Skype goes SIP

Skype decided to accept SIP as the defacto to take the corporate route. They had resisted SIP for a very long time, probably the only company that grew to its impressive user base without any standards acceptance. Although, I do admire their sense of creative an preseverance in getting to this point, they did leave a lot of opportunities on the table. Also, one has to bring in the Ebay effect into it, sheer lack of understanding by Ebay hurt them (probably??)
Nonetheless, it seems like the right move for Skype atleast for the corporate side.
The movement of VoIP of the last six months has reinvigorated by belief in VoIP again and has created the motivation of directing some time in thinking of creating new things in that direction. Need to take this segment seriously once again. Sounds like it is 2006 again ;-)

SG

Enum goes live in UK

Enum is a technique of using the IP address of the VOIP end point that can be registered via DNS. With Enum now becoming a national movement VOIP will become mainstream reality. Like any other technology adoption US is lagging behind. In UK Nominet is running the Enum service which is a fantastic. The number is reversed and the 'e164.arpa' is added at the end for the node to be recognized with its IP address within the domain name system. A few more countries get involved in the Enum system and then you have a true PSTN parallel, reliable and affordable VoIP network that is truely reachable anywhere and everywhere and converged communication channel.

SG

What could the new things be in the VoIP and media convergence?

IP Telephony segment really did not see much revolution for the last four/five years. Most players have tried to make things simpler, cheaper and some claim that they have the QoS to offer better service. Simpler maybe, cheaper questionable but QoS really not. Service quality has really not improved. I am a Vonage customer for a long time (over six years). I have gone through four different VoIP switch that they have send me over the years from Motorola to Cisco (Linksys). All of them are dumb as a door knob. QoS over the Internet is an end-to-end problem and lots of unification needs to happen within the path of the packet flows for maintaining any kinds of QoS. I use Skype quite a bit and find that even Skype with innovation is codecs (they just released a narrow-band codec with network load feedback within their data-path for improvements in network path). If I used Skype and then do file I/O over my local LAN (I have a LAN with five computers on it) I see jitter and I am not talking about the WAN speed allocations that I or my Skype route having no control over.
Another thing that I am very excited about it the possibilities of presence based routing. Nobody talk about it, probably not working in that direction or even considering that to be a possibilities. This is a very interesting concept and has great applicability. Think about it!

SG