All this talk of telcos developing a VoIP-based "Skype Killer" has me thinking about the future. It's likely that the United States will be among the last holdouts to migrate from its Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN) to a VoIP Standard Telephony Network. (VSTN). If you don't think it's going to be a challenge, look at the decades-long battle to switch from analog to digital TV -- and we still won't be all digital until early 2009, assuming there's not a last minute panic to extend the process further.
Why do I say VSTN rather than IP? Carriage of voice akin to the (legacy) PSTN is going to have some specific regulatory and public safety requirements attached before we pull the last plug on the last black handset with an RJ-11 in it. There is likely to be some sort of minimum service requirements for voice quality and reliability reaching into (and hopefully exceeding) the "five 9s" of the legacy PSTN.
While the Voice 2.0 crowd says "voice is just another app," it is and it isn't. It is an application that we expect for the call to go through, regardless of potential DDOS or SPIT attacks. It is an application where we expect to be connected to a first responder when we dial 911 and we have come to expect that under most cases the first responder will be able to look at our phone number and know what physical address we are calling from (A standard the cellular industry seems to weasel around compared to the ones consumer VoIP providers have been held to when it comes to location-based positioning).
The VSTN will need some hardcore interoperability standards as well. I don't mean to put the SBC people out of business, but when carriers talk about having to transcode between SIP "standards," brother, we have got things wrong. Carriers, equipment manufacturers, and software vendors need to agree to a set of universally accepted basic standards to make handling voice fast and efficient in an IP environment while delivering a flavor of service equal to (and preferably better than) today's PSTN. And they should be hard core STANDARDS rather than some of the fuzziness that has taken place in the IMS world.
Today, layers of software and services are being used to provide VoIP interoperability and that's fine but I can't help but think that a little simplification on the front end would get us to a faster-running, more reliable, and more secure VSTN than the current way we're running VoIP.
- Doug [1]