I’ve written about Voice over IP (VoIP) before… it’s great… but it has some technological hurdles if it is to become mainstream… or even notably improve…

Firstly, the phone is much easier to use than a computer based VoIP solution. Pick it up, dial a number, and you’re connected (maybe just to voicemail, but connected nonetheless). Solution? A Vonage-esque melding of the two: easy of POTS use, power of VoIP.

Secondly, in a word: bandwidth. For a “good” VoIP connection you really need at least 128kbps (256 prefered) syncronous (per two-sided conversation). That’s not really a big deal for homes (cable, DSL, fixed wireless, etc.), where it is a big deal is with latency. You need a snappy response time in addition to a fat pipe, as it were. This is more difficult in mobile deployments due simply to the nature of coverage. You’re 90%(-ish) covered on University Campuses (campi?), at home, and at work, maybe at the city park, if you’re lucky. But you’re out of luck in your car, or hiking, or at the cafe’, or… etc. Even if you’ve got the pipe, you may not have the low-latencies needed for VoIP.

How do you resolve that? Well, one way is how Skype is approaching it, inovative CODECs. Unfortunately, they’re proprietary.

Proprietary, for practical purposes, means they’re either narrowly deployed or drive the cost of implimentation/usage up (not good). Additionally, proprietary also means no (or very limited) peer review of the source, which results in poor security.

Vonage uses standard voice CODECs. That’s the good news. The bad news? They’re old and terribly out of date compared to the compression and quality of modern CODECs.

What we really need is a W3C of sound technologies, broken into workgroups that focus on specific areas (local storage based music, Voice, etc., in both streaming and non-streaming flavors). These, in turn should tie in with the video folks who have local-based video clip, TV, DVD, HD, etc., with streaming and non-streaming flavors), and, ideally, the two groups would collaborate for use of the other groups standards (to tackle stuff like music videos, video conferencing, etc. (using local or streamed combinations of the complimentary audio & video CODECs).

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen this collaboration. Sure the JPEG guys (and gals) are working on pics and motion, and whoever is in the MPEG (is there such a thing) are working on theirs… But what of a group for audio… Is it just a hodgepodge of disassociated circus acts?

Imagine if the folks at Microsoft, Pioneer, Maxell, Skype, Vonage, AT&T, Ogg Vorbis, etc. all joined an audio special interest group (A-SIG) (similar to what we’ve got with Bluetooth?) to produce open-source, freely licensed audio CODEC… Then imagine that their work plugged in seamlessly with a V-SIG (Video SIG), and vice versa… No more worries about Real Player, Windows Media 9, QuickTime, Divx, Xvid, etc… We’d just have a family of CODECs which would be used by the author for his/her various audience configurations….

Nirvana?