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Open Source And Net Telephony
Gark writes: "There's an interesting article at Upside Today that talks about the Bayonne project, which has the potential to change the telecommunications industry the same way that Free Software has changed computing. It's interesting that the project got its start when a proprietary software developer was going out of business, and decided to GPL their source code, thereby creating new business opportunitites." The article talks a lot about Open Source and the Net, compared to the Telco industry and its history of proprietary systems. It's a good read.
Most of the older software companies should GPL their old source like what id did. I mean, wouldn't it be cool to rewrite your own versions of Warcraft? I like this company already. And old hardware comps. should gpl their schematics and all the relative specs, too!
hlag
From my experience with telco industry is alot like Win9x, the large base that it's on is pretty much proprietary, noone cares how it works (except for people that build stuff for it or have too much free time). However there is a very opensource top level interface that everyone and thier brother has tinkered with. It's been that way since the Carterfone decision and the breakup of AT&T and ma Bell (even though bells like SBC are buying other bells like Pacific Bell now). The only thing that really needs to be changed to change the whole infrastructure is the lowest levels.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
the amazing is that cisco didn't buy this out already?! in Santa Barbara there were quite a few companies working on telephony equipment and technologoes. Many of them were bought out by the larger companies looking to get a strangle hold on the telephony market. I think digital sound was aquired by Unisys, and cadence and others were aquired by Cisco. Ericson jumped into the ball game too.
kick some CAD
That article was not easy to read. For a while, I kept thinking, "Wait a minute.. this is about open source software... not open source telephony." I mean, the focus of the article was some ten-year-old abandonware made by a company that was going out of business. That sort of grudging "Fine, we're out of business, we'll open the damn thing" mentality is good for the Open Source movement, but it isn't exactly a triumph of ideology.
Anyway, I guess the article in question is more about "internet voice conferencing" than anything else - something that's been around for quite a while, but apparently with ugly time delays. I didn't actually read anything that claimed that this open-source conferencer solved the problem, but I guess the idea is that eventually, we'll solve the problem. And by "we", I don't mean "me", so don't bother asking me for it.
In conclusion, this is a Good Thing, but not exactly earth-shattering.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
So many companies consider their software to be valuable even when it is totally obselete and useless. If you can't make money from it, its not going to cost much to give it away so why don't more companies do this. Just how much software over 10 years old could actually be sold? I bet there's practically none over 20.
Sounds like an idea with great potential to me.
This could (eventually) lead to some damn fine software. I think it's high time that, as the net becomes more ubiquitous, I shouldn't have to pay long distance charges. Telephony just makes sense in terms of maximizing bandwith potential, and OST might just make quality, vesatile telephony a reality.
Isn't that what you call it when you know the phone is going to ring?
http://www.ridiculopathy.com
Good... "the current telecom market is like a Malibu, Calif., hillside in late August: rich, beautiful and just waiting for the well-timed spark to set off the inevitable oxidation process."...We, as users and supporters of free software ideologies and technologies need to expand our view of what we can accomplish with organised effort.
Why? Reliable, useful, scalable technology can be developed without the presence of a monopolistic profit-hungry entity...What other tech industries and protocols will be affected next? I am really encouraged by this article. Too bad they couldn't make Iridium a free technology!
What the heck?.....BIOTECH!
.........They say every ending contains a new beginning. In the world of open source telephony, where revolutionary breakthroughs have been slow to come, it took the final act of an outgoing proprietary vendor to give the movement its much-needed jumpstart. .....
Its sad to know that these companies with so much potential doesnt realise the potential in Opensource until they are going out of business. If only they had designed and built it in the first place and released the specs for peer review by the open source community and standardising it, they would have been a success than having to shut down.
.....the telecom market remains a labyrinthine hive of black box technologies, a place where customers and value-added resellers (VARs) remain dependent on the proprietary hardware and software systems of a dominant telco or wireless company......
Just reiterating what I said above. But the sad part is they also made their money out of it and now that they have to shut down, only then they realise the potential of a GPL.
Rapid Nirvana
yeah, but nothing prevents the buyer from giving
it away for FREE..so not really feasible for
someone to "sell" the software..unless u're
charging for *support*
Can't people step back and realize that Open isn't always good? Would you write your novel Open Source? Would you make your washing machine Open Source? No, so why would you make your Telco solution Open Source?
As much as I'm a fan of the open development model, I sometimes think that people around here are just communists - they wish all products to be developed in an Open fashion, and that just ain't right (at least without a major rewrite of our governmental structure!)
