Via SIPthat I notice that the Koreans are issuing phone numbers for IP telephony from a reserved range. What makes this interesting is that they are only being issued to operators whose calls meet certain minimum quality criteria.
Does anyone else see the irony of this? Firstly we’ve seen an explosion of cellular usage despite the grossly inferior voice quality. Nobody blinked at giving out phone numbers to mobile phones. We now even give out numbers to data cards merely so they can be provisioned on networks where the phone number is a required identifier — even if they can’t ever make or take a call. Expats around the world happily make free VoIP calls of questionable quality to keep in touch.
To me it’s a classic way of excluding competitors, particularly P2P networks where there is no operator to certify. It also descends into meaninglessness when you consider that the key determinan of voice quality is the connection’s bandwith, jitter, latency, and application contention, none of which are under the control of the service operator.
I look forward to this Korean innovation being copied by incumbents around the world. Yo Korea! Leading us on into the broadband revolution… two steps forward and one step back.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 04:42 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Singapore also has a similar proposal: http://james.seng.cc/archives/2004/09/21/ip_telephony_and_enum.html
Posted by: at October 6, 2004 05:50 PMMartin,
Am I missing something? VoIP is an end-to-end application, it does not need any steenkin phone numbers from any steenkin centralized authority. If SIP is too complicated, use IAX, and VoIP will be just another app on the net. Or am I missing something big in front of my face?
David I
"I'm not a number, I'm a free man", or in this case, woman.
I prefer using my name - fairly unique, so I guess I'm lucky not being called Jane Smith or something but even so, most people seem to find email addresses they can remember and which are unique identifers. I've got ICQ, IM/Trillian, emails (lots of em!), Skype, FWD, etc etc - all different formats and all accessible from my device. Finding others is pretty easy and I don't follow the need for standardisation. Many Internet users seem to have no idea that their website address should not have an @ in it, so why try to simplify things for people with other things to worry about?! VoIP doesn't need to emulate PSTN - not in billing, use, ownership, numbering, or anything else I say.
(I can see problems with this convention of using your name if you are called 'Singh' or similar, although the alphabet with 26 letters has more combinations than 1-9, and then there's Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic etc ..........)
But what worries me about all of this is the intrusion, yet again, of some regulatory type authority, who should be butting out of this and letting the online society solve the problem for itself (if there even is one). Just imagine if a Govt had tried to develop Linux, or a National Health Service database? It would cost more billions than any of us can imagine, be years late, and never work as planned.
And I've got no connection to PSTN any more (satellite broadband out in the sticks saw off the phone lines!) so no doubt I'd have to pay for a new PSTN number, no thanks! Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and moved on.
Posted by: at October 14, 2004 04:03 PM