If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Late in 2000 my company launched one of the first free VoIP services in Italy, Chocophone, which was based on a proprietary protocol in order to improve the quality of phone calls over dial-up internet. In addition to this, the proprietary protocol let us make a very lightweight softphone without the need to carry all the stuff around the H323 protocol, definitely too “heavy” to work well over a dialup connection.

This choice led us to develop a server application where we had to convert our proprietary protocol into H323 in order to get connected to the most common and available media gateways to break into the PSTN.

What about the “white page” syndrome? Developing a H323 stack from scratch would have taken too much time. For this reason, we made a very deep usage of the OpenH323 libraries, something that saved us a huge amount of development time.

All that said, many companies contributed to the development of those libraries and made a deep usage of such stack. Developers had to be hands-on and use that code, make corrections, add features and so on and it was also a great way to learn about VoIP if you weren’t expert enough. At the end of the day, open source applied to VoIP already meant faster development, competence sharing, learning on the job, faster time to market.

Asterisk and SER have been and are, on the contrary, the icons of Open Source VoIP in regards of the SIP protocol. Many important carriers and ISP around the world offer */SER - based services to their users, leveraging the huge amount of development going on behind the scenes and the hard work and investments made by many players in the VoIP market in order to support those projects. In a nutshell, less entrance barriers to those innovative minds who want to setup their own VoIP company very quickly and saving money.

There are some downsides, of course, since when you start using platforms like those you are bounded to them with not that much space to integrate your own proprietary bricks to perform some very specific functionalities. On the other hand, you can do that by integrating your pieces of proprietary code to those Open Source projects, being pretty sure that you are working with widely used and standard implementations of VoIP and having the ability add value without the need to make your products open source too. Of course, a deep attention to the ongoing developments, branches, bugfixing and so on were/are a must.

The second part of the story of the impact of Open Source VoIP to the whole telecom market is made of softphones and stacks. Ekiga (formerly known as GnomeMeeting), Linphone or PhoneGaim, just to name some, have been a great source of knowledge for new entrant developers in this field and a great way for providers to offer a cheap way to make phone calls from your PC. SJPhone deserves a special mention too, even if it has been shipped for FREE but it’s not open.

Speaking about stacks instead, that is a complete set of libraries which include everything related to make/receive a phone call using H323 or SIP, those are a lower level piece of software which helped you to create brand new softphones without having to turn the main guidelines coming from RFCs into code. Vovida.org was a good source for developers in the past, even if it appears to be shut down now.

The next step is about APIs. Dameon aka Phoneboy wrote a very thoughtful piece for GigaOM which led to an interesting series of comments and other blog posts. In particular, I would like to highlight Dan York’s comment:

APIs need to be based, as much as possible, on *open standards*. Otherwise: 1) an API becomes just yet-another-way for a vendor to lock you in to their specific platform; and 2) developers can’t use their existing knowledge and have to learn how to use *your* new API.

I completely agree with Dan although I don’t think #1 VoIP vendors will ever embrace this approach because at the end of the day everyone offers its own implementation, definitely a good way to keep best developers and consultancy companies tightly linked to their brands and solutions. Right now it’s important not to reinvent the wheel and the focus must be on the application layer and in this perspective APIs are critical. Ask Ribbit or Tom

What’s next? First of all I would like to point out this comprehensive source of Open Source projects/resources. This area is in continuous development so this collection of projects might not be complete at this time, even if it is a great starting point. Secondly, I would like to invite you to join me to the Internet Telephony Conference and Expo in Los Angeles from Sept. 16th to 18th where I’ll be moderating a panel about Advantages of Open Source VOIP, with a specific attention to the Enterprise and SMB market. Trixbox, Voiceroute (Druid UCS) and Intuitive Voice will join the panel, offering their experiences and views thanks to the products they are proposing to the market and to the market’s response. I firmly believe it’s gonna be interesting

.

In conclusion, my last comment is for Skype. The main subject here is open source VoIP and how it has been critical to make the VoIP market as it is today. On the other hand, proprietary services like Skype have been fundamental to tell the masses what VoIP is and to make adoption explode. What does it mean? When it comes to consumers, they don’t really care of what this or that service use in terms of protocols, codecs, or whether it is open source or not. They care of usability, costs and it must work. Period. Not SIP compliant, far from being open source, but Skype is the best example of a winning service for the consumer market. The question is: what about businesses? I really would like someone at Skype to join us for the mentioned panel… I should drop TMCNet guys a line…

Comments, experiences, tips to share? Just leave your comments and I’ll be glad to join the discussion.

Technorati Tags: dan york, druid, ekiga, gigaom, intuitive voice, linphone, luca filigheddu, open source voip, openh323, openser, phoneboy, phonegaim, ser, sjlabs, sjphone, skype, tmcnet, trixbox, Voice 2.0, voiceroute, VoIP

Dan York wrote an interesting post today where he points out why he chose NOT to cut the landline cord in his new home.

After reading that, I got back to four years ago when me and my wife decided, on the contrary, not to get it in our new home. Here are four reasons why we took that decision. Keep in mind that the story between me and Dan is very different, since I live in Italy and not in the US and the Telecom landscape here is much different. Anyway, I thought it could have been useful to share my story as well.

1) Communications are Personal

Who would benefit from calling my landline number at home? Weekend apart, during the weekdays me and my wife are rarely at home. Who wants to call me and always find me or my wife, call us at our mobile phone. This way people are pretty much sure to find us and to talk to the right person. I know that the story is a little bit different in the US. A few months ago I discussed about this subject with Stuart Henshall and he told me that US people still feel the necessity to have a family phone number. In Italy this is not true any more, since mobile operators are strongly bombarding families with attracting offerings in order for them to give up on PSTN and use their mobile phone only (and porting their landline number too!).

2) I don’t need a FAX machine at home

When I need it, I use the one located in my office. For personal usage, I have a virtual fax number when I can receive faxes and from which I can send faxes by just sending an email with a PDF attached. I don’t use it so often, but I can always use it when needed (and at a very low rate too).

3) I don’t want to pay any Telecom monthly fee

In Italy you just have to pay around 15 euros/month to the local incumbent just to cover the basic cost of the line. Then, on top of that, you can add plans, minutes and the DSL connection. This means that in one year you pay about 180 euros for… nothing. Since I don’t like it, I chose to get a naked DSL at home from another operator. I pay a little bit more than 15 euros per month but I get a 4Mbits ADSL at home without having to deal with the incumbent. For any call, I can use my mobile phone or VOIP from my laptop. No waste of money with this solution.

4) Disturbing calls

In Italy, intrusive advertising phone calls are rare on your mobile phone. On the contrary, you can receive up to 4-5 calls a day to your landline number, because your number is publicly listed on the local white pages and companies usually don’t care about the stringent privacy rules we have in Italy. This is, for example, one of the reasons why my parents (and many others) are thinking to cut the landline cord too, after 40 years of service.

All that said, ADSL is a must for me but I don’t want to pay more for a service that I can get thanks to other tools and services. Yes, there are many operators that let you have their own contract, sometimes reimbursing the fee you have to pay to the incumbent. In any case, at the end of the day, for me, it’s not worth it. 

Technorati Tags: dan york, landline, luca filigheddu, Mobile