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Microsoft Serious About VoIP
VoIPluvr writes "Microsoft, is quietly turning into a voice-over-IP powerhouse. It all started with the launch of its Microsoft Live Communication Server. Bill Gates says, 'Communicating in a better way has a huge impact for business,' and he states that he wants Microsoft to marry the PC, the cell phone and the desk phone. Recently, Microsoft teamed up with VoIP companies like Sylantro to offer hosted IP-PBX services, and now is rumored to have bought Teleo, a small VoIP company based in San Francisco. Microsoft's dominance on the desktop is helping the company extend its reach into the fast growing VoIP business, thus putting it in direct competition with the likes of Cisco. Teleo, for instance could help the company compete more effectively with the likes of Yahoo and Skype."
Yeah, right. Who in his right mind would ever route his phonecalls over a Micro$oft "secured" servers and protocols?
Prepare for the blue screech of death when you pick up the phone!
Sorry...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
VoIP is definitely taking off, and we're beginning to see most of the major telco equipment manufacturers signing onto it. I thought the most interesting part of the article was Microsoft's partnership with the big telco equipment companies, such as Nokia and Motorola. Motorola's already doing some interesting stuff with a Microsoft protocol called WMV12C, which is at the heart of Microsoft Live, where data moves using a circular topology. As you can see from the diagram, the protocol is optimized for typical voice traffic.
This is an exciting time to be in telecommunications. Long term, I see protocols like 802.16 taking over from traditional mobile telephony. You'll use an HPC instead of a traditional cellphone, and subscribe to a combination of a VoIP SP and a set of wireless (802.16) operators, getting all you can eat telecommunications for a price relative to the number of locations you travel to rather than the length of time you speak.
Pretty awesome.
Great now my cellphone, home phone and PC can all crash at once.. thanks Micrsofot for being the leader in innovation!!
-=Linsys=-
http://www.intrusionsec.com
Is Yahoo Serious as well???
VoIP + RSS = VoIPcasts
a true "core" product?
everyone else seems to be seeking out one specific segment of the market, is MS finally realizing specializing in everything means you specialize in nothing?
i think they are good and bad, but they seem to have lost the wind in their sails...
Microsoft makes a PDF-like format, Microsoft takes over municipal water works, Microsoft creates new ice-cream cone. My god, can't Microsoft leave anything alone? This is what is going to kill MS; they are doing too many things and fighting too many wars on too many fronts in an effort to maintain market dominance. You would think large companies would ditch MS wholesale simply because MS may one day use the revenue to compete with them.
-_-
I wonder how this is going to play with the Telco's. I worked a long time at one of the Telco's and we did much/most of our work on IBM mainframes and Unix servers. Then our high level management and Microsoft marketers got very cozy and all of a sudden many of our critical applications began shifting to the Windows 2000, SQLServer, IIS platform. This was all very much with heavy opposition from technical staff, but their input wasn't wanted. In the course of five to ten years I saw us (them?) become very heavily vested in Microsoft platforms (including the public facing web site (which was nothing but problematic rolling out on the MS platform)).
And now, Microsoft wants to enter the market of the telcos? I know everyone is jumping in on this, and I for one have little empathy/sympathy for the PHB's who've made their beds with Microsoft, but I wonder how much they like Microsoft now?
Didn't MS want to marry the PC with my television and my stereo?
Now they also want to marry it to my cell phone and my desk phone?
Ups, got to stop posting, my tv is ringing.
over the years everyone has hated MS at one time or anohter.. and /.'ers seem to realy hate MS
all i know is i like MS .. i say keep up the work
(you keep me in biz)
your consultant
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Doesn't MSN Messenger provide a voice over Internet protocol of sorts via add-on services like Net2Phone? I think it use to be free wiht MSN Messenger and a few other services like Yahoo! (IIRC), but now a fee is charged.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
It seems to me like any new sector or industry comes along and people start making money microsoft goes AAHHH we don't control that! So they buy a bunch of companies and produce some buggy vaporware and spend a bunch of money. Is it possible for them to be happy with that they got or at least not branch out so much and focus on goods they can produce and produce them well.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The submitter, VoIPluvr, must be using the Yale comma style and not the more popular Harvard style.
