Disruptive Telephony

I just realized that I never wrote here that an article I wrote recently came out online.  Published in Mitel's "Presence" magazine, it's titled "Using IP Communications as a Tool for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity".  Okay, so the title's not overly catchy, but here's the first paragraph:

If a hurricane devastated your main office, how rapidly could you restore telephone connectivity? If a branch office had a fire or other disaster, how soon could you connect back into the main office? Or if Avian flu or some other pandemic created a situation where you needed to stay out of the office, could you access remote phone capabilities equal to that at the office? How long would it take your business to recover? How much (and how many customers) could you afford to lose in the process?

I go on to talk about why IP communications/IP telephony/VoIP fundamentally changes the traditional way you might address these issues and offers tremendous benefits.  In fact, to me, the ability to put an IP phone pretty much anywhere you can get an IP address remains one of the major - if not the single biggest - disruptive aspect of IP telephony/communications.  Remove geography as an issue and suddenly things like disaster recover and business continuity take on a whole different view.

While it's in a Mitel publication, there's nothing in the article that is really Mitel-specific.  Listeners to Blue Box or readers of Voice of VOIPSA probably won't find it terribly new since I've been talking about this before in those sites... but for those of you not familiar with DR and BCP and how VoIP can change that, I think you'll find it a useful read.

Quite a bit of activity lately, it seems, over in Skype-land:

1. Private beta of an "Enterprise Edition" - First seen on Jan Geirnaert's weblog and then subsequently confirmed, it appears Skype is sending around an email looking for participants in an "Early Adopter Program" for a product that would include:

• Enterprise network compatibility.
• Company-owned Skype Name creation.
• Customisable to your corporate requirements.
• Direct technical support from Skype.
• Ongoing upgrades maintenance.

A bit more text about it on Jan's weblog.  Will be interesting to see what evolves out of this.

2. New version 2.6 for the Mac with Call Transfer, public chats, Skype Prime, etc. - Over at Skype Journal, Jim Courtney writes about the new Mac version that brings the Mac version closer to parity with the Windows client (as seen in the release notes). It also apparently includes "call transfer" that will, per the download page, "Transfer calls to your Skype contacts - effortlessly." Jim provides a teaser to us that Windows users can use this Call Transfer as well... and this will be described later this week. 

If Call Transfer does indeed work, this is the first time I've really seen it in a P2P client.  (I'm suddenly thinking my wife's Macbook might need some "system administration" time spent with it.)

3. New release of the Windows 3.2 beta - Jim notes in the same post that a new build of the Windows 3.2 betaa is available, which, per the Release Notes, seems mostly about bugfixes.  (Hmmm... I suddenly become curious what the "odd background noise" is that apparently appears in the silence between two 3.2 users...)

4. Multi-device presence - I didn't note here that last week Jim also had a post about two small features in the Skype 3.2 beta that made for interesting reading.  Skype is interesting in that unlike MSN/WLM or AIM, you can have multiple instances of Skype running at the same time.  (In fact, there's a security issue related to this that we've talked about on Blue Box before.[1])  Having multiple computers, one of which has a DUALphone connected to it, I make use of this feature to have Skype on both systems.  However, there is the very real issue of "which instances' presence setting do you broadcast to Skype contacts?"  And also to the web presence icon.  I've seen the issue myself when I look at my blog from my laptop (with Skype running) and see that my Skype web presence says that I'm "Away" or "Not Available"... due to the fact that my other PC has had enough inactivity for Skype to automatically change the presence setting.

It would appear that Skype's solution out of that is to have presence be pulled from whichever Skype client logged in last.  I guess it's one way to do it... but I'd prefer a checkbox in the options that said something like "Make this instance of Skype authoritative for my presence" (obviously worded a bit better).

In any event, these are all some interesting developments... thanks to the Skype Journal team for continuing to provide the investigative digging they do.

[1] In a nutshell, the "security issue" is that with the "multiple login" feature, you have no way of knowing how many instances of Skype are open with your username.  An attacker could open up Skype, enter your username and keep guessing passwords until he/she could get in as you.  If the attacker is successful, he/she can see all your contacts, all your chats, see your event history, etc. The attacker can't listen to your calls (since those are point-to-point), but they could make a call as if it were you and presumably could also deplete your Skype Credit.

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...

Over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, security researcher Shawn Merdinger is 2/3 of the way through a series of posts on the "top 11 VoIP security issues you need to discuss with potential vendors".  His posts are:

• Pucker Up - Intimate VoIP Phone Security Questions, Part 1 of 3 (1-5)
• Pucker Up - Intimate VoIP Phone Security Questions, Part 2 of 3 (6-8)

with the third post coming at some point soon to cover points 9-11.  Shawn's posts are definitely "required reading" for anyone working on or concerned about issues around VoIP security.  He's done a great job bringing into one place the many questions that you should be asking VoIP/IP telephony/IP communications vendors about the security of the systems you are considering (or have already deployed).

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...

Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal was obviously having way too much fun with graphic-editing programs, but the results are hilarious (at least to me). A very mooving piece titled "First Look: Skype for Cows 3.2".

Given today's date, it's definitely well worth a read....     ;-)

In my previous post about the Skype 3.2 beta out today, I said this:

I'm sure there will be some other things found in the release, too,

but I had no idea how right that statement was... Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal just posted this "Skype 3.2 Sets New Standard for Sound Quality" and he's not kidding. I just called Jim using Skype 3.2 and spoke to him first using just my laptop mic and speakers and then with my normal mic/headphone setup. In both cases he said the audio quality was excellent (obviously even better with the mic/headphone setup I have). He spoke to me with the setup he describes in his article... sitting back away from his computer a bit and with his microphone situated between speakers. I do have to say that the sound quality was impressive given that Jim is trying to create echoes (I heard none).  Definitely an interesting move on Skype's part... obviously only of use between 3.2 beta users, but it will be interesting as this rolls out into their production software.

In the meantime, if you are a 3.2 beta user and want to give me a call to test it out... I'm certainly interested in listening to the audio quality under different circumstances.  (Skype ID = danyork).

The fruits of the eBay purchase of Skype continue to start appearing... today Skype released a 3.2 beta for Windows (sorry Mac & Linux fans) which has as it's main feature the ability to send money to another user via PayPal (provided both users have PayPal accounts).

Rather than write more here about the feature, I'll just point you over to Skype Journal where Phil Wolff has already provided a walk-through of the Send Money feature (as well as the nice graphic I used in this post). 

It's an interesting addition... as we briefly chatted about in Skype Journal's public chat today, this has a bit of a potential to take some money away from Skype Prime, although probably not much.  If you were in a call and wanted to charge someone for the call, you could ask them to send you money via PayPal.  In contrast to Skype Prime, you could ask them to send you any amount you wanted... and you would get the money immediately (versus the 4-month hold of Skype Prime).  I don't think it will impact Skype Prime too much, though, because the process to send money via PayPal is more involved... Skype Prime makes it extremely simple.  We'll see... personally I think the jury is still out on whether or not people will use Skype Prime.  Time will tell.

As noted in the Skype blog post, the 3.2 beta also simplifies access to your Skype account info.  Previously, you had to login to Skype's web page to do everything... now, as Phil shows in another walkthrough, it's all right inside the Skype client.  There's also an ability to easily update your picture with a webcam directly inside the Skype client, which I'm sure some folks will have fun with.  The Skype blog also indicates you can now import contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail and GMail... firing another shot across the bow at those three titans of the consumer email world.

I'm sure there will be some other things found in the release, too, but for the moment it seems to be primarily about sending money...  (and anyone who wants to test sending me money via PayPal is welcome to do so... I'll even send it back to you, minus a, say, 10% "experimentation fee" ;-)

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.