SIPphone - Call worldwide over your Internet connection with any phone

Don't Forget the Fundamentals

It is trade shows season around the world, and the press releases for new VoIP and SIP products, services and companies are hitting the newswire fast and furious. But the onslaught of "new" reinforces the importance of the fundamental principles that led me to start SIPphone. These ideas are, I believe, critical to both the success of SIPphone and the industry as a whole.

Quick Service Note: Tuesday we will be moving our servers to a new home in the datacenter. As a result, you may experience brief outages with your SIPphone service. There should be very few outages, and they should be very quick (well under 10 minutes). Thanks.

Standards trump proprietary solutions

For many companies and services, either the allure of proprietary solution or the fear of losing customers leads them to make decisions that are bad for their company and the industry. They choose to build a proprietary solution. The first to mind is Skype. Skype is a good service that in the end may do far more damage than good. Consider the world of Instant Messaging. There are at least four major networks, none of which talk to each other, even the two owned by the same company (ICQ and AOL). If proprietary VoIP solutions like Skype succeed, we will all be running many networks for voice communications in the future, and the PSTN world will live on far longer than it ever should. Not to mention we will all need 3 page business cards.

Unlock hardware and software

Every piece of hardware and software SIPphone sells is unlocked. So while the products we endorse may auto-configure with our service, there is nothing stopping a customer from switching to an alternate provider. However, services like Vonage are literally paying hardware manufactures to cripple units to their service. What will the future look like? Will we have to sort through tens of identical routers or adapters from Linksys, D-Link or Netgear, each artificially locked to a different service, each with monthly fee based services? Lets hope the hardware manufacturers are smarter than that. As you know, we are working hard to keep the future of hardware open or at the very least honest.

Last month we filed suit against Vonage and some retailers for using blatantly misleading advertising and packaging in selling their locked hardware. We are not saying that you can't sell locked hardware, we simply demand that this limitation and hidden cost be disclosed clearly on the box and in advertising. But the better solution is not to lock hardware at all. Can you imagine how computer buyers would react if HP or Dell were to sell their computers with LAN or Modem ports that only worked with AOL! It is unthinkable and it is a terrible precedent for the industry. Just because the past PSTN world was about monopolies and anti-competitive business, doesn't mean the future has to be. In fact, email is a far better metaphor than the PSTN world when thinking about the future of VoIP.

Calls are free

The PSTN will live on for sometime. The real future and promise of VoIP resides in places where we are not using telecommunications today. So whether it is integration into IM, the OS, or the web pages we surf, VoIP promises a far different future of telecommunications. Looking at the world today you would think that VoIP's great promise is that it does everything my old phone did, just less reliably and for 20% less money a month. So while all the big AT&T wannabes (including AT&T) race each other into the basement with their monthly flat fee services, we at SIPphone started at $0/call. SIP calls, like email, web pages and IM messages have no support for per minute charges, no matter where you live in the world. The PSTN world on the other hand will never be free, but then again it's days are numbered.

Peer, peer, peer.

In the short term, pure VoIP guys like SIPphone can do two things to make SIP calling more powerful. First we can provide gateway services between the PSTN and VoIP world with services like SIP Minutes and Virtual Numbers, which save consumers huge amounts of money. We have some users report that they have already saved over $1000 using SIP Minutes. The next thing VoIP guys can do is peer with as many of the private networks out there as possible. By peering, you eliminate the expensive middle guys in the PSTN world and calls are free. So far you have seen peering deals from SIPphone with universities around the world, like UCSD. But soon you will hear about much bigger peering deals with even larger private networks adding millions of people that can call each other for free around the world. Peering makes the line between the PSTN world and the SIP world much more gray and to the great advantage of customers on both sides. So whether you are a small university in Europe or a giant mobile provider like Verizon Wireless, drop us a line and lets peer.

As you read the many new and similarly worded "break through" product announcements promising "a revolution" in this or that, keep in mind these simple fundamentals of success for the VoIP industry. Ask yourself, "Is this new [fill in new product here] good for the industry by furthering standards, keeping hardware unlocked, or pushing free worldwide calling?" If it isn't, it probably won't be around for long.

Stay open. Stay standard. Call free.

**Michael Robertson
CEO and Founder
SIPphone.com