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[edit] What is Wongi?
Wongi is a royalty free, open communications system for digital voice. It differs from H323 and SIP in that it is targeted at many-to-many communications over a local area network, rather than one-to-one communications over the Internet. It started out as a what if discussion in the ##australia Freenode IRC channel, resulting in the original wiki site. Wongi comes in two flavours, IP Wongi for communications over a TCP/IP network, and RF Wongi for communications over radio.
It gets its name from the aboriginal word wongi, a verb meaning to talk.[1]
[edit] Why?
None of the existing VoIP solutions, to my knowledge, offer many-to-many discussions, without the use of some intermediate server. Other systems and software packages I'm aware of:
- Skype -- One-to-one communications, Proprietary
- Ekiga -- One-to-one communications, SIP and H323, Open-Source
- Microsoft NetMeeting -- One-to-one communications, H323, Proprietary
- TeamSpeak -- Many-to-Many communications, Client-Server based, Proprietary
- Mumble -- Many-to-Many communications, Client-Server based, Open-source
Many of these are intended to work over the Internet. This is fine, but suppose you're organising a big LAN. You haven't got all your network infrastructure together, but you've got a load of PDAs, and a wireless router/AP. Wongi allows you to load software on each of these PDAs, connect them to the wireless network, and effectively turn them into two-way radios for efficient communications.
The same infrastructure can also be used during the LAN -- rather than setting up one box to host a TeamSpeak server, having to tell everyone the IP address, and having that box get inundated with the volume of traffic, instead separate Wongi nets for each game are constructed, with traffic being exchanged between those participating stations using multicast UDP.
In the amateur radio world, sure the concept of D-Star is great... but there are a couple of problems:
- D-Star is not completely open -- some parts of the specification are hidden from public view.
- The AMBE codec used is a proprietary codec which cannot be implemented on a computer due to licensing reasons. This effectively means you cannot implement D-Star as a sound-card based mode.
- It is only available on 2m, 70cm and 23cm. It is not possible to use it on 20m for instance.
[edit] How?
At this stage, the first move towards this goal, is the creation of the Wongi POC (Proof-of-Concept) Protocol. Please see the Wongi POC page for details. Along with this, will be a reference implementation in C, that will form the basis of a trial system.
Once we've got the specifics of how this is going to work nutted out, we can set to work on a formally defined protocol specification, that will make use of existing standards and RFCs.
Update: Work has halted on Wongi POC... and instead, the focus has shifted to RF Wongi as an alternative for D-Star. The plan is to implement a full system stack (based on the 7-layer OSI model) that can be applied to internet communications, and should give us the scope for repeater linking and other features.
[edit] Who do I contact?
At the moment, this is my pet project. My contact details are on my website. I can also be found in the ##australia IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (web-based IRC client here).
[edit] References
- ↑ The Macquarie Dictionary, Third Edition, ISBN 0949757896 page 2442
