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Consumer VoIP: Plusses, Potholes, and How MIT Alums Are Filling the Gap

By Stacy Swider '89

Unless you live in a cave, you have no doubt become aware of VoIP. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has matured into a bona-fide consumer product, complete with amusing commercials and softphone [a piece of software for making telephone calls over the Internet] IDs showing up on business cards. Unlike the traditional analog, public-switched telephone network, VoIP digitizes voice into data packets and sends them across the Internet. Ultimately this brings the phone to your computer—either as a traditional-looking phone off to the side or simply as a software window. Plug in a headset, and dial away.

To those in the industry, it's old-time stuff. "Fundamentally, it has been available for years," comments C.J. Whelan '92 of Conserto, LLC, a phone conferencing firm. "Most calls you make today have a VoIP component somewhere along the line." But now it is penetrating business and residential phone markets. Gartner Dataquest estimates there will be nearly seven million users of IP telephony in North America by 2008.

The advantages of VoIP products are twofold. First, they are easy to install and reduce calling costs to as little as a penny a minute. According to Forrester Research, businesses installing VoIP saved 20 percent more money compared to installing traditional phone networks. Second, they offer features such as call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, instant messaging, and text messaging for free. Newer soft-phone companies are coming out with even more free features. These multimedia phones can be an excellent choice for computer-centric environments and lifestyles.

A screenshot of damaka's dialout page.

But how secure and cheap are these products? Companies offering a hosted, custom network such as WebEx can be very pricey. MSN and Yahoo messenger have no security, and they host communication on servers that store your data. Vonage is mainly a duplication of the legacy-switching world, with high hardware dependency and no encryption. Products that take advantage of excess resources by daisy-chaining through private computers (Skype) leave those private networks open to hacks. According to Business Week: "Most troublesome are questions about whether Skype's technology is safe to use inside corporations. In recent days, consultants have begun warning companies that employees who use Skype in the office could be poking holes in the security systems designed to defend against hackers and other intruders."

Siva Ravikumar GM '03 has formed a company that solves these issues. "Initially, I was looking for a way to lower the cost of international calling," he says. "Because of my background in telecom, I knew proprietary software would defeat the purpose of worldwide use." This led to a need to use a popular standard. In this case, he chose session initiation protocol (SIP). To this he added special encryption. Not only is the media encrypted but the SIP signaling itself is encrypted. "I had experts look at the signals, and they could not even recognize it as SIP," claims Ravikumar.

Furthermore, he made the software truly peer-to-peer with a personal softswitch, whereby the switch that routes the connection resides on the end-user's PC. This direct PC-to-PC technology creates an extra mode of security because there are no servers hosting the communication. Control and data stay with the end user, and the encryption is end-to-end. His company, damaka, which loosely translates to "joy of communication" in Hindi, launched their product in February 2005. Along with regular PC-to-PC calls, damaka offers secure IM, video, file sharing, desktop sharing, voice commands, and IP television. The consumer version can be downloaded free from the company website. More features are planned for future versions.

"Whatever device you have today will become software and break free of its current hardware platform," says Andrew Lippman '71, the founding associate director of the MIT Media Lab, head of the Lab's Viral Communications program, co-director of MIT's Communications Futures program, and advisor to damaka. "Our job is to build the collaborative future and show you how you can live in it."

So while some current offerings in the VoIP arena have issues, it looks as though newer companies are coming along to improve customer features and security. MIT alums are certainly contributing to the race to give consumers more reasons to switch to the everything-over-IP lifestyle.

After all, with broadband connectivity at our fingertips, why do we reach for the telephone? The era of universal webcams and headsets is upon us. But business owners and consumers alike should research carefully before jumping to the cheapest VoIP solution—it can have the hidden cost of lost confidentiality. Look for products that treat your communication with care.

About the Author Stacy Swider '89 has experience with cutting-edge materials science, semiconductor equipment, and entrepreneurship. In 2003 she co-founded GateRocket, an IC design-tools company, where she led business activity and secured investment for the company. Currently she is consulting for damaka and other companies. She lives in Bedford, MA.

Published October 2006

What Matters is a guest opinion column written by a different MIT alumnus or alumna each month. The views expressed in What Matters are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Association or of MIT. For previous columns, please see the archives. Would you like to contribute a What Matters column?
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