At the first level of approximation, the traditional voice network, or PSTN, resides in the E.164 address space and the SS7 signaling protocol. The future voice network, or voice cloud, resides in the IP address space and the SIP signaling protocol and similar protocols like XMPP.
By 2018, SS7 will be fading, but the E.164 address space will continue to be heavily used for many decades to come.
For this chapter, we will define "applications" as:
1. Software that runs locally on client devices, like iPhone apps and productivity applications on PCs.
2. Server-based software that end users access through their browsers, like Salesforce.com.
3. Server-based software that end users access through their phones or other voice interfaces, like IVR systems.
Not included in this definition of applications are:
1. Service-enabling software that runs on IMS and similar systems.
2. Service provider back-end software like billing systems or device management systems.
3. Embedded software like that in session border controllers.
4. Service platforms with APIs like Asterisk, Adhearsion, Voxeo, Ifbyphone or Tellme. While these systems are not categorized as applications, they are the definitional part of the voice cloud that enables application developers to embed voice capabilities in all categories of application software, and to piece together sophisticated voice-oriented applications using web programming methods.
The PSTN is a dedicated voice network; it can effectively only do voice, though it has been kluged to do additional things like SMS, fax and dialup data. For mobile networks it has also been upgraded to videophone capability with 3G-324M. Voice is only one aspect of Unified Communications, which in turn is a subset of all the modes of communication on Internet, both real-time (like phone calls, video calls, and instant messaging), near real-time (like SMS) and time-shifted (like email and voicemail). So the migration of voice from the PSTN to the "Voice Cloud" is really the migration of voice to the Internet, where it becomes just one among many modes of media interchange.
It is quite possible that the notion of a "Voice cloud" will seem quaint by 2018, and that application developers will see phones as multimedia IP terminals running apps and applets that use web APIs to implement features a la carte from different providers - voicemail from one, SMS from another, conferencing from a third, voice recognition from another, routing services from another and so on.
So the notion of the "Voice Cloud" as something unitary is no longer useful to an application developer. A better view is to see it as a category of network-resident capabilities and features that can be added to any web-based application or service. For example, in a SIP-based video chat application, the only major differences between voice and video are the codecs and the render/capture devices.
AKA SIP Trunking...
Like Google Voice
ENUM, like Neustar Pathfinder or e164.org.
Like Twilio. Not voice, but part of the PSTN, so important to include in a discussion of the Voice Cloud.
Like Voxeo
Like VoiceCloud
Like Tellme
Like Transera
Like Ifbyphone
The PSTN is not very secure. Analog phones can easily be tapped physically, many PBXes are vulnerable to long-distance minute theft, and the escapades that brought down the News of the World showed that voicemail is laughably easy to hack.
The Internet is both more and less secure than the PSTN. More secure because mechanisms exist to provide virtually unbreakable security, less secure because these mechanisms are often not used.
There has been error in communication with booki server. Not sure right now where is the problem.
You should refresh this page.