[VOIPSEC] 4G Issue Map: signaling complexity

[Paul E. Jones]

Hadriel,

Oh, no doubt it is growing.  But, I'm not comparing SIP to anything else in
the market.  I'm comparing expectation against reality.  The expectation was
that SIP would take the market by storm and that we would have a lot of
interoperable SIP devices, voice would be free, I could just plug in my SIP
phone and talk to people anywhere without the need for a service provider,
ENUM would allow me to have a fixed number for life, etc.

None of that was realized in any significant way.

SIP has had a fair amount of success in various islands of deployment, just
as other protocols have.  So, I'm not saying it is dead, has never seen the
light of day, or anything like that.  I know very well that that's not the
case, as I sit and stare at my 3 SIP phones from two different manufacturers
in my home office.

I'm just disappointed that we have not made progress faster, really.
Perhaps I'm just asking for too much too quickly, but I do believe that the
idea of creating a simple, distributed VoIP protocol was good and the idea
has been lost.  Things have not worked out the way I had expected.

What worries me more is that as I watch IMS and the "NGN" evolve, it looks
like it will still be a few years before we see things start to really
settle.  Once it does settle, I don't think it will be the kind of system I
think most people on this list expected or wanted back in the mid-90s when
we got this effort underway.

That is good news for Skype, as it has a few good years to continue its
strong growth ;-)  (More than 6M people logged in today... absolutely
amazing.)

Paul

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hadriel Kaplan [mailto:HKaplan at acmepacket.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 1:01 AM
> To: 'Paul E. Jones'
> Cc: Voipsec at voipsa.org
> Subject: RE: [VOIPSEC] 4G Issue Map: signaling complexity
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Voipsec-bounces at voipsa.org [mailto:Voipsec-bounces at voipsa.org] On
> > Behalf Of Paul E. Jones
> >
> > So, we let the current systems limp along.  I've been a proponent for
> > "doing
> > it over again" for a four years now.  Doing it over again means doing
> > exactly what you said: don't just re-invent the PSTN over IP.  That's
> what
> > current VoIP systems do, by and large.  That's also why SIP has not been
> a
> > wild market success, in spite of the fact that I implemented my first
> SIP
> > code in 1999!  That was ages ago!
> 
> I beg to differ.  I don't think many people think SIP is not a market
> success.  Compared to what?  At least from where I sit (and I sit in
> H.323,
> SIP, MGCP/NCS, and H.248 worlds), SIP is growing at a much faster clip
> than
> any other standard voip protocol.  IMHO, H.323 still dominates
> video-conferencing (for technical reasons) and PBXes (for legacy reasons),
> but SIP's adoption curve is steeper overall.  Unless you mean compared to
> Skype?
> 
> -hadriel
>