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Michael Robertson Talks VoIP With Voxilla
Vick writes "Two 'Bad Boys' of internet audio, MP3.com's Michael Robertson and Kazaa's Niklas Zenstrom, are done taking on the recording industry. Now their big fight is with the telephone companies and, apparently, one another. In one corner is Zenstrom's Skype, a software-only VoIP product that uses its own protocol and is banking on the huge popularity of Kazaa for its success. In the other corner is Robertson's SIPPhone.com, trying to simplify VoIP, and using the standard SIP protocol, to try to bring internet telephony to the masses. In this Voxilla.com interview, Robertson talks about the future of VoIP and minces no words in explaining why Zenstrom and the Kazaa boys have got it all wrong." (Last month, we posted about Skype.)
I don't think he is CEO of mp3.com anymore.
--
VoIP using P2P technology is a great idea, byt Skype looks like a proprietary solution (correct me if I'm wrong).
Would someone care to enlighten me on VoIP/P2P solutions using open standards?
.: Max Romantschuk
a P2P VoIP system, that displays ads, and puts them into the conversation?
The problem is, that it is a proprietary solution, and like kazaa, it will probably only have a windows version, while the rest of us Mac OS X and Linux users will have to reverse engineer a poorer client.
Does anyone know of any cross-platform VoIP/P2P apps?
- Sherman
Note: I've not used the SIPPhone, nor do I know much about the protocol.
That being said, back the standard that is open to scrutiny, can be updated and improved, and that others can build on.
P2P sounds nice, but if it's proprietary, one company holds all the cards, and if they fold...
Hey, I made a punny!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I hope he doesn't alienate Linux users (ie large % of slashdotters) by keeping it Windows only! I don'tknow how much money he'd lose, but I'm sure it'd be significant, right?
nope, no longer the ceo of mp3.com now he's the CEO of Lindows (that piece of shit os)
Hear ye hear ye
WELCOME TO OPEN SOURCE HELL
It's a well known fact that open source is like Hell. Besides the obvious uselessness of open source (open source is more like open sauce- if sauce is left open, it spoils. It's also like open sores, where sores left open fester) and the total niggerfication of Linux, it's obvious that using open source is like going to Hell, only thousands of times worse.
When Bill Gates sent his only begotten son to die on the cross for your sins, he didn't plan for all of us to turn against him and use the disgusting, fecal OS that is Linux. Linus originally wanted to use a devil for his OS's mascot, but the asshats at BSD took it before he could.
The "penguin" is an actual hidden message for Hell freezing over, which is what will happen if it gains a market share of more than 5% and is actually used by someone besides a virgin geek for more than 5 minutes.
Did you know Linux is used to oppress niggers? What about jews? Linux is used across the world as a digital whip to put all the niggers and hook-nosed fucks in line, ready to suck Linus's (i.e. The Antichrist's) dick.
Use Linux, you'll see. You'll feel the shackles of Satan himself around your neck as you fail completely to install a piece of software. You'll scream in agony as your dependencies aren't perfect and your OS gives you a fatal error, causing your testicals to fall off. You'll wail in horror as you realize you didn't pay your $699 SCO license fee, and therefore reduced to teabagging Darl.
So break free the gay bonds of Hell and use the angelic OS that is Windows XP, you ignorant fucks.
... not so open your brain falls out.
The flip side is that sometimes a standard can be *too* open, too easily built upon, and it fragments because no one can agree on exactly what it is any more.
User_A has a SIP phone that supports session-timer, OPTIONS, REFER, and NOTIFY. User_B has a SIP phone that supports rel-100, PRACK, SUBSCRIBE, and NOTIFY. User_C has a SIP phone that supports MESSAGE, session-timer, and OPTIONS. All of these are SIP phones, and you could probably make a phone call between all of them, but will any/all more advanced services work between them? Hard to say, but each manufacturer behind the phones can call it a fully compliant SIP 2.0 phone.
If the standard is toooo open, everyone will have to be checking the labels to see which extensions each phone has to make sure it interops with another one... or they will all just default to buying the well known brand name/proprietary implementation, if only because they know it will work with everyone else who bought the same brand name.