That said, VoIP is a pretty reasonable direction for M$, it's something that they can easily embed in their OS and rip the benefits afterwards.
The Raven
So letsee... in order to go from traditional PBX to VOIP you could either a) deploy a brand new separate IP network to directly replace your PBX or B) Upgrade your existing IP network including all of your ethernet switches so that they support PoE (Power over Ethernet).
You may need to implement QOS (you don't want some FTP transfer blocking time sensitive voice traffic.
You may need to redesign your core routers, backbone etc for this increase in traffic.
Also, if the CallManager (the computer that sets up the connection between the two telephones) goes down, you're not making phone calls. Do you really want to trust this to Windows? Yes, I realize that Cisco's CallManager runs on Windows, but rumor has it they are making a linux version.
So the question remains, with all the changes to your network that are required I doubt this will go far.. unless of course MSFT buys Juniper, Nortel...
Method for outputting a crashdump as a series of audio tones.
bill: hey steve, can you hear me now!!
steve bummer: what WHAT!!!
bill: GOOOOOOODDDD...
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
I wonder when that little pop-up will start appearing on computer screens during incoming VoIP calls. I can think of a million ways MS could embrace-and-extend VoIP to add features that only work/ "work best" with MS software. Makers of VoIP add-ons will then test their widgets with MS only and not support "non-standard" operating systems.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
See also:
Hotmail
WebTV
X-Box
MSN
MSNBC
Etc.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You're talking Windows here, so your comment should read " EVERTHING you open or look at is logged into temp files or stored in user.reg files."
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Avaya built one of their switches based on Windows. They tried to sell it at the same price as their *nix switches. They lost money on it big time. What was interesting was that the switch had to have double the CPU and double the ram. Even with that, it still crashed and could not carry the same load. Finally, the support cost were enormous.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Damnit! Don't they get it? I just want a simple phone that works, not lots of gadets. How am I supposed to fit my PC, my cellphone and my desk phone in a shirt pocket?
Besides, I find this whole thing unnatural and sick. We should pass a Constitutional amendment prohibiting the marrying of objects. Just because Bill Gates has a sexual fetish for devices, doesn't mean I want it shoved in my face. Respect the sanctity of human marriage!
... and then they built the supercollider.
he states that he wants Microsoft to marry the PC, the cell phone and the desk phone, Why? Has anyone thought of that? Integration is nice but sometimes it's pointless and harmful. For example, my Motorola v600 is Java powered. That's great except sometimes I can punch things in faster than it can handle. The battery life is poor. My older StarTac was perfect for me. No java or camera but it go the job done right. I never had to reboot a cellphone until I got this new one. Oh, let's not forget how the battery life is kind of mediocre. Let me count the number of times I've taken advantage of the Java and camera features: 5. Those 5 times, I could have done without them anyways. MS needs to take a lesson fron Apple and even *nix. Do one thing and do it well. Then make all those things play together well. God I wish Apply made cellphones.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
After the first word of this story? I don't think so. What is wrong with the world?
Skype seems to be the only product making cross-platform solutions.
as for video -- it doesn't seem like ANYONE is looking for cross-platform compatibility. iChat doesn't work with netmeeting or gnomemeeting (and the tiny AIM video screen sucks). video4skype only works in windows (though it is great in windows.)
i use linux, but i have recently had to reinstall (dual-boot) windows so I can use AIM's video chat with my girlfriend (who uses iChat.) It's the only solution that easily works through odd connections (firewalls,etc.) And, unfortunately, xmeeting just doesn't work that easily for the non tech savvy (like her.)
why hasn't there been movement to make cross-platform video solutions?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
This one is ours , lets take another.
