[JDEV] Re: Voice over IP

[Jean-Louis Seguineau/EXC/ENG]

Mike Prince wrote:
>
 SIP doesn't need a registrar or gatekeeper.  One of the reasons I like
> it.

As long as you can always be in a stateless mode that is true. Once you need
to be tastefull, or if you require authentication this not true anymore.

> Good thing about SIP is that it brought heavy-weights like Microsoft
> on-board to push home NAT vendors to make devices friendly to software
> that needs to get through.  Though it's still a work in progress.  Who
> says M$ and it's ilk aren't good for something ;)

MSFT SIP is only a flavor of SIP. And unless used it in TCP or TLS it does
not go through NAT or firewall. In that later case you need to add edge
proxies to the design which tends to add a layer of complexity.

> I don't know the current state of SIP clients.  But I still feel working
> towards established standards like SIP gives everyone a much greater
> chance of interoperability.  Good luck going to a telco/next gen SP and
> convincing them to either switch protocols to XMPP or support another
> one.  Not likely.

SIP has a lot of hype behind it and a number of corporation have endorsed it
at an early stage. A large number of these early players are now looking
back at it and not finding it so "friendly". On the telco side, there are a
few deployment, but not as massive as expected. And there are a large number
of telcos that are also looking at XMPP. Anyway telcos tend to become
agnostics as long as they have customers... That said it is not at all
difficult to convince them to look at both protocols, because XMPP is a
reality and some of their corporate customers are asking for it in the IM
space. Not to say that a number of telcos are phasing out any early
investments they had made in SIMPLE because it never worked or scaled as
expected.

I think the above statement is not entirely correct, and probably a little
exaggerated. SIP and XMPP are to coexist in the telco world, that is an
established fact. The fact that telcos have invested heavily in SIP on the
voice side make them more likely to prefer SIP as the session protocol of
choice. But we have seen requests that are leaning the other way.

> The challenge is getting service developers to adopt Jabber as their IM
> solution.  Unless the app is very simple, new bells and whistles need to
> be added to the set of IM capabilities, in which case an open source
> solution shines.  Try calling Redmond or Dulles and ask them to hack in
> your new feature set, or better yet give you the source code so you can
> do it yourself.  Right.

This is one of the challenges indeed. But the number of corporation that are
looking into alternate solutions to what MSFT is offering (imposing...) is
also growing. As usual, they will use a Trojan horse approach "a la internet
explorer" to impose their version of SIP. It's already built into office
2003, and they would probably not stop here. If there is a challenge there
are also people to tackle the challenge :)

--jean-louis