Reminds me of this article about high-availability (99.999% uptime) telco systems, specifically Motorola developing a flavor of Linux to meet those needs.
Today's article isn't about the telephone system at all.. It really looks like a bunch of back-patting because someone did the nice thing and open-sourced their old code. But how often have you heard Linux developers say "Gee, I'd really like to write an IVR app, if only there were good tools available.." C'mon folks. All that happens on NT, and I don't see a great deal of interest in changing that. As the article stated, it's not exactly a glamorous headline-filled buzzword-compliant field like e-commerce or streaming web content.
Sure, this code will prove useful to someone.. but I don't see it being the foundation of anything big any time soon. I hope to be proven wrong.
The coders don't want to have to be expected to keep a dress code at home :-)
2 9&mode= 0 8&mode=
"It's amost ready, we're bug testing"
Actually it sounds like a few Dilbert cartoons.
Or these User Friendly's:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=199808
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=199809
# debian/rules
A brief history of the telecom network:
In the late '70s a great change happened to the telecom systems of the world - the separation of voice and signaling networks. No longer was signaling (call setup, etc.) done over the voice trunks. Old phreaks may remember when the blue boxes stopped working. This was because of "out of band signaling".. the call setup and takedown, etc. was taken out of the voice lines. Having a separate circuit-switched network for signaling also allowed us to do things like 800 numbers, 911, etc.
Now, the standards for Signal Points (SP) on today's SS7 network are very rigorous. The US uses ANSI while most foreign countries use ITU. Both standards are very very rigid. SPs (depending on their flavor) are allowed somewhere between 3 seconds and 3 minutes of downtime a year. That's for the system itself, not the network links, which fail more often for various reasons. The system has to be there to reroute traffic when the links go down.
Keep in mind this is very oversimplified.
Now, the latest revelation in telecom is the SoftSwitch - a "Software Switch" basically.. These don't run on Windows NT, or *BSD, or anything you might run on a personal computer or internet server. A successful SoftSwitch demands a fast, tight, realtime OS, that can be fitted snugly with the hardware.
I don't think the open source model will work with telecom becasue this is not the kind of thing you work on at home in your spare time. This is not the kind of thing you can release to the community in alpha, and wait for them to lend a hand. This is not the kind of product that would benefit from having the source shipped with it. The customer doesn't have time or know-how to hack on the code and recompile if there's a problem, or the equipment to test it properly before putting it on the network.
Sorry.. Nice idea, but until corporate America is seriously restructured, it won't happen.
wish
---
I'm sure that the telecoms giants will give this the same warm reception that the music industry has extened to Napster.
But it is the future.
In the same way that digital CDs replaced analogue vinal, and compressed computer formats (eg MP3) are replacing CDs, the same will happen in the telecoms industry.
Analogue phone lines are being (/have been, depending on where in the world you live) replaced by IDSN/xDSL, and these will be replaced by dedicated internet connections, with no capability to carry uncompressed voice data.
just my $0.02
A lot of a CT application or product is in the rest of the software - switch functions, human interface, feature set. I suspect that this GPL'd package will need a fair amount of bashing at the interface level to get it into shape for platform portability, but it should have some real value.
we lived in libertasia...
http://www.libertasia.com/
Electricity and Telco are free and powered by the people underground running in hamster wheels that didn't pass the citizenship test.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
If there isnt a "Cold call, scream FIRST POST!, hang up" module, it aint Open Source.
is a Linux client for dialpad. That would rock hard.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Of course not, but most probably you will only ever sell one copy of your program.
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
I just want to use my Linux box as an answering machine. Time to look into the voice modem stuff again...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The idea of copyright being of a limited term (originally 14 years plus an option for another 14 - recently perverted into life of the author plus 70 years at the behest of Disney) was that every creative effort would eventually enter into the public domain. And, "Public Domain" can be read as "Open SOurce" if you like.
The works of Shakespeare are in the public domain - i.e. you can publish them, put them on web sites, use them as the basis of new creative works, print them on tolet paper, whatever - and no one can stop you.
So, yeah...eventually everything (barring further evil efforts of the Mouse) will be in the public domain, thus "open source".
Arguably, the intention of the Framers of the US Constitution was to maximize the amount of material freely available to the public. A case could be made that if a creative copyrighted work has been abandoned by it's creator and if no further effort is going to be made to make it available to the public, then it should automatically revert to the public domain.
