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VoIP for the Masses!
SkywalkerOS8 writes: "Vonage has begun offering Voice-over-IP(VoIP) service to residential broadband users. I've had the service since Friday and the quality is indistinguishable from a regular phone line. It's only $20/month for 500 minutes or $40/month for unlimited service. They include Cisco equipment, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Caller ID and Voicemail (which you can check online) in the service price. You can read more about it in this
article in Time. It works fine through my Linux NAT firewall/router and my monthly phone budget has now dropped from $60+ to $20."
I wonder since with limited upstream on most residential broadband connections nowadays, when you try to call someone will it kill your ping on your game of Tribes. Or if you're downloading a bunch of stuff, will your girlfriend get mad because your phone won't ring when she tries to call? ack.. i can see the problems already..
At these prices, what is the point?
Unless it includes international, you can get almost the same deal on a cell phone which you can carry with you and 911 works.
And considering how flaky broadband providers are, do you really want to trust your phone service to them?
Sounds cool. And I admit I'm too lazy to read up for answers.
What about
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Cool idea and all, but why not just go all cellular/mobile? I have for the past year and a half. $40, 4000 minutes (which is WAY more than I'll use in a month), 3 way calling, caller id, voicemail, paging, text messaging, wireless web, email, custom ringers and a phone i can take anywhere if i feel like it. Yes, I know that not all areas have this level of mobile service but once you make the switch you'll never go back. People say that mobile service isn't reliable in the case of an emergency, but from my personal experience I'd trust my cell phone a LOT more than my cable modem =)
just so you can choose your own area code...I think I'd like to be from Alaska (907)
I haven't had much of a chance to look at this technology, but can you do PPP over VOIP?
I ask because my company has no VPN access in place, and forces us to use a dialup connection. ONly reason I still have a land line at all.
This is really funny. Let's avoid "long distance" charges by using the exact same phone lines but calling the information "data" rather than "voice" and therefore bringing the charges under a "data" pricing scheme which is currently fixed-cost.
Something has to change here. This is providing no service whatsoever except a means of sidestepping the billing methods of the telcos. I guarantee that one of two things will happen: phone charges will become fixed-rate, or data charges will increase for "long distance" connections.
TANSTAAFL.
I've tried different services like this and all performed really well. The hard part is finding good hardware. But it looks like this company is helping out in that department. This could seriously cut down your phone bill if you use the unlimited rate. If they can stay afloat I think the public would really love the service.
But what do the Bells think about this? Here's a service you can buy that's about the same price as theirs, but INCLUDES long distance? I'm sure they will throw a fit if they see a drop in sales or customers jumping ship. Just curious as we might see the giants trying to crush the little guy again.
$20 for 500 minutes? Man, my cell phone is a much better deal than that. Unlike VoIP, the number follows me everywhere. I get that this is cool, but it's a long way from practical.
What's your damage, Heather?
Until broadband providers support quality of service as in 802.1q&p, this isn't going to be very popular. Most people will get pretty pissed when their phone service starts to crap out because the kid next door just set up a warez site, and your shared bandwidth is being hogged.
I love VoIP, and can't wait until my cable provider has it, assuming they do it right.
Casca
My question is, with the low service reliability of broadband (mine needs a reboot once a week or two and it goes down every few months for a few hours), what will you do when your phone lines go out for 4 hours on a Sunday for a small "service problem?"
My take: it's too early for residential VoIP. Adam
Interestingly, my cable provider also provider telephone-over-cable, and its infrastructure is said to be completely VoIP - which makes sense, it would be relatively cheap, and on you own LAN you can do a better job guaranteeing QoS. Still, even that service is not as good as the regular telco's.
This gets me wondering what interesting packet-shaping equipment my cableco's ISP has in place. It might be in their benefit to make sure VoIP I run myself has terrible service, forcing me to use their own phoneservice...
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Crap! At last I thought I'd have a way to call 911 for free...
I guess 911 would have trouble tracing a call to 66.96.178.192...
You can even encrypt the voip using various encryption algorithms so all your other geeky friends around the planet can talk for free.
