Here’s a few impressions from the kickoff to VON, which began with a keynote at 4:30. It’s late, so I’m not going to hyperlink this post now, but I will later when I have a chance.
1. Kevin Kealy of ATT spoke of security issues with VoIP in a talk titled “Attacks, Cracks, and Impolite Behavior”, including several humerous anecdotes about finding a wide open wifi-based VoIP implementation at a car dealer and listening in, and also a tool he wrote to insert “voice turets” into an RTP stream. His talk seemed most relevent to enterprise IP PBX type systems. He strongly recommends VLANs as a way to segregate the VoIP traffic. He sees encryption of both signalling and media as problematic because no key management proposal has gained wide adoption or agreement.
2. Jeff Citron of Vonage spent his half hour hyping his per-IPO company. He had a slide that said, and I quote “In a recent survey 17% of all businesses said they intend to switch to Vonage in the next 6 months”. I am serious. I snickered when he said this, but looked around and everyone else was busy scribbling down this wisdom. Maybe I’m missing something and we’d all better go buy some Vonage stock as soon as it IPOs. He also spent a fair bit of time explaining why Vonage had an insurmountable market lead. I was amused when he took a question asking when was Vonage going to sell something other than cost savings over the PSTN. He spoke for a good few minutes about how you have to make a value proposition that people understand at first, and umm, later, umm, you innovate. I guess you can tell I wasn’t impressed.
3. There were a fair bit of people in the exhibit hall for the opening reception. Somethings that stood out for me were that:
- UStarComm has a neat new wifi VoIP phone, supposedly the battery lasts 3 days on standby.
- Xten is in beta with a Linux version of the X-lite soft phone. I was invited to join the beta community, which I will do when I get back home.
- Sipura has a nice new desktop SIP phone, priced around $100 for a two line version and $130 for a 4 line version. It supports downloadable ringtones, is web-administratable, and has a pixel based display so it can display alphanumeric. Move over BudgeTone … They told me you can buy it online at Voxilla.
- My VoIP provider Broadvoice has added support for inbound UK and soon Italian numbers, $3.95 per month each. And support for a distinct soft phone (that is separate from your h/ware device). Very cool.