It's true that broader, mass-market applications could be created for those phones, but that won't happen anytime soon, in part because each manufacturer has its own development environment. This lack of interoperability narrows the market scope for applications and forces developers to recode software for each environment, which ultimately leads to higher prices and more limited choices. Third-party development kits from the likes of Millenigence or Citrix can be used to smooth over these differences, but not without adding cost and complexity to the IP telephony system.
As Art Wittmann points out in this month's Foundations (see page 8), the real difference between companies in the networking industry today isn't in their intellectual property, but in their execution of ideas that are already fairly widely understood. The same holds true for telephone-based applications. If all high-end phones from major telephony manufacturers can run hospitality and other vertical applications, then the real difference between those phones isn't really in the applications, but in the telephone's packaging and design.
WAP WITH WIRES
If the industry is serious about making those silver-screened phones more than just eye candy, then it needs to work together to form a common development environment. Heresy? Hardly. The first steps toward common standards for IP phone applications have already been taken. The Wireless Markup Language (WML) used by the mobile industry for creating applications on mobile phones has been adopted by at least two IP telephony vendors: Avaya, in its new IP phones; and Siemens, in its OptiPoint phones.
But WML alone isn't enough. For one thing, Cisco still uses its own Cisco XML, not WML, on its phones, while Nortel Networks' applications require Citrix technology. What's more, as with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), vendors have written their own proprietary extensions to WML. Thus, while standardized core functionality is set, more advanced features such as enhanced scrolling are still specific to each environment. As long as those differences remain, display telephones may continue to gather a lot of foot traffic at trade shows, but they won't win much mindshare at the desktop.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
