Disruptive Telephony

Do you want to help get open standards like IPv6 and DNSSEC more widely deployed? Would you like to see other technologies developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) more rapidly adopted by network operators?

Are you passionate about the need to preserve the open nature of the Internet? Do you like to write, speak and create other forms of content? Would you like to be part of the Internet Society, the global nonprofit that serves as the organizational home of the IETF?

If so, the team I'm part of that is behind the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme is looking for YOU!

As we noted on the Deploy360 blog, we're currently hiring a new position into the team specifically to interact with network operators and help accelerate the deployment of open Internet standards.

You can read read the job description for what is called the "Operational Engagement Programme Manager". As noted in the document:

The Operational Engagement Programme Manager is a newly created position within the Internet Society. This position will report to the Director, Deployment and Operationalization. The primary focus areas of this position will be to: 1) develop and coordinate increased industry collaboration and conversations about the operationalization of Internet technologies; 2) work with targeted audiences around the globe to develop operational documentation on technology topics covered by the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme including, but not limited to, IPv6 and DNSSEC.

The job description goes on to list out the responsibilities and desired qualifications... the key point is that we're looking for someone who can help us expand the work we're doing in creating content that helps people deploy technologies such as IPv6 and DNSSEC. We're a small, fast-moving team that is highly focused on finding and creating the best possible content and promoting that through many different channels.

If you join our team, you'll be writing for the Deploy360 site and probably working with video, too. You'll be interacting with network operators through various online channels, including social media. You'll be speaking at events scattered all around the world.

And you'll be having fun while doing it! And serving the incredibly important mission of promoting the value of the open Internet!

Additionally, THIS IS A "TELEWORKING"/VIRTUAL POSITION! You do NOT have to be located in our Geneva, Switzerland, or Reston, Virginia, offices, but can be located anywhere. You can, just like me, work out of a home office. (There's this wee little thing called the Internet that makes this possible!)

One note - you MUST have experience with the IETF, so if you have never interacted with the IETF... well... don't bother applying! Experience with other operator groups is also very important.

If you're interested, the job description has contact information and instructions. We're also going to be out at IETF 84 in Vancouver next week speaking to people about this new role and would be glad to meet with you there. We have already received applications, so if you are interested, please contact us soon!

We've got a lot of great plans ahead of us... and we're looking for the right person to join our team. Please do check it out and consider applying!

P.S. The Internet Society is also hiring a Senior Director of IT Development and several other roles. It's a great organization with great benefits, great people and a great mission!

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How do we manage network congestion as we move real-time voice, video, chat and data communication into web browsers? How do we make sure browser-based voice/video doesn't overwhelm the local network?

If you've been following the excellent work of the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative you'll know that developers are already using developer builds of browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to move real-time communications (RTC) directly into web browsers - without using Flash or Java plugins.

It's a powerful step to bake real-time communications into the very fabric of the Web. It stands to open up a zillion new opportunities for innovative uses of voice and video... and can fundamentally disrupt so many aspects of today's telecommunications.

It also stands a chance of completely swamping today's networks with RTC traffic!

So what do we do? How do make sure that browser-based RTC plays nice with other traffic? How do we help it succeed?

Those are the type of topics to be discussed and debated in a "Workshop on Congestion Control for Interactive Real-Time Communication" taking place on Saturday, July 28, 2012, in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the weekend before the start of the week-long IETF 84 standards meeting.

The workshop is free of charge, and even has the possibility for remote participation, but you must be invited to attend. It is a working session and the organizers, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), are requiring all potential attendees to submit a position paper basically explaining why they want to attend. More information and details can be found here:

http://www.iab.org/cc-workshop/

THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING POSITION PAPERS IS SATURDAY, JUNE 23!

So if you want to participate in what should be an extremely interesting session, you need to go now and submit a paper for consideration.

It's an extremely important topic - and one that must be addressed for WebRTC/RTCWEB to truly be the innovative force that it can be. I hope you'll consider participating!

