By the day of communication: the history of IP-telephony
May 7th is the day of radio and communications, which is celebrated by thousands of telecommunications operators and those involved throughout Russia and b. THE USSR. On this day, strange toasts sound toast: “for communication without marriage”, “for connection without a single break”, “for cleanliness of contacts and cleanliness of frequencies”, and people drink to the state of a semiconductor. We congratulate all signalers and related, and at the same time offer Sunday evening to read our Longrid about the history of "new communication", IP-telephony.
In general, the first voice transmission over the Internet Protocol (voice over IP, VoIP) took place in 1973, during testing of the experimental Network Voice protocol created for ARPANET. But until 1995, no major steps were taken ... Well, this is according to the official version and a huge base of sources that the Internet and libraries offer us. However, without a few stories there would be no main story.
Happy Radio and Communication! Interestingly, those who do not know how to dial a number on this disk have already grown?
The technological foundations of VoIP were laid in 1925-1928. when an electronic speech synthesizer was created in the depths of the telecommunications company AT & T, it is also a vocoder. The device analyzed the sounds created by humans, and recreated an analogue of human speech - than is not a primitive packet data transmission. Vocoder was actively used to transmit classified information during the Second World War.
')
Vocoder
In 1988, a significant event also occurred - those involved in IP telephony will not overestimate it: the first Wideband Audio Codec, the famous G.722 codec, appeared, with a quality comparable to the voice transmitted by the PSTN. This broadband codec had a bitrate twice as high as the previous G.711 bit rates and produced a sound that was fine for those times.
In 1991, Autodesk founder John Walker creates a scheme for VoIP, which requires a bandwidth of only 32 kbps (the norm at that time was 64 kbps) and makes a public release of the NetFone program (later renamed Speak Freely), which became The world's first VoIP phone. Although at first the only thing for which NetFone was used was communication within the Walker company.
In 1993, the first Telepresence System videoconferencing system appeared, which the creators simply called ... Teleport, but quickly renamed TeleSuite.
In addition, experiments on voice transmission using packet data switching were carried out at universities and research centers.
The emergence and spread of the Internet almost immediately led to the desire of users to communicate one-on-one. E-mail first appeared, then AOL climbed to the top of technology, which later, in 1998, bought ICQ and provided the world with instant text messaging. Not enough voice communication. In response to the demands of millions of potential users, around 1995, VoIP appeared, a packet protocol (and not a channel, as in traditional telephony) voice transmission. Packets went from one IP address to another using an Internet protocol. So there was IP-telephony.
We will not delve into the technical details, a lot has been written about this in Habré, we’ll just describe the process of voice transmission "for those in the tank." VoIP transmits voice between two IP addresses. The output signal is divided into small pieces of data (packets), in which the parameters of transmission and routing (packet headers) are specified. Packets are forwarded one by one, and then reassembled at the other end, transmitting a voice. In fact, the signal is compressed (encoded), and then “decompressed” (decoded) for the receiving device. Of course, accurate reproduction is impossible, there are data losses, jitters, etc.
Initially, IP-telephony was considered only as a cheap alternative to long-distance and international communication. However, rather quickly, it became in demand by private users and businesses for any, primarily local, communication sessions.
1993 - 1994 Charley Kline (Charley Kline) created Maven - the first program for the PC, which was able to transmit voice over the network. Around the same time, CU-SeeMe video conferencing software developed at Cornell University for PC on Macintosh gained popularity. Both of these applications have found their cosmic popularity in the literal sense - with their help, the flight of the space shuttle Endeavor was broadcast on Earth. Maven transmitted sound, and CU-SeeMe - image. After some time, the program combined.
Interface CU-SeeMe. Source: ludvigsen.hiof.no
1995 year. The pioneers of VoIP were the Israeli company VocalTec, which in 1995 created the first Internet phone available to the masses, which bore the name InternetPhone (can be shortened to IPhone).
To use this softphone, you needed relatively little: a modem, a full-duplex sound card, speakers, and a microphone. It was back in the days when the recommended browser for working with an Internet phone was Internet Explorer. By the way, you can look at the screenshots and read a lively and slightly nostalgic description of InternetPhone at the link .
