I used to like telephony

The old days
I started disassembling phones as a boy, which was a bit risky since only AT&T owned the instrument and you could not go to the store and buy a replacement if you broke it. There was no such thing as spare phones for experimenters. I worked on speech compression in graduate school, and was fascinated by signals, bandwidth, filters, and the like. I almost began my professional career designing digital central-office switches and PBXs at Northern Telecom in Creedmoor, North Carolina, but got a better offer from IBM in Durham and instead worked on data networks (especially LANs). For a while there was some interest in carrying voice on early LANs, like IBM’s token ring, but that went nowhere commercially. Then we tried to harmonize datacom and telecom technologies with asynchronous transfer mode. Only the standards weenies made out well on that one. Finally, with the advent of switched ethernet, it became possible to carry voice calls on ethernet networks. But carrying the voice was only the tip of the iceberg. The control plane and billing presented much greater challenges. So we’ve seen quite an evolution of IP-based telephony systems for toll bypass on the Internet, enterprise systems, and just about everywhere else. And lately the rage is with SIP (the session initiation protocol). I have no gripe with the SIPification of everything – indeed it’s probably a necessary step – but voice is still living in a different world from the rest of the Internet revolution, and it’s mostly a yawn. Too bad. I used to think it was cool.

And now?
I was reminded of the chasm when I attended VoiceCon recently. This all-things-VOIP conference shared a trade-show floor (at Moscone in San Francisco) with Enterprise 2.0, and thank heavens it did. All the major VoiceCon vendors showed their Unified Communications solutions, which appeared to me to merely glom together things we have been using for years, and by “we” I mean all of us with gray hair and traditional work practices. Worse, a number of the smaller vendors were showing new desk telephones, which basically have changed hardly at all in 20 years. They still have a handset, pushbuttons, and a display (which my phone in Switzerland had in 1990). This is new? These things can’t get any more archaic.

The Enterprise 2.0 vendors, on the other hand, showed exciting, if not fully mature, products for communication, collaboration, and documentation, which is how a lot more work gets done in organizations these days. Their wiki and blogging tools were very cool. But they were poorly connected to the voice mechanisms. When are these two communities really going to connect? I think I can help here.