There are free conference bridges that only use the PSTN - they make
money by reverse termination charges (for example /www.freeconference.com
). There are very expensive conference bridges that do cool tricks SS7
technology. There are free confernce bridges that use SIP/H.323/IAX/
Skype (but as far as I know, not Jingle). There are very expensinve
confernce bridges that use SIP - actually SIP seems to be the
preferred way to build a really expensive conference service these days.
The cost of a conference bridge has pretty close to nothing to do with
the signaling protocol. It has to do with if you can reach a human
operator and say "can you phone me back at room 252 in the following
hotel in Istanbul, I don't know the country code and have no idea if
the hotel phone number I have includes anything like an city code". Or
you can ask the operator to find the line with the bad echo and
disconnect it.
I'm sure that opinions vary widely on if we need this level of
conference bridge or not but today we have that and when you need it,
well it is nice to have. My personal opinion as a someone that has
been on these calls is that I could live with the following:
1) a bridge that worked every single time
2) web interface where one could initiate dial out to DID numbers
3) web interface where someone could mute participants that had put
the conference on music on hold
4) would be nice to have web interface that showed active speaker
This is blasphemy but I don't care if it has an VoIP interface or not,
but I absolutely have to be able to call it from my mobile phone.
Obviously I think it would be cool if I could use VoIP with wideband
audio.
Cullen
PS - as a WAG on the budget estimate below, I would guess the IESG
uses something like 150 hours of conferencing a year.
On Feb 11, 2008, at 8:55 AM, Dan York wrote:
I'm with Richard on this one. I have to think that among the many
companies that make up the IETF there exists a couple with
conferencing bridges that can support SIP endpoints! ;-) Can we
move some of this conversation in the bill below onto the Internet
using systems where our costs essentially go to $0? (Obviously we
still need to communicate to non-wired folks across the PSTN, such
as event location facilities, etc.)
Or is the issue really that, as Jonathan Christensen of Skype
states, the original vision of SIP for rich communications remains
"unrealistic"[1]? That as a practical matter we *can't* use SIP
endpoints due to NAT traversal, security issues, federation/trust
issues, etc?
My 2 cents,
Dan
P.S. How many folks out there have phones (hard or soft) from which
they can place calls to other random SIP endpoints? (I do, but also
realize I'm in a minority.)
[1]
http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/2008/02/09/ecomm2008-jonathan-christensen-of-skype-and-the-unreal-vision-of-sip/
On Feb 9, 2008, at 9:38 AM, Richard Shockey wrote:
And this coming from the Standards body that has developed SIP ...
unbelievable. I don't think I'm going to listen to any more
arguments about
IPv6 experiments during Plenary's any more.
One thing the IAOC is looking at at this instant is our phone bill.
The IETF's phone budget for 2008 is
IESG: $58,800
IAB: $22,500
Nomcom: $30,000
IASA/IAOC: $17,235
---------
$128,535
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Dan York, CISSP, Director of Emerging Communication Technology
Office of the CTO Voxeo Corporation dyork(_at_)voxeo(_dot_)com
Phone: +1-407-455-5859 http://www.voxeo.com
SIP: dyork(_at_)corpsip(_dot_)voxeo(_dot_)com Skype: danyork
Blogs: http://blogs.voxeo.com http://www.disruptivetelephony.com
Bring your web applications to the phone.
Find out how at http://evolution.voxeo.com
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