My AT&T broadband cable modem connection is spotty at best. I've had weeks of downtime, their level of customer service is horrible. They call me every now and again and try and sell me their voice over cable service. I wouldn't use it if they paid me. There's no way I'd use this. After all the problems I've had between the cable modem and the digital cable, I went with DirecTV, and even switched my long distance carrier. I just wish I had an affordable broadband alternative (too far down the loop for dsl). Like hell I would ever trust my phone service to AT&T broadband.
That issue aside, has anyone checked out how this works for data connections? Even if you have high speed net, DirecTV + Tivo still needs pots.
Here's their rate chart for international calls
No sig for you!!
From the Time article:
For arcane technical reasons, you can't call 911.
Yeah. That's just GREAT. In your last moments, as you're lying on the floor, convulsing in the midst of cardiac arrest, do yourself a favor and think: "At least I didn't pay too much for real phone service."
For instance, usually your phone still works when your power goes out. Not with Voice Over IP, because your DSL router/bridge is dead. I guess you could get a UPS, but then we start adding additional costs to this technology that is supposed to save us money.
The Cisco VoIP solution is also very popular and has some nice features, but be advised that the core of it, CallManager, runs ONLY on Windows 2000. From what my VoIP consultant friend has told me, it's still quite buggy. And no surprise, patching it or making major changes involves rebooting... and your calls disconnected. I think there is redundancy but whether it works correctly is anyone's guess... since it is Win2K, my guess is no.
The fundamental problem is: no one minds too much if a computer network is down. These things happen and people are used to it. But if the PHONE is out everyone from Grandpa to Little Susie is going to be complaining!
Carl
Vote Libertarian
A residential phone solution that's a couple orders of magnitude more complicated and less reliable than what I've got now!
We've got VoIP here. It's down frequently, even when the network is up. And when it comes to broadband reliability... well, I notice my DSL line being down about 6 hours out of the month, so it's probably down a lot more than that. My POTS line hasn't been down for any noticeable length of time in the last 20 years.
And I can buy a POTS phone for about $10.
I wonder if you could dial by IP :-)
Hey you! Yeah, you! Stop port scanning my machine knob!!!
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
Now I can call all those long-distance BBS's to download my warez without racking up my phone bill!
I've been waiting for this since 1992!!
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
So, this is my field of expertise... To answer some questions/comments...
1. Why?
-- Cost and features. It costs the same amount for the phone company to run 4 or 8 lines to your house as it does 1. Features like 3WC, call waiting, etc... don't require special equipment.
-- You don't have to have seperate phone and data networks (more important in businesses, where they actually own/lease phone equipment.)
2. Latency
Latency on a phone call is generally noticable above 120ms or so (1/8th of a second). VoIP calls typically split audio into 10ms (or smaller) packets, which have maybe a 30ms buffer. Add some propagation delay and you're still well under 120ms.
3. Gateways
Yes! Equipment providers have gateways to translate between packet and traditional TDM networks. All different sizes, including home gateways that have a packet interface on one end and plug into your home phone network on the other.
4. PPP over VoIP
Ick. It *can* be done, but generally isn't a good idea. Wastes bandwidth. (You could then run VoIP over PPP over VoIP again...) For 99% of the cases, you're just going to data over the base IP network.
5. traditional Telcos response
Most major telcos have slowed their growth in TDM equipment in favor of VoIP/VoATM equipment. (Sprint just announced a > $1B deal for this equipment recently.) Fact is that telephone switches are expensive and naturally low bandwidth. Growth is in high bandwidth services, so moving to a data network makes a lot more sense.
6 Why no 911?
That's just a problem with this particular implementation, not of VoIP in general. For even more arcane reasons, 911 uses a specific type of digital trunk and requires a special gateway to talk to that trunk. There are ways around it.
7 What about spotty cable modem service?
That's a problem. Broadband needs to be something that you don't think about before you'd hook your phone line up to it. It's coming, but isn't there yet for a lot of people.
So let me understand this. I can pay $40-50 a month now to get a "broadband connection" that's slow as molasses (read "as a modem") because my roomates on the phone. Wow progress.
1995. Two phone lines. Slow Net, Clear phone call.
2000: One line. Fast broadband. Clear Phone Call
2002: One line. Slow Broadband. questionable clarity phone call.
Fantabulous!
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
There is no way to run PPP over VoIP. The problem is that you've already got IP connectivity. Why bother?
