Ruminations on Russia

Tom Keating has more interesting coverage of Popular Telephony's global numbering efforts ("GNUP"), also from James Enck on Popular's global numbering. I don't like this, read what someone else wrote blogging style but a comment and subsequent response from Peerio (the name of Popular's product) is worth covering;

In order to implement peering between disparate networks, this would need a media wrapper (or gateway) to exist between protocols, wouldn't it?
Posted by: Andrew at October 18, 2004 11:35 PM

Not really... There are no networks really... SIP or H.323 or whatever... it is all on the user machine isn't it?
Posted by: Peerio at October 19, 2004 10:52 AM

As a Mac user I have yet to check out their claims but it seems to me that they are way ahead of the crowd.

Update: Martin Geddes posts from VON with some great thoughts including why we should all be scared about communications. Key take aways;

• Too many border session controllers = trying to make the IP network resemble the current TDM network
• Popular are "hijacking and subverting" the global numbering plan (this was meant in a good way)
• A lot of money will be lost in VoIP - see point 1 to understand the coming crisis - So if you’re putting your pension savings into the VoIP business, tread very, very carefully. This boom going to hurt as bad as the .com explosion. One way or another, there’s going to be a lot of roadkill, and a lot of get-rich-quick money from inflated promises.
• VoIP is a classic separation of application from carrier and more importantly the financial relationship between the two - someone astutely commented that a key aspect of IP was not just decoupling of the applications from the service. It is also the decoupling of the financial relationship between the connectivity and service provider.

All this should apply to the mobile network as much as the fixed. However I recently saw a line in a RFP to a global service provider that said in effect that GPRS and 3G are not yet robust enough to support true VoIP connectivity - bomb shell. Put another way voice is going to continue to have its own protected piece of bandwidth until QOS issues can be resolved.