Gaboogie conference calling is reinventing itself as Lypp. The new service, which features a completely re-architected platform, will debut later in September in an invite-only beta. All existing Gaboogie members will be invited to join and use the Lypp service for free. 

The company says that the changes “will ensure reliable, high quality calls and eliminate the dependencies on partners whose service has caused us and our users to experience some growing pains,” according to Gaboogie’s August 30 email. Founders Dan Gibbons and Erik Lagerway promise Voxilla readers a look “under the kimono” soon. 

Joost has opened up a new API that will let developers build widgets that can be installed in Joost’s peer-to-peer TV client, reportsNewTeeVee.com. 

Samsung is promoting its new VoIP-capable monitors for videoconferencing. Electronista has the highlights. 

Broadband in remote locations got a boost yesterday from Solis Energy with its solar-powered technology for WiFI routers. The UK’s Techworld has the story.

Wireless aftermarket equipment company Certicell is giving teen whiz kid George Hotz, who unlocked the Apple iPhone, a new Nissan 350Z and a consulting contract. Here.

PhoneGnome customers can relax. The feared service interruption that users were alerted to last night likely won’t materialize. And besides, if the VoIP service doesn’t work, with PhoneGnome you always have the fallback POTS.

Yesterday evening, the company sent out a notice that one of its providers was shutting down operations on August 31 — TelEvolution deserves credit for coming out with the information before customers experienced problems. Because this provider hosted a significant part of TelEvolution’s traffic, the development could have had a massive impact on the VoIP provider.

Today it’s looking like the worst can be averted.”Other partners are stepping up and it’s looking like it’s only going to be a minor disruption, if that,” says TelEvolution CEO David Beckemeyer.

In the future, disruptions of this type will be even less likely, according to Beckmeyer.

“We’re working with a better vendor — Hurricane Electric — that offers better service guarantees. But,” he adds, “we’re paying five times as much.”

There’s a warning here for other VoIP providers, says Beckmeyer. “The way the industry is set up, individual companies can pull the rug out from under you overnight. A lot of VoIP players are one step away from the same thing.”

I guess we now know why Earthlink’s much-hyped metro WiFi never saw the light of day. The company today announced massive cuts in its operations and workforce – among the casualties is Donald Berryman, executive vice president and president of municipal networks. Could the company’s recent red ink have anything to do with the fact that Earthlink was charging about $50 a month for DSL when the competition was charging $25? The Biz Journal has the details.

The most entertaining explanation I’ve heard about last week’s Skype outage is this posting from Rostislav Siryk in his blog:

“Skype’s outage is …[a] natural consequence of quantum physics. Because users [are] like atoms.”

In other words, it’s within the realm of possibility that all the world’s PCs will download a Microsoft update and reboot at the identical moment.

On the other hand, when was the last time you saw an object move by itself as a result of all its atoms just happening to tip the same direction?

I thought so. That’s why many are saying Skype’s explanation, issued this morning, is fishy.

Certainly, no one at Skype or Ebay is saying much. My request for a real live conversation last week was answered politely with a copy of the company’s then-current statement and a link to the Skype blog. As Skype has talked with me openly in the past, it’s thought provoking at the very least.

But this discussion begs the question. Even accepting the Microsoft-did-it explanaon, the outage is nonetheless an object lesson for the entire VoIP industry of another immutable natural law: Murphy’s.

It highlights a fundamental industry problem, says VoIP gray-beard Erik Lagerway. Providers ultimately don’t control the underlying network that delivers their service.

“I’ve been in this business 15 years and over that time VoIP has been in beta 15 years. The main reason is that the network that people are riding on is unreliable,” says Lagerway, whose VoIP pedigree includes executive roles at Shift Networks and Eyeball Networks as well as founding Vocalscape Communications and Xten Networks (now Counterpath).

Unless a provider owns the upstream broadband network, a ‘best effort’ service is all a provider can promise, according to Lagerway.

“If the upstream provider has decided they’re going to be making some changes, you’re going to be feeling those changes. If the upstream provider decides they want to filter out [other providers' VoIP] packets or handle them with less priority than their own packets, you’re going to experience that regardless of what kind of service you have.