Seriously Microsoft getting into telecommunications stinks of Monopoly Leveraging to me.
If your convicted of abusing a monopoly , several special rules apply or rather they do not as the courts seem rather passive
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Sadly a quite a lot of investment has already been made in VoIP without any MS extensions, and by the time that MS releases a VoIP client (Presuming it comes with longhorn) all those wonderful MS extensions will be dropped into a world full of devices that just won't talk to them.
Plus they've got MSN Messenger anyway.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Hey, don't forget the $775 million, plus $75 mill of free software. Gotta recoup the loss somewhere.
First, I would love to see Cisco and Microsoft slugging it out.
Second, Microsoft has as much right as anyone to engage in a VoIP business. Reflex knee-jerk bashing is just that, and unhelpful with considering all the ramifications. Simply assuming the worst because it is Microsoft is dead flat wrong and guaranteed to be counterproductive to countering them in competition.
Third, the *nix/non-MS world hasn't taken big enough of a part in brainstorming, talking over, promulgating, and adopting uniform standards and frameworks for VoIP, watching instead as a VoIP industry did it, slugging it out for years until their ideas and visions were finally tested and glommed onto in their own ways by various larger vendors who had before taken a wait-and-see approach.
Before the non-MS world gets all uptight about this, they might want to tighten up their support for common desktop audio-visual hardware like sound boards and webcams. They might want to write networking code as tight and reliable as CiscoIOS. They might want to start innovating instead of remaing fragmented self-deluded noble fantasy rebels againt the evil Microsoft. Microsoft has nothing to worry about until by virtue of sheer numbers of usage, things not created and perfected by them need to be adopted and they have to come to others to sign license and royalty contracts.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Where I work, we have a saying. "There are only two things that need to be up and running 24x7 without a hitch. Ever: phone and e-mail". Until Microsoft can provide an OS with this kind of reliability that doesn't cost the farm (like Windows Data Center on Unisys) they will not be chosen as a serious contender for carrier grade mail or phone. How many large ISPs out there use Exchange for mail? None. An for people like me... I want carrier grade quality in everything even for my own home use. That's why I use *nix for anything serious.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Avaya also has a windows-based eIVR product, which they will sell you for a minimum $50k plus custom programming rates of $20k-$50k if you actually want to run anything on it. (Custom programmed in VBScript, and they won't bother to test it with any database other than Sql Server.)
Or you could spend $5k on hardware, install Linux, Asterisk PBX software, spend an afternoon hacking, and have the same thing.
Lots of people mention Skype and similar services. But I want to know how the new MS offering will stack up against Asterisk?
Microsoft have tied all their systems nicely together. I don't know much about Microsoft products but once or twice every year I see problems that brings down every Microsoft based problems.
Whenever we need different MS systems to talk to each other, they pretty much needs to be on the same network or at least have so many open network ports between them that firewalling them in different security zones becomes useless.
I'd prefer different systems with clearly defined boundries, communicating trough standard protocols instead. Moving everything to a big consolidated MS monster, might have helped bring down some of the expenses of having different systems. But I have yet to see it bring better stability.
I see some signs of people not any longer want everything to be tied in to a MS system after have had problems with one vendor to rule them all.
but sadly the management in a lot of places does not understand why they don't get the stability they had on the mainframe after moving it all to MS.
That's currently a feature in Live Communications Server 2005. And when you miss a call, you get an email in your inbox with a .wav file that has the voice message attached.
"There are no such things as mutual fantasies. Yours bore us and ours offend you."
- Bill Maher
PBX's and Key systems will still rule the day for small businesses and branch offices. The cost to roll out VOIP is too much per user. The quality can be poor, choppy and dropped calls. The last 20 years I have seen 0 viruses on one key system and two PBX's. In the last 2 years I have seen two viruses on Cisco Call Manager.
I would say that Apple should start a PBX on Mac OS X and see how many people choose the MS PBX vs the Apple PBX. We all know that viruses for Mac OS X are very rare and it can run for years without a re-boot.
