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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."
The whole VoIP technology has the ability to revolutionize communications. We just need to make sure that the industry is kept open enough, so everyone has a chance to innovate. Open source and open protocols are an excellent way to help do that. If the government steps in and starts regulating everything like they did with POTS, then we'll end up with a few huge monopolies that offer horrible service and horrible prices again.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
Incorrect!
VoIP companies can and do provide E911 addressing. Vonage for example has a web page that you can tell them your home address and that will be sent with any calls to 911.
The only place where VoIP does have a downfall in this area is for wireless VoIP phones. Since these phones have no idea where they are your company will be providing your home address as the 911 address even if you are in a hotel halfway around the world.
Hence we hear the cry "Put GPSs in all of them like newer cellphones". Only problem with this is that most of these are used indoors and GPS signals are horrible at penetrating structures.
Then we hear the cry "Place the location in all the access points". Once again the problem with this is... you have to tell the access point the location and you know that someone is going to forget to set/change it. This would also take a LARGE overhaul of how access points work since they would then have to inject this location into the datastream as it passes instead of being a passive bridge of the data.
I think people are just going to have to be taught what the inherent risks are and how they can avoid them beyond that we start getting into the stupid world of blatantly obvious warning labels and such.
Everything has an inherent risk... learn to deal with it people!
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
I think the biggest thing that the VoIP providers can do to avoid regulation is open up their SIP networks. And the best thing people like AT&T can do to get upstart VoIP players regulated is to open up their SIP networks.
VoIP get's most of the emphasis, but SIP is the killer app that VoIP is riding on, IMHO. The most annoying thing is that the VoIP providers won't allow customers, other VoIP providers or CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) manufactures access to the really cool features of SIP.
What can you do with truly open SIP. For starters it help to understand that SIP is a signaling protocol (like SS7 in the POTS world), not a communication protocol, SIP doesn't bother with encoding, decoding, or routing of the actually bits being communicated. As the name implies Session Initiation Protocol initiates communication session between end-points, once initiated the communication occurs direct between the end-point devices using some other protocol negotiated by SIP when it initiated the connection. However, the word "initiation" is a bit misleading because the SIP server also maintains awareness of the connection once established and can be used to control the connection afterwards and that can include adding/subtracting end-points, add/subtracting layers of communication, re-connecting end-points, etc. Very powerful stuff.
So with open SIP, you could have your cell phone route calls to the ATA in your home when you're home, but directly to your cell phone when away (and visa versa) by having the SIP server of your home ATA tell the SIP server of your cell phone provider that the new end-point device for phone number xxx is here. Also, you could set up complex multi-media connection on the fly. You're chatting over IM with someone and decide you need to up the bandwidth to voice, click, both parties (2 or more actually) phones ring, need to add a data feed to that to send a file, click. Need to add video, click.
The possibilities of what can be done with SIP have just barely been explored because of the limitation imposed by the VoIP providers. If only they understood Metcalf's law: The power of the network increases proportionately with the square of the number of nodes on the network. So by artificially limiting the number of nodes on your VoIP network to only your customers you really do yourself a disservice.
So if AT&T opened up its SIP network first and allowed users to see the power of SIP then the public sentiment could very quickly tilt in favor of regulation on other VoIP providers to do the same. On the other hand, if Vonage opened up its SIP network first then it could maintain the regulatory high-ground that VoIP inherently creates a competitive marketplace without regulations.
This is one of the primary reasons for dumping IPv4 and going IPv6.
I have been working on setting up my own IPv6 network. I am even investigating the possibility of getting true native IPv6 addressing along side IPv4 from my ISP.
The real problem for us is going to be all of the jokers out there that are so short-sighted that they ignore IPv6 claiming that "IPv4 and NAT are good enough for anything you want to do."
Well, those people are simply wrong. There are lots of reasons for IPv6. Cheap, or even free, global phone service is just one of them. Let's all work to re-establish the Internet as the peer-to-peer network that it was originally, and not the client-server network where the content is provided by big business and multi-national media conglomerates.
1) When your power goes out, the phone still works. Your computers (and VoIP phone) do not.
2) When your Network connection flakes out (as it is known to do periodically), your VoIP phone goes silent.
3) When your ISP starts to block or throttle back VoIP calls which are not routed through their own VoIP service, your VoIP phone is almost useless. You can thank the lack of regulations for this.
The VoIP industry is very much in bubble mode right now. It will burst, and when it does, I think that VoIP will finally have the opportunity to mature into a product which is actually useable for joe average.
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