Pigs are flying - Image credit Joshua Lutz

Pigs have apparently begun to fly as Google and AT&T seem to agree on something.  Both companies expressed a desire to get rid of the legacy analog phone network so in December 2009, AT&T wrote a letter to the FCC advocating the abandonment of the old telephone system.

Google is adding a feature to their Google Voice software that allows direct calling over the Internet using the Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) standard.  More specifically, Google is adding a SIP URI identity to Google Voice customers.  A SIP URI is the Voice over IP (VoIP) equivalent of a telephone number, but it’s reachable over the Internet.  SIP URIs are nothing new and have been an IETF RFC 2396 standard for some time, but Google’s endorsement can only help the standard.

The need for SIP URI adoption is very important because it facilitates a pure VoIP implementation over the Internet that bypasses the analog or digital switching world.  With the vast majority of newer business telephone systems that use VoIP, businesses and organizations have not been able to connect their phones to each other’s business without the old telephone system acting as an intermediary.  This indirect method of VoIP communications not only increases the cost of telephony, but the old analog phone network reduces quality to a very narrow frequency of sounds inadequate for faithful speech rendition and music.  Wide-band telephony (sometimes marketed as “HD Voice”) sounds wonderful on a pure Internet Protocol network but ends up sounding like plain old narrow-band analog telephony if it has to cross the old legacy network.  As Google and other companies put their weight behind SIP URI, we might finally see this standard gain some steam.