SIP in higher education

[(Dennis Baron)]

SIP.edu Conference Call August 25, 2005

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
David Clarke, SIPphone
Tina Donaldson, REEF
Jeremy George, Yale
Jerry Keith, UC Riverside
Jeff Kuure, Internet 2
Brian Savory, Georgia Tech
John Steir, Stony Brook University
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet 2
John Todd, Tello
Doug Walston, Cisco
Mike Van Norman, UCLA
Garrett Yoshimi, Hawaii
Dave Zimmerman, UC Berkeley

*Discussion*

Dennis begins today's call with a brief overview of recent calls,
most of which have centered on number-based peering schemes such as
ISN. Dave Zimmerman asks if it would be preferable to transfer the
discussion of ISN from the main SIP.edu email list to the ENUM discussion
list. Dennis suggests that this might be beneficial if lengthy discussion
of implementation questions begin to arise.

Following this, David Clarke and Tina Donaldson discuss SIPphone and REEF
and the services they provide. SIPphone provides hardware, software,
and support for the installation and configuration of SIP proxies as
well as softphone client software, primarily for universities looking
to offer SIP service. The hardware offered consists of a Linux computer
with a configuration utility for Asterisk as well as a standard T1 PRI
for connection to a PBX. LDAP integration is planned for the future,
as the configuration software will be modified to configure SER as
well. Currently, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego are signed
up and have begun forwarding traffic between their universities using
SIPphone's proxy.

There are questions from participants about the reliability and redundancy
of SIPphone's configuration. Some participants express concern about the
single point of failure and lack of redundancy in the current SIPphone
configuration. On paper, this peering configuration sounds appealing
but in practice is less reliable than traditional voice traffic.

The call concludes with discussion of the recently released GoogleTalk
product. Dave Clarke mentions that some at SIPphone feel that it lacks
features compared to Yahoo's voice chat. SIPphone will be working with
Google in the future, but is unable to discuss specifics.

Ben asks if GoogleTalk is just another consumer IM or a paradigm
shift. Garrett feels it's just adding another ID to everyone's list -
that every company forces you adopt another identity tied to their
product. From a university standpoint, students coming to campus feel
that the universities should adapt to their existing identities instead
of using the one assigned by the university - the four years at school
are temporary, while their IM and email identities are more permanent
and are established before they arrive.

Dennis is impressed with Google's policy and technology directions -
the client is based on Jabber, and stresses interoperability and open
standards.

Finally, Tina from REEF asks if participants would be willing to
contact her or David regarding any issues that campuses are facing
with regards to SIP. Tina can be reached at 
;
 David
at 
.

The next call will be September 8th.