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Pingtel Open Source VoIP Debuts in Europe
jasperbg writes "The Register has an interesting article on open-source VoIP provider Pingtel's debut in Europe. Pingtel is a commercial company which packages and sells products based on code from the SIPfoundry open source community."
Everyone knows that you should have a hotmail account
www.lemonodor.com A mostly Lisp weblog
It seems that a year ago Pingtel had its doubts about SIP as the sole technology for VoIP. And they are right, of course.
The key to making this work is a combination of SIP and other related technologies, but most of all, VoIP needs a solid business plan to work. Despite good technologies and intentions, without a business plan that is well-designed, the project will be doomed to failure. Pingtel thinks they have the right business model. Time will tell
It always seems strange to see a company that "packages and sells open source software", it makes it sound as though all it does is crawl the net for open source software, and then sell it as their own.
Anonymous Coward
it would be nice if there was an open source alternative to skype that got major backing by some big players... let's hope this is it! (not that skype isn't good, it's great... but competition is even greater)
Get your torrents...
How about this for a summary ...
The rest is just a bit of marketing speak - basically an advert with some generalised statements about where SIP is going and why SIPfoundry is better than Asterisk.
El-Reg put it down to a conflict between a standards group (SIPfoundry) and a "fleet-footed" application development group (Asterisk) ... as we've all seen the standards always win over the latest bells and whistles!
Oh, wait! ...
I call godwin's on that...
Its finaly nice that VoIP services are comming here in an open source form , i just wonder how they are going to deal with emergency dialing , Since the rulling last week over in the USA i hope they had good sense to deal with it from the groud up , rather than rulling against them forcing them to do a rush job
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Geez, I bet that faster than you can say "slow news day" there will be a shitty 'documentary' about the people lining up for VoIP service ...
hizzle heazing schnazzle snozz
n/t
WHAT?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Was i the only one reading it as Pringles?
And i got all excited over Voice-Over-Pringles-Can for nothing. =(
Please tell us where you work that employees find themselves in a position to require 911 service daily.
Something about this post seems odd. Maybe I've just been trolled (!), its Monday morning and my brain is still off. Anyone else think this is bogus? The giveaway, for me is "the VOIP suddenly had an error reading from our intranet site." Huh? Vonage reading from an intranet site? Ugh, coffee...
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
1. Google for open source project
2. Repackage code
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!!
Really, as long as they are not violating the license agreement of the OS project, who cares? Lot's of people do it. Some companies (like the morons I work for) insist on spending money on software.
Our "Chief Software Engineer" (some very, very, very old guy who hasn't written software since punchcards went out of style) proclaimed "Open Source software is worthless. If it had any value, it wouldn't be free."
So, someone has to cater to that mindset. That's all there is to it. I wish I had the time/resources/contacts to do it, because there's definitely no shortage of people who will pay money for something that they could get for free.
Who woulda thunk it?
The whole emergency services thing is a pile of crap. Just because a VoIP service performs LIKE a telephone, doesn't make it a telephone service.
The 9xx issue is just a way for the authorities to get their foot in the door of regulating VoIP.
I really feel that education about what exactly VoIP is and isn't would be better than regulation - It is a real shame that it takes death and injury for people to actually pay attention to the limitations of technology.
So Pingtel is not merely selling something they didn't work hard to create. They made the original corpus of code, though the growing contributions of others will clearly improve it.
And even after these contributions grow in proportion to Pingtel's original source, there's still benefit in providing the same service RedHat does: decide what is ready for "prime time enterprise deployment" and what isn't, and package a release accordingly.
Yeah this looks like a bit of bs to me...
Oh, and to the point that Skype's firewall piercing is unique or unacceptable -- it isn't. See an analysis of Skype signaling done at Columbia University. Skype appears to use a variant of the STUN/ICE technique currently being worked through in the IETF for use with SIP, too. What isn't acceptable in the corporate environment is the local LAN probing / discovery that Skype does at startup!!!
So I want something that plays well with me, and others.
a sheltered work program for the disabled. light industrial. all the ordinary risks of accident and fire on the shop floor plus 150 clients who may need emergency medical services, advanced life support, at any moment.
you're depending on your internet connection for that???
Groklaw's credibility has been diminished for very specific reasons, including its censorship policy, hypocrisy and flouting Godwin's law.
Let's be clear: PJ threw the first punch at MoG by publicly accusing her of lying. Thereafter, the Groklaw community regularly attacked MoG in the most vicious and personal terms. If someone was anonymously running a web site attacking me, I sure would want to find out who was behind it.
Asterisk is a demonstration product that Digium wrote to sell their proprietary hardware. They don't care about interoperability with other SIP devices, which is why you've never seen them at a SIPit interop event, and which is why Asterisk doesn't interoperate well with user agents... Sure, you can call your grandma with it and talk to her for 10 minutes, maybe even put her on hold, but don't try any really complicated call scenarios. That's why there are standards.
The whole emergency services thing is a pile of crap. Just because a VoIP service performs LIKE a telephone, doesn't make it a telephone service.
