Evan,
They certainly do keep lining up. Several days ago I posted an opinion that lobbying from big business would be the determinant and not the clamoring of a "virtual march" on Washington by the digirati. That may have been an overly conservative and shortsighted stance (read: residual bellheadism doesn't go away, easily), because in my haste to hit the enter key, I failed to take into account that professional lobbying can, and apparently is, coming from both directions.
I read Jeff Pulver's letter to Gore several times (Congrats, Jeff!), and while I see the legitimacy of most of the issues cited, and applaud same, in principle, I'm reminded that this is, after all, an open, free market matter, and not one that necessarily lends itself to government dictates. But that goes both ways, and the government should likewise refrain from being overly 'taxing' on this neophyte industry, and give it a chance to breath, at the same time. Whatever happened to the tax incentive initiatives of the 80s that favored pioneering and developing new markets?
The confusion, and the cause for questioning some of these carriers' directions and their ensuing lobbying efforts, arises when you take into account that the way the VoIP protocol is being used in a great many of the more popular deployments, i.e. the newer, larger carriers, is to emulate the inter-office links of the old POTS model, without demonstrating anything new that would ordinarily be attributed to the benefits of TCP/IP or IP, as it were. That will change over time as the art form improves, but for the moment it is same-o same-o, for the most part. It's just less expensive to provision.
True, there are those carriers (ITSPs) which may be using the open Internet, and those are not the ones I'm referring to here.
Take L3 and Qwest for example, and throw in a host of others while you are at it. When VoIP is merely being used as a substitute 'language' of the end point muxes while retaining all of the other constructs of a traditional network, including dependency on the LEC's line information data bases, and even billing functions in some instances, then I don't see where anything new is being accomplished. Many of these carriers are merely using a more efficient transport under the guise of being an Internet carrier.
You could do the same thing with statistical muxing, or ADPCM, or VTOA (ATM), or any other form of low bit rate voice. A further detriment could actually be cited wherein most of the newer boxes using VoIP are still not SS7 compliant, and therefore don't even allow for the call setup functionality that I could derive from some of the alternatives just cited. And even if it did, it would merely be a furtherance of the emulation of POTS/AIN.
In brief, not enough has been done to allow VoIP to break away on its own (and for good economic reasons, I might add) and therefore it may be getting the undue acknowledgement of being a "new" paradigm, when in fact, for the moment it is merely the same animal with a different hairdo. There are, theoretically, directions which it could take that would allow it to stand as a new framework entirely, but only time and painstaking evolution will bring it to that point, IMO.
In closing, I have to state it again. VoIP is not a simple, singular discussion. It takes many forms. It's a lot of discussions. These remarks are not aimed at what I consider to be true, open-Internet Telephony initiatives. Rather, they are intended to demonstrate that you cannot tell a book by its cover.
Just some thoughts.
Best Regards,
Frank Coluccio |
