A trove of VoIP and IP telephony treasures

In my never-ending quest for good sources of information about voice over IP and IP telephony, I'm continually cruising the Web looking for the same. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a darn good collection of talks, papers, vendor lists, industry organizations, Web pages, Internet RFCs and reviews at a place that I didn't expect to find such coverage—namely, from the venerable but still interesting Dr. Raj Jain, noted IP expert (and apparent VoIP and Internet Telephony aficionado). He's still on the faculty at Ohio State University, because that's where his Web pages reside. I had the privilege and the pleasure of teaching on the faculty with Dr. Jain at Interop from 1996 to 2001, and always enjoyed the opportunity to hear him speak. He's a dynamite instructor who's always worth listening to and learning from!

• Pointers to papers and videotaped lectures from Dr. Jain, colleagues, and students at Ohio State on subjects that range from VoIP Products and Services to related protocols and standards, plus issues and challenges.
• A nice bibliography of books and industry reports on VoIP and related subjects (no titles newer than 2001, however). A reasonably comprehensive list of IETF working groups related to VoIP, multicast, and quality of service topics.
• An interesting list of VoIP gateway vendors that ranges from 3COM to VocalTec.
• A lengthy list of IP Telephony and VoIP Web pages that include lots of useful info.
• A list of related Internet RFCs that goes up through RFC 3136 (dated June 2001).

He's also got a nicely formulated set of queries into the IETF's various databases on terms that include voice, media, PSTN, and telephony, among others.

Altogether, this is a nice resource, even if it is a bit dated. Maybe more of us should e-mail Dr. Jain and ask him to put somebody to work on bringing this great collection up to date!

Ed Tittel is a regular contributor to numerous TechTarget Web sites, and the author of over 100 books on a wide range of computing subjects from markup languages to information security. He's also a contributing editor for Certification Magazine, and series editor for Que Publising's Exam Cram 2 series of cert prep books. E-mail Ed at etittel@techtarget.com.