What Would Telephony be Like if we Designed it Today? (with demo)

Like a coal-fired, steam-powered relic of the past, telephony keeps chugging along, seemingly oblivious to the changes that have happened in the world.  And there have been a lot of changes, particularly with what technology has made possible.  Thanks to the Internet, moving data is cheap, and distance doesn't matter.  Thanks to Integrated Circuits, computers fit in your pocket.

With tools like these at our disposal, what kind of a system would we build for telephony?  What kind of a system would we make for people to talk, over distance, with other people?

Telephony ought to work the way the Internet works, both technically and socially.  If we designed telephony today, it would be designed around packets instead of circuits.  It would put users in control of their time and attention, and it would create new economic models for voice that move beyond service providers and consumers of "minutes".

In this talk, we'll cover the challenges and opportunities of re-designing telephony with modern tools that work the way people want to work, rather than the way the networks force them to.