[dundee] jabber

[Rick Moynihan]

On 03/03/2008, Lee Hughes <toxicnaan at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Where skype has cornered the market is thier ablity to skype out to
> the normal pots telephone systems (ss7).

I'm not convinced this is the real reason for Skype's dominance and
success, though it has certainly helped.  IMHO Skype had simply
managed to achieve sufficient scale quickly enough to become dominant.
 This and how Skype offered a single network where all addresses would
route globally was a clear benefit over other more open technologies
such as SIP which require operators to manage and coordinate peering
arrangements.  Also there appears to have been slow uptake of ENUM's
in DNS which would enable 'global (SIP) telephone numbers'.

That's the problem with open standards, yes it's better to have a
market place for products and services, but if the parties involved
can't get their stack together quick enough they may loose out to a
single-vendor proprietary solution.  This said I still have high hopes
for SIP, asterisk and DUNDI (a distributed routing and peering
protocol for locating telephone gateways).

> Like all this technology, it pushed data transfer to the edge of the network
> (your computer) , rather than keeping it the core, that's not an efficient
> means of data distribution, but a damm sight cheap than renting rack space
> at a peering point.

Personally I prefer edge solutions like this (though not proprietary
ones), it may not be as efficient in terms of resource utilisation but
P2P architectures tend to be more resilient and robust due to the
inherent redundancy.  This said even networks such as Skype's can be
taken down when thousands of your users machines simultaneously reboot
due to a forced microsoft update:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/20/skype_outage_post-mortem/

> Arron M Finnon <afinnon at googlemail.com> wrote:
>  But i do think Jabber supports Voice, and the likes.

It doesn't natively, though JINGLE (which is a protocol Google built
on top of XMPP) does, and it seems to be entering the final phases of
the standards process.

http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0166.html

People have also managed to get JINGLE working with Asterisk (the
excellent - if a little clunky) opensource PBX:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Speaks+with+Google+Talk

--
Rick Moynihan
rick.moynihan at gmail.com
http://sourcesmouth.co.uk/blog/