over video. But consider this:

• The video conversation was initiated from within web browsers.
• There were NO plugins used... no Flash, Java or anything else.
• The entire conversation was securely encrypted.
• The call used "wideband audio" (also called "HD audio") to provide a much richer experience that far exceeds any kind of conversation you can have on traditional telecom and mobile networks.
• The call did not have to involve any external telecom networks or services and could have been initiated directly from one browser to the other. (I don't know exactly how they set up this call.)

And perhaps most importantly:

Any web developer can now create this kind of real-time communication using a few lines of JavaScript and other web programming languages.

As I'm said before, WebRTC will fundamentally disrupt telecommunications and add a real-time communications layer to the Internet that is based on open standards and is interoperable between systems. Creating applications that use voice, video and chat is being removed from the realm of "telecom developers" and made truly accessible to the zillions of "web developers" out there.

Congrats to the Google and Mozilla teams... this is a huge step forward for WebRTC!

You can see the video below... and if you are a developer interested in playing with WebRTC further, both the Google and Mozilla blog posts offer pointers to source code. The team over at Voxeo Labs also released a new version of their Phono SDK yesterday with WebRTC support that may be helpful as well.

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UPDATE #1: The discussion threads on Hacker News related to the Google and Chrome blog posts make for quite interesting reading and provide many additional links for exploration:

• Hacker News thread about Google blog post (long thread about relation to Skype)
• Hacker News thread about Mozilla blog post

UPDATE #2: Over at Forbes, Anthony Wing Kosner weighed in with a similar piece and proved he can write far more poetic headlines than mine: Google And Mozilla Strike The Golden Spike On The Tracks Of The Real Time Web

UPDATE #3: And over on No Jitter, Tsahi Levant-Levi gets the "wet blanket" award for dampening enthusiasm with his post: WebRTC Browser Interoperability: Heroic. Important. And...Expected

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Fascinating news today out of Oracle that they have purchased Acme Packet in a transaction estimated to be around $2 billion US. For those of you not really tracking the VoIP security space, Acme Packet is probably the world's largest vendor of "session border controllers (SBCs)", devices that are used to securely and reliable interconnect VoIP networks. SBCs also provide a very important role in helping with interoperability of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling between the SIP products and networks of different vendors.

As Andy Abramson writes, the fascinating aspect of this acquisition is this:

This is an interesting grab by one of the tech world's true giants because it sqaurly puts Oracle into a game where they begin to compete with the giants of telecom, many of whom run Oracle software to drive things including SBC's, media gateways and firewall technology that's sold.

This acquisition does put Oracle VERY firmly into the telecom sector at a carrier / large enterprise level, as Acme Packet's products are widely used within that tier of companies. As the news release notes:

"The company's solutions are deployed by more than 1,900 service providers and enterprises globally, including 89 of world's top 100 communications companies."

Acme Packet has also long been recognized as a leader by analyst firms such as Gartner. People from Acme Packet, in particular Hadriel Kaplan, have also been extremely involved with industry efforts such as the SIP Forum and standards activity in the IETF.

As far as integration, Oracle already has a wide array of "communications" products, including several unified communications (UC) products that could potentially interact with Acme Packet products extremely well. Beyond all of that, though, this acquisition will have Oracle being a strong player in providing telecom infrastructure as we continue to collectively move to basing all our communications on top of IP.

Congratulations to my friends at Acme Packet and Oracle... and I wish them the best as they proceed down the path to completing this acquisition.

More information here:

• Oracle news release
• Oracle page about the acquisition
• A letter from Acme Packet CEO

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