If one compares the culture of the telecommunications industry to that of the Internet, it is sometimes difficult to believe the two are related. The Internet was designed by enthusiasts, whereas contributing to the development of the PSTN is impossible for any individual to contemplate. This is an exclusive club; membership is not open to just anyone.* |
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) clearly exhibits this type of closed thinking. If you want access to its knowledge, you have to be prepared to pay for it. Membership requires proof of your qualifications, and you will be expected to pay thousands of dollars to gain access to its library of publications. Although the ITU is the United Nations’s sanctioned body responsible for international telecommunications, many of the VoIP protocols (SIP, MGCP, RTP, STUN) come not from the hallowed halls of the ITU, but rather from the IETF (which publishes all of its standards free to all, and allows anyone to submit an Internet Draft for consideration). Open protocols such as SIP may have a tactical advantage over ITU protocols, such as H.323, due to the ease with which one can obtain them. Although H.323 is widely deployed by carriers as a VoIP protocol in the backbone, it is much more difficult to find H.323-based endpoints; newer products are far more likely to support SIP. The success of the IETF’s open approach has not gone unnoticed by the mighty ITU. It has recently become possible to download up to three documents free of charge from the ITU web site.†Openness is clearly on its minds. Recent statements by the ITU sug- gest that there is a desire to achieve “Greater participation in ITU by civil society and the academic world.” Mr. Houlin Zhao, the ITU’s Director of the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), believes that “ITU should take some steps to encourage this.”‡ |
The roadmap to achieving this openness is unclear, but the ITU is beginning to realize the inevitable. |