What DOES the world look like when every router is a SIP proxy?
March 3, 2005 - 10:41am — bmann
Alec Saunders is experimenting with SIPatH, a SIP proxy that runs on a $50 Linksys WRT-G router. Here's what his rules for the future of telecom are:
- Your PSTN connectivity is outsourced to the lowest bidder. The only calls you pay for are calls that terminate on the PSTN.
- Your "telephone number" is simply a SIP address terminating on your local SIP proxy. To call me, you use your SIP client to reach alec@saunders.com - the SIP proxy I have at home.
- The telephone network, as we know it, ceases to exist. Telephony is nothing more than an embedded application running on a common transport.
He also points out Mr. Blog, talking about running Asterisk on the same router (where Asterisk is a full-fledged IP-PBX).
I suppose I should stop being amazed, but we're not quite there yet. I had a quick look at both projects, and they would both take more fiddling than I'm willing to deal with at this point. However, since they are running on commodity home networking gear, it means we're not more than a year or so away (less?) from having a shippable product that is pre-installed and relatively plug and play. In the meantime, I'm still looking for a good PSTN termination provider in Canada.
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PSTN Termination in Canada
On the topic of PSTN termination in Canada, we've been using babytel (www.babytel.ca) since August and have nothing but good things to say. They can terminate or originate PSTN calls in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke and Halifax. Cheers.
Cool technology
I think all of that is pretty cool, and ultimately inevitable. The whole world has taken on SIP, practically overnight.. I still run into the odd person who mentions H.323, and I really feel they must have been living in the dark ages for a while. What's really exciting is all the stuff that's coming with SIP, and what that means for the end-user experience. I was talking with Robert Sparks a while ago (co-writer of SIP), and he was letting us all in on what's being hashed out now by the Simple and SIP working groups. It's going to be pretty exciting.
As for a SIP proxy on a router -- that's pretty cool. What they should really do is also integrate a STUN server, since most proxies (or at least the users trying to use that proxy) are limited without one. I know the boys at CISCO are currently putting STUN into some of their routers. It's a pretty exciting time in VOIP right now.
Very cool.
Very cool.
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