Subject: [Sipping] draft-stein-great-00.txt

From: "Henry Sinnreich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 20:06:45 -0500

Title		: Great Real-Time Problem Statement
	Author(s)	: Y. Stein
	Filename	: draft-stein-great-00.txt
	Pages		: 11
	Date		: 2005-9-30
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-stein-great-00.txt 

This document seems to be a reflection of all the sour grapes about the
Internet, VoIP, QoS and reliability and makes one wonder how come that so
many public VoIP services work well and have an ever growing customer base.

No evidence is provided to support any of the statements.

If the author's intent is to address the facts, a white paper for the
marekting department may be the better place for such a memo.

Thanks, 

Henry Sinnreich
Pulver.com

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From: Dean Willis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2005 14:27:32 -0500

> marekting department may be the better place for such a memo.

Well, I read it a little differently. I think this draft should be  
required reading in college clases on VoIP. It provides an excellent  
description of the difficulty of exactly replicating the PSTN  
experience on the Internet. It correctly raises questions about  
whether we're thinking about the problem the right way, and whether  
it's even a "phone" problem at all.

Personally, I'm sick and tired of trying to replicate the PSTN  
experience on the Internet. I spent an hour yesterday wrangling with  
a colleague about whether we needed to differentiate between "call  
forwarding busy or no answer" and "forward unanswered calls to voice  
mail" behaviors as hard-coded "features" in an application platform.  
This is just a ridiculous discussion to have, and it all comes from  
people thinking about phone services and not internet services. It  
leads to ITU-type exercises intending to replace the Internet with a  
phone-type network that offers a few Internet-like services.

As the author points out in this draft, the Internet is a not the  
circuit switched phone network. It may provide a different user  
experience, it has different operational characteristics, it places  
different limits or restrictions on the applications that might be  
used, and MOST IMPORTANTLY it offers a different value-proposition to  
the end user. We need to understand all of these differences in our  
work, and not pretend we're working on "telephone 2.0".

--
Dean

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From: "Dale R. Worley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 09:18:01 -0400

On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 20:06 -0500, Henry Sinnreich wrote:
> Internet, VoIP, QoS and reliability

That's one way to phrase it, or equivalently one could say "These are
dimensions in which we know it is possible to make better telephony
systems.  Perhaps we should consider improving the Internet technology
to reduce these problems."

I've long been curious if full-scale deployment of QoS mechanisms would
alleviate these problems.  In a theoretical world, one's border router
would negotiate and purchase packet flows to the hosts one needed to
communicate with, and each would have an appropriate QoS commitment from
the network operator.

> and makes one wonder how come that so

To quote from Stein, page 2:

   Why would anyone use a VoIP systems if the user
   experience is significantly inferior to that of the standard
   telephone system?  [...]  Here some
   enthusiasts have suggested that the attraction of VoIP is due to the
   additional functionality that is, or will be, available (e.g. instant
   messaging, video).  However, in most cases it is probably either the
   economics (free calls) or the ready accessibility for people already
   seated at a PC (along with presence indications) that induces most
   people to tolerate the poor quality.

The few people I know who heavily use VoIP state that they do so because
of the reduced cost.

> No evidence is provided to support any of the statements.

They seem to be what is universally believed.

Dale