After its first success, VocalTec continued to develop communications systems for IP telephony, and in 1996, it joined forces with Microsoft NetMeeting, a video conferencing program from Microsoft. Today VocalTec deals with the famous telejia adapter MagicJack, with the creator of which, YMAX, merged in 2010.
In 1996, the first version of the H.323 standard, designed for voice and video communication over the Internet, was published, at the same time work began on SIP as an open standard for IP telephony. SIP was originally designed to connect several people in conference mode and had nothing to do with VoIP. The first SIP project knew only one team - to make a call, and only three years later mastered six teams. But even then it was clear that in terms of scalability and capabilities it would bypass H.323 (by the way, both protocols are still used).
1998 was one of the turning points for IP telephony. Companies realized all the advantages of this type of communication and began to develop commercial solutions. In particular, entrepreneurs began to move away from PC-PC solutions and products and began to develop PC-to-phone and telephone-to-phone solutions for VoIP. IP telephony has become integrated into public switched telephone networks (public switched telephone network, PSTN, PSTN, PSTN).
In the same year, the first physical equipment for IP-telephony appeared - the first IP switches that were responsible for routing calls. Despite such technical breakthroughs, VoIP calls as of 1998 did not reach even 1% of all voice traffic. In 2000, this figure barely reached 3%, but in 2003 there was a sharp jump - up to 25%. IP phone calls quickly gained the image of free and very cheap calls to all directions, regardless of distance. At one time, commercial companies exploited this free of charge and could broadcast commercials at the beginning or middle of a conversation as a “fee” for a free connection. Later this practice ceased.
In 1999, the first IP-PBX appears (a virtual PBX for VoIP, because the virtual PBX for PSTN was created several years earlier) - Asterisk. As it often happens, Asterisk has grown from the company's need for a product that it cannot buy or that does not suit her. So, Mark Spencer, who has his own Linux technical support company, realized that he urgently needed a powerful PBX for a call center, but for those times this equipment cost fabulous money. Then he created his open source IP PBX. After Asterisk gained popularity, Spencer repurposed the company to support and develop hardware for Asterisk. Until now, Asterisk is very popular with developers and businesses. So, for example, when we integrated IP telephony with our RegionSoft CRM , we chose Asterisk as the main virtual PBX.
year 2000. Today, one of the world leaders in working with communication technologies is Cisco. In 2000, she initiated intra-corporate migration to the IP telephony of her headquarters in California (San Jose). In one year, 55 buildings and 20,000 people were transferred to IP telephony. It was one of the largest projects in the industry. This experience has also affected the company's profile - Cisco provides unique powerful solutions in the field of IP telephony and network management.
2005 year. Calypso Wireless introduced the C1250i, the world's first mobile phone, that could switch between a GSM cell tower and an available Wi-Fi 802 network using Cisco Aironet Access Point and its own patented Calypso Wireless ASNAP technology. Thanks to this, users could create video conferences and make calls via VoIP. Formally, this phone was considered a smartphone on Windows Mobile.
It looked like Calypso
In 2006 , the first mobile application for IP-telephony Truphone was released. Initially, the application was developed for Nokia mobile phones, but was soon released for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms. The application is able to make free calls within its network, send text to another network, including to Skype and make calls to the PSTN. The application used SIP and made a call via the Wi-Fi network, not via GSM. Later, the company released several softphones, and at the moment it is engaged in profitable travel SIM cards.
toptenplus.com
In 2003, Skype launches its beta version and immediately receives a huge attention of all categories of users. But this was preceded by a small story. Several programmers from Estonia have developed a peer-to-peer file-sharing client, Kazaa. It, like the Napster peer-to-peer file sharing network, was used by millions of people to exchange music files (mostly pirated), videos and software (no less pirated). Peering networks provided an unprecedented rate of data exchange at that time. Kazaa was bought from the creators of Nicholas Zennstrom from Sweden (by the way, an employee of Tele2) and Janus Friis from Denmark (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis). The new owners improved the software and by 2003 Kazaa became one of the most downloaded applications. However, the guys sold the company, largely because of endless legal problems and subpoenas, and started developing Skype (then it was also called skyper = sky (sky) + peer (equal, referring to P2P), but was changed to Skype because skyper.com domain name was busy).
