FastTrack

Three years ago, peer-to-peer technology was all the rage made popular by Skype and file sharing applications such as KaZaA, Shareaza, and BitTorrent. I too caught the P2P bug and together with two other co-founders developed a P2P-based distributed telephone switch. Coming from a telecom background in mobile network equipment and Internet Multi-media Subsystem (IMS), we thought the use of P2P for node addressing and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call signaling would make for a powerful and low cost disaggregated telephone soft-switch. We experimented with several P2P protocols including Sun's JXTA, Gnutella2 and FastTrack but eventually ended up with a beta product based on the more structured Pastry P2P design. The rationale was that to have a P2P network that can match the performance of traditional telephone switches, we needed a P2P protocol that is more real-time deterministic and one that can be made practical on limited resource end-user device such as mass market mobile phones.