The quicker Cisco gets off Microsoft Windows the more credible the platform can be. A PBX running on Windows is like me bragging about my girlfriend, the one who screws any guy in town and has a different venereal disease every month. She sure is good looking and resilient, the diseases have not killed her or me yet!
Your Average Joe
Seems like microsoft wants to get on the bandwagon for anything popular these days. (Rss, Voip....)
The IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) which is coming out of 3GPP (GMS) and 3GPP2 (CDMA) will establish a solid footing for VoIP where it can match the quality of current PSTN.
IMS will allow Quality of Service (QOS) on the network, between carriers.
IMS will also support much more security than available now with VoIP. Especially between carriers.
IMS will allow roaming, because the network you are on will probably not give you QOS otherwise.
Best of all, IMS is based on SIP and other IETF standards. It will allow much more rapid development of multimedia applications for both wireless and wireline applications.
The downside is that while the standards are open, this will be a big player game. While there will be much more intelligence on the End User device compared to PSTN, the network will still maintain control. It has to for QOS. Peer-to-peer VoIP will never match the quality of PSTN. Ultimately the big carriers do not want to be commoditized dumb pipes
Truth be told, most people are not savvy enough for peer-to-peer and putting enough intelligence in our software is still a long-long way off. Especially if it's being developed by Microsoft.
Note: I work for a telecommunications equipment vendor. I am heavily into and biased for IMS.
Peace,
Vudu Child
If you had my real name, you'd use an alias too.
I'm surprised that it has taken Microsoft quite so long to get their hooks into this one.. but it may be what's needed to get VoIP into mass adoption. If a big company such as Microsoft is clearly advocating this as the next step, then more telecom companies are going to adopt the technology -- and yes, while the Slashdot readers are moaning about Bill Gates' empire, most non-tech people respect Microsoft for their achievements. Microsoft also have overwhelming political muscle (comes from the cash pile... not too hard to pick out) which may be a great help in getting widespread awareness.
It's also interesting to note, that the US is slightly further behind in this one. The UK's biggest operator, British Telecom (BT), has invested a large amount of money in replacing traditional phone networks in the UK with an IP routed system (completely separate from the internet of course) for phone calls. This system (not yet in operation) provides the flexibility and adaptability of this network type for various types of data streams, as well as providing the dedicated, managed network needed to preserve the original call quality. While not quite the same as what we think of today as VoIP, this could be the future for the technology -- it certainly quashes the whole QoS debate.
Unless they can figure out a way to have Excel sing out the financial results of British and Japanese companies.
Then, maybe, just mabye, THHGTTG, can be a success.
Oh, Microsoft, yeah, well, they can't make great music with their hind legs.....
668: Neighbour of the Beast
...Microsoft serious about all this other shit it never came up with, but will gladly "innovate" on.
Nigga please. I been told this shit a million times. When they gain the foresight to come up with a good idea from it's foundations, then I'll trust them to innovate on that core. These people don't understand anything, they just take ideas and self-righteously claim an understanding they don't have. That understanding comes from surveys that hardly depict what the framers of that technology intended, but what joe blo understands of it, and that's where innovation comes to mean mediocrity. They need real visionaries, not superfical ones like Ballmer, who doesn't have a clue what the underlying technologies he is working with are truly capable of.
But you can bet on it, that MS will borrow heavily from Asterisk.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have used it, and it has some pretty good features.
-You can send secure IM messages.
-Allows interopability with Yahoo, MSN, and AOL
-Logs messages so that business meet government regulations regarding communications (just as email is regulated).
- even alerts you when you are away from the office that you desk phone is ringing, tells you who is calling and gives your the option of forwarding the call to your home, cell, etc.
