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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

But telcos can still run voice traffic over “sane” protocols (VoLTE and VoWIFI, for example, are both wrappers over SIP if I'm not mistaken – pretty complex, but still using modern tech). They don't have to be “dumb pipes”, but I don't think there's any need to claw into complicated legacy stuff any more than it is needed to interact with legacy systems.

Totally agree with the what we want part.

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> VoLTE and VoWIFI, for example, are both wrappers over SIP if I'm not mistaken

Not wrappers. VoLTE is literally SIP with extensions. And VoWiFi is literally VoLTE over IPSec/IKE with EAP auth, so SIP over IPSec. Really just bog standard stuffs.

> – pretty complex, but still using modern tech

Not sure about "modern", but yeah pretty much every actor uses SIP one way or another. It does have a few old stuff (one SIP extension of VoLTE is to allow SIP-negotiated IPSec tunnel. For HMAC it supports md5-96 and sha1-96 and that's all.), but nothing that makes you scream of over-complication.

Yeah VoLTE and VoWiFi were just getting rolled out when I left telecom. It was all IMS and hacks on top of SS7 and stuff like that.

WhatsApp really applied a ton of pressure to telcos and changed the game. Do you remember they an international sms in the US was $.60 per message before whatsapp?

Well, relatively modern of course (2000 v. 1981 for SS7 :-)

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