Voice over IP is a technology designed to move communications from the existing, old phone system to the Internet. The Road to VoIP: Phone Wars considered the reasons for replacing the existing old phone empire with a new system. The Empire Strikes Out detailed how the phone company fumbled in providing modern communication services for their customers. Here, I’ll look at how Internet services have progressively eroded away at the phone system.
The road to open standards is often a long, rough path. Developers of new technologies consistently aim to own and control networks, protocols, and customers, leaving their users to suffer until more open alternatives arrive. This familiar story repeated itself in email, in instant messaging, and is now playing out in the world of VoIP. Here's what happened then, and what's similarly happening now.
From Proprietary Email to SMTP
The arrival of electronic mail changed how people thought about communications. Prior to email, you could reach others within a few days via mail, or request their immediate attention with a phone call. Email paved a new third road: messages were delivered at light speed, but didn't demand that the recipient drop what they were doing to answer.
Email didn't replace the telephone any more than the telephone replaced meeting in person, but it did offer users an essentially free alternative to both the telephone and mail. That was particularly of interest to users communicating globally, where the expensive per-minute tolls on telephone calls could add up quickly.
However, trying to exchange electronic mail between systems was once a nightmare: CompuServe, GEnie, and other early commercial email service providers only allowed their customers to send messages to other users on the same network. Consumer demand for interoperation eventually prompted the adoption of SMTP and gateways to allow email to freely pass between providers at no extra cost.
Email has since progressed into a nearly free service. Individual accounts with sponsored advertising, like the original HoTMaiL and more recently, GMail, are easy to set up, and companies can host email services for their employees at minimal cost. Email is essentially free when compared to the business costs associated with maintaining a private phone switch (PBX), the monthly fees for a PRI, long distance fees, and the costs involved with setting up conference calls.
From Proprietary IM to Jabber
Instant messaging followed a similar path. The faster alternative to email was popularized by AOL's Instant Messenger, which combined the idea of immediately delivered text messages with a presence advertising system.
Users could signal their availability to chat, and that presence information was relayed through the system and displayed in other users' buddy lists. That made IM a hybrid of email and the telephone; attention was optional, but users could still request a reply instantly.
IM uses a combination of two protocols: one for presence advertising, and a second for actual chat distribution. Apple's iChat application uses the AOL network to find users and register presence information (create buddy lists), and can also magically find users on a local network using Bonjour's automatic discovery.
Apple's interaction with AOL was an unusual development however. AOL had earlier bought up ICQ, an alternative to AOL's IM, and sandbagged it. As other IM systems sprung up, AOL worked to prevent them from operating with their AIM network. Microsoft's MSN, and Yahoo Messenger both created their own private networks. Even though IM was being run a free service, AOL wanted to own IM and market it as a unique feature of their network. They didn't want to share their system with others; in particular, with competitors like Microsoft, who could take all their ideas, build it into their OS, and end up owning IM, just as they had earlier done with web browsing.
Unlike email, IM providers still don't interoperate well. Users who want to chat amongst IM systems are forced to create accounts on all the networks, and then either use a client program such as Adium, that can speak the various different IM protocols (AOL, Yahoo, MSN), or use a gateway service that essentially logs into their various accounts for them and relays their chats between the systems.
Jabber offers an open alternative to all these proprietary network protocols. Anyone can implement a Jabber server and patch into a worldwide network of other Jabber servers that work together to relay chat, similar to how Internet email servers freely pass mail around. The problem facing Jabber developers was really just getting people to use the system.
Apple built their Tiger iChat server using Jabber, and also built Jabber client support into the iChat client program. Google followed by basing their GoogleTalk service on Jabber. That enables iChat, and other clients using the Jabber protocol, to use GoogleTalk, Tiger Server's iChat Server, or any other Jabber server without too much trouble. Imagine that!
From Proprietary VoIP to SIP
Predictably, VoIP is following the same familiar model: it was popularly pioneered by Skype as a product using a proprietary, secret protocol, but now there are standards-based alternatives emerging, such as SIP, used in iChat AV.
VoIP doesn't simply only offer an alternative to talking on the phone; it replaces the old phone network completely. The ideas of long distance and paying for individual phone lines vaporizes as spoken communications move from the old system, developed a hundred years ago as an enhanced telegraph, into yet another Internet service.
VoIP not only offers benefits to phone users by employing more modern technology, but it also replaces the structure of the communications system itself. Rather than being a centralized hub maintained by a utility that patches phone users together to set up call circuits, VoIP technologies allow a network of hosts to set up calls directly with each other. That change creates different ways of thinking about communications, and creates some new challenges. How this is playing out will be considered in a future article on VoIP.
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The Road to VoIP: Paved with Bad Intentions
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
