Message that JoAnn asked me to post

["Walt Magnussen" <>]

Members,

   I was asked by Joanne Hugi of the University of Oregon to post the 
following message.  It askes some good questions.  I think that a part of my 
answer is that we are more interested in the VOIP trunking over abilene and 
ultimately the connection of native H.323 and SIP devices in a reliable 
fashion.

   Our trial intends to use multicast gatekeeper peering to try to avoid  the 
scaling issues that Joanne mentions.  Interoperability is only a small part 
of what we are looking at.  Again this is a testbed and is intended to help 
us answer some of the questions that were asked.  

Here is the initial message.  Other comments welcome.

Hi Ted, Greg, Walt

Could one of you post my message below to the listserv for VoIP?

thanks

Joanne

>Return-path: 
><>
>Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 12:04:07 -0700
>From: Joanne Hugi 
><>
>Subject: comments on the I2 VoIP project
>X-Sender: 
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>To: 
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>Cc: 
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>Original-recipient: rfc822;hugi
>
>Hi Walt
>
>The Networking and Telecommunications staff at the University of Oregon
>have voiced the following concerns/issues with the project proposed.
>
>Learning about different equipment interoperability issues or even the
>administration of multiple gatekeepers from the same manufacturer is an
>interesting project and we can see where it can have significant
>application for higher ed institutions either within intranets or
>between sites of the same or partner institutions using I2 or commodity
>bandwidth.
>
>We question, though, whether it makes sense for multiple higher ed
>institutions to essentially try to replicate the pstn backbone with new
>technology when long distance rates are already so low as to be almost
>free for domestic calling. Unless gatekeepers have become devices which
>can learn of changes to the mapping of IP addresses to phone numbers as
>they are added or subtracted by individual endpoint gatekeepers, it
>means replicating a system that already works very well and is very
>labor intensive, requiring great communication and coordination across
>the members of the network. Even if gatekeepers are now able to learn
>this type of information from each other it is still a complex technical
>and administrative undertaking with much room for screw ups to reduce
>the quality of a service which our user communities expect to work
>flawlessly.
>
>So, if the object is interoperability testing this seems like a good
>thing, although isn't it something that the vendor community should be
>doing more of as well?
>
>If the object is replicating the long distance network for calls between
>schools (and ultimately hop off to local communities) what is the
>service or economic justification?
>
>Regards
>
>Joanne R. Hugi
>Associate Vice President Information Services
>Computng Center
>1225 Kincaid Street
>University of Oregon
>Eugene, OR 97403-1212
>541.346.1702 (voice)
>541.346.4397 (FAX)
>541.953.7104 (Cell)
>http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~hugi/ 
>
> 
>

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