With less than two weeks until Internet Telephony, we here at AudioCodes are putting the final touches on a number of interesting and informative sessions and we'd love to see you participate:

To sweeten the deal, we'll be giving away a Garmin GPS navigator as the show, so be sure to stop by and fill out an entry card!

By now, everyone who cares has heard about the Skype outage (see: Skype Outage Article).  This is not another blog entry about reliability, peer-to-peer vs. centrally managed applications or about Skype's twisted use of other's PCs for their infrastructure.  Instead this is a discussion about popularity.

Back after the launch of Skype, we all rushed to sign-up and get with the "in-set" that Skyped each other.  I was one of the few that recognized that user names were a land-grab and made sure to secure my name right away (I'm "AlanPercy" on Skype).  I initially (and still) found Skype a very useful tool for making calls from hotel rooms in remote places, conversing with long-lost college friends and side-chatter during conference calls.  It seemed that a rush of my friends and colleagues were all becoming Skype users and it was easier than every to reach out to those that I cared about.

However that last few months, I've noticed a pattern of fading use.  I've found that when I open Skype that fewer and fewer of my favorite friends are activating Skype or even using it to reach out.  Looking at my own behavior, it seems that my mobile has become the preferred way people find me - as it's always on and always with me.  I also find that I use text messaging on my mobile more frequently.

Has Skype crossed the "useful" boundary, has the outage caused a lasting affect, or is there something else the people are using to communicate? 

Interesting food for thought....

Unless you have been living in a cave the last few years, you know that hundreds of service providers have popped up with the plan to sell telephony services to enterprises via SIP.  SIP Trunking offers the promise of eliminating the separate TDM (T1/E1 or Analog) trunking to the local telephone company, replacing it with services over existing or dedicated broadband internet.

However, IMHO the promise is far from being delivered upon and there are a range of issues that we in the industry must solve before charging ahead.  What challenges?  See the article I just had published in Internet Telephony : Feature Articles - SIP Trunking: What Challenges Lie Ahead?

Last week, Rich Tehrani and I had an opportunity to compare notes on a few questions:

This last week I've been doing some reading and discussing with others the role that video will play in our daily lives and communications needs.  Just as background, we have two Tivos at home and the Slingbox that Jeff gave us at VON last year.  And yes, I have the mobile slingbox client loaded on my phone.

Since having and using Slingbox for the last year, I'm a convert and yes, I am convinced that people will pay for video on demand services via the Internet (both broadband and mobile).  The question is what will the business model look like?

This is what I suspect will happen: 

First - the current content providers (read TV Networks) will be key in providing access to the media and will eventually host the programming on a pay per view / subscription basis.
Second - your current entertainment supplier (read cable/SatTV supplier) will offer you access to this content. 
Third - you'll use either set-top box from the cable/SatTV company or your computer or your mobile to view the programming.

To make this work, a couple technical hurdles must be crossed:

Streaming - anyone that thinks that the content providers will let you download the whole program onto your laptop is dreaming - even YouTube doesn't do that!  Content will primarily be delivered via streaming - mostly to counter pirates and manage ad time.
Transrating / Transcoding - let's face it, with so many different devices and network conditions, no one format will work all the time.  Something will have to take the responsibility to convert the video to match the device and network conditions AT THE SOURCE.
Authentication/Billing - lastly is making sure that the subscriber is who he/she says they are and track usage.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts?

We've been working with a wide range of application developers over the last five years.  Initially working with our VoipLib API, we found that the traditional CTI architecture had some real limitations that needed to be solved to allow developers to grow their business and fully migrate to Voice over IP.

As a result I've put together a paper and have been hosting a series of webinars on the challenges and solutions to this challenge.  A copy of the full paper can be found at: http://www.audiocodes.com/objects/Break%20Free%20Leveraging%20SIP.pdf

The SIP Invite