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IBM To Run VoIP On Linux
hrhsoleil writes "Johnny Barnes, IBM's vice president of global IT solutions and standards, told attendees at a TechTarget conference this week that his company plans to migrate at least 80% of its more than 300,000 employees to voice over IP by 2008. The project will replace approximately 900 PBXs around the world with regional IP installations. IBM's server-based IP telephony platform is going to run on Linux."
Try the Phillipeans... VoIP is illegal.
Won't IBM have fun installing it there.
Since they are extremely decentralized, this is REALLY a gamble for them. Imaging half of IBM "winking out" when their PBX network dies. I'm happy that they are brave enough to do this, but I worry for Linux's reputation if it becomes a boondogle.
Like all productivity gains, they'll spend the money on new equipment, new r&d, expansion of their business, etc., which eventually means more employees. Which is a very good thing.
Are the voip calls going to be encrypted?
Vonage may not encrypt calls, but at least on the IBM end, until it reaches the demarc line, they should stand up and do the right thing and encrypt all their voip calls.
Perhaps this will be the kick in the pants that everyone who is in love with voip needs.
Transmitting voip calls over the internet is absolutely nuts without encryption. Forget about tapping a phone line with recording equipment. Now all you need is a minimal size hard drive, and standard apps available on all platforms to tap into and record "telephone" conversations.
Don't forget that because wireless telephones aren't considered "secure" by courts, it doesn't require a search warrant, or line tap warrant to record the conversations. By using unencrypted voip, the bar is being lowered to no requirement for a search/line warrant for intercepting all voip phone conversations. And it looks like everyone, including the phone companies are migrating toward voip.
There have been slashdot stories raising big stinks about echelon, about tia, and about the fight over the strength of encryption allowed as exports, encryption classified as munitions, storing encryption keys with the government/clipper, and big stinks have been raised about each of these stories. Yet I've only heard of one company that I can't recall the name of right now that is offering encrypted calls, and they said that if the government needs access, they can turn over the conversation, as they are the midpoint on the encryption, and all the packets are cached on their servers anyway...
Where's the outrage over non-encrypted voip?
Asterisk: the open source software PBX, which runs on Linux, and has a hardware company to back it up with support and equipment?
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
It does. Presumably phone company x gets granted a monopoly on phonelines on condition that it provides them to anyone who wants one - the effect is some (unprofitable e.g. middle-of-nowhere) lines are subsidsed by the majority profitable ones. If a significant proportion of the profitable lines are abandoned in favour of voip, the teleco gets upset.
Alternatively the teleco was really a stealth tax, and the gov doesn't want it side-stepped.
> The parent point was about the primary part of the news: moving so many PBXs from
> PSTN to VoIP will cut the profit of PSTN providers, specifically from long
> distance calls. The questions is: what are they going to do about it? Do they
> afraid a potential death of "long distance call" industry?
Yes, I know this. Aparneltly you and the parent poster (and most of the replys Ive read) dont understand the difference between a PBX and the PSTN.
Think of a PBX as a network switch, or a NAT device.
Then think of the PSTN as the Internet.
(Ok horid comparisons but go with me on this for a sec)
Now, basically what you are saying is "If you replace your home switch/NAT device, with another one, wont your ISP get pissed off that you are by-passing them for internet access?"
Now you can see, you still would need an ISP to get to the internet, and having a number of computers connected to a switch has nothing what so ever to do with the internet, even thou the possibility of being connected to the internet is there.
If you have a PBX, you still need to conect to the PSTN if you plan on making calls to any other phones on the PSTnetwork.
I can't see IBM chaning from older PBX to newer VoIP technology, and then for no reason what so ever disconnecting from the PSTN and not paying the phone company. Noone would be able to call IBM, and they couldnt call out!
Now a little network leason.
I'm sure you have heard of what a T1 is. A T1 is a type of service (NOT a type of line/connection) which most people dont make that distinction.
The physical line is called a DS1. A DS1 is 24 B channels (Each B channel is 64k/sec of bandwidth)
A DS0 is one channel (ISDN has one or two of these), a DS1 is 24, and a DS3 is 720 B's (I think, a DS3 is 30 DS1's)
So, a DS1 is the line. When you use all those B channels as one data line, the DS1 is called a T1. But a T1 is not the only option.
You can also keep those 24 channels seperate, and in this case the DS1 is called a PRI. With this setup, you generally turn up one or more of these 24 channels each as its own phoneline, so you can get 24 phonelines.
Due to switching, this isnt exactly acurate. You either set the PRI to have 24 channels of 56k each, or 23 channels of 64k. The extra space is used for signaling. If you are doing voice, or analog dialup for an isp, you can go with 24 chanels of 56k.. the extra 8k is switching.
Or you can just reserve one whole channel for switching, and use the remaining 23 at their full 64k and do all of voice, analog dialup, and additionally ISDN dialup. For voice, one generally uses 24 chans at 56k, as a phone line wont use much more than 8-16k of bandwidth anyways, and specifically for a phone system, modems dont come into play.
Now back to why I typed all that.
If you have say 3 offices, one being the main office. You get a number of PRI's into the building for your PSTN connection, each PRI giving you 24 phone lines.
Then you get a T1 connection from that office to the other two.
The PBX is able to route calls over the T1's between offices, and then route however is needed to get to the PRIs when someone needs to use an external line.
PBX's ususally use their own wierd data format, so an entire T1 is wasted on this one function. (IP is not running over it)
With VoIP, they can either use existing point-to-point IP links (Im sure IBM has faster than a single T1 internal links between offices already) and just use those. They can also take that T1 they had before and convert it to IP, or just get rid of it if they have much faster bandwidth already (IE a T3 or better)
The links between offices are ALREADY being provided by the phone companys.
It really depends if they continue to use their dedicated phone links with IP, or if they cancel those lines to use existing backbone connections they already have for IP. That will be the ONLY change the phone company would see.
VoIP just adds more