Welcome to my old blog, which I no longer maintain.

For details of my current professional services and activities see www.martingeddes.com.

May 24, 2007

VoSS7

Could it be true?

Is it like a movie where at the end everything that seemed to be true was false and forwards was really backwards?

Maybe...

Just maybe...

VoIP is a mistake.

An attempt to make penguins fly, or cats swim.

It can be done. But it's not pretty or natural or indeed very successful.

Perhaps what we really needed was a "dumb circuit" network. One that can set up point-to-multipoint time-division circuits, potentially with different levels of capacity. But one that has no concept of calls or call routing. All that intelligence lies with the "edge", and the edge devices use IP to perform any signalling they like.

In other words, we threw out the media plane baby with the control plane bathwater.

Oh dear.

What a horrible thought.

At least we can still have VON conferences. "Voice off the Net".

We'll be doing it anyway, since "Video off the Net" (and onto content deliver networks, physical media and broadcast) is already underway too.

Parting thought: if you burn a heretic pundit, should you pay for carbon offset? Or is the hot air saving alone a net environmental benefit? :)

Posted by Martin Geddes at 2:20 PM
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