I recently wrote about Popular Telephony's Peerio (Popular Telephony Peerio a Skype Killer?) This will also be a cover story for Internet Telephony Magazine.
Well today, at 1 PM today Popular Telephony will release their global numbering plan called GNUP.
Popular Telephony announces Peerio GNUP™ – a serverless Global Numbering Plan for VoIP
Popular Telephony Inc, the telecommunications middleware company behind the Peerio™ serverless telephony invention, has announced Peerio GNUP™ - a Global Numbering Plan for all IP telephony users, enabling transparent interconnectivity between all VOIP, PSTN, Mobile and other networks.
Peerio GNUP is a lightweight software agent used with any VoIP application (Peerio™, Skype, Liphone, SIP or H.323 clients, etc), that brings simplicity of phone numbers to VoIP. GNUP™ assigns the user a unique number (analogous to a traditional PSTN or mobile phone number), allowing their computer, PDA or other device to be called from any another VoIP application or telephony network.
Until now, VoIP devices and software were restricted to simple outgoing calls and like-to-like platform or protocol connectivity (Skype-to-Skype, H.323, SIP etc.), whereas standards-based applications required a DNS or Proxy infrastructure. As a result PSTN and Mobile users were unable to directly reach VoIP users without some form of media gateway. Peerio GNUP™ creates a presence for IP telephony users, enabling them to fully participate in the global two-way telephony process. With GNUP™, VoIP software users now interconnect transparently, while other networks users call GNUP™ numbers using a service provider that supports the Peerio™ Global Numbering Plan (the list can be soon found at www.gnup.org/connectivity ).
Peerio GNUP™ is not a voice application. Instead it is a core part of the Peerio™ suite and exists in all Peerio™-intelligent devices and the Peerio444™ client, but it can be used by other VoIP software, as long as another party has GNUP installed on their computer. For instance, a Microsoft MSN Messenger user who has installed Peerio GNUP™ on their machine can find a Linux user, which uses the Liphone SIP application, who also has GNUP™.
Downloadable from www.gnup.org, Peerio GNUP™ involves three easy steps:
It registers user to enlist all VoIP applications existing on the their device
It assigns user with the GNUP™ number.
It identifies other GNUP™ users, creating a presence.
Upon the user’s authorization, GNUP™ places the user’s number at the GNUP™ Yellow Pages section at www.gnup.org/yellowpages for public availability.
“For nearly ten years - the length of the Internet revolution - IP telephony has been limited to outgoing calls alone. Today, we’re faced with a market of millions of VoIP users across the globe who are not recognized as legitimate telephony users.” said Dmitry Goroshevsky, the CEO of Popular Telephony. “GNUP™ finally brings real, two-way telephony to VoIP on a global basis”.
Like all Popular Telephony technologies, Peerio GNUP™ is serverless; and works without any central management server, switchboard or system to handle call processing. It is free, self-serving, self-healing software that the users control.
GNUP™ supports full number portability. User can activate their GNUP™ number wherever they have access to the Internet (home, office, Internet café, Wi-Fi hotspot, etc.) on any platform (PC, PDA, IP phone) by simply entering their log in information. Once keyed in and logged on, the GNUP number is active and the user is available. GNUP™ requires no complex installation and can be carried on a smartcard, any storage device or downloaded onto any device from the GNUP™ website.
Interconnectivity works both ways with GNUP™ - user can call out to any kind of phone and any GNUP™ number. Calls between IP and PSTN are carried by GNUP™ partner service providers or through a GNUP-enabled media gateway.
“Popular Telephony is not a service provider. Our aim is to expand the use of serverless VoIP technologies by giving people free access to the latest innovations when they become available. GNUP™ is just the latest step in the server-free revolution,” added Dmitry Goroshevsky.
Peerio GNUP™ is planned to be available for download November 1, 2004.
I'm on the beta list, so hopefully I can report back here my experiences using their software client very soon. Stay tuned...
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In order to implement peering between disparate networks, this would need a media wrapper (or gateway) to exist between protocols, wouldn't it?
Not really... There are no networks really... SIP or H.323 or whatever... it is all on the user machine isn't it?
Hmm.. perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way, or I just dont get it.
UserA (peerio), calls UserB (skype).
Peerio (h.323, SIP)---->GNUP--->Skype (not SIP, H.323)
Somewhere in there a conversion wrapper has to be built, or am I missing something.
I view Peerio to be peer discovery portion of a communication session. Party A uses it to get the contact information for party B. I presume that the contact information will list various applications and application/network specific addresses, from which A can pick one (something like SIP selects a codec). Hence there is no need for "gateways".
I am just not getting it
If anyone can explain the concept of ENUM/GNUP, and how it works, Skype Me : andrew_hansen or if you would be so kind as to forward me to a "GNUP for Dummies" site, that would also be great..
Thanks.
Has anyone of you tried this new p2p voice communication software dingotel?
personally I liked it.. voice quality was good.. i could do conference with my ma in london and my bro in sydney.. but i think it takes a while to connect..
If I understand it correctly there has to be more than one operation happening here. The part that is being emphasised is the universal addressing which is important since one can be registered with several systems such as FWD, Skype, Linphone and so forth but at present they do not generally share their user ID's . Systems like GNUP or DUNDi or ENUM arrange for standard addressing which can be interchanged between the various applications. However the other important is the voice transmission and different applications may not be using the same encoding algorithms. Some vocoders such as G.711 or G.729 are in common use which helps, but apps like Skype use proprietary coding methods and so would not normally be able to "talk" to different applications. The Peerio client presumably addresses this problem in order to allow a Skype caller to speak to an FWD caller.
I assume that this is the case since they have said that there are no central servers in the path to enable such a translation.
Has anybody seen it work...I would like to give it workout...can't even get my number and password to work.
I spoke with Popular Telephony. They currently have 450 users, but need 1,000 minimum to go "live". According to them it requires 1,000 users minimum for it to become a self-propogating self-sustaining P2P VoIP network.
I'll try and get more people to join up by blogging them again.