HVN,
You assume that Voclf understands this business better than anyone. I sincerely doubt that. If anything, what Vocaltec has learned, is that voice from the PC is going nowhere fast. The real money to be made is from the business, ISP, and carrier markets, not the consumer market.
Vocaltec's experience helps it in none of these markets. Its learning from trying to VoIP from the PC over the Public Internet will never make is a great company. Now, as they attempt to get into the markets where the money is, by making their own gateways and gatekeepers, they find that they are not in the leadership position. LU has better gatekeeper technology, CSCO has better gateway technology.
I wouldn't be surprised at this point if Elon hasn't been out trying to sell the company off.
The last point I would make, don't bet all your money on H.323. Now that people are trying to figure out how to do interesting thing to the voice stream after the call is established, there are finding it ain't so easy and other protocols are starting to show up. If you don't believe it, look at some of the submissions to TYPHON recently, Fast Connect-get rid of a TCP session to aid in scalability; a proposal to move all of H.323 from TCP to UDP; and 3 submissions for CLASS services (at this rate H.323 will be at parity with the RBOCs around 2004).
In true H.323 fashion, what is lacking is anything that would foster interoperability. Look at H.235, Security. It says you may use SSL, or IPSEC, or ... Anyone who does security work will tell that the tough problem is key management, not the bit twiddling. And without a key management process, you have not interoperability. Same with gatekeepers.
It is just hard for me to see how they with this battle. Sure they are strong at TYPHON. But so are the European carriers, and they are not at all interested in seeing VoIP happened sooner instead of later. |
