Driving VoIP Towards Open Standards

I can barely keep up with all of the great stuff here at O'Reilly eTel. (Carpal tunnel, here I come.) Michael Robertson of Linspire started SIPphone with the vision of an open dialtone that anyone in the world could connect to. What do you need for this?

• Open directory (don't discriminate against users from different systems)
• Open standards (let us all talk to each other)
• Common codecs

Robertson notes that when users have a hardware client, they are much more likely to use VoIP. While only 10% of the SIPphone user base is hardware-based, 35% of SIPphone calls are from hard clients like routers. (Yes, the other 65% of SIPphone calls are from soft clients.) Given this, he's paying a lot of attention to VoIP hardware. SIPphone's VoIP uses SIP, but their IM and presence is based upon Jabber, and they peer using GoogleTalk. SIPphone also hooked up with the router manufacturers to develop a standard called Plug-n-Dial in order to support autoprovisioning for consumer devices.

Gizmo is now available for download. This VoIP client competes directly with Skype, but is all standard-based. Robertson believes that Skype's closed system fails the test for using open standards. (Skype does have a SIP gateway, but they don't offer it directly to customers.) MSN/Yahoo!/AOL are also closed, with some talk but no action - there's still little delivery on the announcements that these companies have been making. On the other hand, Robertson loves Google's openness despite his hate of the Google bandwagon. GoogleTalk and Jingle are what the industry needs to drive open standards and interoperability. Besides, while Google's VoIP services don't have a large user base, they "are Google" and they do have a strategy.

Here are the parts of an open VoIP ecosystem that still need work:

• Standards-based NAT and firewall traversal that can compete with Skype. SIP-aware devices actually end up mangling your packets, so maybe it's better to avoid them.
• Codecs. Everyone is using Global IP Sound (GIPs), but it's proprietary and costly. We need a streamlined way to talk to hardware devices.
• MIME types. There's half a dozen ways to initiate a call. There needs to be one that everyone can get behind.
• Address book data standards. Cell phone companies lock you down the most when you have a large address book, since there's no easy way to easily take addresses with you when you switch providers.

Today, SIPphone and Google are the only companies that Robertson believes have a commitment to open standards. Need more to develop competitive pressure that drives the larger companies to compete based on  the actual service being provided. Not because they've locked you in, or because that's the service that your friend uses.

Tags: christine herron spacejockeys space jockeys gizmo technology christine.net telephony o'reilly etel sipphone voip

Comments

[Christine Herron]

This is my first eTel (the first eTel at all?), so I can't speak to typical demographics at that level; I'm also new to this space so I'm hesitant to define consensus opinions without the necessary data.

I *can* say that O'Reilly gatherings tend to attract higher numbers of open source advocates then other tech events!

[Mark Sullivan]

Nice summation of Robertson's comments, and nice meeting you at the conference. Is eTel a hang-out for open-source activist hackers and insurgent start-ups? Is it really the consensus opinion that VOIP should open up, or just the opinion of outsiders like Robertson who don't have anywhere near the subscriber counts that the "closed" services do?