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The IETF MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) Working Group started working on Session Protocols in 1993.

Initial Internet drafts for a Session Invitation Protocol and a Simple Conference Invitation Protocol were prepared in 1996, and merged to a single first draft of SIP by December 1996 (slide 10), with further drafts (2-12) leading up to the publication of RFC 2543 in March of 1999 (slides 11-13, ibid.).

I don't see anything that says BT had a hand in anything to do with SIP up to 1996. More than half the patents BT claims (Exhibit C) were filed after RFC 2543 was published.

I hope this information is a useful starting point for some SIP vendor.

In the UK, for companies like Phorm, and ACS:Law, this would be zero deterrent to what they did, the fines shouldn't be capped percentage wise, as only a fine of perhaps 80% of annual revenue would've been enough to make Phorm and ACS:Law start behaving.

To be fair, consider the companies for whom Phorm is customer. The most infamous example (here in UK) was BT, for which 2% of turnover in 2011 would have been £402m, a quarter of profits - a huge amount for a generally reliable blue-chip, well into having to issue a profit warning. They'd actually have a hard time racking up that kind of fine through systematic health and safety failures.

Bear in mind it is BT with whom customers had entrusted their data. 2% seems appropriate there, and merely the potential threat to Phorm's customers may be more effective than even chance of 200% fine for Phorm, because they can just setup companies and keep withdrawing the cash so if they get fined they just fold the company.

I'm also only saying the 2% should be for accidental and negligent breaches, not wilful flouting of the law like Phorm. Wilful flouting should really allow lifting the veil of corporation and going after the directors (which is done for some things).

How about 2% of revenue plus 100% of revenue that directly resulted from breaching?

On a more general view, I don't agree with caps being completely binding. Perhaps it is my views that judges with specific facts should not be completely bound by politicians who only had general information, but I think there should always be possibility for some discretion, if you can clearly demonstrate the facts are substantially greater than those envisaged with the caps.

BT do have a fibre plan for about 40% of UK households over the next couple of years. It's mostly FTTC, but they said they'd use FTTP for about a quarter of the deployment.

One of the reasons it's taken so long was that it's harder to make a profit if you have to share your infrastructure. Nevertheless, I'm glad they do have to - I'd rather fibre turn up more slowly than have BT Retail as the only ISP.

The scaremongering summary doesn't seem to convey the correct meaning.

I think the implication is actually a move to something like the new style BT network being implemented in the UK. Called the 21st Century Network (21CN). See http://www.btplc.com/21cn/

This isn't about getting rid of your phone and giving you a software phone, it's about ripping out the core of the phone network and it's fundamentally circuit switched systems, and replacing them with IP based packet switched systems.

You'll still be able to plug a plain old telephone into the socket and make a call.

This is the same idea as British Telecom's current 21st Century Network project. When your line terminates at the exchange, it no longer connects to a circuit switched system, but to a packet switched network. For the end user, nothing much changes.

This is a massive project but most of us end users will see and hear few differences. In theory it should allow the phone companies to do more interesting things with their networks, and may help improve broadband coverage/speed (although that remains to be seen). It massively simplifies their infrastructure by carrying all traffic over a single packet switched network, rather than multiple circuit switched systems.

No - see BT's History page "BT - a new name and identity for British Telecom" - since 2 April 1991...

Guess how many they've done so far...

Of course, if you read their website now the original goalposts have been burned and some new ones installed much further apart and in a different place on the pitch: http://www.btplc.com/21CN/Theroadto21CN/Keymilestones/Keymilestones.htm

Our university horror story involved 80kb/s download speeds in Aberystwyth for a household of 8. With at least 3 wanting to use torrents/rapidshare, another using VOIP willy nilly and the rest demanding YouTube to actually play smoothly 24/7. When that 80kb/s is hit, the rest of the Internet hits the dirt, all other subsequent connections are lucky to get 1kb/s.

Anyway, looking into this we found that BT own all of the major household infrastructure in the UK (aside from separate networks like JANET) and that most other broadband sellers are simply reselling their infrastructure.

So, despite exchanges in our area being completely overloaded (it was apparently the same for everyone), BT refused to do nothing. Fortunately they do have a plan: 21cn (that would be 21st Century Networks ~ took me a while) that is essentially upgrading everything to fast (can't remember how fast) while reducing maintenance costs etcetc. Sounds brilliant, except that it's due to finish in 2011 with Aberystwyth being one of the last places to upgrade iirc.

Somehow, our university can hand us 10mb (shared down/up -- it has a particular name that I can't remember) connections without seeing the speeds drop at all across the year.

The situation in the UK is peculiar and accidental. Back in 1982 the government sold off the state-owned telco, including all the lines in the ground (now worth a vast fortune) for not nearly what it was worth. But you could argue that at the time very few people really understood that the plain ol' telephones would turn into such an important service for the economy.

