Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Friday, October 06, 2006
VoIM, what the **** is that?
At many places I've read about a term called Voice over Instant Messaging (VoIM). VoIM in practice means "VoIP used in the context of an IM service". It's definitely still VoIP.
Let's go through some basics:
VoIP = Voice over Internet Protocol = transferring voice (or rather digitized audio) over IP-based networks, one-way or both ways
As Internet Protocol is the most used network protocol, on the Internet and in corporations, in homes etc, VoIP can be transferred pretty much on all networks in existence. That leads to a superior interoperability without a need to convert when moving from the Internet or WAN to LAN, LAN to WLAN etc. Of course you need to convert when moving to the normal telephony network, but that will hopefully go away in a few years (or millenia).
That's what Skype, Yahoo!, Net2Phone, MSN, broadband ISPs etc are doing.
Within corporations an older protocol called ITU H.323 is sometimes still used for VoIP, but the standard protocol for the future is clearly Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), that's also been adopted for triple-play within the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standardization. Similar to how you set up a call on a normal phone SIP takes care of the calling functions. The audio is then transferred as packets via Real Time Protocol (RTP).
Skype uses parts of the above, but as the traffic is encrypted outsiders can't actually see what's going on inside the network packets. This serves two main purposes:
* Providing a secure framework for voice, video, chat etc, minimizing the risk of eavesdropping etc.
* Providing a walled garden, leading to a virtual network where only Skype technology can be used. E.g. to make a phone that houses its own Skype client you need licensed information and technology from Skype.
SIP is likely to overthrow Skype and similar proprietary solutions over time, not because of some rosy notion that standards need to win, but simply because everyone else will do SIP, including telecom. The interop gains are that great.
VoIM will of course stay (simple terms always stay, like digital audio players are still called MP3 players, even if they support much more than MP3 that's not even a proper term), but I hopefully gave you a different angle on the subject.
Let's go through some basics:
VoIP = Voice over Internet Protocol = transferring voice (or rather digitized audio) over IP-based networks, one-way or both ways
As Internet Protocol is the most used network protocol, on the Internet and in corporations, in homes etc, VoIP can be transferred pretty much on all networks in existence. That leads to a superior interoperability without a need to convert when moving from the Internet or WAN to LAN, LAN to WLAN etc. Of course you need to convert when moving to the normal telephony network, but that will hopefully go away in a few years (or millenia).
That's what Skype, Yahoo!, Net2Phone, MSN, broadband ISPs etc are doing.
Within corporations an older protocol called ITU H.323 is sometimes still used for VoIP, but the standard protocol for the future is clearly Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), that's also been adopted for triple-play within the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) standardization. Similar to how you set up a call on a normal phone SIP takes care of the calling functions. The audio is then transferred as packets via Real Time Protocol (RTP).
Skype uses parts of the above, but as the traffic is encrypted outsiders can't actually see what's going on inside the network packets. This serves two main purposes:
* Providing a secure framework for voice, video, chat etc, minimizing the risk of eavesdropping etc.
* Providing a walled garden, leading to a virtual network where only Skype technology can be used. E.g. to make a phone that houses its own Skype client you need licensed information and technology from Skype.
SIP is likely to overthrow Skype and similar proprietary solutions over time, not because of some rosy notion that standards need to win, but simply because everyone else will do SIP, including telecom. The interop gains are that great.
VoIM will of course stay (simple terms always stay, like digital audio players are still called MP3 players, even if they support much more than MP3 that's not even a proper term), but I hopefully gave you a different angle on the subject.
