For those of you who follow the VoIP ThinkTank podcasts, first thank you. There seem to be a pretty good number of you.

This morning most of the VoIP ThinkTank group assembled for another podcast. To explain, we're all here talking about VoIP and VoIP related technologies. We may well dive into IMS, IM, SMS, video or any other number of related unified communications topics, but VoIP is really the core of where we began. So we use VoIP technologies. And in case you haven't been paying attention, there are a lot of those.

We gathered this morning using Gizmo initially, and met on a conference bridge there. Quality was mediocre even after we dialed back in. So we shifted to Skype and began there. Quality was up and down, but it seemed passable.Then bang, I was gone. And I'm the recorder. I think some of the others were too. It took quite some doing, rebooting and fiddling to get reassembled when quality started just tanking.

As Andy Abramson put it on our call, "this is an example of why the technology isn't ready for prime time." Today it clearly was not ready for prime time. I told the other members I'd see what I could do with the recorded audio, but frankly, it's not usable. I've spent three hours processing it to the left and right trying to extract anything worth using, and it just isn't there.

So the planned VoIP ThinkTank podcast I was hoping to put online this evening is a bust. We have our next session scheduled, but it's still a few weeks out. In the meantime, I'll see if we can reschedule, perhaps in smaller groups of 2-3 of us to put some thoughts together. Our topics for discussion were federating IM systems and all the talk of interoperabilty between MSN and Yahoo, Martin raised the reality of SMS as the real IM giant, and the one telcos pursue because it brings a revenue stream. Outside the US, SMS or text messaging is just plain huge business. And we touched on Skype and the reverse engineering of their protocol. Opinions vary on that one.

My apologies for our technical issues. A few listners, very few, have commented when the audio quality was less than good. For us, we think you should share our pain...share our experience with VoIP, be it good or bad. Today it was so bad it really just can't be shared.


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