[clug] VOIP advice
Daniel Pittman
daniel at rimspace.net
Sat Oct 4 11:11:46 GMT 2008
Chris Henman <henman at pobox.com> writes:
> Pardon my ignorance, stupidity, whatever but what about Skype?
I obviously can't speak for others, but for me:
I had no desire to use a proprietary voice solution[1], designed,
encrypted and engineered by a company that really is hostile to
competition, and who had a history of slightly dubious things hidden in
their traffic and code.
I presumed, at the time, that some of the unknown, encrypted traffic
sent to a selection of central servers was going to turn out to be some
sort of dubious user tracking.
Recent events in China suggest that this, indeed, was a real
consideration, though perhaps not one that has yet hurt anyone in a
marginally less restricted country like Australia.
While SIP isn't as sexy, in many ways, it is standard, so I get a choice
of clients, servers, hardware, and PSTN interfaces. Skype gets, and
isn't going to get, any of those.
It also gives me the opportunity to enhance the system -- adding
encryption I trust, for example, or peer routing or validation systems,
if I feel the need.
> I have been using it now for a number of years on both W$NDOW$ and
> Linux . It keeps on getting better and I usually have very few
> problems with it.
>
> Am I missing something on this discussion?
>From a strictly technical level, possibly not. Unsurprisingly, here of
all places, those are not the only considerations...
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] ...even a nice, wideband solution like Skype. No argument that it
is well done here.
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