Disruptive Telephony

(Continuing my effort to flush my "queue of things I want to blog about"...)

Some time back, I stumbled upon this post "Top Ten: Most underrated VoIP Contributors".  Yeah, okay, so I liked the list because it had my employer on it, and mentioned the work Mitel has done with VOIPSA, which is really the activities that I do. So, yes, it's nice to be recognized and nice to hear the kind words about Mitel's contributions.  Some of the other people on the list were also interesting as well, so it was good to be introduced to others whom I haven't read.

Those who know me well are aware that one of my hot buttons is my belief that one of the greatest disruptive potentials of VoIP is to fundamentally change the sound of telephony. With VoIP, we are no longer constrained to the 3.5kHz frequency range of the PSTN... I'll save my wideband rant for another day, but tonight I'll just point you over to Rich Tehrani's post "DiamondWare in HD", which talks about the power of DiamondWare's "3-D" stereo technology.  As Rich describes in his blog entry:

Once on the call I was able to easily position the three callers all around me. One could be directly ahead of me and one on either side. The computer can automatically position participants as well if you so choose.

When everyone was in place, Keith had one coworker start counting from 1 and another reciting the alphabet from letter “A.” While these two participants spoke, Keith proceeded to speak with me and the strangest thing happened. I could focus on anyone I wanted and was able to absorb what all three participants were uttering.

It was an amazing experience and the sound quality was beyond compare. I could hear everything in a conversation and more. A sniffle. Lips moving, etc. I swear I could almost hear eyes blinking.

I've not yet personally tried DiamondWare's stuff (although I've met CEO Keith Weiner several times at various shows and he's offered to take me through it) but I am aware that it's also being used in the SecondLife voice beta trial (also another topic for another day).  To me I just think this kind of thing (and publicity by folks like Rich) is great to see... with VoIP (or IP Telephony or whatever we want to call it today) we have the very real capability to have far better audio communication than we've ever had with "traditional" telephony.  It's here now already (just ask a Skype user, but that's yet another topic)... but companies like DiamondWare are showing us just how much farther the boundaries can be pushed.  Cool stuff!

In my incredibly long queue of things I've wanted to write about for the past few weeks, one item was the Mitel news release about making a direct SIP connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging. The cool part is that you can just use our basic 3300 ICP communications platform (or IP-PBX, or whatever you want to call it) and connect it directly into a Microsoft Exchange Server to use the Exchange Server for a unified inbox (email, voicemail, fax, etc.).  No other boxes or gateways necessary.  Just a nice, standard SIP trunk.  As a long-time proponent of open standards and general "standards geek", it really can't get much better.  It's great to see.

Through a link from Phil Wolff, I learned that Bruce Stewart has posted at the Emerging Telephony blog about someone turning an antique phone into a Skype phone (which actually points to a post on the MAKE Blog).  Okay, so as best I can tell, it's really a glorified USB headset, but I admit that the geek side of me finds it rather a fun idea.  Bruce links to a page on the Instructables site that has more pictures and instructions. 

(I'd note that while the articles say that it is an "antique Skype phone", it really looks to me like it's a USB headset, so it could really work with any VoIP program.)

Fun stuff...

 So you'd like your SIP phones to all work together, eh?  And you'd like your SIP phone from Vendor A to work with the SIP phone of Vendor B and yet give you the business functionality that you used to have in the PBX from Vendor C?

Good luck.

Yes, they will (or should!) all work together for basic call functions, but if you want to do more than just the very basics, you rapidly wind up in the realm of incompatible SIP implementations.  Different vendors support different RFCs... or interpret RFCs differently.  It's a challenge to go beyond basic functionality.

Enter "BLISS", one of the latest working groups coming out of  the IETF. It stands for "Basic Level of Interoperability for SIP Services" and, as noted in its charter, the intent is to define a basic set of functionality ("minimum interoperability requirements") to allow SIP endpoints to interoperate on 4 specific telephony services:

1. Bridged/Shared Line Appearance (BLA/SLA)
2. Call Park/Pickup
3. Do Not Disturb (DND)
4. Call Completion to Busy Signal/Call Completion on No Reply

More details are on the charter page.  These are just the initial four issues chosen to be addressed and Internet-Draft documents are already circulating on some of the items.  I see it as a necessary group if we are to actually have real interoperability between SIP endpoints, and I commend the group organizers on scoping it to an initial 4 issues (rather than making it wide open).