- conferencing use live meeting
- and now voip
If all these things are done reasonably well, that is good product. And from my experience, they are done well
They're gonna have to deal with emergency dial, which will compell at least a modicum of standards compliance. Or should. But you're absolutely right, embrace and extend is MS's MO, as we all know. Some of us care about that kind of thing; PHB's mostly don't seem to think these things matter. Our government bodies seem to behave as though MS represents the US IT industry, and do nothing to prevent their abuse of power.
Anyway, maybe this could all turn out for the good. I will remain a holdout, and use a non-MS phone. Consequently, I will be unable to recieve phone calls, unless they are from people who don't annoy the shit out of me. Whoo hoo!!!
User.dat is a registry file at lease on older widows versions (win98)
sorry that should be "at least"
I love MS bashers - can I fuck you?
Can I Fuck You?
when they own everything, there won't be any competition.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
The third link there, "circular topology", brings up an error message that says "www.tubgirl.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again."
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
as a ravenous, hyper-competent business enterprise that arose from the arena of personal computing to become the global juggernaut that it is today.
That might be true, except for the part about "competent" and the unspoken assumption that the PC marketplace they conquered is in any way, shape or form comparable to an established industry, where the markets are well-understood and the players are all tough characters with a string of corporate corpses in their respective pasts.
If one looks at the many attempts by Microsoft to enter any "mature" industry, you find them pouring tons of money down the drain in an attempt to overwhelm their target market -- it's what worked in the nascent PC industry, where their competitors were either too small to match them dollar for dollar, or chose not to lower profitability to compete in a (wrongly-perceived) niche market, and they expect the same formula to work elsewhere.
Except that it doesn't. In established industries, the major players are too big to be bought or have their access to their markets blocked by the types of schemes Microsoft used to gain control of the PC business. The competition they now face has the wherewithal to do battle with Microsoft on every front, and other lines of business to fund those efforts, just as Microsoft uses the profits from its personal computer software monopoly to back its plays.
Don't get me wrong -- they have boatloads of cash, and a competent player with a long view would deploy that strategically and slowly become a force in the target market over time. But not Microsoft -- they storm the beaches throwing money everywhere. And when the dust settles, they're in about the same place as they started, minus a few hundred million (or billion) bucks.
They have a sufficiently adequate income that they can repeatedly do this and not sink the company. But until they get over their notion that they can win every war the same way they won their first war, they will gain no ground.
And that's why they're not "competent" -- they don't learn. Even in their own kingdom -- the PC software markets -- they were late to recognize the importance of the internet, and late to recognize that system security had become a major issue. If and when a quality user experience becomes a major hot button to their customers, they will be the last ones to get the message. They do *not* represent where innovation comes from in the PC markets, and have no idea where those markets are headed.
There are not a lot of corporations that are a hundred years old. Markets change, and every change becomes an opportunity for a company to fail. I doubt that there will be a Microsoft in 2075, as it will pass into history along with the PC.
PC have had the harware for VOIP for at least the last 5-7 years.. multimedia integration in windows hardware is so p-poor that it's STILL not practical. from a networking point of view it would be wonderful to only run 1 wire to each desk.. It would be way cool to route all the phone messages thru outlook too... the facts are that it doesn't "just work" keeping a 56k limited POTS on the desk is still preferable to tapping a $700 PC for something as simple as a quick chat...
When Apple gets into VOIP THEN be scared!!! That'd be a cool dashboard widget!
Most of the same software and hardware technology behind Vonage and Packet8 is also used VERY frequently in internal phone networks. My uneducated guess is that more than half of new corporate phone systems are VOIP. It just makes sense for a corporate phone system. There is one less network to worry about, huge flexibility in changing extensions or moving them, options to connect sites over a WAN, potential use with WiFi and VPN for users, etc. MSFT's interest in this area shouldn't be too surprising, especially with the natural tie ins to their other products.
other silly questions... Why can't I use the modem in my USB fax/scanner/printer as a general purpose modem? Why can't my computer be programmed to check my answering machine for messages? Why can't I change the channels on my TV or stereo from my PC directly? I know there's hacks to do most of those things, but why don't they just work out-of-the-box.. Why aren't small things designed to work together rather than being entirely independant?
