| While many books describe the theory behind Voice over IP, only Practical VoIP Using VOCAL describes how such a phone system was actually built, and how you too can acquire the source code, install it onto a system, connect phones, and make calls. VOCAL (the Vovida Open Communication Application Library) is an open source software project that provides call control, routing, media, policy, billing information and provisioning on a system that can range from a few test phones to a large, multi-host carrier grade network supporting hundreds of thousands of users. VOCAL is freely available from the Cisco Systems-sponsored Vovida.Because VOCAL is open source, you can look "under the hood" to the base code and protocol stack levels and discover not only how the system works, but also how common problems are being worked out in the development environment. You can take this system to another level by implementing a feature or functionality that no one's thought of before. |
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 a credible open source implementation |
| Review Date: March 1, 2005 |
| Reviewer: W Boudville, Terra, Sol 3 |
VoIP usage is surging amongst many users worldwide. A pack of startups has been established; each trying to dominate this field. And ATT and other large phone companies are also starting to jump in. With all this, the average VoIP user expects it to be virtually indistinguishable from an traditional phone experience.
Well, that is where this book and you come into the scene. To make that simple user experience requires a huge amount of technical work. The book gives you a detailed appreciation of what that involves. This VOCAL is "only" one VoIP implementation. But it may be attractive, because it is open source. The book's authors were instrumental in designing VOCAL and offer the book as the definitive text on it. They give a lot of functionality, with the added promise that it is very scalable.
I cannot discern from the book how VOCAL will fare against well funded proprietary VoIP solutions. But at least VOCAL seems to give them serious opposition, as a credible and free alternative. |
Source those cheap Net phone-calls
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| Review Date: June 2, 2006 |
| Reviewer: FN, Goa, India 403511 |
Source those cheap Net phone-calls
Reviewed by: Frederick Noronha
Practical VoIP Using
VOCAL Luan Dang,
Cullen Jennings
& David Kelly
Publisher: O' Reilly, 2002
Price: $44.95
From the cover, an angry-looking snipefish stares out at you. Across its five-hundred odd pages, a sea of technical data greets you. Practical VoIP Using VOCAL is a book for those wanting to build their own VoIP system. Voice over Internet Protocol software improvements (with better bandwidth and processing speed) have made Internet telephony a decent-enough option to consider.
This book describes how the system is actually built. You can acquire the source code, install it onto a system, connect phones and make calls.
Co-author Dang is co-founder of Vovida Networks. VOCAL (the Vovida Open Communication Library) is an open-source software project. It provides call control, routing, media, policy, billing information and provisioning.
Your system can scale from a single box to multihost carrier grade. VOCAL is freely available from the Cisco-sponsored Vovida.org site. VOCAL is open-source. You can see not just how the system works, but also how common problems are being worked out in the development environment.
This book promises to "show how to implement, program and administer VoIP systems using open-source tools." As co-author Jennings argues: "Along with other VoIP applications, VOCAL is actively inverting the way telephony is deployed by allowing an Internet-style anarchy that was never possible in the traditional PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). It has been a fun area to work in."
True. For us in India, since Fool's Day 2002, the area of Internet telephony has become a reality. Who doesn't want inexpensive telephone calls over the Internet, limiting long-distance charges to the nominal cost of
e-mail?
But the price of this US-published book (almost US$45), for us here, is still an issue. Hopefully the Indian edition at more affordable rates won't be too long in coming. All in all, a good book for those interested in this field. And, this is a field more should definitely get interested, if we're to enable the world's second-largest populated country to have more affordable access to communicating globally. |
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