Comment by e12e

11 years ago

I recently discovered DTLS and QUIC, of which DTLS appear to be most interesting as a "general use" thing. We do of course not actually have a shortage of protocols, but it'd be nice to have something that was a little more suited for the "new" Internet. Full authentication/encryption, something lighter than TCP for multimedia -- and something that actually has a hope of crossing cheap DSL routers.

QUIC looks interesting, but a) is very concentrated on being a transport for http/2, b) is in flux, and c) Google apparently haven't donated any code that makes sense for production (excepting client-side in Chromium).

DTLS is closely connected with WebRTC, has several implementations (though, apparently no support in Erlang/Elixir yet?) and given the current push behind WebRTC appears to be here to stay.

Honestly, I don't know how interesting "hardware phones" are anymore. As long as one can get something to work over wlan with android, things "should" be real-world deployable. And I don't have 100s of SIP devices, so I don't need to care ;-).

It may turn out that wlan+android+WebRTC+DTLS never achieves the kind of latency needed for good live video/audio... I haven't experimented that much, but hopefully it's "good enough".

At any rate, appears that SIP really is the only interop that currently works. At first glance it does seem a little complex for the use-case of text messages, inconvenient in terms of addressing -- but maybe a core focused on WebRTC/IPv6 with gateways for SIP the way to go.

Either way, I guess as long as no big players want interop, it doesn't really matter. One'll just have to make a solution that works for inter-org/inter-friends communication, with the option to federate with those interesting in joining/building a new network. Doesn't look like it'll be easy to take a bite out of FB Messenger/Google Hangouts/WhatsApp etc.