> It was. XMPP, aka Jabber, started late 1998… Skype was first released in 2003…
But XMPP didn’t have VoIP until 2005.[0] More importantly, XMPP and SIP don’t have a great story for NAT traversal and privacy. And corporations are shying away from open standards, e.g. Google Hangouts federation, or when Apple FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard.[1]
A very long time ago, before even Jabber was around, I played with PGPfone[2] on my 33 MHz laptop.[3] No FPU. 128-bit symmetric encryption. For voice, the processing power problem is solved to overkill. But PGPfone proved to be useless because it didn’t traverse NAT.
The ultimate lesson from PGPfone: NAT is inherently repressive. It divides the Internet into haves and have-nots, and most everybody is a have-not. If you want to contact another have-not, you must do it through the graces of someone who has public IP address space. That is why I started advocating for IPv6 long before any of my peers.[4]
> It was. XMPP, aka Jabber, started late 1998… Skype was first released in 2003…
But XMPP didn’t have VoIP until 2005.[0] More importantly, XMPP and SIP don’t have a great story for NAT traversal and privacy. And corporations are shying away from open standards, e.g. Google Hangouts federation, or when Apple FaceTime was supposed to be an open standard.[1]
A very long time ago, before even Jabber was around, I played with PGPfone[2] on my 33 MHz laptop.[3] No FPU. 128-bit symmetric encryption. For voice, the processing power problem is solved to overkill. But PGPfone proved to be useless because it didn’t traverse NAT.
The ultimate lesson from PGPfone: NAT is inherently repressive. It divides the Internet into haves and have-nots, and most everybody is a have-not. If you want to contact another have-not, you must do it through the graces of someone who has public IP address space. That is why I started advocating for IPv6 long before any of my peers.[4]
[0]https://slashdot.org/story/05/12/16/070245/google-jabber-and...
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1xuzif/what_ever_hap...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGPfone
[3]http://lowendmac.com/pb/powerbook-190cs.html
[4]https://version6.ru/en/ipv6-for-freedom