P2P's Role for Indie VoIPers

Nothing’s ever easy for independent communications service providers that have to operate in “over-the-top” mode or on leased facilities. And nobody has time or money to mess around with the sort of risk the lack of a patent portfolio might represent, says Medhavi Bhatia, 3CLogic chief technology officer. And though the idea might cause queasiness, Bhatia thinks peer-to-peer methods of providing VoIP services might ultimately be the only way providers can steer clear of such problems. Facilities-based providers might benefit as well, though they generally are uncomfortable about peer-to-peer technologies. P2P might well be the only patent-defensible way to proceed, at least in terms of a migration strategy, Bhatia suggests. A P2P VoIP network also would be compatible with a provider’s existing network and wouldn’t require any extra equipment or infrastructure, he argues. A simple software upgrade on the home router and the softphone should do the trick. The P2P VoIP network would also communicate using session initiation protocol, providing all the advantages SIP was created to deliver. As an example, he points out that one of the three “infringing” patents in Vonage’s dispute with Verizon, the method used to bridge Internet calls to the traditional phone system (Patent 6,430,275), involves the use of a hop-off gateway that collects user authentication information and provides call accounting detail. “It seems to me that most of the claims of this patent are not applicable to a P2P network since there is no hop-off gateway,” says Bhatia. The billing information is usually collected in other ways in a P2P network as well. Then there are features, such as call waiting and voicemail functions, of which Patent 6,128,304 cover. In a P2P network, the calling node itself can be signaled to route the call to a voicemail device, avoiding any use of the patented method. Patent 6,359,880 covers handling of wireless calls, in particular the use of a home location register database. “I think if the HLR database is dropped and instead the numbers are registered by a P2P-to-wireless interworking node into the P2P network, then the calling P2P nodes will use those registrations to get to the right wireless gateway,” Bhatia says. The first generation of over-the-top VoIP networks were built using a client/server approach, in other words, exposing them to patent dangers since most of the patents assumed such an approach. There are other potential benefits as well. Server outages caused by high call load, instability or the need to do upgrades are a fact of life for today’s providers. As a result, service provider personnel spend considerable time testing, monitoring and maintaining the servers in their network. P2P VoIP provides a proven way to address these issues, he argues. P2P arguably improves reliability because it decentralizes applications. For example, in the case of file or media download, it allows the downloader to obtain the file from multiple users in the network. When applied to VoIP, the location information of users in the network is distributed amongst users themselves, thereby avoiding the need for a specialized server to do the routing. Even applications like voicemail can be implemented in the P2P network itself. All this can be built in a phased manner and, he argues, with a more graceful way to upgrade software as well. It is much easier to upgrade and change protocol characteristics and behavior to keep on avoiding detection from intermediate devices. Management of P2P VoIP traffic is most easily done by the VoIP provider itself and proves to be a hard problem for an intermediary (like a broadband service provider). In fact, to manage P2P VoIP traffic, the broadband provider will need to develop a tight partnership with the VoIP provider. It might be heretical, but there ought to be less need for infrastructure switches, routers, backup lines and redundant power since the network is now in some sense “run by users themselves.” Much the same sort of logic might apply to IP-based call centers as well. Call distribution is itself distributed to any number of call agent end points. At least in principle, the avoidance of centralized call server mechanisms should also improve overall reliability, Bhatia argues. There might very well be good technical reasons why P2P doesn’t fit with a business model. But what service providers ought to be worried about is the equivalent of hitting a technology wall, where the old line of development simply is incapable of making progress as rapidly as other approaches can.