Moving VoIP beyond the phone

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 5:49

Most current commercial and research efforts focus on making VoIP work as well as the current landline and mobile phone, by improving aspects from QoS to security. As important as these are, it is important to move beyond functional parity with 125-year old technology. Traditionally, the natural next step beyond telephony was adding video, despite a fifty year string of failures. However, what has proven to be far more successful is adding meta data and facilitating user control. In this talk, I will describe our efforts in improving the functionality of interactive collaboration applications in a scalable manner, by facilitating the creation of new services by end users, by conveying improved information about the state of participants and by automating the diagnosis of faults in large-scale systems. The talk will also address the practical challenges of building a new global telecommunication infrastructure without users of the existing system becoming stranded. For example, work on facilitating emergency calling has only recently attracted attention, even though the ability to summon help is among the most important reasons users cite for having a landline or mobile phone.