The company kept the product in alpha version and, of course, did not earn anything. In 2003, she simply could not pay the salary to the developers. The creators of the program (and there were already six of them) long bore the question of whether to make all calls paid or not. At that time it was a project that seemed to investors to be another dotcom without a concrete and convincing business plan. However, there were still a few investors, they invested millions in the project, which paid off more than a thousand times over the course of three years. In early autumn of 2003, the first beta version was released: 10,000 people downloaded Skype on the first day, and 1 million in a few months. The market was ready for such an offer, he was waiting for it. Against the background of the expensive services of a traditional MG / IL connection, and even then expensive minutes from cell phones, Skype was without exaggeration a bomb.
In their new brainchild, the developers used the same principle of the peer-to-peer network, but already for voice communication: the more users the application had, the more reliable the connection would become. In addition, all calls were made absolutely free of charge for any direction and anywhere in the world. Skype, built on the basis of a peer-to-peer network, was beneficial to have a huge number of users worldwide. The application quickly acquired the ability to instantly exchange text messages and video conferencing.
At about the same time, the company found a way to monetize: payment for calls from / to regular and mobile phones was charged, which still remained low compared to traditional and, especially, cellular communication tariffs.
However, there were some people who were unhappy with Skype - first of all, they were law enforcement agencies that could not intercept encrypted conversations in the application. By the way, this particular feature was released to the creators sideways - the program began to be used by criminals and scammers who could not be detected. In addition, Skype had another significant advantage - it was installed in two accounts and easily bypassed firewalls and NAT.
Skype 3.0
In 2005, Skype was bought by eBay for $ 2.6 billion. This is a fantastic purchase price of a company that had virtually no income at that time. But you and I understand that the main value of Skype was not in revenue and not even in an incredibly cool concept - both eBay and later Microsoft bought a huge number of subscribers with whom they knew what to do. The number of users was estimated at more than 500 million people. With eBay, especially bright projects did not work out, there is a version that they were just waiting for future income.
The message about the release of the new version on the site inet-press.com. In it, and about the peering network, and a screenshot of that time. The picture is clickable.
Now imagine Skype in mobile phones, online documents, but at least in chat rooms and Xbox player talks ... Well, Microsoft introduced it. In early May 2011, the corporation bought Skype for $ 8.5 billion, each subscriber cost about $ 12. By the way, the creators of the program reacted very negatively to this purchase, calling it almost Skype funeral. But the story is still ongoing. Skype remains a unique phenomenon in the IT environment, it does not lag behind needs, responds quickly to new requirements and is constantly evolving, nowunder the wing of a strong company at Microsoft.
Those who know English can read a very lively and exciting story about Skype here .
Skype, although it was partly a monopolist, was not alone in the market. Starting in 2004, companies began to appear, offering commercial services based on VoIP.The chips were the same as now: communication within the offices of companies for free, wherever they are, the rest - for money. At the same time, there were various ways to connect to the provider.
Gradually, the softphones learned to work with PSTN phones, mobile phones, as well as faxes and email. Moreover, still in large companies when testing IP-telephony tools, the test plan necessarily includes tests for sending faxes from the device to the device, fax to mail and fax between the SIP, H.323 and OKS7 protocols.
IP-telephony has huge advantages that made it extremely popular and left the potential for development:
Today, IP-telephony surrounds us both at home and in business. She literally plowed the landscape of the communications world — even the telecommunications giants were forced to lower prices and seek convergent solutions for their customers. In the history of IP-telephony a lot of interesting points: from encryption to work SORM in VoIP, from protocols to non-standard equipment. The story continues and promises to be exciting.
By the way, we also celebrate the Day of Radio and Communications - not because we developed our own softphone and not because we have telecom operators in our state, which we don’t have ex. We are proud that for several years we have been making life easier for TV and radio holdings throughout Russia by offering them a specialized CRM system - RegionSoft CRM Media .
Therefore, we once again congratulate our clients, our friends, everyone who is related to radio and communication! You are building a future in which we all live.
Those who are looking for a job in Nizhny Novgorod. We at RegionSoft Developer Studio are looking for a Delphi programmer and web developer.
Consider everyone, including young developers who want to develop in the most combat conditions and practice under the guidance of a very experienced engineer. You will learn not just the development, but also learn how to compare it with business objectives - in general, enterprise-hardcore.