Two comments:
Vonage, in the US at least,sells their service as an alternative to a land line - with number portablity, LD, etc. How they route the call is irrelevant to what service they are providing. People will expect 911 to work, and it should work just like any other phone.
Vonage, to their credit, does explain that you need to register to get 911 to work. Personally, if I were to use Voip at home I'd still keep a landline for emergencies and backup, at the lifeline rate if possible. Right now, my service is used to call from overseas to the US.
The 9xx issue is just a way for the authorities to get their foot in the door of regulating VoIP.
Actually, it's a way for existing phone companies to drive up the cost of VOIP, slowing it's acceptance, make some $$ on the interconnect, and buying time while they try to decide what to do.
There's a whole body of econmic thought on what regulation really does - starting with a Nobel Prize winning idea that regulation benefits the regulated.
I really feel that education about what exactly VoIP is and isn't would be better than regulation - It is a real shame that it takes death and injury for people to actually pay attention to the limitations of technology.
While education is good, it's largely irrelevant to the issue - VOIP is being sold as phone service, so people will expect it to act like one. If it doesn't, they'll scream. And even tech savvy peopel (suchas a neighbor of mine who happens to be an engineer) buy it because it's cheap, and haven't really thought about what happens when they lose power, their ISP has connection problems, or they dial 911 and don't get right into the emergency call center.
An the existing phone companies would like to regulate low cost VOIP out of business (at least until they decide how to offer it), while using VOIP tech to route calls they carry.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I disagree with expecting 911.
VoIP services should be responsible and advertise that their phone service is not as reliable as publically regualted POTS is.
There is no regulation to ensure the reliablity of VoIP but there exists regulations for your POTS lines.
What happens when your DSL or cable goes down? There is not much you can do about it. You can hope your ISP fixes it in a timely fashion. A regulated POTS service, on the other hand, is required to keep a certian very high level of service.
There is no way that VoIP can be regulated like a phone line to ensure suitability for emergency service. Saying it needs 911 is absurd. Saying it needs to be regulated is even more absurd!
The whole 911 issue smells of telecom lobbies and special interests trying to nip VoIP in the bud to ensure they do not take away their competition in the long distance market.
If you depend on your consumer grade internet connection for 911 service, you're insane.
The lads at El Reg are certainly enjoying their puns today:
Revenge of the SIP
Star Wars: Asterisk Vs SIPFoundry
You'd swear they were fishing for jobs in the tabloids!
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.
Microsoft.
I don't get it.
Packet8 (packet8.net) has E911 service. Used both Vonage and Packet8 and settled for Packet8. Been a happy VOIP user for over a year now.
There's a lot of gas escaping here. Let's keep some of the more important points in mind:
For many "open-source companies", the bulk of the code they ship is code they've written themselves and placed in open-source. For instance, Pingtel with sipX, Digium with Asterisk, Atlassian with JIRA, Ximian with Evolution, etc. OTOH, there's nothing wrong with a company like Red Hat where most of the code they sell they didn't write. But the open-source company is a business model that people haven't been using for very long, so it will take a while before the financial engineering of such companies is fully debugged.
But as Brooks said in "The Mythical Man-Month", once the code runs, 2/3 of the work remains to be done. Open-source companies make their money doing (and charging for) the other 2/3 of the work. But having the source itself be open is a guarantee to the users that the company won't try to scalp them in the future for maintenance -- a guarantee which is valuable to the customers, and so, paradoxically, raises the price the company can charge.
The fact that there are at least two serious competitors (sipX and Asterisk) in the open-source SIP universe shows that it is maturing into delivering real products, that is, software that can be used by mainstream customers, not just early adopters. A few more competitors would be even better. In the long run, the projects/companies will divide the market between themselves based on their particular strengths and weaknesses. But there's nothing that a mainstream customer likes better than making a chart giving A/B/C/D/F grades to several competing products on various features, and choosing the product that best meets his needs. It gives him something he can show to management, and shows that he has a viable Plan B if his first purchase doesn't work out.
The beauty of SIP over all the proprietary systems (and to a lesser degree over Asterisk's IAX) is the ability to connect various different components in a nearly seamlessly way to take advantage of disparate strengths, provide redundancy, or to support multi-site operation. A *lot* of thought was put into SIP to provide facilities that can be used to implement such system. For instance, several sites operate combined sipX/Asterisk systems. This configurability opens the door to highly customizable systems, serious competition for each individual component of a phone system, and incremental upgrades, all of which puts the economic power in the hands of the users rather than the vendors. (Remember how IP did that for networking? When was the last time you heard of X.400 networking?)
911 (emergency) services are by no means a red herring -- and a phone is not just a way for *you* to summon emergency services, but also for everyone else in your vicinity. (That's why cell phones cannot lock out dialing 911.) So SIP systems, to be real, have to fully implement 911. But like so many things in the real world, 911 has a business/political dimension as well as a technical one. As far as I can tell from the newspaper stories, the FCC just whopped the VoIP companies that they *must* implement E911, and whopped the telcos (who manage the 911 system) that they have to allow VoIP companies to route calls into it. A very reasonable decision.