Opening the Transport Layer

One of the reasons that the phone system has become so integrated into our lives is because it's an open system. To that point, if you pick up the phone, you can dial any phone number (assuming you have the appropriate class of service - such as long distance or international) and it will be connected. You don't have to worry about your friend being on Qwest if you want to call them from your Qwest phone and you don't have to carry four mobile phones - one from each of the major networks - just so you can make sure that you don't miss an important call.

The Post Office, Email all of these networks are open and because of it, these methods of communication become deeply rooted as critical services that we can't be without.

Conversely, the Instant Messaging world, though it has grown faster than the initial adoption of telephones, hasn't become as critical - especially for business users. Why? It's at least in part due to the fact that there are a number of instant messaging applications out there, each with their own network. Want to send a message from AIM to MSN? Good luck. Even though you can aggregate services into a single client, you still need accounts on each network.

It's unfortunately the same way with commercial SIP VoIP providers. Try picking up a Vonage phone and calling a SIP address that's in another network.

Though we can't change the rest of the world, we can at least take a stand. We've always supported calling any SIP address through our network (as long as your phone or softphone supports SIP addresses) - with the caveat that the other network needs to support direct SIP inbound dialing. Moving forward, we'll be making it easier to set up extensions that connect to external SIP addresses as well, with free unsupported and premium supported network-to-network connectivity.