Since then it's been mismanagement all the way. A series of toothless regulators did nothing when BT basically refused to get into broadband (1995-2000), did nothing when BT refused to install fibre to the consumer (1992-today), actually backed down when BT refused to implement LLU deadlines required by law (2000-2003), and are still doing nothing about access speeds, the backhaul network, price of POTS, phony "unlimited DSL" adverts, premium line rip-offs, fibre again, etc. etc.

BT realised belatedly that they could make a bit of cash from one technology, ADSL, which didn't require them to dig anything up and only needed them to install a few racks of equipment at the exchange. The only thing the regulator did was force them to sell wholesale ADSL to themselves (BT) at the same price as to other providers. I was involved in the early days and the other providers still had to fight to access BT's order provisioning systems (which involved a lot of rekeying orders multiple times into slow BT-owned mainframes).

So now most peole in Britain have, almost accidentally, access to speeds around 2-20 Mbps (mostly 2-8) for still quite a lot of money.

But, here's the thing. Where is the investment in speeds over ADSL 2+? BT have spent a few billion implementing what they call their 21st Century Network, which amounts to replacing a bunch of ATM and Frame Relay switches with IP routers, which will allow BT to reduce their costs. But where's the fibre into homes and offices? Where's 100 Mbps+ going to come from? What about the 3/4G mobile access that isn't charged at ££/megabyte?

None of this bodes well for the future of Internet access or indeed the economy as a whole.

Rich.

I'd argue for weighted fair queuing and QOS in the cable box.

Seem to me that for ADSL it would be ideally placed in the DSLAM, where there is already a per-subscriber connection (in any case, most home users will only get 1 IP address, hence making a 1:1 mapping for subscriber to IP -nothing need be per IP connection as the original article assumes). In fact, the wikipedia page on DSLAMs says QoS is already an additional feature, mentioning priority queues.

So I'm left wondering why bandwidth hogs are still a problem for ADSL. You say that this is a "huge collection of tuning parameters", and I accept that correctly configuring this stuff maybe complex, but this is surely the job of the ISPs. Maybe I'm overestimating the capabilities of the installed DSLAMs, in which case I wonder if BTs 21CN will help.

Certainly though, none of the ISPs seem to be talking about QoS per subscriber. Instead they prefer to differentiate services, ranking P2P and streaming lower than uses on the subscribers behalf. PlusNet (a prominent UK ISP) have a pizza analogy to illustrate how sharing works - using their analogy, PlusNet would give you lots of Margarita slices, but make you wait for a Hawaiian even if you aren't eating anything else. Quite why they think this is acceptable is unknown to me; they should be able to enforce how many slices I get at the DSLAM, but still allow me to select the flavours at my house (maybe I get my local router to apply QoS policies when it takes packets from the LAN to the slower ADSL, or mark streams using TOS bits in IPv4 or the much better IPv6 QoS features to assist the shaping deeper into the network).

I see your point about retail ISP size but BT is also by far the largest provider of wholesale broadband connections, which is what the article appears to allude to.

From the BT website: http://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/Companyprofile/TheBT story/TheBTstory.htm

Before tax or other items have been deducted. After the deductions, the amount is described as "net".

Gotta have /.

Anyway I'm now really interested in getting a Bluephone

British Telecom are launching a service based on this early next year. Users will have a handset that uses both GSM and Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used when the user is at home, with the handset making VoIP calls.

In addition, the Secretary of State has statutory powers to require us to take certain actions in the interests of national security, international relations and the detection of crime.

The full 'cosy' relationship

This link says you are wrong.

The article briefly mentions converging land line and mobile services. Tie that in with recent articles about bluephone and BT OpenZone and things start to look very interesting for telephony in the uk!

They used to be called British Telecom - they were spun off from the Post Office in 1981. They became a plc when privatised in 1984, then became just plain BT (with the letters officially not standing for anything) in a corporate rebranding in 1991. (From their company timeline)

Someone should check out this new Bluephone! It is the ultimate VoIP package, u can use your cell over Wifi, 3G or GSM networks, probably the killer app for VoIP.

I found this link on BT's web site http://www.btplc.com/Mediacentre/Agencynewsrelease s/2003/an0327.htm

It looks like all they're doing is pushing a web service to make sure that people's names match up with thier addresses, which is something companies already check for (any time you apply for credit they check your name and address against the electoral register). I would assume that Meter Point Asset Numbers come into it because a) only EU citizens can be on the register and b) the electricity company probably know you've moved in before the electoral register know. As an example, one of my friends had trouble buying an oven a couple of days after he had just moved into a new place because he failed the electoral register check (as he wasn't on the electoral regiter where he had just moved into and he had moved about a bit over the previous year)- had Comet been able to verify he was who he was via the the M-PAN (as he had electricty) he might have had an easier time.

I think the only thing new here is that BT are offering a Web Service instead of whatever method companies currently use to do such checks (with a few enhancements to the current system). From an invasion of privacy issue it's no different than what people are currently subjected to, though I would assume that if it becomes easier and cheaper to do than it might happen more frequently.

Tk