SIP is dead, long live Skype

Hehe, though that might get your attention

Well, that's what Martin Geddes thinks:-

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The number of open SIP nodes addressable via ENUM (or otherwise) is miniscule compared to the proprietary Skype virtual network. SIP has been absorbed by the telecom borg.

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SIP is history as far as the future of voice is concerned. Get over it. The Vob is dead. Shuffled off to join the big pile of dead over-complex standards. DCE, CORBA — please make some space between you, we’ve got company tonight.

He makes some good points, too. Although I think he's missed the main one - and that is the fact that VoIP is actually, currently, a miniscule market itself when compared to the PSTN. And the PSTN is still the big daddy by a factor of several million to one.

In terms of pure VoIP though, clearly Skype has the edge at the moment. But quite how they're going to survive without radical changes in their financial model is anyone's guess.

Dean

Not long...

Besides, is Skype really the 900 pound gorilla the media would have you believe?

http://www.advancedippipeline.com/161500064

The 100 million downloads is meaningless. Of that only 35 Million bothered to regsiter and of that only 2.5 Million are on at anyone time. Compare that to YahooBB at 4 Million paying and always on subscribers...

Geddes is full of crap.

http://forum.skype.com/viewtopic.php?t=24795

Well no one has told all the Mainstream PBX makers this, Otherwise they wouldnt be adding SIP functionality to their IP PBXs.

Also Does a true skypee hardphone exist? AFAIK no it doesnt,
Does skypee intergrate with any IP PBX yet ?

SIP is where the money is being put, Skypee is for the "kids"

Skype quality is good, but you need a computer turned on all the time. With SIP you can get an ATA and there is no necessity for a computer.

Skype people need to establish agreements with ATA manufacturers.

Skype also relies on there being enough "supernodes" (PCs with no firewall or a suitable pinhole) being available at any instance.

With XP SP2 now being automatically installed with Windows Update, I suspect that there will be less such machines available.

Add into this the number of capped broadband packages being introduced and Skype starts to look rather fragile.

Skype is starting to look like quite a good scam in some ways.

1/ Let us run our program on your PC and we will let you speak to other people running the same program for free. You also agree to let us use an unspecified proportion of the Internet bandwith that you pay for in order for us to operate the service.

2/ If you want to speak to other people on the PSTN, give us money over and above the cost of the call(s) in advance. You also agree to let us use an unspecified proportion of the Internet bandwith that you pay for in order for us to operate the service.

3/ If you want people on the PSTN to call you via our service, give us some money. You also agree to let us use an unspecified proportion of the Internet bandwith that you pay for in order for us to operate the service.

4/ If you want voicemail, give us some money. Oh and you also agree to let us use an unspecified proportion of the Internet bandwith that you pay for in order for us to operate the service.

SIP is complicated, uses multiple ports, has firewall and NAT transversal problems that ensures that it won't just work as a nobrainer from anywhere.

SIP uses text based signalling that makes it inefficient, with a much higher overhead than needed.

SIP is a convoluted creature created by committe to establish a VOIP LAN protocol to replace the even worse H.323 protocol.

Skype is a propriatory protocol that will only talk to another instance of itself. I know of no one who has had any luck so far in interconnecting Skype with any other gear or PBX equipment.

If you want something that really rocks, consider IAX (actually IAX2). It does everything that SIP does, but with a minimum of overhead. IAX supports both audio and video, with your choice of codecs. It requires just a single port (UDP 4569), and supports TDM, so that you can multiplex many calls on a single connection. It will go through multiple NATs without any problems.

IAX is the VOIP protocol that truly rocks. H.323, SIP and Skype are basically legacy protocols from the early, immature years of VOIP that we are stuck living through.

See URL below for more info on IAX.

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/tech/2005/ ... pdate.html

Aswath has also now picked up on this one:-

http://www.mocaedu.com/mt/archives/000139.html

Skype do many things well. I still think their survival will depend on an "opening up" of their protocols.

SIP still carries the advantage in that respect. And it's a good one.

