Slashdot Mirror
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."
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! ...
What exactly do you want from VoIP which only Skype offers? The firewall piercing net code will never be part of any standard VoIP protocol. It's just plain inacceptable in a corporate environment. The higher voice quality comes at the expense of increased bandwidth consumption and has no effect on VoIP-POTS calls anyway. The presence functions are better performed by IM software like ICQ or Jabber. So, what is it?
Nothing wrong about it, as long as they give proper credit to the original authors.
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.
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.