Audio/Video Communications Infrastructure Call
Friday, February 19, 2010
2:00 PM Eastern
Led by: Ben Fineman
Actions, Outcomes, Next Steps
1. Reconvene group in two weeks.
2. SIG will be held at SMM10 in Arlington
Call Notes:
Ben: group formed from perceived need based on community and Megaconference. Talking through dial plan issues our community faces, current schemes available, advantages and disadvantages of schemes and moving to unified solution for our community. Please introduce yourselves - name, where you are from, what you want from this group. Let's start from Pacific coast
Roll Call:
Scott Hipsak - Anchorage Alaska -
Mike Carter and Matt - good timing, interested in doing neighboring, shared dial plan and directories as possible - UM (Minnesota) video conferencing support
Sheila Cisco in FERMI in Batavia IL - v/c coordinator and chair of a WG made up of tech staff and users who advise ESnet users.
Charles Ganzhorn - CISCO in Minnesota
Alisa - TX TeleCo Network in Austin TX
Bob Dixon - OARnet - doing this a long time, beginning of GDS, concerns we can't operate in a vacuum, what we do has to be done in organized way, transitional way - to keep old working with new to avoid disenfranchisement.
Mike from Penn State - worked with Bob Dixon in late 90s. Want to migrate to eliminate GDS from user interface, giving users more web based, shibb'd to be easier for user.
Robbie and Gabe Moulton - The Commons/OSU/Oarnet
Mike LaHaye - Internet2 Director of Tech Services, glad that Internet2 can step up, provide framework and drive a direction for the entire community.
Laurie Kirchmeier from Merit Network in Michigan. Very interested in this topic, lots of interest in Michigan. He asked if Jeanine in Michigan was on the call, and mentioned complexities of dialing...
Steve Kirk from Ohio.
Adam Dobiki from Johns Hopkins, watched the threads and interested to see where this is going.
Leaving the US - are there any international participants? None.
Anyone else we may have missed?
Ken Fox from OARnet
Ben Roy from UWashington
Getting started: Ben's plan for this call is to discuss the challenges with the dial plans we are using and ideas for improvement.
Laurie suggested a quick poll: GDS vs IP? Three GDS, three IP. Ben asked IP users if their institutions didn't use GDS? Less digits to dial. Comment made about being a test site.
Ben said GDS has been the most recent initiative but has failed to achieve success. Critical mass, penetration. Ben is hoping to hear comments as to why? What are the challenges?
Scott - no web page only a wiki page. Hard to get a hold of North American route. Nick Thompson. Second part is a sales and marketing. We have to get it out, tell the community as a whole, and the vendors - they need to know about GDS and articulate why dial plan is needed. Tandberg is good. Polycom doesn't care, neither does CISCO. Need the info, need to put in the form to have people say it's cool, I want to use GDS.
Ben asked benefit of GDS vs. IP:
? As you can take web sites and balance by domain name, you are doing load balancing. Not cross country, when can be accessed locally. Routing, direct IP path of a call, may not have anything to do with how call is routed. Remove the application from the network layer.
Scott - in Alaska, service provider with competing entities. Private circuits behind firewalls in medical community. Needs to abstract IP dialing from the network. Customer over satellite. Two dialing options. Need to get competing entities to get along so docs dial the same to get to different locations. Huge, have to sell to both customers and competing entities. He is stuck in the middle.
Ben asked if using GDS is an achievable result? Dial digits are what anything can dial vs. uri strings because of vintages of end points and vendors. No guarantee it can be dialed, and what is the behavior of the end point. (vintage, gatekeeper, etc.) Dial digits look up mechanism is well defined.
Ben asked if there is anyone on the call to suggest solution other than GDS? Lack of adoption, stale web pages, is problem in academia. He? Doubted if it was still in use. Info search for GDS info is very stale. There was talk about exclusive Director Lookup. Lack of penetration, rumors that it is going away, etc. Video is "cool" but not job one. A bit of a niche - recognize there is no agreed upon dialing route throughout the world.
Bob Dixon - associated with The Commons, relied on teaching workshops for Site Coordinators. Clear web site needs to be updated.
Scott suggested listing (understanding security issues) be published with prefix and list them. Then you can see who is joining and build that critical mass, – look we have 10,000 people on GDS you can connect to. Or how many people at an institution connected to. Many have phone extensions but may not be listed. Maybe mention the number of working extensions on a specific prefix. Scott mentioned clinical settings and things set to auto answer. Don't want folks dialing accidentally. Working to move away from that.
Bob said there was a directory, several reiterations over the years. Trouble is, folks move on, hard to maintain, takes significant effort.
