PSTN is dead

Or at least dying… Long live SIP!

So, the last few days have been an interesting endeavor into the world of post-christmas shopping crazed people, Nokia firmware flashing and VoIP. To make a long story short, I recently acquired myself a shiny Nokia N80. Unfortunately this wasn’t the Internet Edition, since this, for some strange reason, is impossible to find in Denmark. Ten intense, sweaty, trembling minutes of firmware flashing took care of that. To my luck it left me with a newborn N80 Internet Edition, and not an extremely expensive paper-weight. The instructions for carrying out this feat are here. I won’t give you any warnings. Go ahead, do it. Just don’t blame me if you mess up your phone.

All this stuff lead me to the unexpected discovery that the N80 can act as a SIP phone. So what does all this gabbering about SIP mean? Allow me to explain. SIP in itself is just a set of rules (a “protocol”) for connecting devices over the Internet. So, “what is so tremendously fantastic about this?”, you might ask. I will answer, but first, let’s look at something we all use everyday. The telephone. This intriguing device was invented somewhere around 120 years ago, but still it’s nature of eating your money has not changed the least. Enter SIP telephony. Using SIP, two (or more) devices can connect to each other over the Internet, and exchange data, for example audio. And what do you have, when two devices are exchanging audio? Correct, you have a telephone.

“Jeez”, you might be thinking, “the guy thinks he has re-invented the telephone. Nope dude, SIP was invented by Mark Handley in 1996. “Allright… But what make a SIP phone better than a normal phone, then?”. Again, I will answer, and this is where SIP shines it’s glory. Remember what I told you about SIP being a set of rules that let two devices connect and share data? This means that you can cut out the middle man, generally known as the telephone company. So, what happens when there is no telephone company? There is no-one to charge you. Yes, it makes telephone calls free. “But isn’t this the same as, say, Skype?”. Skype is free, yes, but it depends on you using the Skype application. A SIP phone in itself requires no specific application. SIP is a “open standard” meaning that anyone can make an appliance that acts as a SIP phone, or write an application that acts as a SIP phone. Furthermore, this means that any SIP phone, be that a real piece of hardware or an application can communicate with any other SIP phone.

Piecing all this together means that you can connect and talk freely from any SIP phone to any other, given you have some sort of Internet access. This is truly amazing. SIP is a real alternative to the old PSTN (“Public Switched Telephone Network”), taking away the telephone companies’ monopolies, and enabling free voice communication, from anywhere, to anywhere in the world.

Enabling SIP on the N80 is truly a great step forward from Nokia. I can now call any SIP phone directly from my N80. I can also call any Google Talk account, since they decided to support SIP. And it’s all free. Using, for example, sipphone.com’s service, I can also place calls to old PSTN phones, anywhere in the world at very low rates.

But the most important thing is not the money, it’s the open nature of the SIP network. Anyone can connect, anyone can use it, and anyone can talk to anyone, no matter the distance. It’s what telephony should have been. An open infrastructure, controlled by the individuals using it.

The easiest way to set up your N80 Internet Edition as a working SIP phone is to use the service from Gizmo Project. The service is actually owned and run by sipphone.com, but Gizmo Project is their front-end. You simply go to the Gizmo Project website and set up an account. Then you download the Gizmo VoIP application from the N80’s download/catalouge application. That will set up everything, and you will only have to enter your username and password. Bang! Your N80 is now a fully working SIP phone.

Alternatively you can use any other SIP provider. I tested it with iptel.org, and it works just as perfectly. You will have to enter the settings manually though, which can be a bit confusing. Maybe I’ll do a tutorial on that.

More SIP goodness to come!