Category: SIP
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Skype and SIP interop – the two sides of the issue raised by Michael Robertson
Continue Reading: Skype and SIP interop – the two sides of the issue raised by Michael RobertsonShould Skype open up it’s network to other users? to other networks? Should Skype stop preaching about “openness” when it’s network remains closed?In the middle of last week, there was quite a little storm raised in the VoIP corner of the blogosphere after Andy Abramson published a letter from Gizmo Project founder Michael Robertson critical of Skype’s openness after Skype continued to call upon the FCC to open the wireless network to applications. (See also here and this Skype blog post (and this one) for background.) Being at ITEXPO last week, I didn’t have the chance to blog about this at the length I felt it deserved until today.
First, for some context, here are some of the blog posts last week:
- Andy in VoIPWatch: Gizmo Project’s Michael Robertson Sounds Off
- Phil Wolff asks some pointed questions (of Michael) at Skype Journal: Michael Robertson says Skype should open to Gizmo Project
- Phil posts: Michael Robertson Responds where Michael responds to Phil’s questions
- Andy responds: For the Record, Gizmo vs. Skype
- Alec Saunders had a whole cast of characters on Friday’s SquawkBox, including Andy, Michael Robertson, Jim Courtney (Skype Journal) and a good number of others.
- Phil posts: A few…
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Heading out to Los Angeles this week for Communications Developer Conf / ITEXPO…
Continue Reading: Heading out to Los Angeles this week for Communications Developer Conf / ITEXPO…As I note over in my Voxeo blog post, I’ll be out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) this week in Los Angeles. I will be speaking twice. First on Wednesday morning I’ll be talking about SIP Trunking and security as part of the Ingate SIP Trunking workshops from 10:15-11:15am. Next, on Thursday, I’ll be speaking about “Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud”, a favorite topic of mine these days.Voxeo will also have a booth and I expect to be there. I’m also doing some video interviews and other media work (actually on both sides of the camera). I’m looking forward to catching up with a good number of folks out at the show.
If you read this blog and are out there at either the Communications Developer Conference or ITEXPO, please do come by and say hello. I posted the schedule of talks over on Voxeo’s blog site. You should be able to find out more about where precisely I am through either twitter.com/danyork or twitter.com/voxeo.
Technorati Tags: conferences, voip, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference, los angeles, dan york, voxeo, danyork, cloudcomputing, sip, sip security,
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Want to learn more about Voxeo? Join Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor appearing on Squawk Box conf call tomorrow
Continue Reading: Want to learn more about Voxeo? Join Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor appearing on Squawk Box conf call tomorrowAre you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders’ daily “Squawk Box” conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including:- Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion
- Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support
- Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies
- Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine
The call will take place using Alec’s company Iotum’s “Calliflower” conferencing/collaboration application. To join in to the call, you simply need to go to either of the following links to “join” the call and receive a PIN and call-in number for the call:
- Calliflower Facebook application – If you are a Facebook user, simply go to:
http://apps.new.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/37402
You will be prompted to add the Calliflower Facebook application and then will receive the call-in information.
- Calliflower.com site – If you are not a Facebook user or just don’t want to add another Facebook application, you can go to the Calliflower.com site at this URL:
http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/37402
You will be prompted to create a free Calliflower.com user account if you have…
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An extraordinary week for Voxeo…
Continue Reading: An extraordinary week for Voxeo…Last week was a truly extraordinary week for my employer, Voxeo. Here’s a bit of what went on:Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion – In these economic times, it’s incredible to be part of a company putting out information like this.
Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support – To our knowledge, this is first commercial telephony voice application platform to be available on Mac OS X (as well as Linux and Windows). While our customers might not deploy production servers on Mac OS X, this means that their developers using Macs can now even more easily run our application server. Additionally, we’ve developed some new graphical management interfaces that are pretty incredible (and useful, too).
Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies – With this acquisition of a company based in Beijing and San Jose, we’ve added a strong SIP Servlet (JSR 116/289) platform into our portfolio and we’ve already started integrating that into our core platform. Developers will now have even more ways to build VoIP applications on top of our platform.
Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine – We received an award at SpeechTEK last week…
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Want to understand Peer-to-Peer SIP (P2PSIP)? Listen to this podcast…
Continue Reading: Want to understand Peer-to-Peer SIP (P2PSIP)? Listen to this podcast…What if we could design SIP-based VOIP systems… but without any servers? What if we could have SIP endpoints just communicate with each other and “self-organize” into networks? What if we could essentially build an open standards-based version of Skype? How would it work? Who would use it? How would we secure it?Those are all questions we discussed in the Squawk Box podcast / interview I did with David Bryan on July 10th. David is the co-chair of the IETF’s P2PSIP Working Group and also the CEO of SIPeerior Technologies. It was a great interview where we covered all these questions and much, much more.
P2PSIP, to me, represents one of the most exciting new directions for SIP research and is something I’m definitely following closely. I wrote about my interest in P2PSIP clouds (and connecting them to larger clouds) at some length over on Voxeo’s Speaking of Standards blog… it’s all about clouds of SIP communication… and how we weave them all together. It’s a fascinating time.
