Andy points to a story and quotes Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton as saying that Verizon “plans to do away with traditional phone lines within seven years as it moves to carry all calls over the Internet.” According to the published story Verizon will offer phone service to its FiOS customers using VoIP technology. He is further quoted as saying that VoIP will help “Verizon offer a greater range of services”. What he and many others in the industry have overlooked is that there is no need for service providers in VoIP world.
Directory service, NAT traversal and PSTN interconnection are the three services provided by a VoIP service provider. As we have demonstrated with EnThinnai, each user can provide the first two services on their own servers that host their blogs. For example, you can initiate a communications session by entering your OpenID in the accompanying widget (or icking on this link) that is running on my server. If I have given permission for you to contact me, then my server dynamically download an applet for you to initiate a communication session with me. Thus my server acts like a directory server. Secondly, my server and the two clients execute ICE procedure so that the two ends can traverse any NATs in the connection. Since I can insert in many places including the URL that is my OpenID, it is easy for you to locate a widget that will facilitate contacting me. That leaves only interconnect service. But that will not be that critical if PSTN withers away as suggested by Verizon.
Just as I could run the basic services on my own server, I could run any additional services as well. For example, as is done in EnThinnai, you could get my availability status from my server. There is no need for some third party to provide Presence service. You take any service offered by the companies that Andy mentions in his post. Do you think they can not be run in a common server?
So what is needed is packaging EnThinnai in such a manner that people can install them in their servers just like they install Wordpress or MovableType. Of course that is coming soon.
Posted by aswath at January 13, 2009 02:54 AM