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Mapping Phones To IP Addresses
There's an interesting article currently running about the joys of mapping phone numbers to IP addresses, and what that means. Also talks about LDAP directory implementation and other potential fun interactions. (CT: Does anyone
else think it's horribly stupid to map numbers onto names which map
onto other numbers? Dumb da dumb dumb).
And 10.0.0.1 my call can not be completed as dialed!!!!!
But when I dial *.*.*.255 it's a party line!!!!
You've hit on the #1 problem with VoIP phones, the one most /.ers never seem to understand. Phone numbers!
/. ran an article last week about the Philippines charging for terminating VoIP calls, not one post seemed to show a clue as to why this rule came about. ObRant:I miss the old days when a large fraction of the /. posters were highly clued individuals :-)
There are two large scale communication systems in the world today, the phone system, and the internet. The phone system is still a magnitude larger than the internet.
Now the internet supports telephony, and there was even a recent discussion about IP dialtone. But where do you get your phone numbers? Just use IP addresses or URLs? How do you tie the two systems together, since the archaic telephone system can only address a string of numbers? IP addresses with the * key in place of a dot? No, you have to go to the lowest common denominator, phone numbers.
As people have noticed with all the recent press on telephone renumbering plans, the telephone world is growing by leaps and bounds as well. But unlike IPv4, which is hard coded to a 2^32 limit, the telephone system can expand forever by adding another digit to form new city codes and area codes. In every country, there is someone overseeing the assignment of blocks of telephone numbers, and in progressive countries, trying to ensure the established operator plays fairly with the new competition and everyone routes to everyone else's calls. Now, ISPs are being thrown into the mix.
What happens when your techo-peasant mother wants to call you on your spiffy new IP telephone? She'll dial your telephone number, and somewhere in between her analog POTS line and your IP phone, there must be a transition gateway. Either the phone company or an ISP will run it, and somehow they will bill for the privilege.
Nokia, Cisco, Lucent, Alcatel, Ericson, and hundreds of dotcom startups, all have some kind of SS7/IMT to VoIP gateway products on offer. I've set some up, they all require a solid, but schizophrenic, understanding of both worlds. If you thought there was a philisophical gap between Linux and Micro~1.oft, just try bridging the voice and data worlds.
The hardest part is in obtaining a block of working phone numbers for each area, and getting a sympathetic telco to route calls. The next hardest part is in sorting out the billing. Who pays for terminating calls in each direction, and what happens when one system carries a toll call for the other. When
The obvious economic advantage lies in using IP to transport voice calls. Either simply, such as IP to IP calls which bypass local tolls, or in companies using part of their internet bandwidth to pass call to remote offices or partners on the internet.
Career tip: Broadband companies are all desperately trying to create IP dialtone offerings, to help cut out the local telco monopoly. Learn VoIP, SS7, media gateway controllers, E.164 and SIP, and make a fortune selling your knowledge to cable and DSL companies.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I mean, just think, the next time some 313370 nd00d script kiddie tries to hack a machine you own [1], you could call up his mamma and tell her to spank them 'till their ass fell off. DoS = DuS (Dial Up Spanking)
side note: friend of mine put a sound card in his openbsd firewall (sits in front of several semi-popular local websites), and hooked up ipmon's output to a perl script that looked for things that should be handled proactively (it also logged to syslog). Everytime a pattern occured that was probably a script kiddie, he had the script play a sound sample (system("/usr/bin/mpg123","./thunk.mp3") ) of a ripe melon hitting a board. The sound of script kiddies thunking into a wall was ... gratifying.
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Wow.. won't this make spamming people that much easier? Thanks for the email address, I'll just do an LDAP lookup and give you a call, see if you want to buy random good/service. What? I can use the Internet to make those telephone calls and all I have to pay for is bandwidth? It's just like email!
How we know is more important than what we know.
See RFC2916. This describes how to map E.164 numbers (telephone numbers) in the DNS. The primary purpose is so that you can email your phone (for example), but there is nothing to stop this system mapping a phone number to a WWW page. Unfortunately this RFC uses the existing reverse-DNS .arpa domain so the phone numbers are written BACKWARDS! Not very friendly.
I don't see why it's dumb, so you're going to have to back up your argument with a little more than a song.
Having a transition system is critical in deploying a new technology or migrating people to it. (Microsoft understands this very well, but that's a topic for another day) People aren't going to just say "Well, there are telephones on the Internet. I guess i can throw out my old phone." It's the whole chicken-and-egg thing.
Or more accurately, the chicken-and-another-chicken thing. Think- who bought the first telephone? The first fax machine? Why is everyone sticking with ICQ and Napster when better alternatives exist?
Because there is no migration path. We need something like this so that the old phones can use the new system and the new phones can use the old system. It also allows hybrid phones to be made.
But to just sweep this away at first glance because "well, you're just translating from one number to another number" is
I hope this doesn't get me branded "Flamebait", or worse, "Troll."
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