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September 22, 2004

Back to the Future: AT&T Announces (Again) their own VoIP Interop Lab (sort of)

At Spring 2004 VON I remember saying it felt a lot like 1999 based on the buzz and feel of that event. The recent wave of VoIP funding announcements has reinforced this. And the very recent trend of “VoIP Company Acquisition of the Day” announcements has helped just drive this point home.

Several years ago, back during the first wave of VoIP mania, AT&T announced (for the first time) their intentions on building an industry focused voip driven interop lap where they could test products around their own specs and standards. This was back around the time after pulver.com had announced and launched our “Open Test Network” which at least on paper was trying to achieve very similar goals.

This time around, AT&T is once again leveraging their position in the VoIP space to get vendors to compete and build products based on their internal specifications and “AT&T's proprietary Specifications.” Sounds like a great way to leverage a brand and help marginalize their internal discussions/ negotiations with some of their targeted equipment vendors along the way.

Hidden in plain sight of this announcement is AT&T’s statement that they are in fact in production with technologies which represent AT&T proprietary Specifications rather than industry standards. Looks like the detente in the late 1990’s VoIP protocol wars may be broken.

Posted by jeff on September 22, 2004 06:47 AM | Permalink

Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos

Comments

Jeff,

AT&T has indeed indicated it's moving to a SIP-based architecture. The only reason the chose to use MGCP in the original D-Link produced TA I'm told, was for quality and expediency which I reported back in April.

I think you may be possibly reading more into the "proprietary specs" it referred to in the news release. I know I did until I asked them to clarify.

AT&T indicated on a call to me when I posed a similar comment that they "licensed their Intellectual Property to be used by others to create common standards."

Isn't that what patents and the like are all about?

Posted by: Andy Abramson at September 29, 2004 01:35 AM

Whenever I point out that AT&T is not based on SIP (let alone it is proprietary), other participants in the discussion dismiss me saying they will migrate to SIP. Now I can drop a name.

Posted by: Aswath at September 22, 2004 07:52 AM