Ruminations on Russia

Vonage Outed or IT & Telecom Converges

Andy Abramson blogs Vonage's Outage which may or may not have been caused by Global Crossing. In an attempt to get through some 1,000 unread blog's courtesy of much loved NewsGator sitting in the inbox I skim read, deleted and then brought it back and started writing here;

We have an investment in a next generation IN / feature sever play jNETx which is putting in a replacement IN system in to an Irish mobile provider - when the system was launched with a new HLR and various other bits and pieces the whole system went down for 3 hours. I'm pleased to say it was not jNETx that caused it but it was A BIG DEAL with as many expletives as you want to add.

I am not saying that Vonage's outage was or is the cause of calling the end of VoIP - it's not; Vonage et al will continue to take business from PSTN's. However, service includes being available nearly all the time. Is that 99.999 or some lesser number - no idea. What seems logical is that enterprises will demand the same service levels from a full VoIP sytem as they got from the PSTN's, and that is built around 99.999% availability. So whilst Vonage is principally a retail / SoHo play a few hours spent at the beach is OK. To go mainstream it's not.

Whilst I am here a link to a previous post Go South Young VoIP'ers. Yesterday I was in a meeting with a company that claims to have solved the feature issues caused by SIP passing through IPPBX's passing through border session controllers (my middle name is esoteric.)

Andy makes the point that the S. American governments are trying to protect their local PSTN's by regulating out VoIP providers. Same thing happened here in Russia. In an attempt to get the highest price for Svyazinvest, the all controlling super-telco, they force all long-distance to pass through Rostelecom - the long distance carrier. Thus a number of local enterprise CLEC's wanted to move their clients on to full VoIP systems however, they found that when a VoIP call was made via SIP that passed through a BSC and then via an IP PBX (100% of legitimate enterprise VoIP traffic) they lost the features of the call when the IP PBX diverted the call / session to an internal "number". The call went through it just lost any "intelligence" - call forwarding, voicemail (?). Thus the Russian government's desire to protect revenues caused a Russian technology company to overcome a global problem. The law of unintended consequences strikes again.