Disruptive Telephony

Have you ever been curious about the process of creating a Request For Comments (RFC) document within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)?  These are the standards like, oh, “HTTP”, that power the Internet. Have you been interested in understanding how they work?

If so, someone I know, Russ White, recently completed a 7-part article series about the entire process over on the Packet Pushers Network site. Russ has nicely summarized the series on his site at:

https://rule11.tech/the-rfc-process/

He does a nice job providing an overview of the long process of starting with an idea, creating an “Internet draft”, working it through the IETF process, and then hopefully getting it published.

There are many more details, of course, but Russ lays out the high-level aspects and mentions some of the parts of the process which are harder to understand for someone new to the IETF.

If you are interested in the RFC process, I would encourage you to give Russ’ series of articles a read.

Using Markdown instead of XML

I do have one area of disagreement with Russ. He advocates for using XML for writing Internet drafts, whereas I used to write drafts in XML but have moved over the years to instead using Markdown. If you are writing simple text documents, I believe Markdown is a simpler and easier way to work.

Back in 2019, I gave at tutorial session at the IETF meeting in Prague about “Writing Internet Drafts in Markdown”. The materials are at:

• Slides
• Video 
• Github repository

[One important note - this tutorial session was given FIVE YEARS AGO and the state of Markdown tools is always evolving. I would monitor https://authors.ietf.org/drafting-in-markdown to see about new tools and ways to work with Markdown.]

The video of the tutorial session is actually a great comparison of the two ways of creating Internet drafts. In the first half, my friend Matt Miller explains how to create I-Ds using XML tools, and then around the 32-minute mark I explain how to create drafts in Markdown.

Either way - XML or Markdown - hopefully Russ’ series helps explain a bit more about the whole process of writing a RFC.

Last month the first Request For Comments (RFC) was published where I was one of the co-authors. Ironically, this RFC 7649 had nothing to do with SIP, VoIP, telecom, IPv6, DNSSEC, security... or any of the other open Internet standards I've been working on in recent years!

In fact, it's not a "standard" at all but rather an "informational" document.

This document collects together a series of best practices for how someone can fill the role of the "jabber scribe" at IETF meetings, such as the IETF 94 meeting about to happen in Yokohama, Japan, starting this weekend. (Which I will not be attending due to scheduling challenges.) You can read RFC 7659 at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7649

As the abstract states:

During IETF meetings, individual volunteers often help sessions run more smoothly by relaying information back and forth between the physical meeting room and an associated textual chatroom. Such volunteers are commonly called "Jabber scribes". This document summarizes experience with the Jabber scribe role and provides some suggestions for fulfilling the role at IETF meetings.

The document came about because over the years that I've been involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) I've come to both value the critical role the "jabber scribe" can play - and I've also tried to do the best I can to perform that role when I'm in working group sessions at IETF meetings. I typically volunteer as a jabber scribe in any of the sessions I'm in and try to make the experience as good as possible for remote participants.

Largely my interest is because I spent many IETF meetings as a remote participant and I knew how poor that experience can be.

A few years ago after one of the IETF meetings, I made a comment to a couple of people that we ought to write down some of the suggestions and best practices so that people could easily get some ideas for how they could help out in the role. If they were new to the idea... or even if they had been around but were interested in doing the role better.

I kept track of some ideas ... and a small group of us kept occasionally bouncing ideas around... but none of us had the cycles to write the actual document.

Then last year at, I think, the Toronto IETF meeting in July, Peter St. Andre and I were talking about it again - and this time we actually got it off the ground! More precisely, Peter kicked it off and then he and I went through several rounds of revisions and comments.

Given that Peter's authored 35+ RFCs and countless Internet-Drafts (I-Ds), he knows the IETF process inside and out and so was able to guide the document through the publishing process, including having it move through the "independent submission" stream of RFC documents. I've written a number of Internet-Drafts over the years, but none have yet progressed to an RFC. I learned a great bit from Peter through the process and look forward to using that knowledge in the future.

I greatly appreciate Peter's leadership on this - and I hope that this document will be helpful to many folks out there who are helping involve more people remotely in the IETF's standards process.

Given the timezone difference with Japan, I'm not sure how many of the IETF 94 working group sessions I'll actually be able to attend remotely... but if I do, I'll be hoping that whomever is acting as the Jabber scribe will help include those of us who are remote.