Copyright is a good thing, but I don't believe that it should be used to keep creative effort away from the public. Case in point: GO's Pen Point. This was the last real innovation in GUI interface (you may disagree, but check it out and really consider the implications of it's design before you judge). But still, long after Bill FUDded it to death with the idiotic "Pen for Windows" it's unavailable. If GO had placed it into the public domain, or it if had reverted to it by no longer being available, we would all benefit.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
[ incredulous "hello, earth to Stary" look ]
That ... just hasn't been happening, though...
You can even buy, for example, RH CDs without any mote of support and -- get this -- people are still buying them. Lots of Free Software-oriented companies actually make some (or nearly all -- i.e. Cheapbytes) of their money from continuously selling software-on-media-with-no-support.
Hell, RH even puts RPMs and even ISO images up on their site so people can download and/or burn their own, and people STILL buy CDs from them.
People even buy DEBIAN CDs for crying out loud -- there's NEVER any support for those, and Debian's a distro where apt-get mostly removes the need for a local copy on CD anyway...
Apparently, it's suprisingly difficult to saturate the market for copies of a particular piece of software.
DNA just wants to be free...
Support is not the only way to make money off GPL'd software. Just look at Cygnus and what they did with gcc. Sure, they did offer support, but they also charged people to let them add features. I'm not sure how well it worked, but hey, they're still in business :D
Guess what d00d, you're wrong.
In the real world of suits, idiots, and people whose time is valuble, EVERY piece of software needs support. It doesn't matter how good it is.
Joe and Jane may not need support for their iMac, but you can bet that if you walked into a Fortune 500 boardroom and said, "I'm going to sell you the best piece of software that could possibly be written", and they believed you, their first question would be "Who's going to support it?"
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Cisco is indeed burning up the back door with voice over IP. A lot of work has gone into that technology. It is far cheaper to send large amounts of data over IP than a phone. People don't want to have multiple wires. So on and so forth.
The needs of voice and network traffic are not exactly the same. (With data you care about perfect transmission of bursts of information, with voice you care about reliably holding a connection when you get it.) However it looks to me like the technology for data transmission is getting so much better than the technology for voice transmission that it is a question of time until the market says that we only need one of these...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
If the source comes out, then that would allow us to make a copy of StarWorks - ie StarOffice with only the stuff people actually use, in the same way we got AppleWorks and Microsoft-Works. Oh and better integration amongst the modules.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Support is actually an important feature, even if it is not used. Most commercial companies won't touch a product if they don't have something to fall back onto. By being able to buy support they live in the knowledge that if something really does go wrong they can talk to someone - though it does not mean that they will need to use the support they have bought.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yes, but what about the creditors? Suppose GO had placed their intellectual property in the public domain when they realized they had to fold, wouldn't that have been a form of fraud from the creditor's point of view? I mean, they were taking the intellectual property they had created over the years, and had suddenly made it impossible to charge for, effectively destroying it for purposes of resale and recovery of debt.
The reason I ask is because a company I know, that has made this kickass abstract product that is so new that VC's don't Get It in one sentence or less - like spreadsheets when they were introduced in 1981 - that they cannot secure funding. The crators want to Open SOurce their product so that they can at least keep developing it and use it in their new gigs, but they are worried that the institutions the company is in debt to will not look kindly upon having this piece of value taken away.
Has anyone else dealt with this before?
While I understand the sentiment that some feel sometimes things are being done "open" just for the sake of claiming to be open even when its felt not to be the appropriate thing to do (though IMHO there is no case to be made for an advantage to "closed" solutions in any major market, but I digress), I believe telephony has an exceptionally strong case specifically for "open" solutions and that the GPL is the best vehicle both to protect the freedom offered in open telephony solutions and to promote it commercially.
One respect that makes telephony unique is that most telephony solutions (such as small office PBX's, voice mail systems, IVR's, etc) are primarly delivered thru a VAR channel, and there are some 5000 indipendent telephony dealers in this country alone. These dealerships are often forced to supply customers proprietary products that they are only allowed to modify in the expressed manner that has been permitted by the manufacturer. While each mfg talks about "forming partnerships" with their reseller channel, manufacturers use various means to keep control of the reseller and the end user (such as requiring "exclusivity" to carry brand X product, disclaiming of warrenties, etc) and, in that they are actually quite removed from what the end user actually wants and desires, they often produce less than "clueful" products.
What the GPL would mean for this market is that the reseller would be free to adjust a given solution to meet real and actual customer needs, and that the means to do so can not be taken away from the reseller later on. In this sense, it means one has to form a "real" partnership with the reseller channel rather than marketing sound-bites.