“If they decide they’re going to route packets to Istanbul, they can do that,” he says, adding, “The long and short of it is that the incumbents have their long arm deeply inside the network.”

Having said that, Lagerway does allow that Skype’s proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture — a closely guarded “black box” — leaves the system unnecessarily vulnerable in a way that conventional centralized services like Vonage don’t.

“My main issue with Skype is that it’s a closed system,” says Lagerway, an outspoken evangelist for the open communications standard, SIP. “Having one guy [Janus Friis] create the entire peer-to-peer architecture, it’s destined to fail — no one is smart enough.

“What’s going to happen when the next Windows update comes along? What this says is that, at any given moment, Microsoft can screw over every single Skype user. That’s a serious problem. The fact that no one even thought of this is mind-boggling.”

Lagerway points to Skype’s implementation — a self-organizing P2P network operating exclusively on users’ PCs — as untenable for providing a service to millions of users.

“To have such a dependency on so many people’s PCs, that’s pretty risky business. What happens if a whole lot of people decide to de-install?”

A better approach for a P2P network is an architecture that fails back to a centralized client-server network — the way TelTel’s P2P VoIP network operates, for example. “That’s the way SIP operates,” Lagerway explains. “It’s a peer-to-peer network but it bootstraps the operation with a client-server network.”

In the end, while no one can ever fully escape Murphy’s Law, a more open approach could have helped Skype avert this particular disaster, Lagerway says.

“If this [Skype] had been an open standards projects, you would have had much more peer review. If they had used SIP, this particular outage would have been less likely. It could have possibly been averted,” he explains. “Correcting it now is going to be costly.”

The legendary Murphy could have told Skype that, too.

Free World Dial-Up. The name just breathes a certain anarchy appropriate to the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Which, from The Phone Company’s point of view, is exactly what it was when the world’s first IP phone network debuted in 1995.

Now FWD’s founder and sole financer Jeff Pulver — it’s not exaggerating to call him the Abraham of VoIP — has decided that it’s time for his baby to stand on its own two feet.

In keeping with Pulver’s vision of “participatory communications,” last Friday FWD users were asked to support the service as paying members, who will cooperatively set the organization’s priorities and determine its future direction.

So far the response has been promising, according to FWD president Daniel Berninger, with several hundred users signing up for the $30 individual membership and a number of business users signing up at the $300 business level. FWD has about 700,000 users, with about 30,000 online at any given time.

“Once we get on our feet and sustaining, and it’s member-driven, we can focus on members’ priorities,” explains FWD president Daniel Berninger. “One of the complaints [by members] over the years has been about support and reliability. One of our top priorities is to look at reliability and support and streamline those.”

But that’s just the beginning. Just as FWD was “disruptive” — one of Pulver’s favorite phrases — in 1995, the organization continues to advance that mission in its new incarnation.

“FWD is really about evangelism for the [VoIP] industry and ecosystem,” Berninger says. “We say to people, use FWD and all the other services out there — all the options for people, all the alternatives to the phone company. Our goal is not survive or fail on any one service.”

For businesses, this evangelism plays out to make FWD a business development platform, according to Berninger.

“The good thing today is that we have a lot more options to communicate. The bad news is that it’s really complicated. What FWD tries to do is help people navigate that complexity. The basic idea is to provide tools for people to create their own solutions.”

That’s why the FWD network was always open to any IP network, and any IP phone or ATA can be configured to work with the service.

In addition to continuing the focus on opening new alternatives, the organization is also looking at evaluating the growing number of VoIP/WiFi handsets. “We want to show that you can do some interesting things with VoIP/WiFi handsets,” says Berninger.

One thing that won’t be a focus is the PSTN. FWD began as an exclusively IP network, and while it has added some out-calling features, the service remains focused on IP communications.

“Since we were looking to provide an alternative to the PSTN, we’re not in a hurry to interconnect,” Berninger explains, calling the PSTN “the third rail” for IP voice communications because of taxes, regulation and E-911.

“We’ve had a number of requests [for PSTN connection]. But we’re trying to break people of that habit,” he says, adding, “It’s a very different world view.” You could call it disruptive.