The Lack of Emerging Telephony 4
The telephony industry sickens me. I make it a point to follow things closely. I sift through the nauseatingly boring Del.icio.us VoIP feeds, catching the occasional library I hadn’t seen before that mildly captures my interest. I hear that SuperBigComm has bought TinySmallVox every week or so. I subscribe to the feeds of the VoIP’s biggest bloggers (of which there are surprisingly few) and usually read their posts last, procrastinating the tedium. I don’t unsubscribe and keep the faith because I want to believe this industry is going somewhere.
But last night my feeds agreed with my doubts. Resounding through the VoIP blogosphere, O’Reilly announced they have cancelled their Emerging Telephony conference and blog. To help paint the picture, Emerging Telephony was widely considered to be one of the actually fun, innovative conferences every year in this space.
Therein lies the problem. Too little fun and innovation exists in this industry to make a full conference out of it.
Remember the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the omnipotent Q places all of humanity on trial for being a savage, inferior species? Q asserts that the years since the first time he placed humanity on trial has been squandered with virtually no progress toward enlightenment. I’m convinced Q was so pissed off because of this ridiculous blemish in our history. We are a savage, uncivilized race apparently.
This is a frustration I’ve had since I created Adhearsion. The framework’s name reflects my attempt to unify this godforsaken wilderness. I’m herding cats and fighting the good fight simultaneously.
But I’m not giving up yet.
There are many wonderful things brewing under the covers of the new version of Adhearsion. It’s a maverick, opinionated approach but it may just work. The effect could be truly disruptive:
- A significantly next-generation approach reaches hackers who can finally develop actual open-source VoIP applications.
- An open-source ecosystem forms.
- More people become professional VoIP developers.
- Additional global expertise increases the number of open-source VoIP applications.
- The ability to host the applications becomes predictable and inexpensive through standardization.
- Startups form around new applications.
- A few startups succeed and contribute back.
- Years of contributions improves software quality and lowers barrier to entry.
- Disruptively innovative companies catch big telecom companies with their pants down and chip away at their market share.
The fight will be a long and difficult one, though the next baby step is to get Adhearsion v0.8.0 out the door. Near the end of the this month I’ll outline the changes in the new version of Adhearsion which should see a release by RubyConf on November 4th, 2007!
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://jicksta.com/articles/trackback/40
Subscribe to this blog
Chad Fowler said some really nice things about Adhearsion a little while ago in his blog, so I’ve been watching this space. He said it was like a Rails for telephony, but the relevant thing here is that Rails runs on cheap commodity hardware, free and abundantly available software, and open networks.
The problem with VoIP is the tightly controlled networks you run on. Low latency isn’t a big issue for normal webapps but it’s huge for you. So you have 3 choices:
1. Give up because the networks are going to remain tightly controlled for some years.
2. Hope that some sort of compromise is reached where the networks agree to provide QoS levels to random people like you and work towards that day.
3. Hope that someone like Google or whoever comes up with another network that is open and has some QoS and that becomes a widely deployed network and work towards that day.
I think 2 and 3 will happen someday but I don’t know when. I wouldn’t bet my time and money on it happening before my app is ready. You may be better off working on something else till you have a better idea of when 2 and 3 will happen. On the other hand, if you can afford to work on this now, it’s a great way to build up expertise until the actual day comes.
ETel dead? Nah see www.eCommMedia.com
@Ajay: You’re forgetting that more open telephony application platforms do not necessitate VOIP end-to-end to introduce previously impossible (or obscenely expensive and thus out of reach for all but the largest organizations) functionality. I don’t care if the PSTN is connected to the Asterisk boxes or VOIP/SIP trunks. The point is I can build the apps I want and talk to either.
-jr