Opinion: Is part of the future of VOIP open?

In February, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered "a focused examination and assessment of California state government." The US$10 million review, conducted by about 275 state employees and released in early August, calls for about a bizillion changes to the way that state's government is run.

The 2,500-page report says California would save billions of dollars per year if all the suggestions were implemented. Recommendations include using more open source software and replacing the state phone system with a VOIP one. Maybe California can do both.

The report (www.report.cpr.ca.gov/) recommends switching to open source because of a "much lower total cost of ownership"; improved security"due to the extreme scrutiny of the source code before being deployed"; support for multiple environments (that is, not just Microsoft); and lower maintenance costs; and because it is "often less vulnerable to viruses." I expect Microsoft disagrees with much of this, but if anyone can stand up to "The Bill" it's "The Govenator."

The report recommends switching to VOIP for both cost and function reasons. The report estimates that switching could cut $10 to $40 off the average $80 per month that the state pays for a phone line. Considering how many phone lines California pays for, even converting half the phones to VOIP could save as much as $6.3 million per month.

If that level of savings could be realized, then the $6.5 million conversion cost would be covered in less than two months. Even the report's most pessimistic numbers would have the break-even point within five months. The report does not talk about open source with VOIP, but lots of other people are these days.

A quick Google search comes up with about 456,000 hits for "'open source' + VOIP." Some of the more prominent include: SIPFoundry (www.sipfoundry.org), to which Pingtel donated its software; Asterisk (www.asterisk.org), which announced its 1.0.0 release at the end of September; and the Vovida Open Communication Application Library (www.vovida.org), which has been around since 2002.

Google also turned up some sites that list available VOIP software including VOIP-info (www.VOIP-info.org), whose Web site includes a section on open source software. Most of open source VOIP software supports the IETF's Session Initiation Protocol and some also supports the older ITU-T H.323 specification. Open source VOIP software exists for phones, proxies, gateways and even for billing (www.trabas.com/opensource/). Somehow the concept of open source billing seems a bit funny. But because a lot of VOIP will have to be connected to the paying-world regular phone system, I guess billing can be useful.

The Apache Web server and Linux have both proved that open source can be quite successful within big companies. It will be interesting to see if California and other VOIP users embrace the Apache/Linux example or would rather the traditional phone system vendor picture painted by Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies, Avaya and others, maybe even by Microsoft.

Call me radical, but I'm far from sure that these old masters, to borrow a concept, will paint the best pictures.

Disclaimer: Harvard has museums full of old masters, as well as a lot of other things, and buildings full of not so old folks, many of whom will be seen as masters some day. But the above muse is my own.