Category: Internet
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World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) Starts Today in Dubai
Continue Reading: World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) Starts Today in DubaiToday is the start of the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai. The aim of the conference is to update the “International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs)“, a treaty between nations that establishes rules for interoperability and interconnection for telecom between countries.These ITRs were last updated in 1988… and the world of telecom has changed just a wee bit since then! 🙂
Unless you’ve been asleep or offline for the past few months, you’ll know that some of the countries out there are seeking to use this WCIT conference as a way to expand the ITRs to cover the Internet – and to thereby control the Internet more or to impose other business models on the Internet. Obviously a lot of people (myself included) are opposed to the expansion of the ITRs to include more of the Internet and believe that the ITRs should remain focused on the telecommunications interconnection related to the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
This all will play out over the next two weeks in the meetings happening in Dubai that will culminate with a series of votes by the member states. The ITU is a United Nations (UN)…
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Hypervoice – The Fundamental Flaw In The Proposal
Continue Reading: Hypervoice – The Fundamental Flaw In The ProposalI am a huge fan of Martin Geddes, but he and I disagree fundamentally on one key part of what he is now calling “hypervoice”. NOTE: Today’s VUC call at 12noon US Eastern will be with Martin discussing his ideas. If you’d like to weigh in on the issue, please join the call. (Unfortunately, I’ll be waiting to board a plane home from Mumbai and can’t make it… hence this blog post.)To back up a bit, Martin has always been one of the “big thinkers” in realm of VoIP and telephony/telecom. Way back in mid-2000s when a number of us all started writing about VoIP, Martin’s Telepocalypse blog was brilliant. He was always thinking about the “big picture” and drawing connections where they were not already apparent. His work with “Telco 2.0” was excellent and it was no surprise when he went to work for BT looking at their strategy. Now that he is back out on his own as a consultant, I’m a subscriber to his “Future of Communications” email newsletter (subscribe on the sidebar to his site) and enjoy reading his frequent issues.
Recently he gave a closing keynote presentation at the Metaswitch Forum titled “A presentation…
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Slides: How The Hidden Secret of TCP/IP Affects Real-time Communications
Continue Reading: Slides: How The Hidden Secret of TCP/IP Affects Real-time CommunicationsRecently at Voip2day + ElastixWorld in Madrid 2012, Olle E Johansson gave a great presentation outlining where we are at with telecom and VoIP in 2012 – and where we need to go! Olle is a long-time, passionate and tireless advocate for the open Internet, IPv6, SIP and standards and interoperability. I’ve known Olle for years via Asterisk-related issues, via the VUC calls and via work on SIP over IPv6.This presentation (slides available) really hits a number of key points about where we are at now:
The secret of TCP/IP and how it affects your PBX from Olle E Johansson
In particular I was struck by his slides 24-28 that strike the same theme I’ve been writing about across multiple blogs, namely the way we are reversing the “open Internet” trend and retreating back inside walled gardens of messaging:
He goes on to walk through what happened with SIP and how the protocol evolved – and evolved away from interoperability. His conclusion is that we as customers need to take back control, avoid vendor lock-in and demand interoperability.
He also points people over to his “SIP…
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Video: What Is WebRTC/RTCWeb All About? How Does WebRTC Work?
Continue Reading: Video: What Is WebRTC/RTCWeb All About? How Does WebRTC Work?Do you want to understand what WebRTC / RTCWEB is all about and why so many people are passionate about its potential for extending real-time communications (voice, video, chat, data-sharing, etc.) into web browsers?I recently wrote about some of the larger issues of how WebRTC will disrupt telecom, but in this video, “RTCWeb Explained“, Cullen Jennings, one of the co-chairs of the IETF’s RTCWEB working group, dives down into the technical details to explain how it all works and what the various different components of of the solution are. I particularly like how Cullen covered some areas like “identity” that I haven’t seen stressed as much in other pieces about WebRTC. The video comes in at about 39 minutes and is well worth viewing:
For more information, I’ve put together a page about the broader WebRTC / RTCWEB initiative with links to relevant resources.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (And Change The Internet)
Continue Reading: How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (And Change The Internet)If we step back to before 1993, publishing and finding content on the Internet was a somewhat obscure, geeky thing that a very few people cared about and very few knew how to do. It involved gopher servers, ftp sites, archie, veronica, WAIS, USENET newsgroups, etc., and this "World-Wide Web" service primarily demonstrated via the server at info.cern.ch. It was an amazing period of time for those of us who were there, but the number of users was quite small.
Then NCSA released Mosaic in 1993 … and suddenly everything changed.
Anyone could create a web page that "regular" people could see on their computers. Anyone could download Mosaic and use it. Anyone could share their sites with the installation of server software.
The Web was truly born into public consciousness… the creation of Web-based content was democratized so that anyone could do it… the creativity of developers was unleashed… a zillion new business models were thought of… and the Internet fundamentally changed.