The telephony reseller channel is one where solutions are fit to customer needs and the majority of the profit often comes from service agreements and support, rather than the sale of tangible goods. This sounds like a classic case of the "open source" service business model to me, and it's practiced every day by a 50 billion dollar industry.
I was reading a wired interview of the director(?)
of Xerox PARC, and when they mentioned linux, he
said that "Open Source is Literacy". Maybe people
won't want to hack their own telephone switch, but
if it brings some people to a higher level of
understanding, can't it shake up the monopolies in
other ways? Maybe it will lead to better standards
in the future for something as "trivial" as
digital answering machines or something else
that can benefit us hackers.
While in fact neither ACS nor the Bayonne project actually used any of the Ingate code (I actually have never even looked at it), I do believe one or more interesting projects could certainly emerge from it. I recall being told there is an example of the Excel switch control protocol, and perhaps a free switch control daemon project could come from it. There is presumably some good stuff related to clustering shared file systems between multiple hosts (what I recall of the Ingate platform is that it used a bunch of QNX/2 servers that all accessed a common SCSI array and common file system from it). There may be some code related to Dialogic hardware and it could certainly help seed the eccs "free" Dialogic driver project.
I am not sure if the Ingate platform could itself be ressurected as a free software project in whole, but one never knows. It might be easier for me to be somewhat skeptical on the matter as I have no emotional/sentimental attachment to that particular code base. However, in my own opinion, when you have a very large code base that is already x number of years old, and originally was built in a proprietary manner, it might be best to use it as a "reference library" while writing something new to replace it with.
I have in my hand a copy of the AT&T Standard Technical Training Course, job aid 9, special services telephone handbook. Dated September 1978, this book makes absolutely no mention whatsoever of out-of-band signaling. It's a great review of signalling units for the various carrier systems, trouble-clearing procedures on 2- and 4-wire circuits, so on and so forth.. but everything's still VF signaling. (Even right down to the little note about using 2604 Hz test tones: "Do not measure at this frequency if 2600 Hz signaling units are used in the layout. Instead, interpolate from the values measured at 2504 and 2704 Hz.")
/everything/ is bound by an NDA? Or is there just not enough interest to warrant writing a set of basic texts on the subject? Everything I can find dates from the early dawn of ESS, and was apparently written in 40-column mode on an Apple //. I'm just looking for something a bit broader and more juicy than the ss7 overview I've found.
Yes, the switch to SS7 did happen, but guessing from the evidence in my hand, it wasn't until later.
I'm not familiar with the SoftSwitch, but I'm guessing it's a best-route selector for data circuits? Given the intelligence required to run one, it sounds like it probably performs error correction too. Damn, I spend too much time with transport and not enough time with switching.
Here's another question, since you might know: There seems to be so much publicly available info about the intricate workings of IP networks, tutorials on everyone's products, etc etc.. But there's absolutely nothing out there about the real deep telco stuff. Is it because
Now imagine if these systems were open. You can basically plug in a box which would be more like a traditional computer with a T1, PRI, or maybe just plain copper interface card. The software running on that computer you can use to setup new phone sets, assign speed dial numbers, configure call blocking, and manage voice mail boxes. Because it's open you can get plug in software and hardware. Just a plugin away from an automated attendant that will read back your current emails over the phone. It would also simplify the voice over IP situation because just because your office has one brand of PBX doesn't mean you cannot talk to the branch office with an entirely different PBX over your existing WAN or VPN links.
On the hardware side of things you no longer need to buy your phone sets from the same provider as the PBX. Just buy whatever model has the features you need and plug it in. Say you want one of those new 2 mile range cordless phones instead of a traditional phone set, just plug it in.
Who is going to build this equipment you might ask? The answer is every telephone and network equipment company that is looking for a new market to sqeeze some profit into their bottom line. This is a perfect opportunity for the computer industry to undercut the traditional manufacturers. Most network equipment manufacturers would kill for half the mark-up that PBX's are sold for today and they will be the ones to create the technology. Someday your phone may have a Cisco logo on it.
Listen, a full implementation of an H.323 stack is a softswitch. For an open one, see openh323.org. Every cisco switch shipped within the last year is a softswitch, it's in IOS. A softswitch is a call manager the responds via a standard protocol interface and carries out switching logic. THE GOAL IS TO CREATE OPEN SOFTSWITCHES. Your PBX doesn't use SS7, but when you are getting 32 channels of voice and 1M of data from Sprint next year over an MMMD wireless connection, you will be happy to find that your linux box can split this out to USB phones on your LAN. Why? Because some people are out there working their asses off to create softswitches that are open-source. That's why.
every linux company sells GPL'd software. SUN makes over half their consulting revenue off of sevices.