Those clowns haven't been able to even converge the PDA and the cellphone. Now they're talking about the PC, the cellphone, and the desktop phone, as if they're any good at any of them. All they've got is a brand, a monopoly, and the best marketers money can buy. Phones are bad enough without lowering them to Microsoft standards.
--
make install -not war
I don't want to download patches to my phone. I already get phone spam.
It must be easier, cheaper, and more reliable. That's pretty hard.
Why not go after the wheel market too?
Microsoft Wheels. Where do you want to go today?
What happened to it?
What they're trying to leverage their desktop monopoly into. The windows monopoly does not give them any advantage in VOIP. Also, there is zero tolerance for failed dail tone. Absolute zero - not something MS is used to dealing with at all.
Further, if they try to bash heads with cisco (I have yet to see a cisco router just crash in over 13 years of working with them), who dominates networking perhaps as well as MS dominates the desktop, they will have to actually compete. This would be a battle, should they decide to take it, that they would actually have to fight for real - not buy, negociate, or spin they're way out of.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Should've linked to loopback.jpg instead.
...and in four years (we were a very early adopter), the only problems we have had were the fault of Cisco's software, not Microsoft's OS.
Don't even get me started on *Unity*.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Microsoft are stanardising on SIP. So that won't be a problem as such. Messenger is already a SIP client, although not currently well suited to VOIP.
I've seen a few screen shots of the new business messenger, it does have a few interesting features such as outlook integration, so that you can see a VOIP users phone status from within outlook, you can also embed phone numbers into office documents and do a few other things.
The Mitel sales guy who showed off this version of messenger wasn't expecting the microsoft client to replace their own client, but will include suppport for completeness.
Jason.
Either that, or you can just have enough bandwidth. I use VoIP regularly from home. It takes 64 kbit/s out of 10 Mbit/s and on my standard issue ethernet broadband service it is hardly noticed. Sure, maxing out a file transfer can make the call stutter but how often do I do that? It has never been a problem.
ever seen that movie anti-trust with that guy thats not bill gates but suspicously looks a heck of alot like em? his idea is to connect all the cellphones, computers, pdas and make a mass comminication network... this is strangley similar.
yep a lot of investment already and a lot of that investment was from MS. They standardised on SIP long ago and cisco et al are also moving into line from there proprietry standards. MS already have VoIP client. check out live communication server it is actually quite a good product.
"Microsoft's dominance on the desktop is helping the company extend its reach into the fast growing VoIP business, thus putting it in direct competition with the likes of Cisco."
So, what Cisco needs to do is put sneaky code into its routers that identifies traffic between two MS products and "messes" with it. ~;-)
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
MS might come up with technology similar to http://www.ipdrum.com/
Slashdot = Sarcasm
If you're running on SDSL, or only running one call at a time, you might have enough data transmission quality to get decent results, but if you're trying to put multiple voice calls on DSL, especially consumer asymmetric DSL, you often won't have a good enough data connection for it. The problem is that while the connection from your premises to the DSLAM may have enough bandwidth (if you're using a Vonage box or something similar to prioritize the voice), but the connection from the DSLAM up to the internet itself is typically oversubscribed, and there may or may not be enough bandwidth for your voice calls on that segment. For instance, that 128kbps upstream may have only 32kbps guaranteed between the DSLAM and the outside world, and while you'll usually get it, sometimes you won't, and your voice packets are now competing with your data packets and everybody else's packets.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
- Fixed - The antenna's nailed up somewhere, and doesn't move, and you can even aim a directional antenna. This part works pretty solidly.
- Portable - you can move one of the endpoints to a different location and it'll still work, as long as it's close enough to the tower, so you can take your laptop to your customer's office or home or the coffeeshop and sit down and work, and you can drive your car somewhere and park, but it won't work while you're driving. This part mostly works.
