VoIP and ENUM

After the IMS desaster I went to the last session of the day: General session: Peer to Peer SIP, and I was back to normal. This panel was top-class, basically a peek-preview of next IETF week in Dallas (also in the audience): David Bryan, Henry Sinnreich, Henning Schulzrinne, Alan Johnston, Cullen Jennings and Willi Wimmreuter, basically the creme de la creme of P2P SIP, in the audience lurking Rohan Mahy, Brad Templeton, Karl Stahl and others. Also the presentations where well coordinated, godfather Henry setting the scene, Henning, Alan and David providing the details, Willi giving the view of a manufacturer providing already early products, and finally Cullen speaking about naming and identity problems to be solved.

The vision of P2P SIP is in principle to provide the end-user with an easy to use minimal, self-configuring system, killing most of the (optional) boxes such as proxies, servers, SBC, Softswitches, etc. (= IMS). So the IMS session before was basically done by zombies? Interesting Daves outlook to use P2P not only for communication, but also for configuring e.g. consumer devices at home.

They even want to obsolete the DNS, which I still doubt. Maybe for normal operation such as call set-up, but not for naming and identity. Users will like this, manufactures not (except consumer device manufacturers). Providers? depends what they want to provide. At least you still need broadband access. But services? No, they are built in the devices and you buy them at Walmart, Aldi or Hofer (depending where you live) on display beside the frozen peas (as James Enck put it in the morning).