Aswath Weblog

Now You can be Youe Own Phone Company

A couple of months back Brough Turner penned a column in TMC arguing that SIP has failed to live upto its expectation that “SIP, as a peer-to-peer protocol, would redefine the very nature of telecommunications. No longer would telephony depend upon a central agency — the “phone company.” It was expected that “individuals would directly connect with other individuals.” He goes on to list how SIP has failed to revolutionize the PBX industry and with IMS, it has co-pted by service provider industry. He grants that Skype offers “he most interesting telephony service enhancement after mobility […] with its seamless integration of presence, instant messaging, wideband audio and video” (even though it is based on proprietary protocols). The purpose of this note is to introduce EnThinnai as a solution that meets most of the service objectives put forward by Brough.

EnThinnai is a web application in which you can also store digital information like status, contact information, files and Notes. You will be able to maintain a white-list of your friends identified by their OpenID. ET will use this list to control access to your information. Furthermore, ET will generate a link that your friends can use to communicate with you with text and speech. It should be noted that ET has adopted ICE procedure for NAT traversal and uses Speex, a wideband codec. The best part is there is no service provider; if the garden is walled, it is erected by you. At last, Pulver’s “you can be your phone company” dream has been realized.

To see this in action, please click here. There you will be able to view my status information when you hover the mouse over “My available status” text. You can view my contact information when you click on “My Contact information” link. Finally, if I am connected to my ET server, you can chat with me by clicking on “Click here to chat with me” link.

If you are interested to explore further, you can get a trial account at EnThinnai. Once we finalize our business plan, you will be able to download and install it in your own server. In any event, I am looking forward to your feedback.