2008 The Year We Peer II

On January 2, 2008 , I posted here in this BLOG entry "2008 The Year We Peer"

Although I had thought little about this over the last several months, I now see that it is a vision that almost immediately began to come true. The truth is I had a very strong sensation that I needed to write that entry and quickly, even though I was involved in a move. Now I can say that rather than being embarrassed when the end of 2008 arrives, I can now proudly say that I hit the nail squarely on the head. SKOOKUM!

Sometime later in January , apparently Gizmo / SIPPhone announced Gizmo5 , and Gizmo5 "Backdoor Dialing". I did not think too much about this , nor look into it too deeply. In fact, I figured it was just more hype. However what I have found is that truly SIPPhone is offering FREE calls via Peering, and not just to VoIP providers. This even seems to include for example any Qwest number in Portland, Oregon. Unfortunately they play a "Free Call" recording on these calls, but the calls seem to connect with high quality.

Also since publishing that Blog entry, I originally took the announcement of an annual charge from Freeworlddialup.com to be bad news. As it turns out is WONDERFUL news for peering. They have apparently come to realize the value of their association with Ipeerx, also a Pulver Company. A year ago I was "backdooring" into FWD to get access to all Packet8 and Broadvoice numbers. I even asked the question of Jeff Pulver about people exploiting available services on FWD which could potentially break FWD. I did not tell him about backdooring these calls into the FWD network, as I did not want to ruin a good thing. In fact I wrote a BLOG entry in December 2007 and the tests I referred to there were done through FWD. Jeff, do you read my BLOG? If so you now know what I was talking about in my message about "disruptive technology".

If you build it, they will come!

I think in the case of both of these services, they seem to lack a "lookup" service to find out easily if a number is in the database, much like ENUM. In Fact users of Asterisk could use this same kind of lookup to easily interface these wonderful service offerings into their products.