Write a letter, send a resume and portfolio to contact@regionsoft.ru
Those who learn. If you are interested in the theory of communication, PSTN, IP-telephony, GSM - we recommend the classic textbooks of Boris Goldstein and his co-authors. They helped us a little while creating the article.
In general, the first voice transmission over the Internet Protocol (voice over IP, VoIP) took place in 1973, during testing of the experimental Network Voice protocol created for ARPANET. But until 1995, no major steps were taken ... Well, this is according to the official version and a huge base of sources that the Internet and libraries offer us. However, without a few stories there would be no main story.
Happy Radio and Communication! Interestingly, those who do not know how to dial a number on this disk have already grown?
"Prehistoric" era of IP telephony
The technological foundations of VoIP were laid in 1925-1928. when an electronic speech synthesizer was created in the depths of the telecommunications company AT & T, it is also a vocoder. The device analyzed the sounds created by humans, and recreated an analogue of human speech - than is not a primitive packet data transmission. Vocoder was actively used to transmit classified information during the Second World War.
')
Vocoder
In 1988, a significant event also occurred - those involved in IP telephony will not overestimate it: the first Wideband Audio Codec, the famous G.722 codec, appeared, with a quality comparable to the voice transmitted by the PSTN. This broadband codec had a bitrate twice as high as the previous G.711 bit rates and produced a sound that was fine for those times.
In 1991, Autodesk founder John Walker creates a scheme for VoIP, which requires a bandwidth of only 32 kbps (the norm at that time was 64 kbps) and makes a public release of the NetFone program (later renamed Speak Freely), which became The world's first VoIP phone. Although at first the only thing for which NetFone was used was communication within the Walker company.
In 1993, the first Telepresence System videoconferencing system appeared, which the creators simply called ... Teleport, but quickly renamed TeleSuite.
In addition, experiments on voice transmission using packet data switching were carried out at universities and research centers.
VoIP straightened his shoulders
The emergence and spread of the Internet almost immediately led to the desire of users to communicate one-on-one. E-mail first appeared, then AOL climbed to the top of technology, which later, in 1998, bought ICQ and provided the world with instant text messaging. Not enough voice communication. In response to the demands of millions of potential users, around 1995, VoIP appeared, a packet protocol (and not a channel, as in traditional telephony) voice transmission. Packets went from one IP address to another using an Internet protocol. So there was IP-telephony.
We will not delve into the technical details, a lot has been written about this in Habré, we’ll just describe the process of voice transmission "for those in the tank." VoIP transmits voice between two IP addresses. The output signal is divided into small pieces of data (packets), in which the parameters of transmission and routing (packet headers) are specified. Packets are forwarded one by one, and then reassembled at the other end, transmitting a voice. In fact, the signal is compressed (encoded), and then “decompressed” (decoded) for the receiving device. Of course, accurate reproduction is impossible, there are data losses, jitters, etc.
Some theory
The main functions of VoIP in relation to the voice signal:
- on the transmitting side - converting analog speech into a digital signal and providing a digital signal in the format required for transmission over the IP network (the speech signal is encapsulated into IP packets - packet data transmission)
- in the IP network - managing telephone call service (establishing a connection, maintaining voice communications, disconnecting) and transporting packets
- on the receiving side, the restoration of analog speech from received packets and a discrete signal.
The process of converting speech into a number and numbers into speech is implemented by codecs (coders-decoders) in accordance with ITU-T standards.
Initially, IP-telephony was considered only as a cheap alternative to long-distance and international communication. However, rather quickly, it became in demand by private users and businesses for any, primarily local, communication sessions.
1993 - 1994 Charley Kline (Charley Kline) created Maven - the first program for the PC, which was able to transmit voice over the network. Around the same time, CU-SeeMe video conferencing software developed at Cornell University for PC on Macintosh gained popularity. Both of these applications have found their cosmic popularity in the literal sense - with their help, the flight of the space shuttle Endeavor was broadcast on Earth. Maven transmitted sound, and CU-SeeMe - image. After some time, the program combined.