Open standards are the best solutions for standing the test of time. Proprietary solutions are at the mercy of the owner. The birth of the moden internet is usually marked as the time the protocol was switched to TCP/IP. Imagine something as wide reaching as the internet being able to function at the level it does if more than one concurrent standard would be in use. Every day people find use for the internet. THe internet is the modern swiss knife. With one tool you can research papers, buy anything, get porn, music or art, and read even the craziest fanatic's ramblings. And now it's poised to revolutionize voice conversation. Because of this I back Robertson. There's nothing wrong competition, but the true advantage of market competition comes from a level playing feild where players win by making new features and technilogical advances.
Robertson and Zenstrom aren't taking on the music industry, they're sucking the dick of the industry. Robertson rode the wave without doing dick for consumers when times got tough, and Zenstrom is cashing in as well.
Fuck them. They don't represent the people, and they're not worthy of mention here.
Would 'taking on the recording industry' include illegaly and stupidly ripping thousands of CDs and making them available for download from your website?
I'm willing to say that Kazaa and MP3.com have done more to harm legal P2P and legal MP3 usage/distribution than anything else. I'd rather they had never existed.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Maybe Michael Robertson portends the success of the SIP protocol. But he will be responnsible for its success in, at best, a very minor way. Expect him to attract lawsuits and press coverage.
One version is just software on individual computers connected to the internet allowing 'Voice over IP' to other computers connected to the net.
The second version is the one that allows someone on the internet to actually connect to the phone company's system and make someone's actual phone ring.
The first version is nothing special.
The second version was big on the net until most free version went bankrupt because ad revenue wasn't there. I could make a long distance call across the USA for free which was real cool.
VOXILLA.COM Staff Report
It says a lot about the future of internet telephony that two of the most successful bad boys of the internet - Kazaas Niklas Zenstrom and MP3.coms Michael Robertson - have turned their attention to promoting the growth of Voice over IP.
Both Zenstrom and Robertson incurred the ire of the music industry and the Recording Institute Association of America because the technologies they helped establish made it much easier to download copyrighted music over the net. Robertson came first by helping to make the MP3 compression format the ubiquitous standard for audio on the net. Zenstrom followed by releasing Kazaa, which quickly became the most popular P2P program used by music sharers around the world.
Now the pair are slashing away at a whole different breed of industry titan: the giant telephone companies. But, though they share a common adversary, they have chosen to fight their new battles in entirely different ways.
Zenstrom is hoping to bring the telephone giants to their knees with Skype, an IP-to-IP VoIP software program that currently works only in Microsoft Windows and utilizes a proprietary protocol to establish voice connections between its users. Banking on the popularity of Kazaa, Zenstrom says more than 1.2 million users worldwide have downloaded Skype.
Robertson, on the other hand, has chosen a totally different route. His SIPPhone.com provides users with two telephones for less than $130. The SIPPhones, manufactured by Grandstream, connect to an Ethernet port and utilize the SIP protocol, which is quickly becoming the de facto standard for IP-to-IP voice communications.
Robertson is hoping that SIP becomes as widespread as MP3, and believes SIPPhone will help carry it a large portion of the way there.
In a way, Robertson is trying to do with SIP what he did for MP3 and later with Linux with his still-kicking Lindows operating system: Take a technology that works well but is understood only by the geekiest of computer users, simplify it to its most basic form, and market it to typical consumers directly.
Robertson still does not know how his new company will ever make a profit. His goal is to make it available to millions of users and go from there. Having sold MP3.com to Vivendi for more than $370 million in 2001, he can probably take his time to get there.
We caught up with Robertson during VON 2003 in Boston last month. Heres our conversation:
Voxilla: The SIPPhone has been out for nearly two months. So whos signing up?
Michael Robertson: I would say that probably the number 1 feedback we get is that its from international users. Theyll get two phones, theyll try them out and then theyll email us with Hey, Im ordering two more because I have a friend, or a co-worker, or an office in, fill in the foreign country here, India, China, Mexico. Thats one of the key uses were seeing initially.
V: Do you see international use as the major driving force behind VoIP growth?
MR: Yes. Thats where people pay huge phone rates. They want to avoid those huge phone bills. Thats where the phone bills get the biggest because you have private and government monopolies that own a lot of these companies. So it makes economic sense.