UMinn - mentioned localized control, not shared in a tier fashion.
MikePSU asked about integration with SIP, as main protocol and how SIP gets integrated. Bob said there is no SIP dial plan. GDS does not support SIP. Bob does not see people use SIP. (Mostly in R&D and in the desk top items they are looking at - want a person to person dialing based on person.
Bob mentioned keyboard vs. only having a remote control. Desktop systems vs. room systems.
? Wants to dial a number and let the call control plane dial the right number, completely hidden from the users. MikePSU wants to dial name@domain instead of digits. ? said this is problem for creating unified plan.
Scott mentioned Polycom capability of dialing by number or by name. The infrastructure has to understand how to get to the device. Polycom can register three or four variables. Bob@xxx or a number. He mentioned if you know the phone number, you can dial it and it works. No need to retrain the user.
Mike LaHaye - do we tackle interoperability across GDS and SIP? Underneath all is the dial plan. Do we deal with interoperability? Yes.
? said it is a matter of trunking. If destination for out bound call is different protocol, it speaks it, but caller doesn't need to know. Caller's protocol, trunk protocol, receiver protocol.
Comments about state of Minnesota dialing, prefix, asking 10 digit question to internal dialing plan and es prefixes. MJL summarized Charles' comments - dial 9 to get out.
Mike LaHaye is thinking of a dialing plan to accommodate these protocols. Is there a way to build dial plan to accommodate everything, but still transparent to the users.
If ENUM had happened, it would have. End User ENUM is not going to happen.
Database, and the route that would have made that possible will not exist. Hence IME scheme to have numbers generated by number issuing authorities.
Scott does not know if 10 digit dial plan is even possible. He mentioned inability to share number 1001 goes to this gatekeeper and 1002 to another one. Need to share info and have a database for the gatekeepers. Need to break into chunks. Or have Feds say this is how you will do dialing and gatekeeping. Need to have Best Practices - here's how to integrate with your VOIP phone. Don't know if we can get concise and consistent 10 digit numbers. He thinks this could work.
MJL is looking for consistent method for end user to place a call. Critical for us to figure out this for the user if we can. MikePSU commented about no numbers, only people.
Bob asked do we generalize GDS to allow alpha-numeric info. Charles said no. Charles asked about getting this to a 10-digit string. If you're ok with difference in string length, then there's no problem. The GDS is what tells the call routing to look at GDS and ask about that number.
MikePSU - working toward Wizard system that uses phone numbers. Sister project - SIP based soft phone. No numbers on the SIP side, need to dial by user@psu.edu Why is that a good thing? Users aren't good at remembering numbers but they do remember people. Discussion.
Didn't you create a division between SIP people and the not SIP people - they can't call across the boundary. Mike explained the way the call would flow and be converted to their PSU ID.
MJL asked if goal is to take this to extension of IM. MikePSU said yes, it's about communications and people. It all flows together when you discuss this. MJL agrees when sitting at screen with keyboard. He mentioned inability to get phone number - Google query and press the number on the screen. He has been abstracted from it.
MJL agrees need for well-defined dial plan underlying. MJL mentioned goal for helping to find direction for this group. MikePSU agreed what we are trying to do today is not available.
?Charles - could have been built for all SIP entities to be reachable. Interoperability between SIP and not SIP. (PSU made conscience effort to not do this.) This could be enabled in the future.
Shelia mentioned not having unified or SIP mindset. You could have a GDS number or dialing plan for particular service. Concerned about multipoint.
MikePSU mentioned having it set up to dial Ben and to end up in this conference.
Scott is hearing need to press vendors to put keyboards on endpoints. SIP is way to go, but we need to worry about transition. PSU Mike talked about room service limitations, web based interface for control for that room system.
Bob said most endpoints have web interface. More for system control. You can bring keyboard on your screen - which is totally unusable. Great if we can add a simple, usable keyboard.
Scott sees UI being able to resolve this. Would work beautifully, and be an elegant solution. In a medical situation, remote tethered or hidden, may not have objects in the room - we'd need to overcome this. Touch panels would work in an integrated room.
Ben said we have 5 minutes left. Lots of good discussion today. He thinks it's clear this is a good group to reconvene, together work toward goals -
Developing best practices for community
Figuring out where we want community to end up
To continue this discussion, Ben wants to form a SIG, bi-weekly calls, wiki set up on the Interent2 wiki space. Dictionary and hash-out wiki items. Planning SIG at SMM10. For now, Ben hopes to see you on next call in about two weeks. Mailing list is active and open. Will continue this discussion. Notes will be distributed following call as well as video archive.
Thank you all, great discussion.
End 2:57 PM
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