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the ...pipe....dream of voip interoperability The (Pipe) Dream of VoIP Interoperability?
Written by Ted Shelton
Thursday, 18 May 2006
I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of VoIP interoperability! You may now call Vonage users from Skype! Gizmo Project users may call Skype users and Vonage users as well! Rejoice, Tower of (VoIP) Babel, you may now all speak to each other... courtesy of the transactional hub we call the PSTN.

What, you say? The PSTN? Yes, this is the sorry part of the story. Long have the VoIP minions toiled to upset the stranglehold that traditional telecommunications companies have on voice communications. And yet in a strange kind of revenge, the old PSTN network has become the backbone for interoperability between the warring tribes of VoIP. If I wish to call a Vonage user from my Skype account, I "SkypeOut" onto the PSTN, and enter Vonage's VoIP network through a PSTN interface. Similarly, a Vonage call routes through the PSTN to my "SkypeIn" number. For each of these transactions the phone companies take a percentage of the money I pay to Vonage or Skype for providing interoperability! But it just doesn't have to be this way.

For too long now VoIP vendors have mistakenly believed that there is a competitive advantage in maintaining a walled garden. The philosophy goes like this -- I use Skype, so I encourage others to use Skype, and there is a network effect in our presence on this network rather than some other that draws even more people to use Skype. In the early days of VoIP this argument certainly made sense. But once Skype and others opened their VoIP network to the PSTN, the unintended consequence was to open a gate in the walled garden, and interoperability. Worse, this kind of interoperability ends up helping a common enemy of all VoIP vendors, the traditional telephony network.


But here is a radical suggestion -- why not connect these VoIP networks to each other directly and cut out the Telcos? Sure, lots of people are talking about this, but why isn't it happening? The market maker to do this is clearly Skype. With the vast majority of VoIP users congregating on the Skype network, a move by them to open connections to other Skype vendors would create value for every other player.

I imagine Skype providing a web service that allows vendors to look up a given phone number and check to see if it belongs to a SkypeOut user. If the phone number does, the calling vendor routes the call directly (over SIP?) into the Skype network instead of going through the PSTN. Skype could even charge a nominal fee per minute (much less than the PSTN charges) for this routing capacity. Once Skype offers this service, Vonage and every other VoIP network will follow suit. Instead of the telecommunications companies laughing all the way to the bank as VoIP providers pay them for interoperability, we can take the next step toward all IP voice communications. As a side benefit VoIP providers might focus once again on innovation rather than merely low prices as a reason for consumers to choose one service over another. But here, perhaps, I am dreaming.

There has been a long running battle for interoperability between "instant messaging" networks. Certainly this wall should fall as well, and perhaps VoIP interoperability will hasten IM interoperability. But the important thing for VoIP vendors to focus on is that voice is fundamentally different from IM in that the PSTN offers real interoperability today where there is no such analog for IM. Arguably offering interoperability between IM networks would hurt some participants. But in the domain of voice, a lack of direct connectivity between VoIP networks simply pushes call traffic out to the traditional telecommunications vendors, with no gain for the VoIP industry.