Von 2004 Will SIP Win? Brad Templeton Chairman of the Board Electronic Frontier Foundation

Von 2004 Why the PSTN over IP (PoIP?) Toll bypass was never the answer PoIP pleases grandpa, but is grandpa looking for a cheaper version of his phone service with quality problems? Or is it just a temporary plan for Vonage and the rest? Emulating Class 5 “IN” services not enough

Von 2004 Think beyond the phone call Teens using phone call, even less and less Busy signals, voice mail? “I’m going to transfer you, give me your number in case I lose you.” – Arno Penzias Presence should stop a call from happening before it can fail

Von 2004 What matters is the user interface, not the infrastructure Billions spent on infrastructure, billions lost Users don’t care how voice gets from A to B Users care about the experience Users hate the telephone. –It’s a leash –It interrupts you –They don’t know how to use fancy features –They don’t want to be more reachable

Von 2004 PoIP is vulnerable to spam A program can ring a million SIP phones No way to screen based on content Will we give up the open phone network? Will we have to screen all our calls Not if voice is part of other applications that don’t even understand the concept of the robot caller. The robot caller is part of the old metaphor.

Von 2004 Can Skype kill SIP? A PC application from the get-go Did all the major things right –Easy install –NAT penetration –High bandwidth codecs –Encryption, Conferencing –P2P scalable architecture –“Just works” –Ignored open standards!

Von 2004 Why didn’t SIP do these things? Almost all already in specs, except P2P People were slow to deploy, and may never deploy Skype claims 600,000 online How many people can you call directly with SIP? 5000 on FWD, some companies. 150K on Vonage, Packet8 almost.

Von 2004 How could open standards lose? Quagmire IETF process Trying to do too much Too much focus on PSTN & PBX made it evolutionary rather than disruptive Not enough focus on the real problems users want solved Not gaining the interoperation that is the whole point of open standards

Von 2004 SIP Interoperation a hoax Does it work over an internet with latency, packet loss for signals as well as RTP? You can’t predict what an endpoint will do, or if it does old RFC, new RFC or not all of either. These compelling apps need widespread interoperability or they will remain proprietary and vertical.

Von 2004 Sip had better watch out Users don’t always realize the long-term benefits of open standards SIP vendors should start putting in high bandwidth codecs, like ILBC and Speex now. –Every VoIP call should be better than PSTN, not the same Presence, IM, collaboration with every call, not just some Encrypt and solve the NAT problem