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.)

Comments

2 Things

[eenglish_ca]

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.

Re:2 Things

[sql*kitten]

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.

The interesting thing about SIP is that it is a generic protocol for starting and running conversations. It's not limited to one medium like say Jabber is limited to text IM only. You can use SIP for IM, VoIP, videoconferencing, file transfer, shared whiteboards, whatever you want. It's pretty cool. And it has loads of real-world vendors behind it. Forget about dodgy startups like Kazaa, I'm talking Nortel, Alcatel, Microsoft, et al. That's important because these are companies that ship real products (i.e. phone on your desk, the phone switch in the basement of your office, etc etc). They can simply roll SIP in and migrate customers very smoothly to it. The analogy to MP3 doesn't really hold, because the real strength of SIP from a consumer perspective is that it will be transparently embedded in everyday items - most users will never even hear about it.

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.

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