SIP in higher education

[(Dennis Baron)]

SIP.edu Conference Call April 27, 2006

*Attendees*

Dennis Baron, MIT
John Covert, Independent Consultant 
Aaron Daniel, Sam Houston State University
Candace Holman, Harvard
Jeff Kuure, Internet 2
Don McLaughlin, UCSD
Dave Roeper, Independent Consultant
Christian Schlatter, UNC Chapel Hill
Ben Teitelbaum, Internet 2
Chris Trown, University of Oregon
Mike Van Norman, UCLA
Garrett Yoshimi, Hawaii
Dave Zimmerman, UC Berkeley

*Discussion*

Today's call begins with Dennis asking if anyone has tried the new
version of eyeBeam. He plans to try it soon, but wanted to wait until
after the call in case anything unexpected happens. He mentions that
you will need a new license key if you plan to upgrade.

Dennis also talks briefly about assembling a wireless adapter for his
Polycom 4000 conference telephone. Following several trips to Radio
Shack and some soldering work, he has a working model. If anyone is
interested he can share circuit diagrams and a parts list.

John Covert asked about MIT's ISN dialing plan. Dennis says that they
have an Asterisk system in place to do the number collection. They can
now make calls from the 5ESS to ISN numbers via their PBX. There have
been some issues minor issues with no audio, possibly related to the
silence supression feature, but Dennis considers this to be of
relatively low priority.

The majority of the call is devoted to discussion of the Internet2
spring member meeting and the RTC-AG presentation. There was also a
normal working group session, and Dennis gave a presentation which
attempted to stir up interest in SIP.edu. The PIC working group had a
session on future campus communication models, which focused heavily
on VoIP and migration strategies. Dennis saw indications that people
are starting to think about cultural and user issues surrounding
future communication services.

Dennis goes over a presentation on Real Time Communications
Strategies, as presented by Tyler Johnson, Walt Magnussen, and
himself. He considers this to be a work in progress. The presentation
is available online:

    http://mit.edu/sip/presentations/RTC-AG_Activity_Update.ppt

The presentation offers an overview of what components the committee
identified as being of value for real time communication, including
SIP for signaling as well as other protocols and services for various
communication needs. They would like to deploy these components on
a large scale at various institutions and base them on a reference
architecture. Additionally, there would be a standardized external campus
interface and the internal components, while somewhat more flexible,
would be based on the same sets of tools and best practices.

Priorities would consist of sharing deployment experiences as well as
promoting the reference architecture and widespread deployment. Research
would focus on security and identity management, location services,
disaster recovery, next generation protocols, and mobility.

Some activities would be considered deprecated, including numeric
dialing as well as the sharing of trunks and gateways for the toll
bypass. There is still discussion and controversy about the
deprecation of numeric dialing, as discussed in previous calls.

There are currently problems involving overlapping activities and
mixed messages between working groups, particularly concerning
addressing, 911 and presence service, and directory services. There
are also several working groups with varying levels of activity, as
well as confusing messages to corporate members. The presentation
offers recommendations for realignment of the various working groups
to overcome some of these issues. Suggestions include keeping the PIC
working group intact, while rechartering the VoIP working group to
focus more on information sharing as well as PBX and desk phone
replacement. The SIP.edu working group would move some of its
activities into other groups and would focus on building connectivity
between Internet2 institutions. Two new groups would be created,
focusing on RTC middleware and data collaboration,
respectively. Finally, the dormant I2IM working group would have its
activities moved to the PIC group, and the Video Middleware working
group would be moved to the the newly created RTC middleware group.

There are questions about funding of the new groups and if they should
be funded by Internet2 or the universities themselves. There are also
conserns about changing the focus of currently active groups like
SIP.edu which seem to be functioning well. Ideally any new groups would
be created and the activities of existing groups would be moved into
the new organizations rather than disbanding the existing organizations
first. Ben mentions that any reorganization is still a work in progress.

Candace asks about the seriousness of these proposals. She finds it
frustrating to be asked for feedback about organizational changes when
the answer is always "we're still thinking about it". Dennis agrees,
and feels that loose thoughts are harder to comment on than more
concrete proposals. Candace feels that more formal announcements about
any realignment would elicit more comments.

The next call will be on May 11th.