Customer Reviews

Putting VoIP to Work: Softswitch Network Design and Testing

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book will not teach most readers anything practical about VOIP. I am a CCNP, with a BSEE and Masters degree, and this is the first technical book that I have come across in a long time that will not give me even a single paragraph of useful information that I can deliver to my class room of technical students who want to learn more about VOIP. The only value I can find so far, is that the author references a bunch of RFCs that are related to VOIP. Since this author is probably going to keep writing books, here is my message to the author. You probably dedicated many years of your life to VOIP and related subjects, and perhaps this makes you an "expert". But the average technical person in the world would greatly appreciate a layman's term high level introduction paragraph or 2, to each and every single technical subject that you are going to talk about, before you start rattling off protocols like H.248 vs H.245 vs H.323 vs H.225 like on page 4 of your book. My only consolation to having purchased this horrible book is that I bought an inexpensive used one, right here on Amazon. This book had nothing but 5 stars by the previous Amazon reviewers and I trusted their judgement. Boy are they wrong! Amazon has advertized that a book called VOIP for DUMMys will be released in June 2005 and I cant wait for this book to be available. Unfortunately, my class begins next week, so I will be forced to use the dry Cisco books.

We have spent the better part of the last seven years trying to create a nationwide infrastructure to support IP services and applications. In spite of the great progress, this is still work in progress. A large question still exists. How are we dealing with the physical and security limitations of packet technologies in the wide area? Some of these early concerns were covered in my first book "IP Telephony, The integration of robust VoIP services", sponsored by Hewlett-Packard / Agilent Technologies and published by Prentice-Hall. But that was only the beginning...there is a lot more work that needs to be done before we can safely say we have hit the target of ubiquitous "seamless integration" of applications and services...and let's not forget that in the end, we will have to address the manner in which we access and manipulate large scale and distributed data across the wide area.

In my second book I cover SIP, H.323, SCTP, MGCP, H.248 and other IP protocols with interoperability test cases and call flows. Understanding the enormity of protocol interoperability is only half the battle. The other half is choosing the architecture that will deliver the performance and product features. The new battlefield the will determine the feasibility of a lot of new network designs will be around data access and manipulation. IT systems and network systems tend to want to blend into each other, but can it be done with the state of the art in data base design? More to come...Enjoy the book.

Bill