If you’d like to understand what P2PSIP is all about, please do definitely check out the Squawk Box podcast… and then, if you are so inclined, head over to P2PSIP.org to…
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Four reasons I am choosing NOT to cut the landline cord
Continue Reading: Four reasons I am choosing NOT to cut the landline cordTwelve days ago I asked the question, “Do I cut the landline cord and move my new home phone number into the cloud?“, and the responses have been great to read. Today, I can write the answer…No, I will NOT cut the cord.
Around noon today my landline in Keene should be installed by Fairpoint Communications (who recently bought all of Verizon’s landline business in Maine, NH and Vermont).
Why did I finally give in and get a landline installed? Four reasons:
FAX – Unbelievably to me, perhaps the primary reason for keeping a landline is an old archaic technology that I absolutely can’t stand… fax. This was brought home to me during the process of closing on the purchase of our Keene home and the sale of our Burlington home. As much as we may hate it, there are still some transactions that require fax. There were documents that had to be faxed to the bank. Documents that had to be faxed to lawyers. Documents that had to be faxed to real estate agents. To contractors.
To a techie like me, it was unbelievably annoying not to be able to simply use email. But in many cases,…
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Do I cut the landline cord and move my new home phone number into the cloud?
Continue Reading: Do I cut the landline cord and move my new home phone number into the cloud?UPDATE – May 21: Today I posted my answer to the question…
In our new home, do I get a land line?
Or do I move our home phone number into “the cloud”?
We’re closing on our home in Keene, NH, next Thursday and as we get set with the utilities that is one of the key questions on my mind. Do I actually “cut the cord” and NOT sign up for a land line with Verizon/Fairpoint?[1]
On one level, we don’t need it. My wife and I both have our cell phones. Our daughter is six and isn’t yet at the age to make phone calls. I work in the world of voice-over-IP and can certainly get a solution there.
Why should we get a land line?
ADVANTAGES OF A LAND LINE
In thinking about this, it seems to me there are the following reasons to get a land line:
911 – UPDATE: As PhoneBoy reminded me in a comment, the overarching reason for having a landline is 911! A landline is the only guaranteed way to dial 911 and have emergency services arrive at your house. Precisely because it is tied to your geographical location it does indeed…
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AOL launches OpenView API and gives us half a phone connection…
Continue Reading: AOL launches OpenView API and gives us half a phone connection…Does accepting SIP connections at your SIP proxy constitute an “API”? Does providing SIP termination services to the PSTN constitute an “API”?Those were the questions I found myself asking after AOL announced yesterday their “Open Voice API” (also see CNET article). Since I work with voice application platforms, I’m always interested in new voice APIs and naturally had to check it out.
WHAT IT IS
I have to admit it took some time to figure out what the “Open Voice Program” really is, even after reading the program page and the accompanying blog post. Largely I think the issue was that I was looking for something more.
So here’s what is going on. As part of their “AOL Voice Services“, AOL has a service called “AIM Call Out“. This allows a user of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to make outbound calls from their AIM client to the regular phone numbers on the PSTN for competitive rates (under 2 cents a minute here in the US).
From a network topology point-of-view, what happens with the call is that the call goes from your AIM client to the SIP gateway on the edge of AOL’s network across some SIP…
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Creating voice applications that interconnect with Skype and SIP
Continue Reading: Creating voice applications that interconnect with Skype and SIPGiven that I write on Voxeo’s blog site, I tend not to write much here about things we are doing at Voxeo.But I thought I’d mention here one specific post I put up recently called “Skype-ifying your voice applications” which talks about the intriguing ways in which you can use our hosted platform to make voice applications accessible through a number of different mechanisms.
As shown in the diagram to the left, an application that you write and is hosted on our platform can be called into over the PSTN, over a direct SIP connection or via Skype or FWD. Likewise calls can go out to PSTN numbers or to SIP endpoints.
This flexibility is one of the many things that intrigues me about the platform (of which I knew nothing about prior to joining the company in October).
Anyway, more information is in the full blog post. I just thought I’d mention it here. (By the way, if you’d like to try it out yourself, developer accounts are free.)
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Nortel’s fascinating move into open source telephony… but NOT with Asterisk
Continue Reading: Nortel’s fascinating move into open source telephony… but NOT with AsteriskNortel and “open source telephony”? Huh?That was admittedly my thought when I received the list of who was going to be on the panel I moderated last week at VoiceCon on open source telephony. The other two panelists were obvious choices: Bill Miller was from Digium (makers of Asterisk) and Raza was from 3Com who have recently announced that they would be reselling a version of Digium’s Asterisk Business Edition. Both Bill and Raza made sense to me. But Tony Pereira of Nortel? Nortel does not leap out at me as a company working with open source telephony – what in the world are they doing with it, I wondered?
It turns out that the answer is… “quite a bit!”
As Tony Pereira outlined in our panel as well as in conversations afterwards, Nortel is in the process of launching their “Software Communications Server 500” (SCS 500) targeted at small businesses and built using open source telephony software!
Interestingly, though, it does NOT use Asterisk.
Instead Nortel is using the “other” major player in open source telephony, the “sipXecs” product from SIPfoundry.org. (Previously called “sipX” but renamed “sipXecs” about a year ago.) I’ve not written all that much…