V: SIPPhone has announced an interconnectivity agreement with Packet8. Are you interested in doing the same with others, such as
Nader-2004
I am interested in the technical aspecs of these protocols.
Whats the main differences between SIP and Skype ?
What are the advantages of each ?
VoIP will not make it unless two things are satisfied:
1. That a standard protocol is established. 2. It is packaged in a convenient form so that minimal effort will be required of people switching from land lines.
The obvious attraction of VoIP is not enough on itself to make it succesful, rather it will need a big push in order to get going. All I have seen so far is that it has barely advanced beyond the simple voice chatting features of an IM client such as ICQ. It needs to become more than just a fancy feature to list out. A standard protocol is without question the key as it was the creation of the 802.11 protocols that allowed WiFi to take off into what it is today. my 2 cents.
Checking out my form of escapism.
The internet comes along and suddenly lots of circuts are open for extended periods for a single fee. In Australia it took a long time for Telstra to accept that internet data calls should not be charged on a time basis. They realized at last that if you're a telco that's OK if its a marginal exercise and you can add circuts into the core network to utilize capacity (even if you have to provide additional capacity it can still be profitable at the margin).
But now someone wants to move all traffic into the additional lines and leave your 'core' circut sales out of the equation. So before you would call China twice a day and it would cost you $1.00 for the call and 20c for the daily internet connection. Now with VOIP you get it all for 20c. The low income additional circuts have to pay for all network costs.
Even if you think telcos overcharge they will be reasonably upset if suddenly all their long distance calls go VOIP and they get no income from them but still have the same traffic volumes.
Does anyone think they will sit and watch it happen.
There is a real chance that Robertson's platform will take over the market for VOIP, because to date, there isn't a similar *consumer* handset marketed by the various Telco bigwigs (Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, etc), and funnily enough, Microsoft also hasn't picked up on the concept yet.
;-)
Using an open technology platform for this also makes sense, as it enables third party providers to tailor SIP-based solutions without needing to sign up for a proprietary protocol.
In fact, it seems like its only groups such as SIPphone that will release such products, because the main communication companies have too much invested in traditional PSTN infrastructure.
One cool idea I have for these units would be an optional expansion slot within which you could place some sort of crypto accelerator card. VOIP STU-III anyone?
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<prompt>
<audio>What you talking about willis?</audio>
</promtp>
<fiel d name="answer">
<noinput>
Just because you didn't make governor...
</noinuput>
<help>
<audio>
There is no help you're too short to compete again Ahnuld
</audio>
......
Ok seriously vxml is nice and all, but its
expensive as hell to set up a functional
site using it. Not only do you need the
programmers, you also need ivr, asr, tts,
vxml interpreters, not to mention people
who are good at speech (e.g. scientists),
good assed db programmers. It's steep.
I know a while back Berkeley had something
called Suede, SpeechWorks had an open source
product open vxi (i think it was called),
etc., but it's no small task.
MoFscker
...before these two signed on. Well actually Skypes is not anyhting really impressive VoIP anyways. and SIPPhone's main attractor is it is an all in one SIP device as opposed to a router that a phone gets hooked to, and that they are not operating with month to month fee's- buy the hardware and your done. Of course though they are not a telco or any for of carrier but more a directory service (411) and hardware retailer. Maybe he fully expects that he can make enough profit from each sale then bugger out at the right moment when having some minimum form of month to month is needed. In the meantime there are a number of VoIP systems and companies that have been around for a while now. Vonage, Lightspeed Communications and others. They have been in the markets now for at least a year, and have been picking up speed steadily. Enough so that in a number of states the PUC's are itching to regulate and apply regulatory fees to them. Luckily the Fed courts have so far seen the light and said no. Oh and yes they are standards based, in fact they use a number of standards including SIP just like the SIPPhones...in fact the SIPPhones should be able to be used with Vonage or a similar company, of course getting one of those comapnies to support it might be a different story. You would have to pay me to use a standard phone companies services for telephony anymore.
The story does make it clear that both SIPPhone and Skype offer IP-to-IP VoIP connections.
Since Voxilla.com is mostly about VoIP, the distinction between this kind of service (which you say is "nothing special") and IP-to-Phone service (your "second version") is pretty much evident throughout all the site's pages.