Meanwhile, it is kind of fun to have my name on an RFC, even if it's an Informational one. I look forward to being able to play even more of a role in the IETF standards process in the years ahead...

THAT is the fundamental question of the Internet Video Codec (NETVC) Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) happening at IETF 92 in Dallas today, March 24, 2015, from 9:00-11:30 CDT (UTC-5). You can listen and participate live using the following links:

• Meetecho conferencing system (WebRTC-based)
• MP3 audio stream
• [email protected] chat room

You also may want to view the presentation that will be used during the session.

The goal of the overall effort is defined as this:

• Development of a video codec that is:

  • Optimized for real-time communications over the public Internet
  • Competitive with or superior to existing modern codecs 

  • Viewed as having IPR licensing terms that allow for wide implementation and deployment 

  • Developed under the IPR rules in BCP 78 (RFC 5378) and BCP 79 (RFCs 3979 and 4879)
  

• Replicate the success of the CODEC WG in producing the Opus audio codec.

The BOF proposal contains more of a narrative:

The Internet needs a royalty-free (RF) video codec that can become the backbone for universal deployment of video related technologies. Royalty-bearing codecs put constraints on implementors that are unacceptable, but current RF codecs are not yet competitive with royalty-bearing offerings. This dilemma stalls innovation in the space and means large sets of consumers don't have access to the best video technology.

There are efforts underway by several groups to produce a next-generation, royalty-free (RF) video codec, including VP10 by Google and Daala by Mozilla/Xiph.Org. While far from complete, these efforts aim to surpass the royalty-bearing competition. Efforts within other standards organizations like MPEG to create RF video standards have been unsuccessful so far, but have showed that many consumer device manufacturers would support an RF codec.

The success of Opus from the CODEC WG has also shown that collaboration, based on the IETF's principals of open participation, can produce better results than competition between patented technologies. The IPR rules in BCP 78 and 79 are also critical for success. They impose a duty to disclose, and require exact patent or patent application numbers, in addition to basic licensing terms. This allows participants to evaluate the risk of infringement and, if appropriate, design work arounds, in any technology adopted, and assess the cost of adopting such technology. Because it does not force participants to agree to license their patents under RF terms, it helps to encourage participation even by those opposed to such terms (instead of guaranteeing they stay away). In addition to an environment which encourages third-party disclosures, this provides much better chances of success than SDOs which have a "patent-blind" process or which require blanket RF grants.

And the NETVC BOF agenda outlines the plan for the session today.

I do believe that creating this kind of royalty-free codec for Internet video is a critical step to enabling video to be used everywhere across the Internet... not just where people are able to pay to license royalty-bearing codecs. I'd like to see even more developer creativity and innovation unleashed with this action.

I'll be listening and participating remotely. I hope that many of you will join in as well. 9:00am US CDT today (10:00am for me on the US East Coast).

P.S. If you have no idea what the IETF is all about, you may want to skim The Tao of IETF first...

GoogleTalk is dead, Jim!

By way of a comment to a post I wrote back in May 2013 about Google seeming to kill off XMPP/Jabber support in Google+ Hangouts (spoiler: They did!), I learned from a friend that the GoogleTalk API was officially deprecated as of February 23, 2015. I confirmed this by finding a Google+ post from Google's Mayur Kamat.

Now, this is not a surprise. Google has been clear that Hangouts was the replacement and also that Hangouts does not support XMPP:

Still, I'm sad to see the XMPP integration die off. It is just a continuation of the descent of messaging services into walled gardens ... a topic I've been writing about for many years.

On that note, it was really no surprise to see the media reports about Microsoft killing off Google and Facebook chat support in its Outlook.com service. Microsoft made this Google integration available back in May 2013, but today Microsoft really has no choice:

• Google has killed off XMPP integration with Hangouts.
• Facebook has killed off XMPP integration with their new v2.0 API.

And so Microsoft can only offer Outlook.com its own proprietary walled garden... Skype!

Goodbye GoogleTalk and... sadly... goodbye XMPP integration!

A friend asked me that question and my response was:

It depends.

and even more unfortunately:

I don't know.

It turns out to be a challenging question to answer... and it led me to ask:

• How do we define what "SIP" is for telecommunications in 2014?
• How do we help vendors move their products/services to be based on SIP?
• As we talk about "turning off the PSTN" and "moving all telecom to IP", how can we make it easier for companies to switch to using SIP?

