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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.
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.
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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..
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.
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.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.
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 ?