A little history about me, what I did in the 90s that made me a little famous.

In the early 90s I started working at Nortel Networks, one of the biggest telecom companies at the time. My Job was to lead a group of 8 engineers investigating telecommunication technology evolution.

We decided to investigate if we can make phone calls over the “new” IP packet based asynchronous network.

Up to that point all telephone calls were carried over the synchronous switched PSTN network which physically connected the 2 end points to each other over a dedicated link.

The wisdom at the time was that you needed a switched synchronous network to make phone calls or stream any kind of media because voice and video were synchronous media by nature and needed a synchronous dedicated channel. TV stations for example broadcast over dedicated committed channels (synchronous).

In the early 90s the web was created using an IETF protocol called HTTP . Which was not a real time or point to point protocol. It was initially only used to send text and images with a best effort transport. No one cared if the text or image took a few seconds to load.

My team at nortel and a few other people in the telecom industry wanted to bet that this new IP network will be used so much in the future that it will have a bigger reach, and will not be limited by the dedicated channel restrictions and will have much higher throughput and also will have better ways to control quality. We were starting to see some proposals at the time about quality guarantees and things like that. We also knew that the bandwidth will be so cheap that it will dramatically reduce the cost of phone calls, especially long distance.

The rest of the telecom industry thought we were crazy. Most of the funding was going to bigger and better dedicated links like ATM, ISDN…

Our VP of advanced technology had some extra funding he did not know what to do with, so he gave it to us to try it out.

In 1996 we made the first voice over IP call on the Nortel IP network between Dallas and Toronto. At the same time a few other telecom  companies were starting to make similar calls over their network using an old ITU (International Communications Union) protocol called H.323. That protocol was an afterthought expanding the H.320 protocol which was voice over synchronous network.

At the same time IETF was working on a protocol at the same level as HTTP called SIP which was intended originally to carry text messaging over the IP network.

We thought that SIP was the answer to setting up and carrying phone calls over the IP network. We were also a minority there too. Most people in the field thought that the ITU h.323 would be the one to get adopted if this technology ever got adopted.

So we were betting on carrying voice conversations over an asynchronous network, using a protocol that was intended for messaging not phone calls. I remember in one of the IETF meetings I went up on stage and suggested this. Tens of people lined up behind the microphone to comment. I noticed at the front of the line a famous engineer who used to work for Bell Core and then went to Microsoft. I was so excited that this famous guy was going to comment on my proposal, until he said “I think this is the stupidest proposal I have ever heard”.

But we kept at it and Nortel kept funding us. They wanted to be seen in the IP standards bodies because they were looking to buy Bay Networks and try to compete with Cisco.

We filed for Patents on the technology and we continued to preach in the standard bodies and industry forums.

I started participating in IETF to extend SIP to support voice and video and in the ITU on gateway control protocols between old switched systems and new packet networks (the 2 systems had to talk to each other).

In 1999, the big telecom companies like Nortel, Lucent, British telecom, Japan NTT, Siemens, Ericson, and most others, started realizing that there is a need for standardization and interoperability in this new paradigm. So they created the MSF (Multi Service Forum) industry consortium. I ran for Architecture Lead in the new consortium and I was voted to lead the Architecture group. Our task was to design an architecture and protocols that allow these different networks to interoperate with each other and advance the adoption of SIP as the protocol of choice.

We created interoperability protocols for all networks, new and old to link to each other and complete calls, manage features and billing…. We also decided to contribute our work to the IETF SIP group that by now realized that they will need to enhance SIP for voice and video. And to ITU H.248 Gateway control protocol to manage these gateways between the networks.

In 2000, Cisco got into the field and beat Nortel to create an new Enterprise telephony system that took away a market that Nortel owned 60% of. Nortel Developed the technology but Cisco commercialized faster and better and soon Nortel went bankrupt. I continued my work at a company called Ramp Networks, then at VocalData. By this time I was getting to be known in the field.

In 2002 we finished the work at MSF. I won several awards for that work. Around the same time GSM 3G also decided to adopt the same architecture from MSF, IETF and ITU. IEEE also started getting involved with standardization of devices.

I got my patents awarded in the early 2000s (4 of them) all related to carrying voice calls over the IP network.

Today the public switched telephone network is gone. All media, voice, video, texting, gaming, streaming… is carried over asynchronous IP networks. When you make a call using any device and any network: Cell Phone, whatsApp, facebook Messenger, skype or any other possible way other than shouting, you would be using an architecture and protocols that I invented and have patents on.