As for IP-to-IP VoIP not being "special," I think a lot of people (including the 60,000 or so who have signed up around the world with Free World Dialup, the 1.2 million who have signed up with Skype, and countless others using dozens of other methods) may disagree.
What SIP offers is an opportunity to develop a parallel phone system that works independently of the pricey landline phones most of us depend on. As VoIP technology continues to develop, there may come a time when you'll be look at your Bell South, SBC or Verizon phone and realize you can't call any of your friends who have turned to SIP.
For anyone who makes more than a few international calls, the advantage of an IP-to-IP service is more than a little significant. It allows you to use a regular phone to dial a number of a pal across the seas who hears his own phone ring when you call. The entire conversation is carried over the internet. And it costs nothing to either party.
I'd say that's pretty special.
Marcelo Rodriguez Editor Voxilla.com http://voxilla.com
Can you hear me now? Darn . . . What was that IP address again? Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
Sell the unit, with no associated service. You can call anyone else with a similar unit for free. If you call a telco line, you get a free three minute call, but you have to listen to a commercial first. You can buy more outgoing minutes into the telco network if you want to.
I will listen to the Free Software Song
Damn, this was hilarious, who is the beautiful voice behind the microphone?
Is it just me, or is it really aggravating that Michael Robertson even gets media attention in the first place? This guy makes headlines promoting his(?) new business strategy focusing on The Next Big Thing. Yet every time he's tried, he's failed. MP3.com and Lindows stick out in my mind the most, and maybe there are others.
Really... Roberson isn't coming up with ideas that nobody's ever heard of before, and he sure as shit isn't a marketing genius. So WHY do I keep reading about him in various places? What has he ever done to deserve the media attention that he gets?
Linphone offers SIP calling for Linux.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
There's a LOT of open standards VOIP work - see openh323.org and other usual suspects. It turns out that many of the VOIP hardware makers are really happy to fund open standards development so there's something for their equipment to talk to, whether they make voice cards for PCs (either single-user or small PBX cards), or IP PBXs that want more features to make them interesting to users, or boxes that provide some glue function, or whatever, and even Cisco is funding some of them, and some of the little software companies are happy to do open standards work as part of consulting to the hardware people.
New PBXs are pretty much all migrating to IP-based; it's much easier to reuse low-cost PC hardware platforms and build good tools that way. The big PBX makers are generally taking their old PBXs and adding IP features on the side (as opposed to the big router makers adding VOIP boards to connect to old PBXs and telcos), and the real question for most of their customers is when to rip out the old stuff and replace it (for new buildings that need PBXs, it's obvious that IP PBXs are the way to go), because you really start to get operational benefits when you can interconnect multiple locations that way. The PBX industry could have gone to quasi-open standards with ISDN in the late 80s, to take advantage of the reduced development costs and simplicity, but it mostly didn't happen.
The real complexities are the interactions with existing public switched phone companies. There's a huge amount of economic and regulatory baggage built around who pays who how much money when a phone call gets handed off between parties. In the US, there's the originating local telco, the long distance telco (if it's long distance), the delivering telco (if it's not the originating telco), and the Gore Tax folks, all of whom want their cut of the money, and the settlements and pricing aren't really appropriate to the much lower costs of IP telephony, and the prices and regulators are different for intra-state vs. inter-state calls. In the international calling market, this
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am using skype to call from malaysia (dsl) to california (dialup) and i am STUNNED at the quality and low latency in skype. This is the 1st voip app I have used that does not require headsets to cancel nanoying echo when talking to people on dialup connects.
broadband to broadband is better than using the phone when it comes to delay, dialup is about the same or better. i am used to 1/2 second delay on calls from asia to usa.
the product is beta, they have mentioned plans for mac, pocketpc & linux further down the road.
true disruptive technology folks. i have both my parents, brother and sister using it to keep in contact. i have spoke to them more in the last month than in the last year, because of skype.
there are other solutions out there, picophone, speakfreely, etc. the problem is latency. if you have an echo then people don't want to use it. headsets are a pain in the ass, switching out plugs from speakers to headphones.. people just don't do it. the difference here is that it works (through firewalls & nat also) well enough that anyone can use it easily and the quality is good enough to speak natural.
can't say enough good things about it. i am hoping they come out with symbian version for phones like nokia 3650. imagine making calls through your nokia phone using your pc's connection via bluetooth.
or pocket pc skype at hotspots, very cool indeed.