If you work with SIP, I'd encourage you to check out the BLISS web site, read the "problem statement" and charter... and then join the mailing list (and please read the archives to see what's happened so far).  I've joined the list... and would encourage others to consider doing so.  If we do want real SIP interoperability, we need to hammer some of these things out.

For more information, you can download the set of slides presented by Jonathan Rosenberg of Cisco at the IETF 68 meeting stating the problem and why the BLISS working group is needed.  To make it easy to see them, I'm going to embed a SlideShare version here:

See you on the list...

So with the release yesterday of RFC4824, The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS), one has to wonder... which of the vendors will be the first to attempt to implement VoIP transmission in this medium?     I think it would make for a rather slower conversation, but it would certainly be intriguing.  Hmmm... I wonder which would be faster - this method?  Or the avian method defined in RFC2549.  Probably this one, methinks. 

Oh, you have to love a standards body with a sense of humor...

First, let me state that I like the VoIP News website.  They've been producing a lot of great articles that we pretty regularly talk about over on Blue Box.  Their "50 Most Influential People in VoIP" was a great catalog of the people really moving VOIP forward. Heck, one of their writers even interviewed me and I was quite pleased with the resulting article (something that definitely is not always true).

However, I was rather annoyed to read their "Hacking PBX: 20 Tips and Tricks to Optimize your Business Phone System" article that came out yesterday.  Not because of the content, which was (mostly) actually quite good, but more because the title didn't at all line up with the reality.  Here's the reality:

It's not 20 tips and tricks... it's 15 tips/tricks and 5 advertisements.

Which is too bad, really.  I was really enjoying reading down through the article because these are all good things to have as part of a PBX system (and pretty much all are available through solutions from my employer, Mitel, although we haven't integrated GPS as mentioned in #9 :-).  Everything was cool and useful up through #15...

... and then suddenly with #16 it switched from "tips and tricks to optimize your business phone system" to "here are 5 PBX solutions that you might want to use".  Three of them being open source, of course, (although they might be interested to note that the lead FreeSWITCH developer doesn't view the system as a PBX but more as a core soft-switch) and then two other commercial PBXs being Evolution and Switchvox.  Now I have no real issue with Evolution or Switchvox... in fact, I don't really know much at all about them.  But I guess it comes down to... why them?  There are a ton of companies entering the low-end IP PBX space these days... why these two?  Did they pay for placement?  Were they just the favorites of whomever was writing the article?  What about all the others in the space... both new entrants and existing companies who provide PBX solutions as well?  And for those two, are the $895 and $995 prices truly representative of a system price?  It reads like it's just the server... what about phones?  Licenses for things like voicemail?  What's the real cost?

My annoyance came really at that...  if they had stopped it at 15, I would be writing here about what a great article it was and how these are definitely all things that you should look for in an IP PBX.   Instead, I'm trashing the article for having an inaccurate headline.

I would still suggest you read the article... at least up to #15.  And I'd suggest to VoIP News that they might want to be sure their headlines do in fact reflect the reality of what they are covering.

Jon Arnold tagged me.  Of course, we really have to blame Luca for starting it and Jeff, phoneboy and others for pushing it along - and Moshe Maeir for adding the phone angle. I don't usually like to play the meme games... but it's Friday, it's lunchtime, I have a horrid cough and generally feel lousy... so I'll take a moment of distraction to blog my setup.  Plus, I get to talk about phones.  So here it is (click for larger view), and courtesy of 5 minutes in PowerPoint I've even numbered the phones.  What you are looking at is two computers with three screens.  The screen in the corner of the room is my rather old home desktop PC.  My (also older) laptop is then connected to the second monitor in the right foreground.  You can see pieces of my podcasting rig, although much of it is hidden by the laptop screen.  I write on either computer depending upon what time of day it is and which of the 5 or 6 different blogs I'm writing in. 

As to the phones, proving that VoIP teleworking can be secure (unlike what ComputerWorld.au thinks), most of the Mitel phones are hanging off of different teleworker servers back up at Mitel's office in Ottawa.  Why do I have so many phones?  Well, part of my job role is to test and experiment... so I'm always trying out new things - and from a security point-of-view, trying to break them.  So here goes the list:

1. Uniden cordless handset for household land line 
2. ancient Mitel 5020 that I started using as a secure teleworker set 4 years ago and never bothered to upgrade (see, we protect your investment ;-)... actually, the truth is I got a newer set to replace it and then decided to use that new set as a SIP set instead 
3. DUALphone for Skype calls (and yes, I could also use it for my land line) 
4. Mitel 5340 IP phone - connected as a secure teleworker set back to an IP-PBX in Ottawa... excellent phone, great acoustics, backlit 
5. Mitel 5220 IP phone (now replaced by the 5224) - running in SIP mode and connected to a local SIP proxy 
6. Mitel Navigator - perhaps the coolest phone I have... see the long silver bar under the monitor - that's the phone!  Handset is off to the right.  Connected as a secure teleworker back into Ottawa.