Fast-forward to today…
… and the "Web" is still predominantly a document-based system. You make HTTP queries to retrieve pages and send HTML and XML documents back and forth between web…
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Hiring! Looking For An IETFer To Join ISOC’s Deploy360 Programme
Continue Reading: Hiring! Looking For An IETFer To Join ISOC’s Deploy360 ProgrammeDo you want to help get open standards like IPv6 and DNSSEC more widely deployed? Would you like to see other technologies developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) more rapidly adopted by network operators?Are you passionate about the need to preserve the open nature of the Internet? Do you like to write, speak and create other forms of content? Would you like to be part of the Internet Society, the global nonprofit that serves as the organizational home of the IETF?
If so, the team I’m part of that is behind the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme is looking for YOU!
As we noted on the Deploy360 blog, we’re currently hiring a new position into the team specifically to interact with network operators and help accelerate the deployment of open Internet standards.
You can read read the job description for what is called the “Operational Engagement Programme Manager”. As noted in the document:
The Operational Engagement Programme Manager is a newly created position within the Internet Society. This position will report to the Director, Deployment and Operationalization. The primary focus areas of this position will be to: 1) develop and coordinate increased industry collaboration and conversations about the…
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What is an Over-The-Top (OTT) Application or Service? – A Brief Explanation
Continue Reading: What is an Over-The-Top (OTT) Application or Service? – A Brief ExplanationWhat is an "over-the-top" or "OTT" application or service? How does an OTT telecommunications or media app/service differ from a "regular" application?
The answer depends upon your perspective.
For a regular user of the Internet, an "OTT app or service" is something like:
- YouTube, Hulu, Netflix or Apple TV for streaming video
- Skype or Facetime for voice/video calls
- WhatsApp or iMessage for messages on a mobile device
- Xbox 360 or World of Warcraft for gaming
Basically, any service you are receiving over the Internet that is NOT provided directly by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Of course, for an ISP / telecommunication provider, the critical point about an OTT app/service is the part I emphasized – it is NOT a service you are paying them for.
And they are not happy about this.
It's not clear to me when precisely we in the industry started talking about "over-the-top" applications and services, but I first saw OTT mentioned back in 2008 or 2009 when the term was primarily applied to video services such as those coming from Netflix or Hulu. At the time, major US service providers such as Comcast and AT&T were rolling out their video-on-demand services and were being…
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June 23 Deadline For Submissions to Invite-Only WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control Workshop
Continue Reading: June 23 Deadline For Submissions to Invite-Only WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control WorkshopHow do we manage network congestion as we move real-time voice, video, chat and data communication into web browsers? How do we make sure browser-based voice/video doesn’t overwhelm the local network?If you’ve been following the excellent work of the WebRTC/RTCWEB initiative you’ll know that developers are already using developer builds of browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox to move real-time communications (RTC) directly into web browsers – without using Flash or Java plugins.
It’s a powerful step to bake real-time communications into the very fabric of the Web. It stands to open up a zillion new opportunities for innovative uses of voice and video… and can fundamentally disrupt so many aspects of today’s telecommunications.
It also stands a chance of completely swamping today’s networks with RTC traffic!
So what do we do? How do make sure that browser-based RTC plays nice with other traffic? How do we help it succeed?
Those are the type of topics to be discussed and debated in a “Workshop on Congestion Control for Interactive Real-Time Communication” taking place on Saturday, July 28, 2012, in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the weekend before the start of the week-long IETF 84 standards meeting.…
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Why World IPv6 Launch Is Critical To Preserve The Open Internet
Continue Reading: Why World IPv6 Launch Is Critical To Preserve The Open InternetWith yesterday’s World IPv6 Launch bringing about the permanent enablement of IPv6 access on thousands of websites around the world (including this one), I recorded a video for the Internet Society’s stream of videos about why I see IPv6 as critical to preserve the “open” nature of the Internet.As I say in the video (below), my big fear is that IPv4 address exhaustion will create a situation where Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will use what is called “carrier-grade NAT (CGN)” or “large-scale NAT (LSN)” to put all their subscribers behind a single public IPv4 address.
The ISPs then become the gatekeepers. They can determine what you will view – or what you will pay to view certain types of content. They could also potentially restrict customer’s access to the next great new service… the next Twitter or Facebook, for instance… until that service pays the ISP for access to customers.
It can completely flip the Internet around from one that thrives on “permission-less innovation” where anyone can create any service and make it available to all… to an Internet that is “permission-based” with gatekeepers controlling access at key points.
The migration to IPv6 does not, of course, remove…
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Video: What is the role of the IETF? How does it help the Internet and open standards?
Continue Reading: Video: What is the role of the IETF? How does it help the Internet and open standards?What does the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) do? What role does it play in setting Internet standards?As readers are probably aware, I’ve been a long-time supporter and advocate of the IETF’s work on open standards, writing about it both here on Disruptive Telephony and previously quite extensively over on Voxeo’s Speaking of Standards blog. In my new role with the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme, of course, I’m even more directly involved and am now regularly attending IETF meetings.
For those who aren’t familiar with the IETF, I recently came across this great video that explains the basics of what the IETF does:
The IETF is a great organization that is truly open to anyone to get involved. All you need to do is sign up for one of the mailing lists for one of the working groups and start reading and then participating. You can also attend one of the face-to-face IETF meetings to get even more involved.
Anyway, if you’re not familiar with the IETF, do check out this video as it is a great intro!
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