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IP Telephony Hardware Stretching Toward Home Users
Banjonardo writes "On today's edition of The Contra Costa Times , there was an interesting article about an actual appliance that replaces the computer in net-to-phone calls. The phone can be connected to an ethernet port, though I imagine DSL users would have to have their PCs on to log in. The company has a nice website dedicated to it. Lately most PC-to-phone programs have been asking for more money for international calls. Netmeeting doesn't cut it for all video needs, but several alternatives are quite acceptable, even for international calls." The phone the article concentrates on requires broadband and a home gateway to set-up; luckily neither of those things is rare any more. A few of the competing devices are mentioned as well; you can almost smell companies like Cisco drooling to own voice transport.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-employee (moved countries, so we parted on friendly terms:) from the Wellington, NZ branch, but that was a year ago now hence the uncertainty (and a quick look at the site didn't help).
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
So, companies like Cisco (and Nortel, who I work for) have been working on this for a while. It's one of the reasons that Lucent isn't doing so well -- all the telcos decided that VoIP was the wave of the future, and stopped buying traditional telephony switches. Lucent didn't pick up on that fact and so they're playing catch-up.
The primary problem with the net2phone box is that it uses the Internet as transport, and there is no end-to-end management of the internet. So, the packets that contain your voice have to compete on an equal footing with other peoples packets, despite the fact that yours are much more time-sensitive.
The delay is likely due to the amount of buffering that needs to be done because of this. And, the fuzzy audio is because the audio still needs to be compressed, despite the high-bandwidth connection. Most home broadband connections can transport much more data coming down than going back up, so the outgoing voice stream needs a lot of compression.
There are other problems: What services does this box do? Can it handle 3-way calls, call-waiting, call-forwarding, etc.... What happens when you plug a modem or fax into it?
What I think you'll see is the broadband service provider putting in a home gateway (Analog phone-to-VoIP Gateway, not the ubquitous linksys box), then routing that VoIP over their private network, instead of feeding it straight to the internet. Cable-modem folks are especially eager to get into that market, because while VoIP doesn't use up that much bandwidth, phone-calls are a high-dollar business.
Try these links to get you started:/
t ml
http://www.openh323.org/
http://www.linuxtelephony.org/
http://www.linuxjack.com/
http://www.openphone.org/http://www.voxilla.org
http://www.speakfreely.org/
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/unix/sfunix.h
Surely you could do this better with a phone-sized Linux box - maybe with wireless networking - which has sound hardware. The CPU doesn't actually need to be that meaty for voice compression (GSM phones manage it).
Isn't there already a Palm-type device with built-in microphone and speaker which runs Linux? Use that!
Or better, sell some small 'base station' for your digital mobile phone which sends the GSM data across the net. You'd temporarily swap out the account details card from your mobile and replace it with one that contacts your home base station (which has a very weak transmitter covering a radius of about 200m).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Since when?
http://www.papajohnsonline.com/html/pj/pj_i ndex.js p
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
It's usually not a question of the bandwidth, it's a question of latency. Most people with DSL connectivity should be able to use VoIP, provided that the latency between them and their calling partner is less than 150ms.
Until we get a voice compression system that can compress my voice into a 5Kbit stream cleanly ant at telephone line quality, it will not happen over the internet.
I'd say its also going to take people learning to live with phone calls that suffer from a lot of digital artifacts (high latency, jitter, dropouts, etc). I think many people who own cell phones already are there in terms of noise acceptance. It's getting people who grew up in urban areas in the 60s and 70s on 56k toll-quality to accept it. It's too bad the older generation who grew up on circa 1920s handsets and even older switching and cabling aren't the decision makers on IP telephony purchasing, they'd tell you, "Hey, it sounds great compared to the 1910 Bell wall set I have at home, shut up about your 56k toll quality already..."
I have abandoned my POTS line, in favor of a combination of Dialpad for long-distance and a $30 a month AT&T cellphone for local. And so far it's worked rather well. I have more cell time than I could ever use, and when I need to call someone LD, Dialpad is there for me. And I'm not paying much more than I was for landline local plus long distance.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Its the latency, stoopid.
