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VoIP Gets a New P2P Routing Protocol (DUNDi)
bkw.org writes "Today Digium released DUNDi which can be used with the Asterisk Open Source PBX for p2p call routing. Digum has also released a whitepaper (pdf) on DUNDi so others can implement this new technology into their products and give VoIP a push into the mainstream." Voxilla also has a story.
Great, Now I can get telemarketers trying to enlarge my bank software in nigeria, and viruses on my VOIP line and in my e-mail
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
* is awesome, and for anyone who hasn't given it a shot, I definitely recommend it. Digium even sells some FXS/FXO cards if you want it to replace your traditional in-house system.
Something neat for every geek!
s.
--crock
--crocodile
--crock o' dial
--dun deal
OK, cold & dumb...lame attempts at humor
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What do we need this for? Don't we have enough protocols?
This is actually pretty cool from a distributed PBX perspective. I am not sure I would want to use it over the internet with untrusted PBX's but it would be pretty useful inside a large corporate structure.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Wonder if this will sping up into localized phone services like wifi and cheap fiber based internet did for small towns. The whole town chips in and gets to kick out the big corp. and run the local service as the citizan see fit. Plus it will be cool to run in my house!
- Skript kiddiez abusing it to go VoIP-to-landline on someone else's nickel (oh yes, the days of phreaking are coming back)
- Bulk dialers. You thought telemarketers were bad? Wait until the spammers get a hold of free calls to your home!
I fear for the future...Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
The above information is taken (with minor edits) from the dundi.com website. It's the sort of information that would have been useful in the executive summary, IMHO.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Well, look at things this way: ENUM has been around for *years*, yet there's still no official ENUM tree. There's no way for VoIP carriers like Vonage to publish SIP addresses for the PSTN numbers that they service.
Why? Because of political squabbling by telcos, verisign, and the like. Whoever controls the ENUM tree will be able to control the future of telecommunications. That means money and power, and that's why there's no progress occuring--all of the usual players are jockeying for position, and will be for years.
Since ENUM is really just a DNS tree, that hasn't stopped people from producing their own ENUM trees (e164.org, etc), but there's nothing particularly official about any of them. They're all interim solutions, and none of them are big enough to be able to make a difference on their own.
There are a couple differences with DUNDi. First, it's *designed* to be decentralized, without a single point of control (or toll collection). There's an open-source implementation right out of the gate. It at least pays lip service to spam and telemarketing issues. As long as you sign the agreement, it *should* be possible for anyone to participate. And, it already has several mid-sized providers involved.
In short, right out of the gate, DUNDi is already ahead of ENUM, because it's already usable, while ENUM still doesn't have any way to publish numbers in the "official" e164.arpa tree. DUNDi doesn't have room for Verisign-style toll collection, while the official ENUM tree almost requires it.
We'll see how it goes. If Vonage joins up, then DUNDi has probably won and ENUM will end up being irrelevant, because the network effect will strongly favor DUNDi.
This new protocol is not for peer to peer voice communication. It's a method like a phone book. So you ask your peers if they know how to contact person X, your peers contact their peers and so on until they find the address of a person (for example the IAX/SIP/OpenH.323 address). Then the address is passed back though the peers to the original person doing the lookup, and is cached along the way.
You then make your telephone call using VOIP. The IAX (Inter Asterisk Exchange) protocol is amazing at getting though NAT'd connections etc. It can even trunk lots of calls together into one packet.
So in a nutshell, this is like a p2p enum.
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
And they did it to themselves.
1: Skype uses proprietary protocols that are incompatible with any other service.
2: Skype refuses to publish their interface profiles, so no one else can make software that is compatible.
3: Skype has stated in no uncertain terms, over and over on their web page and FAQ, that they will never publish their API, never open their source. Period.
Yet Skype doesn't sell their software. They maintain the full burden of development and testing, and try to pay for it by selling the service of POTS calls made through their software.
Oh well, once the idea is in the wild, someone will "open source" it. Maybe someone will adapt the Speak Freely user interface to a P2P transport layer, maybe utilizing the Gnutella network itself? Hey, this is sounding like a good idea....
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics