VoIP Regulation, SIP Insurrection

Chris Holland writes "As voice communications are evolving beyond traditional phone systems and making better use of the Internet, Aswath Rao is offering regulation-advocating counterpoints to Dr. Daniel Ryan's original analysis of various VoIP industry players' arguments for deregulation. Many of the above discussions revolve around closed, regulatory-scrutiny-fostering voice communications ecosystems reserved to a small, resourceful elite. Meanwhile, an open Internet protocol which provides support for all forms of real-time communications including Text, Voice and Video, with a few open-sourced server implementations and free client solutions is starting to gain serious ground: The Session Initiation Protocol enables just about anybody with little resources to become their own Real-Time Communications Giant."

Comments

Re:data of VOIP

[stratjakt]

Yes, you can send and recieve faxes and dial-out via modem over VOiP.

I dial out over Vonage all the time, since the only access to most of the boxes I support is via dial-up. There are still plenty of computers that aren't on the 'net, especially where privacy/security is key.

Re:No 9-1-1

[Big_Al_B]

I don't know where you've gotten this "No 911 with VoIP" idea from.

I work for a telco/ISP/VoIP provider, and we've offer 911 services standard with all VoIP services. It's the same E911 service that cell carriers are providing.

And most major VoIP industry players offer it as a standard, or at least optional, feature.

Cell carriers are legally bound to provide E911 services (stage 1). VoIP carriers are not, but most serious providers do anyway, to have feature parity with the POTS market.

Re:SIP behind Nat

[valmont]

SIP was recently made to work behind NAT just fine thanks to STUN. read the article 'till the end. STUN was introduced in 2003, while SIP's been around for nearly a decade. I've even recently pushed the envelope to verify how well STUN works by making and receiving SIP calls from/to my earthlink SIP account behind 2 layers of NAT: 192.168.1.* network, linked to a 10.0.0.* network, linked to my earthlink (verizon) dsl.

Re:No 9-1-1

[Scyber]

Wrong, I have Vonage too. And if you read their page: http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911 They even tell you the following:

Your Call Will Go To A General Access Line at the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). This is different from the 911 Emergency Response Center where traditional 911 calls go.

This means that your address does not automatically appear on the Call Centers computers. Currently only Packet8 offers this feature. Although I heard that Vonage is beta testing in some markets.

Microsoft Windows Messenger uses SIP

[daern]

i don't suppose anyone on /. will mention it, but Microsoft have adopted SIP in the latest Windows Messenger client.

Note that this is *not* the same as the .NET Messenger client, which is designed for public Internet use. Windows Messenger is designed to work with a Live Communication Server, integrated into Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange. If you have the whole Microsoft suite, it actually works really well...

More info here... http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxp pro/maintain/wmsgrfaq.mspx

We use this for corporate IM, voice and video conferencing, as well as remote desktop support (using the "remote assistance" feature) and also for desktop application sharing.