The reality is that being "SIP-compliant" does turn out to depend upon where in the larger SIP interconnection ecosystem the vendor is located.

Is the vendor:

1. a SIP client, in terms of a "hard" phone, a softphone, or other application that is seeking to connect to a SIP server?
2. a SIP server seeking to connect to a SIP "service provider" to have connectivity out to the PSTN and other SIP networks?
3. a SIP service provider seeking to interconnect with other SIP service providers and to the PSTN?
4. a middlebox such as a firewall or session border controller (SBC) seeking to be in the middle of a SIP communication stream?
5. an application that interacts with SIP systems in some way? (ex. call recording, IVR, networking monitoring)

To be "SIP-compliant" really means you need to figure out what amount of "SIP" you need to implement to play your part in the larger picture. Particularly when the SIP "architecture" we describe isn't the pretty little picture we use:

but rather a much more complex reality:

Unfortunately, the "Session Initiation Protocol" (SIP) is no longer just good old RFC 3261 and a few friends. RFC 3261 provided a radical new way to do telecommunications... it was "HTTP for voice"... it was simple, easy and pretty amazing. If you have a moment, go back and read RFC 3261. It's a remarkable document and set of ideas.

However, there were two factors that started to complicate "SIP":

• the "Internet" community kept thinking of new and innovative ways that they could do more with SIP-based telecommunications; and

• the traditional telecom companies/vendors kept wanting to bring across more and more legacy PSTN functionality into the world of SIP, typically without changing that PSTN functionality so that they wouldn't have to change their business models or processes.

This combination set SIP up to slowly become more and more of an accretion of various hacks and kludges designed to either enable SIP to unleash new possibilities and/or to take over key functionality from the PSTN.

But in doing so it became so much harder to define what "SIP" was.

Back around 2008/2009, Jonathan Rosenberg tried with his "Hitchiker's Guide to SIP" that was published as RFC 5411 in February 2009:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5411

Now consider that this contained about 26 pages worth of documents to be referenced... and this was back in 2009! In the 5 years since, the "Realtime Applications and Infrastructure (RAI)" area of the IETF has been extremely busy and a similar document today would be be MUCH longer.

But does such a long list really help?

Going back to to my list of different roles within the SIP ecosystem, do we need more narrower lists for each role? A SIP client connecting to an IP-PBX may not need to implement all of the same specifications as a SIP service provider connecting to the PSTN.

What is the minimum set of SIP specifications for each role?

The good news is that for the second role I mention, the SIP server to SIP service provider, the SIP Forum has done some outstanding work with their SIPconnect initiative. You can find more info at:

http://www.sipforum.org/sipconnect

You can download the SIPconnect 1.1 technical specification and see the great amount of work they have done. The idea is that ultimately any "SIPconnect-compliant" IP-PBX or other SIP server can connect to any "SIPconnect-compliant" SIP service provider. It should "just work" with a minimum amount of testing. The goal is to allow the more rapid deployment of SIP-based IP-PBXs and making this part of the interconnection puzzle work that much better.

So if you are a vendor of a SIP server, whether you call it an IP-PBX, a call server, or whatever... or you are a SIP service provider seeking to connect to SIP servers at your customers - in either case you have SIPconnect that you can use to be "SIP-compliant".

But what about the other roles?

What if a vendor has multiple products?

What if a service provider or enterprise is just trying to get "SIP" products to work together? What should they specify beyond the vague statement that a product should support "SIP"?

Now, there are other organizations that have attempted to answer this question. The 3GPP has a list of SIP specifications and the GSMA seems to have similar documents. The ITU-T has many recommendations but since they rename everything it's hard to understand what really links back to SIP - and many of the ITU recommendations are only available to members and so you can't easily view them.

Which brings me back to these questions:

• Do we need a new IETF document that aims to update RFC 5411 with a newer list and perhaps "profiles" of what would be needed for different roles?

• Is this something the SIP Forum or some other organization should take on?

• Has someone else already created a concise list/document/specification and I just haven't yet found it?

And perhaps the even larger question:

• Do you believe this is an issue that we collectively should be working on as an industry to help make the deployment of SIP easier?

What do you think? How do we define SIP in 2014? What should we do? I'd love to hear your comments either in response to this post here on this blog or out on social media where this is posted. (Thanks!)

