Jonathan Christensen at eComm 2008: Ten Years of Internet Communications

Lee Dryburgh, producer of last month’s eComm 2008 (Emerging Communications) has just published a transcript of Jonathan Christensen’s keynote presentation that opened the conference. By providing an historical perspective as well as mentioning the conditions that allowed Skype to be born when it was, Jonathan set the context in which all the other speakers could comfortably present their innovative ideas and concepts. Key points:

• a brief history of the evolution of VoIP services
• complementary innovations required to improve service quality and reliability
• tandem trunking and the march to the death of physical distance
• early consumer VoIP: Free World Dialup and the Komodo ATA
• initial commercial consumer services: Vonage, long distance players, cablecos
• "The landline telephony game becomes cheap, boring, stagnant and at the same time [was] losing to mobile"
• Mom disconnects her phone line that she had had since Jonathan was a little kid.
• the final nail in the "death of distance": VoIP export networks – sending Vonage sets to relatives overseas
• disruption in numbering plans: losing their geophysical and political bonds
• Leading up to the birth of Skype

In 2003, I was leaving Microsoft, I was standing on a piece of land in California that I was thinking about moving to and I got a call from Jeff Pulver. I had called him in a beautiful sunny afternoon. I totally remember it. And he said, "Hello Jonathan. What is up?" This is like June of 2003. I said, "Jeff, we have to build a client that is super lightweight and simple and just works. It gets over the NAT traversal issues. It just works. People can just download this thing and make it work." And Jeff said, "Well you know, Free World Dialup works and the clients are getting better all the time and there are third party providers who are billions." I said, "Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, look, it is way too hard to use. We just need to build the client that works."

A few weeks later, a friend of mine, Allan Duric who was working at Global IP Sound at that time, got me an early beta account, pre-release account of Skype and the lights went on. And that was in the summer of 2003. By Fall VON, there were 500,000 registrations. I was in Boston and everybody was talking about Skype. And most people were pretty angry about it especially the "SIP die-hards". Skype had made some early noise about, "Oh well, we do not use SIP because we do not need to and that really ticked off people who have been working in this space for a while.

• IM as the foundation of the next wave:
  • "I Am therefore IP, IM is the run away next generation signaling infrastructure. We were all talking at that time about what is the next signaling infrastructure."
• The conditions that allowed Skype to happen:
  • "….we have chat in our IM client and so on and so forth. There was a robust audio stack, multi-media PC’s were well-penetrated, broadband penetration was on the rise …."
  • "The P2P file sharing network had introduced new paradigms for low cost infrastructure. The NAT traversal techniques were well-known at that point. Maybe not deployed, but well-known."
  • "The IM networks were well deployed for sure. All that Skype did was that they closed the loop. They added the other 2% at the top and they made this thing work."
• The paradigm shift to the smart platform at the end point.
• Opportunities in the "mobile mess"

So for the next 10 years, I think that there is the possibility that we will enter the era of rich Internet communications. Again, the same list as before, but add to that new mash ups of fixed mobile convergence of web-based communication and voice and video and other real time communications perfectly mashed together in ways that developers can recreate and mix and match applications. We will have freedom to these applications on a new platform that includes mobility.

• Questions on the eBay-Skype relationship, the complexity of interconnecting to the Skype network at a high volume level and a perspective on last summer’s outage. Included in his responses:

The projects that I am leading in my team and that we are working on for the next 2 years or 3 years I think are ground-breaking projects. And that sense of innovation and hard work and startupness is very much alive in the company. I cannot really talk about the specifics, the things that we are going to be rolling out but I am really serious when I say that I am personally excited about what we are working on. Like almost no time before my career.

View the slides here or download them here.

Tags: Skype, Jonathan Christensen, VocalTec, Jeff Pulver, Free World Dialup

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