[Asterisk-Users] Re: Re: iax or sip

[Chris A. Icide]

On 06:51 AM 7/7/2004, Randy Bush wrote:
 >
 >why enum?  forcing humans to deal with telephone numbers
 >is analogous to asking them to use ip addresses instead
 >of domain names (which are bad enough, but that's another
 >story).  do you want to send email to randy at 147.28.0.62?
 >so why not 'dial' randy at psg.com or whatever?

Because phones are Ubiquitous.  They are everywhere, the proportion of 
people who have computers versus those who have phones worldwide, is 
probably still under 10%.  By limiting the ability to map the current world 
wide legacy telephone address space into some method allowing you to reach 
systems via IP transport as well as TDM transport, you limit the reach of 
your voice communications network.

Consider it backwards compatibility, sure, use randy at psg.com where you can, 
but I surely know if I told my parents to call me at chris at netgeeks.net, 
they'd suffer the human 'blue screen' event just trying to comprehend what 
I just said.

For the majority of the people out there, saying 'call me' automatically 
causes a reaction 'what is your telephone NUMBER?'  The telephone is such 
an integrated tool in most people's lives that you can't just switch it out 
for a keyboard and expect everyone to get it.  Over time, perhaps, but then 
you have to consider compactness and usability.  I have some small devices 
that allow me to use alphanumerics (palm's handwriting detection, or a 
blueberry's tiny keyboard), but they are bulky compared to my cell 
phone.  And 'compact' keyboards leave a lot to be desired, IMHO.

Of course there was the day when you could pick up a phone spin a little 
handle and then say Hi, Jenny, can you hook me up with Joan over in 
Jacksonville?  Thanks!  So maybe not people can make the change back to 
picking up thier 'phone' and just saying some unique identifier (Joan over 
in Jacksonville might not cut it now - but joan at jacksonville.or.us just 
might) of who they want to call.

This has gotten WAY off topic, so I'll just drop it here.

-Chris