Interface CU-SeeMe. Source: ludvigsen.hiof.no
1995 year. The pioneers of VoIP were the Israeli company VocalTec, which in 1995 created the first Internet phone available to the masses, which bore the name InternetPhone (can be shortened to IPhone).
To use this softphone, you needed relatively little: a modem, a full-duplex sound card, speakers, and a microphone. It was back in the days when the recommended browser for working with an Internet phone was Internet Explorer. By the way, you can look at the screenshots and read a lively and slightly nostalgic description of InternetPhone at the link .
After its first success, VocalTec continued to develop communications systems for IP telephony, and in 1996, it joined forces with Microsoft NetMeeting, a video conferencing program from Microsoft. Today VocalTec deals with the famous telejia adapter MagicJack, with the creator of which, YMAX, merged in 2010.
In 1996, the first version of the H.323 standard, designed for voice and video communication over the Internet, was published, at the same time work began on SIP as an open standard for IP telephony. SIP was originally designed to connect several people in conference mode and had nothing to do with VoIP. The first SIP project knew only one team - to make a call, and only three years later mastered six teams. But even then it was clear that in terms of scalability and capabilities it would bypass H.323 (by the way, both protocols are still used).
Some theory
The first specification of the SIP / 2.0 protocol was published in RFC 2543, which has undergone many modifications. Currently, the standard of the SIP protocol is RFC 3261. The SIP is based on the basic properties:
- personal mobility of users based on assigning the user a unique identifier that allows him to move within the network and receive communication everywhere, informing the location server of the place of stay
- SIP network scalability
- protocol openness - the ability to complement its support functions for new services and to adapt to working with various applications.
By the way, look at the SIP and H.323 call patterns.
SIP is considered a standard VoIP protocol, which has several important advantages over H.323. Although the complexity of modern SIP old protocol is almost not inferior. SIP has a convenient extensibility, easily compatible with older versions. To establish a connection in SIP, one transaction is enough, while H.323 requires several (you will see this in the photos below). SIP packets are human-readable, H.323 transmits messages in binary format, it is a complex protocol with a huge number of requests.
Even now, in the middle and even at the end of the 2010s, VoIP engineers are jarring diagrams of calls of different configurations. We retrieved photographs of the recordings from the notebook of a real practicing test engineer — even after months of work, they keep the cribs in front of them. On the pages you can see how much simpler the basic SIP call is than the basic H.323 call.
SIP Basic Call Scheme
SIP basic call with call errors
H.323 Basic Call Diagram - Complicated Scheme with Multiple Commands and Parameters
Even now, in the middle and even at the end of the 2010s, VoIP engineers are jarring diagrams of calls of different configurations. We retrieved photographs of the recordings from the notebook of a real practicing test engineer — even after months of work, they keep the cribs in front of them. On the pages you can see how much simpler the basic SIP call is than the basic H.323 call.
SIP Basic Call Scheme
SIP basic call with call errors
H.323 Basic Call Diagram - Complicated Scheme with Multiple Commands and Parameters
1998 was one of the turning points for IP telephony. Companies realized all the advantages of this type of communication and began to develop commercial solutions. In particular, entrepreneurs began to move away from PC-PC solutions and products and began to develop PC-to-phone and telephone-to-phone solutions for VoIP. IP telephony has become integrated into public switched telephone networks (public switched telephone network, PSTN, PSTN, PSTN).
In the same year, the first physical equipment for IP-telephony appeared - the first IP switches that were responsible for routing calls. Despite such technical breakthroughs, VoIP calls as of 1998 did not reach even 1% of all voice traffic. In 2000, this figure barely reached 3%, but in 2003 there was a sharp jump - up to 25%. IP phone calls quickly gained the image of free and very cheap calls to all directions, regardless of distance. At one time, commercial companies exploited this free of charge and could broadcast commercials at the beginning or middle of a conversation as a “fee” for a free connection. Later this practice ceased.
In 1999, the first IP-PBX appears (a virtual PBX for VoIP, because the virtual PBX for PSTN was created several years earlier) - Asterisk. As it often happens, Asterisk has grown from the company's need for a product that it cannot buy or that does not suit her. So, Mark Spencer, who has his own Linux technical support company, realized that he urgently needed a powerful PBX for a call center, but for those times this equipment cost fabulous money. Then he created his open source IP PBX. After Asterisk gained popularity, Spencer repurposed the company to support and develop hardware for Asterisk. Until now, Asterisk is very popular with developers and businesses. So, for example, when we integrated IP telephony with our RegionSoft CRM , we chose Asterisk as the main virtual PBX.