You can do telephone-quality vox over ip with as little as 3K/sec bandwidth. I remember toying around with some early, early stuff back around 1993 or so that had nothing more than two 33.6K modems on either end, and it worked fine quality wise--The issue was latency, not quality. Width of the pipe isn't the issue, gang. You can have the widest pipe in the world, but it will be totally useless if your latency is terrible. Who cares what the quality is if theres a 3 second delay between point A and point B?
Broadband is nice, sure, but its not going to do anything to improve the way your packets are relayed, and subsequently the delay between sender and reciever.
Bowie J. Poag
- My cable modem has had nearly perfect uptime. I can't speak for everyone out there, but I've been with two companies, and have had about 99.99% uptime.
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My local phone bill is over 50$ US. Which is more than my Cable bill. I don't know about Canada, but in the US, a fair portion of my phone bill is taxes.
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A one time 19.99 fee isn't too bad, considering a lot of telcos around here charge installation fees.
- Savings is savings, whether it's marginal or not, but for most people they probably would save about 20$ a month, or $240 a year. I could buy a lot of junk with that
:).
I've been looking for a way to dump my home phone for a while, the main hangup, is my wife likes having the number, and not having to charge her cellphone battery. If I could save a few bucks and still have a number based at my house I'd go for it.Just of note:
The Aplio/Pro is Linux based, and the Aplio/Phone is not (dedicated hardware). Aplio chose to head away from dedicated hardware simply because of the development costs.
All it seems as though they have done is to point the unit at their Gateway/Gatekeeper, which is how the calls get to/from the IP network to phone lines. These devices should quite easily be capable of talking to any gateway/gatekeeper that meets the specs, like Cisco, Ericsson, OpenH323, etc.
If you want to learn more about VOIP, and the H.323 protocol, check out http://www.openh323.org/ which has a wealth of information and links.
I realize it takes time, but that doesn't mean you're invincible. That's how dumbasses like you get caught.
If this caught on bigtime, you can bet the broadband providers would start blocking it and/or making it illegal by contract. The whole idea of giving you more downstream than upstream bandwidth is predicated on web browsing that uses more down than up. Voice by IP requires identical up/down usage and would therefore strain the current DSL/cable configurations.
:)
Just a word of warning: never mention the word "server" in earshot of your cable modem installation tech.
there are plenty of phones with ethernet jacks, we are using some siemens ones in our company, they are standard h323 phones, with DHCP and configurable by a webbroswser ;) really cute
Heck, I say give 'em points for just being on topic with the #1 post.
There's a really good article called "Where in the World is VOIP Banned" here with a followup here.
I've worked in VoIP for a carriers carrier company for the past 2+ years and its amazing how fast we've grown.. Anyone who uses pre-paid phone cards has about 20 percent chance of their call going over VoIP for domestic(US) calls and 60% chance for International during some leg of the call and they never know.
The next logical off step after phone-voip-phone and PC-Phone is Phone-Phone mini gateways.
In the next year you'll be seing usb boxes hanging off your computer or etnernet ones of your hubs that plug into your house phone network(unpluggin from outside telco legacy network) and you will be able to use your hose phones to Call anywhere and recieve calls..
Its gonna be a great next few years and after 5-10 your gonna see the need for ILEC's completely disapear NPA assignments and thats it..
Cisco is already in this market. They have had products out there for two years now.
I don't think they aspire to own the transport, they just want to profit from increased bandwidth usage and more Cisco devices being sold. They are sticking to standards in this market like they do everywhere else (AFAIK).
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
It is VERY clear in the article that your PC doesn't need to be on. The phone grabs an IP from DHCP and uses your account with them. This succeeds in being less awkward that computerized systems.
At my office, we have the 3com NBX system. Once you leave the LAN, we use normal long distance, but internally it is over ethernet.
The quality is fine.
However, once you use the software based phones, the lag is horrible, and generally worthless. Dedicated hardware is much faster than software over generic hardware.
Alex
You've been unhelpful, thank you. Neither BeOS or Linux are RT OSes. I wanted to let the Admin staff's Windows boxes double as phones instead of getting phones. It failled, miserably.
We were just going over Ethernet, the same ethernet as the physical phones, so there was no latency issue.
