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Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the me-too dept.

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?"

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Too many players? by bwd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Interoperability by ztransform · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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*

  3. Re:Standards please... by grasshoppa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!