What gives our CRM system integration with IP PBX Asterisk
Integration with Asterisk Call Center allows you to make calls directly from the interface of the CRM system . In addition, we made friends with Asterisk with RegionSoft SIP-Phone.
Working through the Asterisk phone server allows you to use all the advantages of modern telephony:
Working through the Asterisk phone server allows you to use all the advantages of modern telephony:
- use the functions of a digital PBX, internal and external routing - to transfer calls and manage connections
- Record telephone conversations with the possibility of subsequent listening - for the purposes of quality control and staff training with the best examples
- organize call forwarding to other landline numbers or mobile phones - to always stay in touch with customers
- work through SIP protocols
- implement the rules of outgoing switching
- collect any billing related reports
- organize an interactive voice menu (IVR), etc.
year 2000. Today, one of the world leaders in working with communication technologies is Cisco. In 2000, she initiated intra-corporate migration to the IP telephony of her headquarters in California (San Jose). In one year, 55 buildings and 20,000 people were transferred to IP telephony. It was one of the largest projects in the industry. This experience has also affected the company's profile - Cisco provides unique powerful solutions in the field of IP telephony and network management.
2005 year. Calypso Wireless introduced the C1250i, the world's first mobile phone, that could switch between a GSM cell tower and an available Wi-Fi 802 network using Cisco Aironet Access Point and its own patented Calypso Wireless ASNAP technology. Thanks to this, users could create video conferences and make calls via VoIP. Formally, this phone was considered a smartphone on Windows Mobile.
It looked like Calypso
In 2006 , the first mobile application for IP-telephony Truphone was released. Initially, the application was developed for Nokia mobile phones, but was soon released for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms. The application is able to make free calls within its network, send text to another network, including to Skype and make calls to the PSTN. The application used SIP and made a call via the Wi-Fi network, not via GSM. Later, the company released several softphones, and at the moment it is engaged in profitable travel SIM cards.
toptenplus.com
Skype - the era inside the era
In 2003, Skype launches its beta version and immediately receives a huge attention of all categories of users. But this was preceded by a small story. Several programmers from Estonia have developed a peer-to-peer file-sharing client, Kazaa. It, like the Napster peer-to-peer file sharing network, was used by millions of people to exchange music files (mostly pirated), videos and software (no less pirated). Peering networks provided an unprecedented rate of data exchange at that time. Kazaa was bought from the creators of Nicholas Zennstrom from Sweden (by the way, an employee of Tele2) and Janus Friis from Denmark (Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis). The new owners improved the software and by 2003 Kazaa became one of the most downloaded applications. However, the guys sold the company, largely because of endless legal problems and subpoenas, and started developing Skype (then it was also called skyper = sky (sky) + peer (equal, referring to P2P), but was changed to Skype because skyper.com domain name was busy).
The company kept the product in alpha version and, of course, did not earn anything. In 2003, she simply could not pay the salary to the developers. The creators of the program (and there were already six of them) long bore the question of whether to make all calls paid or not. At that time it was a project that seemed to investors to be another dotcom without a concrete and convincing business plan. However, there were still a few investors, they invested millions in the project, which paid off more than a thousand times over the course of three years. In early autumn of 2003, the first beta version was released: 10,000 people downloaded Skype on the first day, and 1 million in a few months. The market was ready for such an offer, he was waiting for it. Against the background of the expensive services of a traditional MG / IL connection, and even then expensive minutes from cell phones, Skype was without exaggeration a bomb.
In their new brainchild, the developers used the same principle of the peer-to-peer network, but already for voice communication: the more users the application had, the more reliable the connection would become. In addition, all calls were made absolutely free of charge for any direction and anywhere in the world. Skype, built on the basis of a peer-to-peer network, was beneficial to have a huge number of users worldwide. The application quickly acquired the ability to instantly exchange text messages and video conferencing.
At about the same time, the company found a way to monetize: payment for calls from / to regular and mobile phones was charged, which still remained low compared to traditional and, especially, cellular communication tariffs.
