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.)

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Article slashdotted, have mercy for Voxilla server

[Sir Haxa1ot]

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

What happens to call charges if this takes off.

[cyril3]

The telcos make lots of money at the moment out of selling circuts for varying periods of time for voice calls. So every time you make a call to China you hire a circut for a short time and make your call.

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.

SIP for Linux

[kirun]

Linphone offers SIP calling for Linux.

H.323, SIP, Telcos, PBXs, Open Standards

[billstewart]

There are two and a half main standards for VOIP. All of the standards use the same codecs - the big differences are in how you set up connections and calls.

• H.323 is the old standard, which almost everybody supports. It's a bit complex and ugly, and looks a lot like the ISDN telco standards. Microsoft Netmeeting supports it for video as well as audio. If you just want to connect two things together, H.323 will work fine, but if you want to build any sort of complex system, it's pretty clumsy. If you want to connect two new fancy systems together, and they're not really compatible, they'll often fall back to H.323.
• SIP is the main new standard, and everybody says they're going to use it Real Soon Now (particularly the VOIP router and PBX folks), though many of them don't actually have it implemented on all of their products yet because they've got too much embedded base. SIP is a much simpler and cleaner protocol, which looks like something written by Internet Unix developers who weren't worried about their embedded base of ISDN telco code.
• The extra half is "Skinny", Cisco's proprietary protocol that most of their IP PBXs and IP phones use, developed before SIP was sufficiently standardized. H.323 was too much baggage, though most of that equipment can fall back to it, and most of it will handle SIP Real Soon Now.
• Yes, Skype is proprietary and closed. Too bad, because it seems to be trying some interesting approaches to user interaction and directory service.
• Speak Freely is one of the best open-but-non-standard systems out there - it was an early attempt to do a crypto phone. Unfortunately, its originator and main developer has decided that there's too much NAT in the world to make it worth continuing to develop it; getting around that takes a major redesign.
• A lot of Instant Messaging systems of various sorts have added VOIP capability.

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