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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.