However, there were some people who were unhappy with Skype - first of all, they were law enforcement agencies that could not intercept encrypted conversations in the application. By the way, this particular feature was released to the creators sideways - the program began to be used by criminals and scammers who could not be detected. In addition, Skype had another significant advantage - it was installed in two accounts and easily bypassed firewalls and NAT.
Skype 3.0
In 2005, Skype was bought by eBay for $ 2.6 billion. This is a fantastic purchase price of a company that had virtually no income at that time. But you and I understand that the main value of Skype was not in revenue and not even in an incredibly cool concept - both eBay and later Microsoft bought a huge number of subscribers with whom they knew what to do. The number of users was estimated at more than 500 million people. With eBay, especially bright projects did not work out, there is a version that they were just waiting for future income.
The message about the release of the new version on the site inet-press.com. In it, and about the peering network, and a screenshot of that time. The picture is clickable.
Now imagine Skype in mobile phones, online documents, but at least in chat rooms and Xbox player talks ... Well, Microsoft introduced it. In early May 2011, the corporation bought Skype for $ 8.5 billion, each subscriber cost about $ 12. By the way, the creators of the program reacted very negatively to this purchase, calling it almost Skype funeral. But the story is still ongoing. Skype remains a unique phenomenon in the IT environment, it does not lag behind needs, responds quickly to new requirements and is constantly evolving, now
Those who know English can read a very lively and exciting story about Skype here .
Life outside Skype
Skype, although it was partly a monopolist, was not alone in the market. Starting in 2004, companies began to appear, offering commercial services based on VoIP.The chips were the same as now: communication within the offices of companies for free, wherever they are, the rest - for money. At the same time, there were various ways to connect to the provider.
- The classic option: Ethernet and wi-fi.
- Analog telephone adapter: the phone connects to the network using a special connector.
- Softphones (later - SIPphone): calls are made through an application that simulates a telephone with additional services. All settings are written in the softphone interface, dialing and managing additional services is performed from it.
Gradually, the softphones learned to work with PSTN phones, mobile phones, as well as faxes and email. Moreover, still in large companies when testing IP-telephony tools, the test plan necessarily includes tests for sending faxes from the device to the device, fax to mail and fax between the SIP, H.323 and OKS7 protocols.
RegionSoft SIP-Phone - our small contribution to the history of IP-telephony
When we paid great attention to the integration with telephony, it was decided to develop our own softphone. RegionSoft CRM RegionSoft SIP-Phone, CRM-, . RegionSoft SIP-Phone . SIP-Phone 8 . . , . ( ). RegionSoft SIP-Phone ' ', - .
IP-telephony has huge advantages that made it extremely popular and left the potential for development:
- it is inexpensive - in fact, the user receives a single rate, not depending on distance
- she has open standards
- it is relatively simple for developers and implementers
- it is supported by many devices and platforms
- it is easily embedded in third-party applications, etc.
Today, IP-telephony surrounds us both at home and in business. She literally plowed the landscape of the communications world — even the telecommunications giants were forced to lower prices and seek convergent solutions for their customers. In the history of IP-telephony a lot of interesting points: from encryption to work SORM in VoIP, from protocols to non-standard equipment. The story continues and promises to be exciting.
By the way, we also celebrate the Day of Radio and Communications - not because we developed our own softphone and not because we have telecom operators in our state, which we don’t have ex. We are proud that for several years we have been making life easier for TV and radio holdings throughout Russia by offering them a specialized CRM system - RegionSoft CRM Media .
Therefore, we once again congratulate our clients, our friends, everyone who is related to radio and communication! You are building a future in which we all live.
Those who are looking for a job in Nizhny Novgorod. We at RegionSoft Developer Studio are looking for a Delphi programmer and web developer.
Consider everyone, including young developers who want to develop in the most combat conditions and practice under the guidance of a very experienced engineer. You will learn not just the development, but also learn how to compare it with business objectives - in general, enterprise-hardcore.
Write a letter, send a resume and portfolio to contact@regionsoft.ru
Those who learn. If you are interested in the theory of communication, PSTN, IP-telephony, GSM - we recommend the classic textbooks of Boris Goldstein and his co-authors. They helped us a little while creating the article.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/328172/
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