[*] Last night's meeting

[Bill Reid]

Hi All,

Thanks Les for hosting the meeting last night. We had nine come out and enjoyed 
a lively discussion. Also enjoyed Les's demo of splicing fibre.

One topic that we discussed was why are the vast majority of IP phones not 
accessible from the Internet. I was lamenting that this has been the big failure 
of the whole shift to VoIP. I proposed that you should be able to phone someone 
by phone#@company.domain or even better by using their email address. This of 
course is technically possible and not that difficult to do. Others said that 
this would be not good because of spam. There is some validity to this concern 
but I was thinking that unlike email this should be even easier to stop. A 
system sort of like captchas should be sufficient.  Asking the caller to respond 
to a question should stop spam. My feeling why this has not happened is probably 
due somewhat to security concerns but probably more lack of knowledge and a PSTN 
centric view of telephony.  It also may be when IP phones were initially being 
rolled out VOI (Voice over Internet) had many issues with quality. Those 
concerns are generally not an issue now.

-- Bill