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Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng
Anders Bylund writes "Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring, adding Voice over IP features to the upcoming Yahoo Messenger release. With way too many players on the field, there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?"
The more, the better. The IM/VOIP market is one of the few markets where we have true competition. If Yahoo! is going to make a better app with VOIP than what I currently use (Google Talk), then I'll switch.
The concern I have with VoIP going forward is interoperability. This is on two levels:
1. voice data transfer, and
2. signalling transfer
Essentially the world telcos today send voice around the world at 64Kbps (or a slightly lower rate for the robbed-bit signalling format used by some Northern American telcos). They can encode their data in two companded formats: A-law and mu-law.
VoIP, on the other hand, can be transferred in a number of different codecs including G.703, G.711, etc.
When sending VoIP over the internet the biggest problem is having to use two identical clients that speak the same data transfer encoding. But getting agreed standards on codecs to use is simple compared to agreeing on signalling formats!
Let's use a call from Australia to the UK for example. Say that a telco in Australia sends a call from Australia to the USA on one fibre hop. Then a provider in the USA switches the call to the UK over another fibre hop. Will the data that I sent, compressed in codec A, be uncompressed at the US provider and re-encoded before sending to the UK?
What if I need to make a call that traverses 3 or 4 providers! Compressing and uncompressing using lossy codecs equals a lot of noise introduced into the signal.
Now, what if I want to make a VoIP call initiated by Yahoo! or Google or MSN or Skype or some other client desktop.. (dare I say Cisco or Nortel or Lucent or Alcatel?). If I want that call to, at another stage, enter another network there are so many compatibility problems to be sorted out.
*pulls out hair*
It would be useful to mention that by saying "VoIP" it means that voice transmission capabilities will be added to it, and not that it will interoperate with current VoIP telephony standards such as SIP, which by the way, Google Talk has plans to add in a future release.
The article mentions Vonage and SIPPhone alongside as "competitors", which gives people the idea that somehow they will be able to use it to make calls.
There already are standards. SIP. 711 ulaw/alaw. IAX to a lesser extent.
The problem is these new players want to carve their own niche and lock them in. They have MS envy, in essence.
That's why I love asterisk.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Diversity and competition do not always lead to a "shakeout." With any luck, however, it will lead to a better situation than exists with the current (stagnant) telephone service.
/dev/random
How does the 'fully encrypted' part of skype work? Is it personalized encryption via public key, private key? Or does skype act as the man in the middle somehow?
I suspect that issue will cause a call for government regulation to ensure wiretapping. In fact, I'll bet that this is a large factor in causing China to try blocking voip.
Get a bluetooth headset, or that Uniden cordless phone with bluetooth.