Ok, I might be wrong about all of this, so take it with a grain of salt. But I think something really, really big has happened, mostly without people noticing.
Google is putting their muscle behind an open VoIP address space, compatible with free p2p calling, that no single entity will control. Because Google is so big, and because free voice calls seem to be the direction of the future, I think that this new address space is going to be where everyone will get their phone calls in 20 years.
I’m a VoIP hobbyist. I don’t know much about it, and have only played briefly with Asterix (open source software PBX) using the Asterix@home distro and soft phones. I am a reasonably happy Vonage customer, as well.
I’ve tried to think through the economics of VoIP, and I came to the conclusion that the address space is a very key element of everything that’s going on.
Let me explain what I mean by address space. If you want to call someone who is plugged into one phone network or another, you need some information. Usually, it’s the big global phone system, and you need a regular phone number if you want to make a call. But if you use skype, their network is much smaller, and you need skype specific user information to place the call. Skype has their own address space, in other words, although they do gate calls to and from the larger phone system, if you want that.
It turns out that if you want to make calls to and from the global telephone system’s address space, it costs money, but if you just want to communicate with someone specific, and both parties are willing to join some new voip only telephone network, it’s free. This is a pretty basic economic reality for voip as it exists today.
Skype or other voip only systems can be free because the data flows peer to peer. The skype server makes an introduction between two callers, but the actual voice data doesn’t flow through the server. Skype can run servers with very little bandwidth, because all they have to do is make introductions. So they can give the service away for free, in the hopes of selling you gateway services to the larger phone network.
You can’t run p2p if you want to call your aunt gladys on the big phone network, though. She’s not a peer on the internet, she’s just someone with a phone. So someone else has to run a server you run data through, and someone has to pay the old line telcos to talk to them and gate them into the system.
What this means, when it’s all said and done, is that I have to pay vonage $15/month.
Now the fight over free VoIP, I think, is really the fight to control the address space. If we all use MSN to route our free VoIP calls, then Microsoft controls the address space. They can create address, give them to whoever they want, and destroy them. And they can keep track of who you’re talking to, and use that information to target ads at you. Do you make calls to state farm? Well, maybe geico wants to send you an email.
The alternative, would be to have some sort of open commons for addresses, that wasn’t really controlled by anyone, and which would allow phone users to actually exert real control over their phone addresses. It did not look to me like the big companies had much interest in that, though. They seemed to want to duke it out and try to create their own isolated networks. This has been, in fact, how they’ve approached IM systems, and VoIP is being rolled out as a tacked on feature to existing IM networks. Everyone’s VoIP address is the same as their IM address, and you make calls through the same software you use to chat.
Google, though, has done something really big. They’ve signed on to the Jabber protocol for their Talk product. This is an open and decentralized system based on open protocols, and with open source software available.
What this means, essentially, is that I can set up my own Jabber server and use it for VoIP, and people on Google talk can communicate with me. I can say, “My phone address is alex@strasheim.org”. I own that — no company can take it away from me. I can run my own server, or forward my calls to a google talk system, or whatever.
The domain does cost me something, and I have a vps that I have to pay for. (All less than a single phone line from the old telco, though). But once I have that basic cost, I can create lots and lots of phone addresses.
Google Talk will probably create a critical mass of users in the Jabber protocol phone network, too.
All of this means that a viable path for a transition to a free VoIP network that no one entity controls has been blazed. Google brings a critical mass of users to the table, or at least a good chance that such a critical mass will come together.
Right now, I could set up an asterix machine on an old PC, and buy a cheap card that would give me a phone jack. I could build a hybrid phone that would talk on the jabber network and on a VoIP network. Either way, my phone would ring, people would reach my voicemail, etc. Anyone with Google talk could call me for free, and to me it would work just like my normal phone. I could call people with Google talk for free. And I could still make normal calls.
If I picked a cheap VoIP provider that’s asterix friendly, I could probably shave off another 33% of my already very low Vonage bill. I could get down to $10 a month or so.
I think I have to do this for real now.