It could be the OS, it could be the scheduling, but it sucked. I don't care that someone will whine about how other OSes that don't have the software. A non-Win32 version of this is kinda silly.
There just isn't a market for software that needs to be on a tuned Linux box. A tuned Linux box is no more useful than a physical phone, because I need to tune it for a special purpose. Once I do that, I'll buy the phones.
Alex
Linksys has a sweet little cable/DSL router line, one of the variants having IP telephony capabilities and a phonejack; plug in a phone, somebody rings your IP, and the phone rings.
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The subscription is usually around the same as monthly phone charges with potentially greatly increased functionality. Wouldn't you rather negotiate your speed dial numbers through a java-gui interface to your address book, instead of trying to remember who's programmed into where?
The incoming phone number charge varies greatly with providers. The company I work for, for example, will be providing an incoming number (toll free) as part of the base subscription price.
The real power of VoIP, mostly using SIP, is that it can easily go back and forth from data to PSTN networks. There are several transit providers offering soft-switching, as well as hardware vendors offering boxes for companies who already have large numbers of circuits from Telcos, perhaps with numbers attached to them already.
VoIP is not really aimed directly at the home market, but instead at businesses, especially large multi-office corporations. Imagine being able to build a transparent PBX system with a soft-switch at the "edge of network" that people call into. Then you pay next to nothing to route calls across the internal LAN/WAN and can transfer calls easily from any phone in any office to any other phone in any other office.
Obviously there'll be a slow phase in to different markets, based on who has the most use for the technology. Eventually it'll become refined, polished and cheap enough to make it to the home, much as every other technology has.
Just remember, people used to sneer at the thought of anything other than dialup being affordable enough for home Internet acces. That was, of course, after they'd finished sneering at the thought of people connecting to the Internet from their homes at all.
wishus
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Cisco makes some really slick SIP/Skinny phones, but the cost about $1000 each. Though the average, non-technical person could use one quite well, I doubt they would be excited about purchasing one.
Who wouldn't love to have a cordless phone that runs VOIP on encrypted 802.11b, with both POTS and Ethernet in the base?
Your grasp of technology is laughable - if you're going allow the option of connecting to the PSTN at the base, why would you packetize data in the handset? And since it doesn't make sense to packetize data at the handset, even if you don't want to connect to the PSTN, why not use RF? It would be alot easier than trying to use H.323 or SIP between the handset and base.
wishus
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It's not just the reliability of your DSL/Cable provider, and "last mile" fibre isn't the problem. My DSL's connection to the DSLAM has been, to my knowledge, uninterrupted (except, of course, at my end). But then you have the DNS servers and every hop between you and your call's recipient, and the reliability starts to drop. Not to levels that make home internet too difficult, but to levels that would make phone service unbearable.
Of course, that doesn't even count the biggest reliability problem of all (which the initial reply misses). How stable is your electricity? I'm in Minneapolis, and even though we're supposedly not having any problems this year, it was out twice last week for an hour at a time. Unless you've got your own generator or some serious UPS time, if your electricity goes down, your IP telephony goes down (for that matter, if the only phones you have require electricity on your end to function, your SOL too). I've nowhere near enough trust in our power grids to abandon the 47 milliampres or so that the phone company is sending to me to power my POTS.A few of the competing devices are mentioned as well; you can almost smell companies like Cisco drooling to own voice transport.
since odds are we're not going to pay for it.
BigZoo.com has been a problem for me recently. They have charged me for calls that have not been connected. They have refused to review my bills with them for return of the money.
Are there any alternatives for inexpensive calling internationally?
What about in the U.S.? What is the cheapest phone-to-phone method of calling? What is the cheapest PC-to-phone method of calling?
Bush's education improvements were
Ecuadorian would mean someone who lives along the equator. I guess you're one of those arrogant Andeans who think "Ecuador" only includes a certain country sandwiched between Peru and Colombia.
Malaysian would mean someone who lives on the Malay peninsula. I guess you're one of those arrogant Malays who thinks "Malaysia" only includes a certain country north of Singapore.
South African would mean someone who lives in the south of Africa. I guess you're one of those arrogant Afrikaners who thinks that "South Africa" only includes the RSA.
