Prof. Henning Schulzrinne et al. from Columbia University published recently two interesting papers. One paper "An Analysis of the Skype Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony
Protocol" is trying to re-engineer Skype and is giving some insights to the inner working of Skype.

The second paper "Peer-to-Peer Internet Telephony using SIP" is proposing a way to implement SIP as P2P protocol. The most interesting point IMHO is the possibility for a client to register with a normal SIP-proxy ond at the same time to participate in a P2P network.

The Economist had an article in his December 2nd issue: The phone call is dead; long live the phone call. (premium article).

Raising the basic question: Who wins and who loses as phone calls move on to the internet?

The Ecomomist had an article on Internet Telephony (VoIP) in his December 2nd issue: The phone call is dead; long live the phone call.

raising the basic question: Who wins and who loses as phone calls move to the internet?

....

Because VOIP service relies on software, rather than the traditional physical telephone infrastructure—voicemails, for instance, come into one's e-mail inbox and can be saved and forwarded—it upsets the entire telecoms industry, for two reasons.

First, while traditional telephony takes account of geography, distance, and time, says Michael Powell, America's telecoms regulator, “VOIP shatters all three�. In most cases it makes no difference to a VOIP caller where he is, how far away from the person he is calling, or how long they talk. VOIP phones can have traditional telephone numbers, yet still work no matter where they are, provided they are plugged in to a broadband internet connection. Lots of Indian mothers in Delhi have Vonage phones with the American area code 650 so that they can make cheap “local� calls to their sons in Silicon Valley.

Second, VOIP uncouples the two previously intertwined components of telephony: access to the network (via a wire running into your house, for example) and service (the ability to make and receive calls). Traditionally, both have been provided together. With VOIP you can buy broadband access from one firm and a telephony service from another—or even from a company in another country altogether.

Who will be the biggest losers? Not the fixed-line telcos, even though their revenues may fall by 25% by 2010 due to VOIP, according to Mr Mewawalla.

The mobile operators are likely to be the big losers, with their revenues plunging by 80%. Together, VOIP and wireless broadband could fatally undermine their costly third-generation (3G) networks.

 

Australia Rolls Out ENUM Services; U.S. "Stalled"

While ENUM - they tying of telephone numbers to Internet Protocol addresses, a potential boon to the growth of Internet telephony - is described as "stalled" in the United States, it is being rolled out in Australia "with a light regulatory hand," according to a story published April 12 in Washington Internet Daily , an online newsletter. One would hope U.S. regulators would watch and learn from the Australians.

The story isn't available from the newsletter's website, but is available via Lexis-Nexis. Here is a very brief excerpt...

Austria is ready to be "first to jump the cliff" into commercial e-numbering (ENUM) services, Internet Foundation Austria (IPA) Chmn. Michael Haberler told us. A 2-year commercial phase will launch this year, overseen by the country's Broadcasting & Telecom Regulatory Authority (RTR) and with NIC.at providing registry services, said Georg Serentschy, RTR managing dir.-telecom section. The plan flies in the face of claims ENUM isn't ready for prime time in Europe because technical and regulatory issues aren't resolved. Because no one knows how ENUM will develop, Serentschy said Thurs., regulators are exerting a light touch.

ENUM activities don't fall within Austria's telecom act because it specifically excludes domain names from RTR's authority, Serentschy said. However, he said, early on the govt. applied for .3.4.e164.arpa for its ENUM domain name because it recognized the relationship between telephone numbers and ENUM services. As the domain owner, RTR sets rules for its use.

Austria ran an ENUM trial, but it's shifting to a commercial rollout in the late 3rd quarter or early 4th quarter, Serentschy said. The phase is limited to 2 years because "one of the things we want to find out" is what the ENUM service will look like, he said. NIC.at will have the right to operate the registry during that time, he said, but if ENUM proves popular, others may be allowed to bid on providing registry services. Extensive discussion in the U.S. has concerned whether there should be multiple registries as well as registrars. Austria is most likely to go with a single registry and several registrars, Serentschy said, but it depends on the market. It's not clear who will be most interested in ENUM - consumers, businesses or both, he said. Until that's known, the govt. doesn't want to overload the emerging service with regulatory constraints, he said.

The only regulatory action the govt. has taken is to dedicate a new number range - 780 - for ENUM services, Serentschy said.

U.S. regulators ought to watch what Australia is doing - and not doing - about ENUM, and learn from it.

As Computer Business Review reported April 7 :

Public deployment of ENUM, the three-year-old standard for using telephone numbers over the internet, is still a way off in the US, despite the fact that many people think it will be an essential component of widespread voice over IP adoption.

The US government came out in favor of accelerating ENUM plans in February 2003, but little has happened since, as the telecommunications, cable and internet industries try to hammer out the details of how implementation should happen.

Interested parties organized into a group called the ENUM Forum have agreed that the best way to introduce ENUM in the US would be to form a limited liability corporation, which would receive contractual authority to run ENUM from the government.

But there is still disagreement over how the ENUM registries contracting with this LLC would be required to operate. The complex issue takes into account political boundaries and competition and revenue concerns.

Nominum is bragging in their website about their ANS. Since I cannot confirm or deny this, I just copy in the content of the page for the esteemed audience:

Nominum delivers groundbreaking ENUM benchmarks for VOIP.

ENUM is a combination of Internet-based technologies designed to map the global Public Switched Telecommunications Network (PSTN) telephone numbers, known as E.164 identifiers, into domain names. ENUM facilitates the convergence of the Internet with traditional telecommunications services.

Whereas the DNS architecture is highly scalable across the Internet, ENUM changes the rules of the game by requiring individual DNS servers to store several orders of magnitude more records, respond with reduced latency, and guarantee 99.999% availability.

To test scalability and performance at ENUM levels, Nominum loaded 200M records into its Authoritative Name Server (ANS) and several other DNS servers. Only ANS loaded the 200M records. All other servers failed at loading even 50M records.

DNS Server	ANS	BIND9	DJBDNS	Power DNS
200M Records	Pass	Fail	Fail	Fail
50M Records	Pass	Fail	Fail	Fail

With 200M records loaded, Nominum’s Foundation Authoritative Name Server (ANS) answered to 45,000 queries per second with an average latency of 2 milliseconds.

Click here for the full benchmark results.

Click here for the press release.

Click here to download high performance version of queryperf.