An audio commentary on this post is also available:

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What devices support the Opus audio codec? What softphones? hardphones? call servers? Obviously given that Opus is the "mandatory to implement" audio codec for WebRTC, it will be in many web browsers... but what other I was asked this question by a colleague recently and when I couldn't easily find a list on the Opus codec web site, I turned to the VUC community inside of Google+ and posted there. The great folks there naturally were a huge help, and quickly came up with this list:

• Web browsers supporting WebRTC:
  • Google Chrome
  • Mozilla Firefox
• Softphones:
  • Blink
  • Counterpath Bria
  • Jitsi
  • Linphone
  • Mumble
  • (Maybe Skype? They talked about it.)
• "Hard" IP phones:
  • AudioCodes 400HD series
• Mobile applications:
  • Acrobits (iOS)
  • Counterpath Bria (iOS)
  • csipsimple (Android)
• Switches / Call Servers / IP-PBXs:
  • FreeSWITCH

What other devices or software supports the Opus codec? (Or what other lists are out there listing devices supporting the Opus codec?) Please do let me know either by comments here or on social media.

Thanks!

P.S. If you don't understand WHY the Opus codec matters so much, please read my earlier post on this topic.

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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?

• 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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My post this week about Google Voice ringing into Google+ Hangouts generated a good bit of commentary, not only on the original post but also out on Hacker News, Reddit, Google+ and other areas. Given the range of responses, I thought I'd reply to a couple of points and also expand on some further related topics. So here goes...

"DUH! This is nothing new/disruptive. You could do it forever with GTalk/Gmail!"

A common response was to point out to me that Google Voice had been integrated with GoogleTalk / GMail for quite some time and so this integration was really nothing new.

Okay, fair enough. Point taken.

I'll admit that I never keep GMail open in a web window and so while I do recall that this integration was there in the past, I never personally used it.

Similarly, in Google+, I've taken to logging out of the GoogleTalk/chat sidebar because I found it was sucking up CPU cycles on my Mac. For whatever reason, the new Hangouts sidebar doesn't seem to consume as much CPU cycles and so I've left it running there.

So yes, the integration may have been there in the past and now it is there in Hangouts - and people like me are actually now noticing it. :-)

Ringing G+ Hangouts BEFORE Ringing Other Devices

There were a couple of comments that it seemed like calls to a Google Voice number rang the Google+ Hangouts first and then rang the other devices connected to the GV number. In my own testing there does seem to be about a 3-second delay between when the call starts ringing in Google+ Hangouts and when it starts ringing on my cell phone and Skype. Now, this may be a fact of Google giving priority to their own application - or it may just be an architectural fact that when they fork the call out to the different numbers it is faster to connect to their own service while the calls to my cell and my Skype numbers have to go through various PSTN gateways. Either way, there does seem to be a degree of delay before all devices ring.

Delay In Answering

A couple of people noted that there was a delay from the time you hit "Answer" to when the call was actually established. I've noticed this, too, although not consistently. I think part of it may be with starting up the Hangouts component inside of your browser - particularly with getting the video going, since that seems to be required for the Hangouts component. It may also be just the paths through whatever systems Google is using. It's certainly something to monitor.

Google Voice Call Does Not Ring The Hangouts App on iOS

In my own testing, I found a curious omission. When I call in on my Google Voice number, it does not ring on my Hangouts app running on my iPad. It rings Hangouts on my web browser... but nothing happens in the mobile app. Now, my iPhone rings - but that is because it is also connected to the Google Voice account. I didn't try removing that number from Google Voice and then seeing if the Hangouts app on the iPhone would ring. At least for the iPad, nothing happens. It would be great if this did work so that I could receive the calls on that mobile device.

XMPP...

Multiple people pointed out that my final remark about maybe some day getting SIP support was probably unrealistic given Google "dropping" XMPP support. I was admittedly away on vacation and at a conference last week and so I missed this point in all the announcement about Hangouts coming out of Google I/O. I wrote about this yesterday, though: Did Google REALLY Kill Off All XMPP/Jabber Support In Google+ Hangouts? It Still Seems To Partially Work

Although, as pointed out in a comment on Google+, this "partial" XMPP support may just be a factor of the continued GoogleTalk support - and may fade away when Google finally pulls the plug on that.

This is definitely an area where it would be helpful if Google could provide a few clarifications.

That's all I have right now for a quite update and response to points. Thanks for all the great comments and I do look forward to seeing where Google is going with all of this.

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