However, in this case, it looks like they're using G.711, which is essentially the same encoding as standard phone lines. In that case, you can get relatively decent modem speeds, but you can't really hold them for very long, as there IS a not-humanly-detectable delay in encoding(as much as 40ms). You won't notice it, but the modems will, especially at high speed.
What would be more impressive is if they offered G.729 compressed down to 14k. THEN you could use it while online with a dialup, and everybody'd be really happy.
How long until we see P2P VoIP solutions?
A Gnutella like network could be setup to search for computers that are a local call to where you are trying to call. Once you have found a host, it will take care of the land line communication and the rest will happen via the internet. Should the call happen to be dialing someone who is already on the network then they wouldn't even need to hit a land line connection.
This could already be done (albeit crudely) with existing hardware like voice modems and sound cards. Would be a neat project anyway...
Phone calls in almost all cases are digital almost as soon as they leave your local handset. SONET (fiber connectivity) is built for DS3s, which are digital. They really have no idea about data or voice, just DS3(or OC3) frames.
From their our technology page: "SIP-thru-NAT, Vonage's proprietary communications technology. "
:)
NAT
SIP
Doesn't look terribly proprietary to me
_______
2B1ASK1
Any idea if there's any noticable lag / delay using this?
One thing that drives me batty using cell phones some times is the delay between the time you speak and when the other person hears you (or the other way around)... you end up talking over each other all the time, and conversations are just painfull!
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
It depends. Just because you have an active phone line in your house doesn't mean you have to pay for the local phone monopol^H^H^H^H^H^H^H company's monthly calling plans.
In most parts of the country the price for the lowest tier of service (toll calling) is regulated and very cheap (e.g. $5/month). Add that to your Vonage charges and you will still be better off than if you signed up for the "Unlimited Local Calling" plan (ca. $20/month, plus toll charges for some calls within your area code) and the long distance company of your choise (ca. $20/month, plus $0.10/minute long distance).
-Renard
I seem to recall services that allowed people outside the U.S. to place international calls anywhere at reduced rates by routing the call through the U.S. The to-U.S. leg was set up as a bogus "collect" call, so they caller payed deregulated U.S. rates for the whole thing, instead of paying local monopoly rates.
This goes back to Thomas Edison. Unable to patent his movie film, he copyrighted the sprocket holes. That gave him a monopoly -- until somebody invented a camera that punched the holes as the movie was being filmed. No DMCA back then of course!
Then there were "tax carts". In the UK, they used to asses road taxes on people who owned wagons and carts, based on the number of axles. Naturally somebody invented a cart that held up to six people, but only had one axle.
Social Libertarians like to think that Evil Unchecked Regulators are a sudden, massive crisis. It gives them an excuse to demand the other extreme -- privatize everything, even the army. No regulation of anything, except by contract and lawsuit. Nice classroom exercise --- let's hope that's where it stays.
The reality is that a modern society is full of people with conflicting agendas. The comprimises and workarounds they generate are often weird, kludgy, and inefficient. But that's preferrable to mandating that everybody adhere to some "logical" theory, be it Libertarianism, Marxism, or whatever.
I've been using VoIP for quite a few months now. I have a hardware IP phone plugged right into my hub, and the connection goes through my firewall (over an IPSEC VPN) back to the central office, which is 800 miles away. I can just pick it up and dial a three digit extension to speak with anyone in the office. It works very well -- under ideal circumstances. Those momentary little pockets of packet loss that cause you to die in CounterStrike make the conversation sou..nd li..ke.. so..th...ng..swe. oke...n.. It's not bad for talking to the folks in the office, but not a good thing if you have to deal directly with customers. The quality has gone to heck since cox.net took over. I want my @Home back. :(
If you're not doing QoS (which isn't very likely on residential broadband), then you'll need to terminate (or at least pause) all your high-bandwidth activity while you use the phone.
In an unrelated topic, I ran nmap against my phone (what an odd concept!) and found a telnet daemon running on it. Has anybody hacked this puppy? It's a Polycom SoundPoint IP 400.
So my thinking is to go in on one of these, register myself as living in Boston with family, plug the thing in up here in Montreal and hey I've got a home phone with cheap "local" rates!
'cept they don't even list Quebec in their calling rates. They've got listings for the rest of Canada (though some of the names are wrong) but Quebec - nope. 25% of this nation's population is skipped over.
