This article originally appeared in the Dec. 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.

It is 2011, and the videophone on my desk is even more useless than the videophone I used back in 1999. Because of the limitations of the telephone technology it was using at the time the quality of the video was not very good, and the terminal itself was expensive, but it had a formidable advantage over the current technology: I could use it with anybody else that also had a videophone, because the telephone network was and still is ubiquitous.

One decade later, we literally saw some incredible improvements in the video technology, but at the same time the potentiality of establishing a video call with someone decreased. I use my videophone with my employees because they have a subscription to the same service that my videophone uses. But for all my other calls, even if I can in some rare cases use Skype (News - Alert) or Google Talk, most of the time I cannot use video at all, even if both sides of the calls use hardware that is more than capable of providing the resources required for video, wideband audio, presence, real-time texting and all these advanced media technologies that we were promised a long time ago.

We were in fact robbed of something that could have been spectacular, because the Internet, the medium that most of us use each day, is even more ubiquitous than the telephone network ever was. But in spite of this fact, VoIP is fractured in a way that would be incomprehensible to a telephone user, and it is not even the fault of the medium itself.

There are multiple explanations for this, from the inability of providers to see beyond their walled garden, to the reluctance of network administrators to open their networks, to the realization that VoIP spam would be far worse than e-mail spam is for the end user. The problem is not new, and there have been some initiatives that have attempted to offer solutions to this problem. 

That includes ENUM, a way to use the DNS infrastructure to provide mapping between a phone number and a VoIP address. So far, however, none of these initiatives have been successful.

Even something as interesting as RTCWEB, a joint effort between IETF and W3C (News - Alert) aimed at standardizing VoIP inside the web browser, is not so much about having web applications from various websites making video calls to each other as it is to make sure that any browser can be used by the same website.

VIPR, a new technology currently also under standardization at the IETF, aims to fix this problem by transferring the ubiquitous property of the telephone network to the Internet. The idea is simple: If you made a phone call to someone, then it is possible to substitute the path that this call used by another path that is using only the Internet. Not only it is possible to do this substitution, but it is possible to do it in a way that is secure (in that it does not open a VoIP user to denial of service, intrusion or spam), but that is also automatic (in that it does not require someone to manually add an entry in a database and, more important, does not require periodic verification that this entry is still valid). Right after this substitution, the same phone number that was used to make the phone call can now be used to make a video call.

Developed by Cisco (News - Alert) and submitted to the IETF standardization process by Jonathan Rosenberg and Cullen Jennings, the VIPR technology could be the bridge that will break the isolation of all the existing VoIP islands, from enterprises to independent VoIP providers and carriers.

Keep looking for future installments of this column, as we will detail the inner workings and potential of this game-changing new technology.

Marc Petit-Huguenin (News - Alert) is CTO and co-Founder of Stonyfish Inc. (http://stonyfish.com). He also blogs at   http://blog.marc.petit-huguenin.org/
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Edited by Stefania Viscusi