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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."
w00t!
How about a little explanation from an editor?
Everyone knows that closed source software is far more efficient and secure! No seriously! ;)
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
Brilliant summary of the situation at hand!
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
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...
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 ...
n/t
Was i the only one reading it as Pringles?
And i got all excited over Voice-Over-Pringles-Can for nothing. =(
An employee suggested to me that we load VOIP in a few offices here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day teleconferencing. So I decided to let him install the VOIP (Vonage I think) into 5 offices to see how the users got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using VOIP in his office and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the client offices?
Once he'd got the machines up and running with VOIP we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: Vonage was a pretty good replacement for regular service and the users could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to (like 911 service!) or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the land line. The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when the VOIP suddenly had an error reading from our intranet site and corrupted his conference call.
Needless to say, the VOIP team offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee remove Vonage from the offices and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
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?
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.
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.
With THOUSANDS of T0 avoid so as to with the work, or of Walnut Crrek,
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.
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.