Open Malaysia

When engineers build roads, they're usually faced with what seem to be insurmountable barriers in the form of ridges, hills and mountains blocking the proposed path of the highway. There are two ways around this, to either reroute the highway around the barrier or the more brute force method of going straight through it.

If they choose the latter option, splitting a mountain is by no means an easy task. Thousands of years of geological growth is not going to allow itself to be broken apart easily. Engineers however sometimes use the strength of Mother Nature against herself. A common way of splitting mountains is to make cracks in the mountain, and then pour gallons of water into the cracks. They then freeze the water and take advantage of the fact that the volume of water will expand when it becomes ice. The expansion of the freezing water pushes the cracks apart and the mountain is then slowly broken into two by the forces of nature and physics.

Just like freezing water splitting a mountain, the opening up of the telecommunications mountain by IP telephony is breaking down barriers artificially put in place by legacy providers. The continuing growth of the Sessions Initiation Protocol (SIP) commonly used for IP telephone calls and its near ubiqutous availability is allowing individuals and enterprises to wean themselves away from their providers and at the same time take a firm grip on their communications needs.

Because SIP is an IETF open standard, anyone can implement a SIP stack into their software. We are increasingly seeing the IP telephony enablement of traditional enterprise applications like ERP, HR, financial and operational systems and this is a good harbinger of the converged network. Some legacy handset manufacturers have read the writing on the wall and have either released or have plans to release SIP enabled GSM mobiles. I wrote about one such device by Nokia, the E61 which I use on a daily basis. D-Link will soon release a WiFi/GSM handset which is based on Linux and contains a SIP client as well. 

These two will not be the last SIP enabled devices either. As more of these devices proliferate in the marketplace, enterprises are going to realise that there is a whole lot more their communications systems can do for them through open standards and interoperability. True interoperability which is based on open standards would make it trivial to connect your enterprise's IP PBX with your Web 2.0 AJAX driven application. Our developers at QubeConnect, led by Ditesh, are exploring this right now and are producing some really cool applications based on Javascript, AJAX and Firefox plugins.

For this growth to sustain however, the adherence to the SIP standard has to be complete and clear. Too often, vendors are known to bastardize a standard in order to create an intentionally non interoperable product in order to lock in customers. Nowhere is this practice more pervalent than in the telecommunications industry, as even we've experienced before when attempting interoperability with a very large legacy equipment vendor.

Additionally, regulators should also be wary of telecomms operators who accidentally on purpose block SIP calls over their ISP networks. Wary of the next generation network eating into the revenues of their incumbent parent, these ISPs usually try to stall these moves until they have a competing service in the market and then use less than ethical practices in QoS to show why their service is better than rival players.

But like water eating into cracks and breaking up the mountain, the  flow of openness in the telecommunication sector will erode the barriers which are put in place. As more enterprises and individuals go towards IP telephony, the relevance of monopolies of old will become less of a factor. This includes companies like Skype, popular though they may be, who are still based on closed and unpublished standards to create a walled garden for their subscribers.

Communications is all about being open and connected, and we are not going to be able to get this done well if we practice a closed approach to the matter.