[Asterisk-Users] Re: quasi-skype channel for Asterisk?

[Duane]

Stefan Märkle wrote:

> that it does nothing that asterisk and dundi can't do themselves better.

But Dundi isn't the solution for this, it certainly won't do what you're 
hoping it will. The question is how long before script kiddies start 
announcing your route to other people to some sex chat line, rerouting 
political numbers to their opposition or any other number of fun things 
to do on a Friday night when you have no life. At best all dundi will be 
used for is a replacement to enterprise/telco enum systems if all their 
equipment is asterisk, but I personally doubt cisco is champing at the 
bit to start supporting it.

The fact is without some form or centralisation or checks and balances 
you can't trust anyone outside your little ring of immediate friends. 
This means that dundi will only be useful for voip providers and 
enterprise wanting an easish way to distribute their dialing plan, it 
won't be useful in the medium to long term for the general public.

What's more the decentralised nature means each call probes every 
server, so instead of probing one server and getting an authorative 
response it could be bounced across the entire network for every call, 
short term this would have no impact, what about 1 billion calls, or 10 
billion calls, potentially there could be more traffic for finding 
numbers then actually voice calls.

The other point that could be made is about potential adoption by the 
wider community, currently enum has been adopted in many devices and 
software, and many companies already run it internally, I doubt they'd 
suddenly drop it to adopt asterisk and a protocol that may get more hype 
then use.

I personally advocate the use of enum, or more specifically the 
implementation others and myself have been involved with ( 
http://www.e164.org ) and my reasoning for enum is quite simple, in the 
next 5 to 10 years (at least) people will want to stick with what's 
familiar, after all 100 years of "phone numbers" is going to be a 
difficult mind set for some to deal with if it suddenly changed 
tomorrow. While most phones might be in fact VoIP devices in the next 5 
to 10 years, how many incumbent monopoly telcos are likely to let them 
be addressable by anything but existing numbering plans? Whether we like 
it or not numbers are he to stay for quite some time. If you want a good 
example of mind set, most people here where possible get their PABXs to 
sound like the normal phone network because they can't deal with it 
sounding like something completely different.

I think mobile phones and "smart" cordless phones might be the first to 
shift once they include a SIP component and you don't have to deal with 
entering email like addresses in all the time, for the most part 
entering an email like address into a phone for a one off basis will be 
highly inefficient unless you have a better lookup system to link people 
to phones, at this stage the simplest solution is still numbers as it 
saves you from requiring a PDA to make phone calls with. People like 
smallish phones, only geeks and people wanting to save on expensive 
phone calls want 101 key computers to make quick phone calls with, so 
getting better interfaces will be highly important to breaking the mind 
shift.

Finally people will be mightily ticked off in future if geographically 
representing numbers is no more, others and myself have had numerous 
calls at 3am coming in via fat finger dialing/wrong numbers, if the cost 
is reduced and there is no easy way to distinguish where a person in 
relation to their time zone then this trend will only increase. Another 
similar example in Australia is the fact that mobile phone numbers 
aren't geographical based, this of course let the telcos charge crap 
loads for calls but that's another matter, but people often call wrong 
numbers and get someone on the opposite side of the country without 
realising it. For another kicker, the main telco used to charge by distance.

I'm not advocating the ITU or any other telcos, but the fact is numbers 
are a good way of co-existing with almost every other phone on the 
planet at this point in time, rather then trying to make existing 
infrastructure fit in with geek idealism. However DNS makes a good, 
scalable flat file database, it is already implemented in a lot of 
devices/software and it just plain works.

-- 

Best regards,
  Duane

http://www.cacert.org - Free Security Certificates
http://www.nodedb.com - Think globally, network locally
http://www.sydneywireless.com - Telecommunications Freedom
http://happysnapper.com.au - Sell your photos over the net!
http://e164.org - Using Enum.164 to interconnect asterisk servers

"I do not try to dance better than anyone else.
	I only try to dance better than myself."