Re: [GnomeMeeting-list] Open discussion about ILS/SIP/FWD

[Florin Andrei <florin andrei myip org>]

On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 01:44, Craig Southeren wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Sep 2004 22:13:18 -0700
> Florin Andrei <florin andrei myip org> wrote:

> > I have a feeling that many people will simply be interested in a
> > full-featured SIP client, rather than in a SIP software that comes with
> > some kind of LDAP registry. A solid SIP foundation should be the main
> > focus, the rest is secondary.
> 
> Again this is not true as a general statement.

Please pay attention to the qualifiers: "many people will..." not "all
people" nor "all GnomeMeeting users..."

I was merely pointing out that, while GnomeMeeting seems to be oriented
towards (like you said) "federated" networks glued together by LDAP or
some other such things, there's more to VoIP ("V" meaning both "voice"
and "video") than just that.
I'm more into the PBX side of things, and that's where those "many
people" :-) i mentioned are waiting for a portable, complete VoIP
(Voice/Video) SIP client that doesn't suck. GM could fill that gap, if
it learns SIP and if it works fine on Windows.
Since we seem to belong to groups differently focused, we will never
agree upon what's true and what's not until we aknowledge that we're
looking for different things. ;-)

I agree with you that it was an exageration for me to say "nobody is
interested in H.323 nowadays".

> > While there are NAT workarounds for H.323 and SIP, the NAT issue is
> > solved in an elegant fashion by IAX, the protocol developed with
> > Asterisk:
> 
> The very feature that makes Asterisk very nice for PBX-style
> applications (combining signalling and media into a single data stream)
> makes it very unsuitable for highly distributed configurations. Every
> entity that handles IAX has to be both a signalling and media gateway
> which introduces both latency and complexity.

Right. Again, it's the difference between the groups focused on
directory-backed VoIP (to which you seem to belong) and the PBX people.
I was merely trying to bring some other issues into the focus of the GM
community. GM has a lot of potential into many different areas, it would
be a waste to keep a narrow focus.

And just to respond to your comment: the issues with latency and
complexity that you mention are platonic as long as the VoIP channel
does not work at all due to issues with NAT and such. Here's a real
world report for issues with NAT (the whole "iaxy vs sipura" thread, it
started as a hardware VoIP clients comparison and it ended up as a
IAX-vs-SIP thing in the context of road warior scenarios):

http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2004-September/thread.html#61492

So, "There's More Than One Way To Look At It..." ;-)

> > Well, H.323 is the "dying protocol" and SIP is the "emerging standard",
> > so...
> 
> To paraphrase Mark Twain, 
> "The reports of the death of H.323 are greatly exagerrated"

I agree with that. H.323 seems to still be backing a lot of large VoIP
pipes. Perhaps i was too focused on trends, rather than on the current
situation.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/