SIP in higher education

[Duane <>]

Ben Teitelbaum wrote:

> I am not a lawyer, but my perception is that when communications
> looks, feels, and sounds like telephony, regulators are inclined to
> regulated it as traditional telephony.  If we are building a private

In the US at least, the FCC has already made a determination on internet
communications and they determined they are internet services, not
telephone calls, although be careful about 911 and other emergency
service issues that is a bigger problem then anything, if someone makes
a call in an emergency and it doesn't go through you could find yourself
on the end of a lawsuit or 10...

The reasoning behind the FCC decision is basically until the calls hit
the PSTN it's near impossible to regulate them, especially if you start
throwing in SRV records that allow voip calls to connect on non-standard
 ports, throw into this encrypted data/voice streams and it's going to
be interesting trying to determine what service is what.

As for VoIP traffic all companies will be paying taxes on earnings, so
forcing them to move to more VoIP friendly countries will have them
loose out on tax income.

The ACA in Australia is trying to impose a VoIP provider fee, but this
will simply shift VoIP providers to other countries, and these countries
will end up gaining a lot of tax revenue because of it, or start forcing
a lot more pure internet traffic.

> network to enable collaboration among researchers and educators (as we
> are), using globally-significant E.164 addresses sends the wrong
> message.  Also, if we are interested in campus/enterprise-enabled
> communications (as I am), it sends the wrong message.

I think skype will push this issue as time goes past and regulators will
basically determine things are one way or another, either they all are
or they all aren't, in any case there will no doubt be a hell of a lot
of lawsuits before we have a final answer on this.

> Your point about fail-over is absolutely right.  During the transition
> from TDM voice to VoIP, there is a huge opportunity to use both to
> achieve a high-level of availability---and for that, we would need to
> use E.164.

This is what most people using our service tend to do (myself and my
clients included) they don't care how the call gets there, as long as it
sound ok etc...

So my boxes attempt enum.164 via e164.org, then it attempts voip
providers, then finally fails over to the PSTN, in either of the last 2
cases having the original PSTN number in some usable format is an
extreme advantage.

-- 

Best regards,
 Duane

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