Turkish would mean someone who lives in a certain near-flightless bird in the vulture family. I guess you're one of those arrogant Ottomans who thinks "Turkey" only includes the country straddling the Bosporus.
Lemme guess, you're either Canadian or a South American grad student. Either way, you're an idiot.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Even then it's more expensive than regular LD (normal dial-1 charges these days being around 4-5c domestic, no fees or minimums, as long as you don't go with MCI/ATT/Sprint) unless you make hundreds of hours of calls. I cannot see how this could possibly be worth it. I've been looking around for a device like this to hang on one of the ports of our PBX just to see how it works out, but I am sure as hell not going to pay effectively 25% more for long distance in exchange for trying out a new gadget that will surely provide far worse-quality calls.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
IP Telephony rules, but not over the Internet. Using private networks, it is possible to achieve a very good quality and reliability.
Big bandwidth providers like Level3 are beginning to provide softswitching technologies (you call your local gateway and your call is routed through the private network transparently).
As usual, the problem is the last mile, as the Baby Bells really don't want you to do that.
Nobox: Only simple products.
There are still a few reasons not to give up your good ol' POTS line just yet though:
- Checked the network availability stats on your cable/DSL modem versus your local telco lately? Ever picked up your phone and received a "server timeout" error? Obviously these net-to-phone gizmos are primarily for saving money on long distance calls, but you'll still need a land line for ordering pizza or calling 911 after your double-cheese-and-bacon-pizza induced heart attack.
- These things still require a subscription to the order of about $10 to $20 a month. That's on top of your $40 (minimum) DSL subscription. And the article I read said it needed a home gateway box ($100 or so). Plus the cost of the net-to-phone device itself ($100-$200). You're going to have to make a lot of long distance phone calls to offset all that capital & ongoing expense.
- You pay extra to get an incoming phone number.
- The amortized average cost per minute for a LD call with one of these things is still a few cents . I pay
.10 CDN for long distance, most US residents can get LD for 7 or 5 cents a minute, of peak. Again, unless you make a lot of calls or mostly on-peak calls you're getting a fairly marginal savings.
Overall, I'm not convinced that it's really economical. Neat, maybe, but not all that economical.Has anyone heard of any Linux projects regarding GPL IP telephony? The big boys are doing it and it rocks for big offices but what about for us geeks at home? Death to RJ-11!!!!! RJ-45 till I die!!!
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$ chown -R us:us yourbase
The reason why we're not seeing many successful IP Telephony systems is because these companies have to lease bandwidth from Telcos ... the same Telcos against which they are competing in the long distance market.
The technology already exists, but until a major Telco comes out in support of a provider (i.e., one of their subsidiaries), it's unlikely that these ventures will be successful.
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Check out the facts:
Now, if you want Rave, you pay for the device, the monthly fee. Extra money if you run over your monthly alotment. You also pay for a router or whatever and broadband access.
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
The local cable company here is set to provide phone service over their cable lines using ip telephony. They are installing a cable modem like device on the outside of one's home and then routing it through your existing telephone wire. In essence the technology behind this is going to be transparent, and it will seem to work exactly the same as a regular telephone hook up. From what I hear, the few test units in the field work flawlessly.
I saw the Linksys router with the phone jack a few months ago and was intrigued enough to do some research. It turns out it really wasn't that cool, they pretty much just route you to some company who wants to be your long distance provider. But the existance of the box, the fact that these devices can already do all the hard work of IP telephony makes me wonder if anyone has looked into hacking them.
More specifically what I'm wondering about is whether it would be possible to set up a telephony server and have a group of these telephony boxes point to it rather than the company that sells them. It would provide a cheap, secondary form of communication that would be very easy to use. Picking up the receiver and pressing 5 on a spare phone on your desk could quickly connect you to a friend without tying up the main line. More interestingly, your server room could have a "red phone" that would ring up another server farm in another country.
So my question is, is anyone doing this stuff? Not a replacement for the phone companies, but an easy way to link these boxes together and form a small phone network?
That means that the use of this kind of equipment, netmeeting, yahoo messenger or any other program that allows voice communication is forbidden if you don't use one of the 11 (minus 2 that become our version of dot.com bombs) licensees networks.
Are any other countries like this ?