Telepocalypse

Point and shoot

I don't do much "go read this" stuff here when I've little to add, but the short article on feature interaction by Carl Ford is a very important thinking point.

The world of the "stupid network" HTTP-based Web is rather different from the "stupid network" faux-circuit SIP-based VoIP. In the former, you have one end point (e.g. a PC) interacting with one service (e.g. Amazon.com). Although we have the technology to, for example, federate identity and profile amongst web sites, the number of real-world examples between public sites is pretty small.

There are different dynamics at play with voice. A 3-way call, or a transferred call, are very natural interactions that potentially span multiple parties and applications or service providers. Yet any small change in the nature of one service could ripple through to have unintended consequences for other users. A trivial example might be that call forwarding and find-me/follow-me end up causing circular behavior between services. With the PSTN, the limited functionality, long deployment and absence of innovation mean these problems are generally cracked.

The conclusion is that we may end up involving intermediaries to orchestrate multi-party off-net rendezvous and messaging. Although the problems may in principle be solvable "at the edge", the vast installed base of the PSTN and mobile networks makes that impractical if ineroperability outside VoIP islands is desired.

If someone can build a marketplace for users to go assemble the features they want, maybe even IMS would suddenlty find a role for itself? It's a totally different world to the one in which IMS is used to meter and ration connectivity; rather, users voluntarily route their calls via intermediates because it is of benefit to them to do so. The middleman would ensure smooth functional interoperation and perform whatever accounting and settlement procedures the market wants from offering advanced services. Whether the idea of the customer owning the middleman, and not the converse, will ever fly in telco boardrooms is another matter...