Didn't you mean "The GNU/Linux Pledge V1.00." Someone call Richard Stallman!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Why not just use Speak-freely? It's non-vapor, public domain code, works really well, and doesn't have for-profit sleaze-ware hooks. The UNIX client talks to the Windows client without fuss, and overseas sound quality is usually better than the real telephone. Even on 56k dial-up. It'll work just fine on a 486 too. NASA used it to communicate with the Space Shuttle on several missions.
Maintainership is in transition, but the package is already mature so that's not too big a worry.
old homepage:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/
new homepage:
http://speak-freely.sourceforge.net/
Long live speak-freely, thanks to free software!
(it rocks; Linux users be sure to grab the tcl/tk frontend)
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I really suck at getting hits for Slashdot posting comments but the my comments on the record completely agree with Robertson. Look at the following responses and keep in mind Slahdot has a bug introducing an artificial white space preventing the last three digits 649 & 569 & 421 from being part of the URLs below :
2 07&tid=) see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78462&cid=6969 649
2 03&tid=) see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=81832&cid=7184 569
0 421
from http://slashdot.org/~skaht/
1) In response to "New VOIP App. Profiled" (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/10/1313
2) In response to "FCC Still Pushing for Number Portability on Nov. 24" (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/14/2025
3) Look at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=58766&cid=562
Two 'Bad Boys' of internet audio, MP3.com's Michael Robertson and Kazaa's Niklas Zenstrom, are done taking on the recording industry.
Excuse me? They're "done?" That's some pretty startling spin you've got there.
Let's take a look at the facts. MP3.com is basically dead. They made several attempts to build a business on models that were clearly illegal, and got smacked for it each time. Kazaa is cowering behind a nod and a wink, but everybody knows that it exists solely for the purpose of stealing copyrighted stuff. It's just a matter of time before a clever lawyer and a right-headed judge see through the haze and shut them down Napster-style.
And you say they're "done" taking on the recording industry.
They're not done; they're finished.
Welcome to the VoIP club...
"And so, on behalf of the entire city, I thank you Professor Robertsonworth. I now present you with the Internet Telephony prize, which we confiscated from Professor Zenstrom after it became apparent that he was a jackass."
"Yes! In your face, Zenstrom!"
- Yes, I'm easily amused. Why do you ask?
Greetings all, This is my very first post on slashdot. I'll try make it informative. www.Dialpad.com has offered a VIOP service that(I believe) is still free for about two years now. I haven't used the service in a year but I remember it being really quite good, even on a 56k modem connection. As I see it these new services saw a bandwagon to jump on and so they did. Kazaa was just another bandwagon jumper and technically so was the MP3.com website although they expanded their services to give relatively unknown bands a portal for thier music.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
I love how this is off topic! I thought the article was about how standards beats proprietary protocols? Except of course when everyone uses a standard protocol and their solutions still don't talk to each other!
GPL Deconstructed
As it is right now, when you hook up a computer on the 'net, it is less than 5 minutes before someone is trying to hack it/anonymously FTP from it/spread a virus to it.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
... in the Linux community.
Thank you Marcelo Rodriguez for the reply and informing me.
I think the #1 VOIP application has to be "asterisk". If is a GPL'd PBX that supports most voip protocals (SIP, h323 and others) plus it supports the PSTN analog and digital (T1) lines.
It can gateway between any of these. And again, it is GPL'd. see www.asterisk.org
asterisk is written is such a way that one can add protocal suppot by writting a kind of "plug in" so the "kaza thing" could be supported as soon as the
protocal is reverse engineered.
The Instant Messaging Standards Race:
_ v1 .0.pdf
Comparing XMPP/Jabber and SIP/SIMPLE
http://www.jabber.com/pdf/The_IM_Standards_Race
Between H.323, SIP, and skinny:
:-)
which ones are designed to explicitly forward ANI information for caller identification? Or is that controlled by whomever provides the service at the junction between the public telco network and the Internet?
You sounded like the guy who might know.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
http://www.openss7.org/