I love the idea of enabling intelligent endpoints to determine their compatible media formats automatically IF that is what I signed up for. In the UK BT runs a VoIP peering fabric that is very feature rich: - Video (H.264, others) - Audio (compressed/narrowband/wideband - iLBC, G.722, G.722.1, etc, etc, etc) - Probably plenty more They also offer a more vanilla PSTN orig/term service that is limited to the standards we're used to seeing (G711a, etc). You purchase, configure, and signal to these groups separately. If I want "traditional PSTN" I want it to be with the parameters specified, regardless of where it goes (on-net, peer, etc). If I want "intelligent" VoIP peering I'll configure my routing, trunking, etc accordingly and use it when and where I want to. On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Mark R Lindsey <lindsey at e-c-group.com> wrote:
The great thing about the vocalized approach is that it maintains the telephony application passed down to us by AT&T.
But the tragedy is great, too. We're all working so hard to limit ourselves to the telephony of 1990:
-- No video.
-- No better-than-g711u audio.
-- No distributed presence.
-- No simple file transfer (which means you're stuck supporting fax machines).
-- No easy conference control (moderation, floor control, remote mute, etc).
-- No location conveyance ("Bring me a large pepperoni pizza. Goodbye.").
-- No simple authentication.
-- No encryption.
-- No easy relocation of handsets.
Geoff, anorexicpoodle, and Paul are all arguing for a sober approach: "The job of the network is to ensure people can carry on voice conversations, so the network should do anything necessary to ensure this occurs." So we centralize all our control into a few central, core devices that act a lot like the 1ESS of 1965.
But we're all using technology designed by an entirely different mindset. All through the VoIP RFCs, you get the idea that the job of the network is to allow endpoints to interconnect however they want. Only by pushing intelligence to the leaf nodes of the network can you have scalable distributed applications.
We are selling the services that customers know they want. But please don't pretend that that the network we're building is the final answer for IP-based telecommunications, or even the most interesting realization of VoIP technologies.
-- Kristian Kielhofner http://www.astlinux.org http://blog.krisk.org http://www.star2star.com http://www.submityoursip.com http://www.voalte.com