- Mobile - you can use it while you're actually moving around, driving at highway speeds or sitting on a train, and it'll adapt to changing radio parameters, switch between towers like a cell phone, etc. This part is at best bleeding edge right now, and I don't think any carriers are going to be supporting it for at least a year or two except perhaps in limited trials.
You need full mobile to do cell-phone replacement.There are still issues about using licensed vs. unlicensed spectrum that are going to affect how much interference you can expect (some carriers translate this to "I can do an SLA for licensed bandwidth but not really for unlicensed.")
It's an absolutely stunning technology to use as a backup for wired service, e.g. you've got a copper T1 and an 802.16 wireless service, so even if a backhoe or earthquake takes out your street, the wireless still works, and if it's raining to hard so the wireless is noisy, the T1 still works, and most of the time you can use both connections. For big business offices, you can get diverse fiber access or diverse T3 copper, configured as a ring so a single backhoe can't take out both sides, but it most of the US it's really hard to get that at T1 sizes or smaller, so a small business or a small office of a big business can't get good diversity from the telco (some applications, particularly voice, don't perform well over satellite, and previous generations of cellphone wireless data are often too slow for most businesses, and freespace optical isn't widely deployed.) In some cases, a small office can get some diversity by using a cable modem as the second connection - but that's mostly available in residential areas, not business areas.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's really no surprise that Microsoft would get involved, since almost every business office is already using their products, and they've got surprisingly deep experience with the older H.323 standards (NetMeeting was one of the first widely deployed H.323 systems in the video world, and yes, that's Microsoft pushing standards-based solutions against the proprietary vendors.) Sylantro, who they're making this announcement with, is a major player in the VOIP-for-Telcos market using SIP standards, so they're not just doing a simple roll-your-own. You'll also notice that Microsoft Windows Messenger is based on SIP - so they've already got a desktop client that's just waiting for a server that's designed for phones and not just mainly for IM. We'll see how well and how fast they execute, and how well they can integrate with the rest of the market, but if they were to attach this thing along side of an Exchange server at a reasonable price, they could achieve World Domination fairly quickly, just as Skype has in the consumer-toy market.
Telcos know that the traditional local+long-distance voice market is doomed, and they're adapting to it. The local carriers still have a business model managing the wires out to your house, regardless of whether they're charging $15/month to hook up the wire to a voice switch or charging $15/month to hook it up to a DSLAM (especially if they're providing the DSLAM or at least the upstream network to the ISP.) And they know they're going to need to replace their old #5ESS and Nortel DMS switches with VOIP switches (i.e. big SIP servers), but that's feasible because the new stuff is a LOT cheaper. Long distance companies are either becoming IP and private line carriers (AT&T, MCI/UUnet, Qwest), or becoming cellphone companies (Sprint/Nextel), or both, and selling out to local telcos (AT&T to SBC, MCI to Verizon and/or Qwest).
There's a lot of transitional business connecting up the old telco services to the VOIP services, some of which is coming from the long-distance or local telcos, and some of which is coming from upstart VOIP providers. The long distance companies will have mostly retired the old #4ESS switches within five years or so, replacing them with VOIP services of various types, and they're desperately trying to figure out how to do it in a way that's scalable - it's much easier to replace a PBX with VOIP than to replace a network that handles 300 million calls a day. The two obvious disruptive models to the remains of the long-distance business are that the local telcos get approval to connect to each other using VOIP, dropping the underlying cost of long-distance to basically zero, or that a decentralized solution emerges along Free-World-Dialup lines, e.g. business PBXs and home phones use spare connections to terminate calls from the VOIP space into the local-telco space. The big moneymaker for the long-distance business these days is still call centers, which have a lot of complexity and added value managing inbound calls and therefore get to charge a lot more for doing that. It's not cl
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
LAN QoS can matter, but usually doesn't. Most offices have 100 Mbps Ethernet to the desktop these days, with some level of switching behind it, and while you should put your big data servers on different segments than your phone switches, that's usually enough. Windows XP has enough QoS capabilities that you can get it to prioritize outbound VOIP over outbound data, and while that doesn't fix the inbound problem, it's a good start. Sometimes you can still get into trouble, but as long as you've got some control over your infrastructure, you can usually avoid it. Worst case is you throw in a wireless LAN to handle your voice users and leave the wired network for data.
