If there is anything that I believe the VoIP industry needs is a customer premise device with an open sourced firmware. VoIP is one of the most complicated technologies because there are so many different variables which can affect quality of service, so the more freedom you have to understand your system, the better. And the CPE is one of the main devices where an open sourced option simply doesn’t exist. The most frustrating part of my job, from my experience, is dealing with CPEs.
Here’s a typical situation I run into at work. A customer is experiencing random beeping noises on their phone line, or their phones ring randomly at night, in the most inconvenient times. I do some basic troubleshooting by going through SIP traces, but nothing I find indicates there is a problem. So I go to Linksys’s website to look up the known issues with their firmware and ATAs, but of course, Linksys doesn’t document any of them. So I upgrade the firmware to the newest version, crossing my fingers that it will fix the problem, but it doesn’t. In fact, upgrading to the newest firmware just breaks PPPoE and now I have even more problems, and an even angrier customer. I try contacting a technician to open a ticket to fix the problem with the firmware, but it seems as though my request is pretty much ignored because the device I’m using has been discontinued. The techs really don’t care about fixing problems with a discontinued device.
We would have much better firmware with the open source model. With open source we would have:
- A change log
- Access to the code for troubleshooting
- More invative code, perhaps even an emulator for troubleshooting
- Faster response time for bug fixes
- Less worries about end of life issues
- More developers working on the code
I realize that VoIP is a carrier and service provider industry, so it’s important that the service provider has control over the firmware/hardware running on the service to ensure QoS, but I’m sure there is a way that the provider could have control over what version, or modification is running on the service. But an Open Sourced firmware would be a valuable asset to the provider.
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