I have an uneasy feeling about open IP telephony for individuals. It's really simple -- if you want enough bandwidth to support IP telephony, you're limited mostly to DSL or cable modems (wireless isn't widespread enough yet). DSL comes from the traditional telcos, and cable companies are also hot to provide telephony services these days.
A CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System, the headend equipment) can be configured to ignore a cable modem whose MAC address doesn't fall into a certain range (I'm not sure whether this is part of the standard MIBs or not) -- it's quite likely that a cable company will be able to throttle telephony packets that don't come from "approved" equipment. In the same way, I doubt that telcos are going to let everyone run their own IP telephone calls down a DSL line.
As others have pointed out, open IP telephony will likely be an option for commercial outfits who can lease a T1 or fiber connection. I could see a company with offices in several cities using IP telephony to connect their offices.
The good news, of course, is that IP telephony will eventually compete with traditional carrier-grade service, and that should mean cheaper phone calls for everyone.
-- Dirt Road
-- Dirt Road
Improvise - Adapt - Overcome (unofficial USMC motto)
Your hopes have been realized. See the Bayonne project for a next-gen open source IVR system running on Linux or FreeBSD and OST's website for commercial support.
"open source software" for telecommunications isn't so much for the network, but for the end user on the desktop.
The existing telecommunications networks are defunct: the so called 'intelligent' network that employed SS7 and smart nation-wide routing systems is a technological legacy due to the increasing ubiquity of the Internet and the progress of technology in the guise of moore's law. It's only a manner of time before it all migrates to an IP based network, and even AT&T has acknowledged this by declining from buying anything other than IP based equipment - this is why Nortel, Lucent, Ericcson and the major provides of old-school equipment are forging into new markets.
Using the net for voice/media calls is still problematic because QoS and billing issues have yet to be sorted out. The mistake that many people make is to think that there will be an "internet telephone company" - there will not be, because the whole concept of "a telephone company" is defunct in light of the Internet. What there is, is a collection of bandwidth providers, and on top of that, there are all sorts of services, of which telephone is one.
What will happen is that internet QoS mechanisms will come into place, and you will be able to "buy" guaranteed information streams across the network, and on top of that, you can run your video/audio/multimedia one-to-one or group communications tool. That obviously assumes the availability of considerable bandwidth, and it will take a while before the networks are in place, but you can be sure that they are heading there.
While a lot of other software has become popularised through open source, no integrated telephony software has - I accept that there are various bits of software (desktop phone, internet videophones, etc), but there is no real movement or interest group in the way that there is for other software technologies and no real common understanding of what it means to make voice calls across the Internet - not enough people understand this concept yet. Even systems like IRC had a large interest community of developors that evolved the code. Where has that been happening for telephony ?
This is summary: the concept of a telephone company is dead, and so is the idea of SS7 and 'old school' switching technologies. The internet is rapidly replacing all of this as a common transport medium upon which voice calls will be just "one type of service". Although various internet telephone companies are around, there is no real unification or movement to develop an internet based phone/media software platform that is open, extensable and integrated on the desktop for the use of the masses. And the masses do not yet understand the concept, nor have an incentive make the change - there needs to be some kind of infrastructure in place (i.e. once many people start to use DSL services, then perhaps if voice/video phone services became available, people would make the voice/video call over DSL/internet rather than making a standard POTS call, and from then onwards, would just not go back to making POTS calls ever again).
Too many people still think that the internet is something at the end of their phone line, that do not yet realise that their phone line is the internet, and a voice call is just some service offered.
The sorts of concept video phones that have been thrown around are also in the wrong paradigm, they work on the idea of an 'enhanced telephone' - the whole idea of a telephone is dead, as is an enhanced one. What is alive, and always will be, is the idea of 'communication' - "call mom" is something people want to do irrespective of whether they use a phone or an internet multimedia service -- all the more better by using the latter and being able to see her face as well.
Through all of this, the biggest problem is the paradigm shift - people still thinking in old ways until a sort of critical mass and juncture hits them in the face, and then they see the new world, and by then, the old world is long on the way out.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Moderate the parent AC post of this UP, it's interesting and relevant.
The only question I have about this is the following: how many open source developers do you think there are out there who have a clue how to develop (and SUPPORT, BIG question) telecom apps?
+++ATH0
Yes I think so.
Intelligent Design Theory is not Creationism