Evan ProdromouJul 9, 2023

I am not open to your ahistorical take on Google Chat and XMPP.

Google didn't do anything wrong by using an open standard.

They didn't do anything wrong by building a good interface that people liked to use.

And they didn't do anything wrong by disconnecting from the network when the spam and harassment outweighed the benefit to their users.

We, the XMPP community, failed to capitalize on success by diversifying the network. It's our own fault not enough nodes were there.

Show threadTimo JJul 9, 2023
@evan Why stop at XMPP? The same thing happened to SIP. The prospect of an open interconnection was obliterated by spam and fraud. The lack of a path to innovation was why I ultimately got out of telecom.
Show threadKadinJul 10, 2023

@timoj @evan I'm not sure I'd call SIP a failure. Maybe the average user doesn't interact with it very much, but vast numbers of people use it everyday. Callcenter operations, corporate PBXs, private LTE systems, follow-me numbers, and lots of telecon services use SIP in some way or another.

The major exception is Microsoft, naturally. Although even Teams—which uses Skype-derived protocols, supposedly—can interoperate with SIP endpoints.
#telecom #SIP

Show threadTimo JJul 10, 2023
@kadin @evan I’m not saying that parts of it aren’t used. I’m saying that the archipelago of incompatible islands undermined the original intent of developing a flattened, confederated communication system. It didn’t displace the PSTN or PBXes… it was coopted by 3GPP and telecom manufacturers and broken in such a way that it ultimately became a closed intranetworking protocol, not what we originally intended when we went to replace H.323.
Show threadKadinJul 10, 2023

@timoj @evan True. Though that's a pretty ambitious goal. The telcos have always been seemingly uncomfortable with the "internet way" of doing things. (Honestly, I think we're still probably 20 years from getting to a single consensus and standards body.)

Do you think SIP would have been better if 3GPP hadn't adopted it into the IMS standard? That always looked like a win to me, finally building on an IETF standard rather than in parallel to it.

Show threadTimo JJul 10, 2023
@kadin @evan Sadly, no. At the end of it, it ended up being developed and deployed by people and companies that had no interest in a functioning, open standard.
Show threadTimo J
@kadin @evan Then again, I used to ask a rather pointed, uncomfortable question about LTE and beyond that never came with a decent answer: if we’d known about the iPhone, would we have built modern mobile networks this way? IMHO decidedly not.
Jul 10, 2023 at 9:25amWeb
Show threadKadinJul 13, 2023

@timoj @[email protected] Really good question. And I think up through WCDMA, the answer is "definitely no". With LTE, the feeling I get is "we shouldn't have bothered wasting time on XYZ", where that might be any number of legacy-ish LTE features like circuit-switched voice and data, baroque encapsulation formats, and the whole idea of terminating a subscriber's data traffic anywhere but at the closest possible point.

Definitively separate control vs. data planes is not a bad idea, though.