It seems like everywhere you go, checking for standards, there are at least two for the price of one: PAL and NTSC, DVD-HD and Blu-ray. H.323 and SIP. SIMPLE and XMPP. Why can’t we just get along and decide on a single protocol for each task?
One ring to rule them all?
They used to call it “convergence”. In the distant past, when people were looking for a nicer word for “VoIP”. It meant all types of devices talking to each other in the same language. It ended up being “IP” – all the rest needs to be bridged by gateways.
Today there’s a better term: “Unified Communications”. You know what that term means for me? “We’re doing more than a single protocol in our products”.
Somehow, as a person who dealt with protocols and standards for a bit over a decade, I think that the only solution these days is to be multi-protocol – to be able to “speak” more than a single language in whatever you are trying to communicate.
It’s no wonder then that you can find both H.323 and SIP stacks here at RADVISION, or that we have all of the client logic that mask these protocols for people who want to develop their own VoIP products. But the thing is – it never seems to be enough. Take HD Voice for example – it has its own set of voice codecs, with no clear winner in sight (at least not one that people are really happy with).
So what can we do about it?
Nothing really. Just make sure we are multi-lingual. At least when it comes to our communication protocols.
Tags: Betamax, Blu-ray, codecs, convergence, DVD-HD, gateway, H.323, HD voice, Protocols, SIMPLE, SIP, standards, Unified Communications, VCR, VoIP, XMPP
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