Plus I've generally got 1 or 2 softphones running on my laptop.   Using our "hot desking" support, I am usually logged in with my extension to either #4 or #6.  Often #6 because the Navigator has the excellent feature of acting as my PCs speakers and allowing me to have music playing in the background - and the music cuts out when a phone call comes in.  Very nice for someone working alone in a home office.

So now, who to tag:

• Alec Saunders 
• Martyn Davies 
• Irwin Lazar

With that, I think I've now down my blog meme playing for 2007....   off to get some cough medicine.

UPDATE: Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal has had some great detailed coverage of Skype Prime over at Skype Journal.

News out of Skype today is that a new 3.1 beta includes a new service called SkypePrime, where you can charge someone to call you for either a one-time fee or a per-minute fee.  It also marks the beginning of the frequently-discussed integration of Skype and PayPal, because the payments go into your PayPal account.  However, the payment is deducted from the payer's SkypeCredit (so you are paying in SkypeCredit and the receiver is getting it in PayPal).  Here's the relevant part of the blog entry:

When you call someone who is a Skype Prime call provider, and you both have the new version of Skype, the provider can initiate what we call a “payment request”. That is, all calls start as free, but you can then switch to the paid calling, charging either by the minute or a one-off fixed fee. The call then proceeds as a paid Skype Prime call and your Skype Credit is deducted by the appropriate amount that then goes to the receiver’s account. The provider does not get the call fees directly as Skype Credit — rather, they go into a special holding “box”. The provider then receives the revenue via PayPal.

It's an interesting model that I could see definitely working especialy for consultants, freelancers, etc.  If someone calls you up asking you questions about some topic, you could say "I'd be glad to help you, but to do so I need to charge you for the time."  You click a button or two and, ta da, you're doing small micro-payments deducted directly from your SkypeCredit account. The Skype/PayPal integration facilitates it all and makes it easy.

Of course, Skype isn't giving this service away for free... as noted on the screenshot to the right (click for larger image), they take a 30% cut of any payments.  Note also the list of categories they have set up.   When "Astrology & Spiritual" is the first one, you can imagine the type of calls that Skype is envisioning.  What is interesting to note is the point Skype makes that this is a global service, whereas traditional pay-per-call services are limited to the local nation in which you live.  Hmmm... think the regulators in various countries might not be entirely thrilled about this?  (Since they're conceivably losing their tax revenue to Skype?) Interesting to note that if you are an EU resident, you'll also be charged a 15% VAT tax.

The Service Provider Terms of Service actually goes into more details... right now you can only charge between $0.50 and $2.50 USD per minute or between $0.50 and $12 USD per call... interestingly, Skype bills in increments of 1 minute and rounds up to the next minute after five seconds into the new minute.

It's also interesting that this allows pay-per-call video calls... and the security guy in me immediately has to wonder about the usage of this for the sex/porn trade.  Calls to 900-number-type-of-services - with video - from the privacy of your PC... and all encrypted across the Internet.  Seems like a rather obvious use for that industry.  Of course, Skype prohibits this in section 4 of their Terms of Service, but one has to wonder... if this is all truly peer-to-peer, encrypted, etc., how would anyone else know?  It will curious to see if Skype is able to keep its SkypePrime Service Providers truly clean and adhering to the TOS.

One thing that's missing, curiously, is any kind of mention of a directory.  If I create a SkypePrime service, how can others find that?  Obviously I can advertise it on my web page, etc., but one would think it would have been integrated into SkypeFind or some other (global!) service directory.  Perhaps that is that the next stage... given that this is just the first public beta.

Lots more to digest in the SkypePrime FAQ.  It will be indeed curious to see how much this takes off and whether this does enable people to earn money from the usage.  In the meantime, if you have questions about something like, oh, podcast production, for a mere $2/minute, I'll gladly talk to you... ;-)

Two of the cool "events" at the Emerging Telephony conference last week were the "Mashup Contest" and the "LaunchPad" (sponsored by GigaOm). In both cases new companies or developers were able to show off their products. I was going to write up my thoughts and summary, but it turns out that Alec Saunders posted about all the companies and included video of their presentations.  Definitely worth a look to see what companies are doing around emerging telephony apps and services.  Thanks to Alec for recording them all.