P.S. If you can't attend that particular day, the outcome of the event will definitely be discussed on the IETF's rtcweb mailing list (Warning - high traffic!!!). Anyone can join that list so you subscribe if you'd like to monitor what is going on. (Did I mention that the list has a high volume of traffic?)

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What does the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) do? What role does it play in setting Internet standards?

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

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

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

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

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• From the Editor’s Desk
• DANE: Taking TLS Authentication to the Next Level Using DNSSEC
• Message from the IETF Chair
• Words from the IAB Chair
• ISOC Panel Addresses Regulation, Innovation, and the Internet
• IAB Plenary Tackles IPv6, Privacy Issues
• New Technology Demo: PCP
• Internet Society Fellows to the IETF Increase Participation on a Global Scale
• IETF Ornithology: Recent Sightings
• IETF 81 At–A–Glance
• IRTF Update
• IETF Meeting Calendar

The IETF Journal is published three times a year and past (and future) versions can be found at:

http://isoc.org/wp/ietfjournal/

If you would like to be alerted to future editions - or would like to contribute articles - more information can be found on that page.
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://bit.ly/voxeoipv6

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

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The 74th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) starts Monday morning out in San Francisco. As usual there is a packed agenda with a lot of great discussions going on. This one is particularly interesting for those of us involved in the "Real-time Applications and Infrastructure (RAI)" area - which is all the various working groups related to SIP and other real-time communications protocols - as there are some proposals moving forward to rather fundamentally restructure the ways in which SIP-related work moves through the IETF. I expect there will be many involved conversations going on out there next week.

As much as I would like to be there, I won't be physically out at IETF 74. It's not my new role at Voxeo keeping me away, but rather this... oh... wee minor little detail that my wife is now five weeks from giving birth to our second child! :-) At this stage of things I'm severely limiting my travel - and flights across the country are definitely out.

Instead I'll be participating remotely, listening to the audio streams and joining in the Jabber chat rooms. Probably writing about some of it over on the "Speaking of Standards" blog I write in from time to time. The great thing with IETF meetings is that you can participate remotely (albeit obviously not to the same level of effectiveness as being in the room).

Lots of good stuff going on...

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Technorati Tags: ietf, standards, 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

This week (March 10-14) finds me down in Philadelphia for IETF-71, the 71st meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (the people who write the standards for the Internet). I don't honestly know how much I'll be blogging here on this blog. I do hope to be writing some over at the "Speaking of Standards" blog on Voxeo's site. We'll see. These meetings tend to be rather intense.

If you'd like to follow along with what's happening here at IETF, I've written up some instructions about how to join in the audio streaming and IM group chats. I've also posted what I think will be my schedule, which will give you a sense of what the various VoIP-related sessions.

That's the news...

Technorati Tags: ietf, standards, ietf71

As I wrote over on Voxeo's "Speaking of Standards" weblog, one of the ironies of the language we use in this space is that we all have been talking about "SIP trunks" for a few years now, but nowhere has there actually been a formal definition of what exactly a SIP trunk really is!

Jonathan Rosenberg has now offered a definition in a new Internet-Draft titled "What is a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunk Anyway?" Here is the abstract:

The term "Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Trunk" has become almost commonplace amongst vendors and SIP providers. Even though the notion of a 'trunk' has a well defined meaning in circuit switched systems, it has never been defined for SIP. This document provides a formal definition for a SIP trunk, discusses its scope and applications, and establishes best practices for identification and security of SIP trunks.

The document makes for good reading even if you are not overly familiar with the concepts behind SIP trunks. Jonathan is looking for feedback and there will I'm sure be continued discussion on this topic.

Technorati Tags: sip, sip trunks, ietf, jonathan rosenberg

Over on the Voice of VOIPSA blog today I posted about a new session has been approved for the IETF 71 meeting coming up in Philadelphia in March called "Reducing Unwanted Communications using SIP" a.k.a. "RUCUS".Hannes Tschofenig, who submitted the proposal, has created a RUCUS web page and is looking for feedback. I'm planning to be at the RUCUS session at IETF 71 and would encourage others who want to talk about voice spam / SPIT to join in as well!

Technorati Tags: rucus, spit, spam, voice spam, voip, voip security, security, ietf, standards