Dean

I'm enjoying this thread. I've been banging the SIP drum for 5 years, but when I started using skype last year I had to say... wow... these guys have got their act together. Skype has a host of advantages (in addition to superior voice quality) to most SIP phones. The most obvious being - auto-configuration - the setup is so simple everyone's grandma could do it, and bulletproof connectivity that pokes through any kind of NAT and the hottest firewalls.

That said - the idea that SIP is over is plain silly. Apart from the billions being invested in SIP networks, ever heard of IMS? The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) provides signaling to control real time multi media services for the packet domain in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). This is basically how the PSTN, the Mobile Phone system and VoIP and all the other IP services are going to get integrated. IMS has been defined by Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in the course of 3G network evolution (release 5.) And guess what? The major signaling protocol used is SIP. It's the glue that ties all the bits together.

In fact, pretty soon Skype will talk SIP as good as Sveedish!

I would venture to guess Skype is using a bastardized version of SIP and STUN. It is encrypted, so we will never know.

The question is not SIP vs Skype, but open/interchangeable vs closed/proprietary.

Which do you think will win?

Cont'd from a thread over here : http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_1212.html

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Presumably security is also a problem (anyone care to comment about this?) - I'm not sure I would give my credit card details over a sip phone or fax.

I wouldn't either. UDP audio packets are relatively easy to intercept.

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I'd be interested in what everyone else thinks the future of voip/sip - and particularly skype - will be.

OK, I'll bite. The future of SIP is I suspect pretty much certain. Already many existing PSTN/POTS service providers are using SIP internally for routing. H.323 is still also widely in use. H.323 is very easy to interface to SIP and vice-versa. Both are simple and open protocols.

The future of VoIP itself is absolute. It's a no-brainer. Packet-switching is simply better than circuit switching. It's like moving from candles to electric light.

Whether or not the internet has the capability of providing a suitable backbone for VoIP remains to be seen. There is an existing PSTN infrastructure which could probably be pulled into use as a private VoIP network by the PSTN telcos. They're doing that now with ADSL.

I personally suspect we'll see two emerging markets - one private network based, the other public (the internet).

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Presumably the skype model only works if people are calling pstn numbers. So as the numbers of people with sip addresses or skype usernames increase, the amounts of capital raised should decrease.

Yes. Skype is an internet based software, so the theoretical end point is everyone ending up on Skype and therefore no PSTN anymore. I suspect that's unlikely. In the event of that happening, the PSTN will lose out exponentially, but you seem to be forgetting the mobile networks.

If Skype continues to be succesful, it's real money will be made with Skype/GSM gateways. Skype know this. That's why they are currently in talks with Motorola and others.

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Similarly, sip providers will connect to another internet telephone for no cost - some even to pstn for no cost.

Yes, again the theoretical end point is we all end up using SIP and therefore ISP's will only ever be able to charge us for our ADSL/Cable internet connections.

Again, I see no immediate demise for the mobile phone (and until I see a working and popular implementation of WiMax I wouldn't even entertain the idea) so there is revenue to be generated in routing from SIP to the GSM/3G networks.

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I have heard the argument that free calls to PSTN are just a marketing ploy

Yes, I wholly believe that is the case. There are many small telco's scrambling for market share in VoIP right now. The easiest way to gain market share fast is to offer your services for free. It's probably cheaper than hiring a PR company.

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but surely the point is that in the end, it will be uneconomic to connect a sip-sip without cost.

Without any cost, maybe. Bear in mind the resources required to run a SIP server, with no media proxying (as we do here for example), is negligible. If you can charge a user 50 pence per month, justified by value added features (voicemail for example), you could probably break even. Even other value adds (fax etc) then become profitable.

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How long have we got?

2-5 years before we're all on VoIP. 2 years before the format of what it will end up being gets clarified, probably by a process of natural selection. Over that period I suspect we'll see an almighty boom-bust cycle of the kind never seen before. It will make the .com boom/bust era look like a picnic.

Dean