The future of telecom

[unixronin]

Google's Voice service lets you have a single master number that is automatically forwarded to as many other numbers as you designate, within reason. It's a good idea. But the US is running out of phone numbers as it is, and there probably aren't enough allocatable phone numbers remaining to let everyone do this without revamping the entire US phone number system.

But what if we rethought the whole concept of phone numbers?

Historically, one number has been tied to one phone line. You may have multiple phones on that line, and you may have a phone that has multiple lines coming into it, and ISDN phones have the capability to have up to three "appearances" of the same number on the line. But still, one number is tied to one line — or, in the case of mobile phones, one number is tied to one mobile phone. This metaphor has been a good match for the way the technology has always worked. But the technology is changing — already has changed enormously — and we don't have to do that any more.

Suppose we decoupled phone numbers from devices, and tied them instead to people and to roles, replacing a 1:1 mapping between phones and numbers with a many-to-many mapping. You have, for example, a personal phone number, an office phone number, and an on-call phone number. Your home phone is subscribed to your personal number — except that on days when you work from home, you subscribe it for the day to your office number as well. Your mobile phone is subscribed to your personal number and your on-call number. The phone on your office desk at work is subscribed to your office number and your on-call number. Perhaps you have a team number as well, that everyone on your work team is subscribed to. Whenever any of your phones rings, the display tells you not only who's calling you, but which of your subscribed numbers they're calling — and which of their numbers they're calling you from. That incoming call on your office phone is from your Cisco rep, but he's calling you from his personal number, perhaps to let you know he's in the area and ask whether you want to meet for lunch.

Discuss....

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

In a way, that's what Google is doing. Trying to decouple phone numbers from devices. And, IIRC, the underlying product they based it upon (Grand Central) does that via SIP -- the backhaul isn't another group of phone numbers, but IP addresses on devices that provide a presence to the server.

caller
-> phone number
-> SIP server
-> SIP user account
-> zero or more presence entries for that account
-> SIP over IP
-> SIP device
-> callee

With the possibility of many SIP devices connecting to the user account on that SIP server.

The problem is: there aren't enough SIP devices out there to make that currently more than a niche environment. To reach a huge audience, you need to allow legacy devices in too. And they don't use SIP, nor a SIP-like mechanism, to address themselves and provide presence information. They use ... phone numbers.

Hopefully Google didn't remove SIP from Grand Central when they bought/re-branded it. SIP, or a SIP-like protocol, is really what the future of telephony you're hinting at, ought to be. But we're not there yet. Carriers block it, refuse to subsidize devices that include SIP clients, etc.

LTE and WiMAX (which layer everything on top of IP anyway, making something SIP-like inevitable) will hopefully change that... but we'll just have to wait and see. Hopefully, though, SIP wont go the way of multi-cast-backbone, and end up getting replaced by lesser & proprietary "streaming protocols" put in place by companies that had no interest in doing things the right way, nor in adopting something done "the internet way".