Page 358 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Wi-MAX
Since we are so bravely predicting so many things, it’s not hard to predict that Wi-MAX
spells the beginning of the end for traditional cellular telephone networks.

With wireless Internet access within the reach of most communities, what value will
there be in expensive cellular service?
Unified Messaging

This is a term that has been hyped by the telecom industry for years, but adoption has
been far slower than predicted.

Unified Messaging is the concept of tying voice and text-messaging systems into one.
With Asterisk, the two don’t need to be artificially combined, as Asterisk already treats
them the same way.
Just by examining the terms, unified and messaging, we can see that the integration of
email and voicemail must be merely the beginning; Unified Messaging needs to do a
lot more than just that if it is to deserve its name.
Perhaps we need to define “messaging” as communication that does not occur in real
time. In other words, when you send a message, you expect that the reply may take
moments, minutes, hours, or even days to arrive. You compose what you wish to say,
and your audience is expected to compose a reply.
Contrast this with conversing, which happens in real time. When you talk to someone
on a telephone connection, you expect no more than a few seconds’ delay before the
response arrives.
In 2002, Tim O’Reilly delivered a speech titled “Watching the Alpha Geeks: OS X and
the Next Big Thing” (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/05/14/oreil
ly_wwdc_keynote.html), in which he talked about someone piping IRC through a text-
to-speech engine. One could imagine doing the reverse as well, allowing us to join an
IRC or instant messaging chat over our Wi-Fi phone, our Asterisk PBX providing the
speech-to-text-to-speech translations.

Peering

As monopoly networks such as the PSTN give way to community-based networks like
the Internet, there will be a period of time where it is necessary to interconnect the two.
While the traditional providers would prefer that the existing model be carried into the
new paradigm, it is increasingly likely that telephone calls will become little more than
another application the Internet happily carries.
But a challenge remains: how to manage the telephone numbering plan with which we
are all familiar and comfortable?

330 | Chapter 15: Asterisk: The Future of Telephony