An interesting thing happened today... the comcast installer came to my house to install a new service (I just moved). And I realized that this whole VoIP thing was really happening, if there was a guy in my small town who's job was VoIP. I mean, someone else other than me.

One thing that's really hard for me, and probably anyone, is to time what's going to be next. I am thinking that we've got the whole world of IP services availble now for the picking. Any service that involves voice can now be pretty easily deployed into the network, and anyone can subscribe to it. The problem is that it still costs some pretty good money to deploy these services. Even at Versatel Networks (which makes a very excellent product, by the way), most customers are looking at tens of thousands to purchase the platform, and off they go.

I wonder what sort of impact would be made by a generalized service platform for VoIP, based on software and developed through open source. It would have an API that developers could write to, and handle prompt playing, recording, some mixing. It would be a SIP only device - no hardware. You write your application to the API, host it on the computer. Maybe make it really scalable, maybe make it fault tolerant....