Speaking of Standards

Last Friday afternoon, the 74th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) drew to a close in San Francisco. It was quite an interesting meeting on a number of levels and while I was not there in person, I was following along on the live audio streams, Jabber chat rooms and mailing lists. I’ll be writing up some of my thoughts over the next few days.

Right now, though, I thought I’d point out to those of you following along where you can find resources to understand what went on at IETF 74. Basically all info from the IETF meetings is online, at pointers such as:

• IETF 74 Agenda – links to working group agendas and drafts associated with the groups. The logs for the Jabber chat rooms are also available as one of the icons in the line next to each timeslot.

• Presentation materials – the slides used in the various presentations and links to the minutes for each meeting. (Minutes are only now starting to appear and more will be added over the next few weeks as working group minutes are submitted.)
• Audio file archive – MP3 recordings of all sessions… but you definitely need to reference the IETF 74 Agenda to find the room and session that you want to hear.

With those links, you should be able to explore all parts of the IETF 74 meeting.

Now the work of the IETF moves back online into the many, many mailing lists for the next few months. The next face-to-face meeting will be IETF 75 in Stockholm, Sweden, July 26-31, 2009. The hosts of the meeting are “.SE” and they have put together a website at http://www.ietf75.se/ that talks all about Stockholm, the meeting venue, travel, etc. I have not been to Stockholm for past meetings, and I’m not yet sure if I am going to this one this year, but I’ve heard from folks who have gone that it is quite an amazing city. After that it’s on to Hiroshima, Japan, in November 2009 and on to other cities after that…

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Technorati Tags: IETF, SIP, standards

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Yesterday Skype announced the beta program for “Skype For SIP“, a new service that allows some forms of SIP connectivity between a premise-based SIP server/IP-PBX and Skype’s cloud and the PSTN. Over the weekend I put together a very lengthy post on my external DisruptiveTelephony blog that goes into the service in great detail, but the net of it is that when you sign up for the “Skype For SIP” service, you will be able to:

• Receive inbound calls to your SIP server from Skype users.
• Receive inbound calls to “Online Numbers” (formerly “SkypeIn”) that are routed to your SIP server.
• Place outbound calls to PSTN phone numbers using what was called “SkypeOut” and at Skype’s cheap rates.

The calls from Skype users are free to all involved. The Online Numbers only cost you $60 per year and the outbound calls are at Skype’s various rates.

The program, at www.skypeforsip.com, is accepting applications into the beta program now. Skype isn’t clear on when it will leave beta, but is clear that they will be evolving the program over the next weeks and months.

Note that what you are NOT able to do is to place calls from your SIP server to Skype users. So the interaction with Skype clients is one way – you can receive calls from Skype clients but not call those (at least not yet). As IfByPhone CEO Irv Shapiro notes in his blog post, Skype also has the “Skype For Asterisk” service available in a beta form and it does provide two-way connectivity to Skype users.

From a Voxeo point-of-view, what’s interesting is that this seems to have the potential of providing to users of our premise application platform, Prophecy, a similar kind of inbound Skype connectivity to what we’ve had for about four years now in our hosted application platform (and about which I wrote about last year). According to the info from Skype, Skype users would be able to call into applications by calling a Skype name which would then route the call over SIP to Prophecy. It’s a bit different from our hosted Skype connectivity in that it is a Skype name directing you to the entire platform, whereas in our hosted environment you have a Skype address for each application. Prophecy users would also, it seems, be able to use Skype For SIP to have outbound PSTN connectivity (a.k.a. “SIP trunking”) subject to Skype’s rates.

We’ll have to see how that all shakes out once we can try the software out, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Kudos to Skype for lowering their walls a bit and providing this kind of SIP support.

UPDATE: I also have a video podcast, Emerging Tech Talk #28, up on the subject.

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Technorati Tags: sip, skype

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Given that I’m not actually in San Francisco for the 74th meeting of the IETF this week, I was extremely pleased to find this new prototype of the agenda page which makes it incredibly easy to follow the meeting remotely:

http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/74/

From one simple page you can:

• See the calendar of what working groups are meeting when.

• Download all the Internet-Drafts that will be covered in a session.
• Start listening to the audio.
• See a list of the presentations that will be given during the session (and then download those).
• Join the Jabber chat room for the session.
• Read the Jabber logs to know what was written about the session.
• See the agenda for the session.

Here’s how those items appear graphically:

I’m not sure who at IETF created this new prototype agenda page, but I have to say that as a remote attendee it is tremendously helpful to have all this information brought together on one simple page.

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Technorati Tags: IETF, standards, sip

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