WAN infrastructures are much more interesting, because they're usually much narrower than LANs. One approach is to ignore the problem - use the VOIP for a PBX, replacing your old dedicated clunker PBX, and use telco facilities to reach the outside world. (Yeah, boring...) Another is to look at all the new services from data carriers - many Tier 1 internet vendors support QoS within their networks (which is enough for your PBX services), and almost everybody is pushing some MPLS solution, either to get a few more years out of their Frame/ATM infrastructure, or to use their IP network to muscle in on the Frame/ATM carriers' business, and most of those have QoS.
SIP is designed to work with multiple levels of proxies, so it's easy to design for scalability. If you want a building to be able to talk when its connection to your headquarters data center is down, you do need to have a local server, but that can be implemented as a simple PC with VOIP software on it, or Cisco's SRST feature running on your router. The reason it's a big problem in Cisco-land is that most of the Cisco IP telephony environment really runs their old "Skinny" protocol, with H.323 and SIP only on the edges, so it's harder to make it scale without a lot of extra hackery (i.e. without paying for a bunch of extra licenses and adding a few extra trunks between diverse servers.) (There's also the minor issue of router horsepower, since Cisco tends to use small CPUs and do most routing work in ASICs; not a problem if you're using a PC-based system where CPU and RAM are dirt cheap.) You could avoid much of this problem if you built a system out of Asterisk, or if Microsoft does a good job of integrating Sylantro and has it priced in a way that works.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, Skype supports a couple of platforms, but they're a fundamentally closed system (by policy, not necessarily by technology) which mostly ignores standards, and is only gradually figuring out how to integrate with the outside world - they do some things very well, and bought some good codecs, but they're a consumer-to-consumer solution, not a business solution.
Microsoft, BTW, gets great credit for giving out Netmeeting for free, N years ago, following the H.323 standards. It wasn't perfect, but it really did work, and that helped motivate other vendors to do the compatibility job they should have been doing all along. (I think some of the Linux video apps work with it, like Gnomemeeting.) MS Windows Messenger apparently uses SIP, though I haven't tried it. (My company uses a Jabber-based IM system internally instead, so I use that for work IM, and I find IM sufficiently annoying that I haven't installed any of the other IM products, ESPECIALLY anything that would let me get AOL AIM messages from my mother-in-law :-)
Video, VOIP, and Instant Messaging are really all the same thing - there's some kind of presence server that you register with, and you set up media channels between the end users. H.323, SIP, Jabber, Skinny, and N different proprietary things are just different variations on how to do this, and there's the usual marketdroid struggle for interoperability vs. control. The VOIP people mostly want interoperability, and are working their way toward SIP while trying to maintain backward compatibility if they have older solutions to worry about. Video has two markets - corporate video conferencing, dominated by people like Polycom, who I think are H.323-based migrating to SIP, who make money selling hardware and like interoperability, and video-chat applications which are mostly related to the consumer IM world, where the aggressively non-interoperable control freaks dominate because they're run by consumer ISPs (AOL vs. MSN vs. smallfry) who make money from selling you their ISP service. Most of them have some kind of Windows client that non-subscribers can use to contact subscribers, like the Netscape AOL Messenger frobs, but the reason they won't work with each other is that they try very hard to block anybody who does re-engineer their protocols. (And as noted, I don't want IMs from my mother-in-law, so other than trying out AIM in my lab a couple of years ago, I haven't installed it :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just as long as there's no Dancing Paperclip of Death or helpful friendly dog named Bob to go fetch phone numbers for me, it'll be ok....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks