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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.
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.
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.