Practical VoIP Using VOCAL

Preface

This book is the product of a Silicon Valley success story called Vovida Networks, a high-technology start-up founded by Alan Knitowski and Luan Dang. Vovida recruited an international team of talented developers to build an open source (http://www.opensource.org) phone system that became known as the Vovida Open Communication Application Library (VOCAL). Vovida’s aim was to enable a community of developers to produce new Voice over IP (VoIP) applications that would challenge the established companies, dispel popular beliefs about phone systems, and contribute to a new world of interactivity and interoperability. All of the technololgy that Vovida built is open source. You can build a complete phone system from it, and this book describes how to acquire, compile, install, and work with the applications as an end user, and how to work with the code as a developer.

During the time that Vovida was building its team and developing its applications, the industry was going through an exciting period of growth and innovation. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html) had opened up a previously closed industry to “...promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies.” At the same time, many venture capital firms had relaxed their guidelines about lending and initial public offerings (IPOs). ...