Furthermore what checks are there to assure I am where the vendor wants me to be? I'm more then happy to appear as being in the US & take my calls here in Canadia but surely there's some tarrif problem with this.
Anyone got any insight into the details on these questions? What is the deal with Quebec (can't be language as everything in Canada is required to be bilingual)? Will they be satisfied with a US billing address & credit card or need I worry about getting cut off someday?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I've been using 3com's NBX VOIP system for a while now at work and i've even set up a telephone extension at home via my cable modem. It works very well. All those that are afraid of VOIP shouldn't be. Most voice conversations only need 64k of bandwidth....most broadband connections can easily handle this. I'd love to get this service at my house!
-ted
I live in the UK. Would this be a way for me to chat to American friends really, really cheaply?
My Journal
The service looks nice, but I have had very mixed experiences calling Poland using VoIP via Net2Phone's phone-phone VoIP. This is a calling card that dials you in to such a box as Vonage uses, though on a much larger scale. The call is routed over IP and then plugged back into the local phone system of the place you're calling. (sometimes such that different latas have different charges. Warsaw $.06/minute, Radom $.15/minute, mobile phone $.24/minute)
My experience? It works correctly about 60% of the time. The other 40%, delays, echos, or frequently duplex problems (ie, one person can talk and the other can listen, but that's it. damn frustrating.)
Net2Phone keeps emailing me, encouraging me to spend the $50 prepaid I have left on my account, but I'm going to wait another month or two to see if they can work out the bugs.
For now I'll continue to pay through the teeth using my VoiceStream cellphone to call Europe.
How long till DSL providers start comming up with reasions to kill it.
How ironic. The DSL killing the phone service.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
My biggest problem with replacing the land line phone with a cell phone or VoIP is that each phone unit is expensive and, in the case of cellular, small. I like to have a permanent phone in many rooms with one cordless that I can roam with. And the cordless is never where it's supposed to be when the phone rings! So can I use all of my regular phones with this?
From the article: Hook your cable modem or DSL line up to one end of the box, plug any ordinary phone into the other end, and you're ready to go.
Can I then plug the "box" into my existing phone network and enable all the phones that I currently have in the house? I think that might sell me right there. I'd be really interested if someone has found a way around the expensive cell phone problem also.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
It appears that thie areacodes they support is fairly slim. Unless you really WANT to have NYC number. Hey mabye the scammers will love this, only takes CC and you can project a local phone number anywhere on their network.
New York - 212 - 516 - 631 - 646 - 718 - 914 - 917
New Jersey - 201 - 732 - 908 - 973
California - 408 - 415 - 510 - 650 - 707 - 831 - 925
So if you don't live in those areas it's useless.
'normal' phone service is blackout-resistant, this for sure isn't. This and the lack of 911 kind of severely hamper people who might want it as their *only* phone.
But getting it for long distance (keep the phone for local calls and to get DSL) seems really good...
-- the cake is a lie
Now they're disguising ads as articles!
Pizzahut: Thank you for calling the Downtown Seattle Pizza Hut, can I have your phone number? Customer: 408-555-1234 Pizzahut: We're sorry sir, but we don't deliver out of state Customer: But I'm only two blocks away from your store?!
If you already have broadband, then $20 or $40 per month doesn't sound too bad for phone service. But I don't already have it. So let's see, what would this really cost me?
From here:
Hmm, that's not too bad. But then add the $25 setup fee and the $20/month minimum for the phone, and I'm up to $62.95/month. Amortize the installation over the first year and make it $65. Suddenly sounding not-so-good. Oh, and can I even use it? From here:
===
1)Generally Prohibited Conduct.
...
5) "Camping on the system". When you are not actively using the Service for any duration of at least fifteen minutes or more, you agree to disconnect it so that other active users will not encounter difficulty logging on. Adelphia does utilize detection programs to ensure that our customers are not keeping the connection open for prolonged periods when not in active use. In the event that such detection programs discover an open connection with no activity for thirty minutes, the connection will be automatically shut down. Active use is user-directed utilization of the connection for activities such as web browsing, e-mail, chat and file transfer. You must be physically at your computer to engage in active use. Use of automated programs to keep your connection open without your active involvement is prohibited. In the event of active involvement for twelve continuous hours, your connection will be automatically shut off.
===
So when they say No getting booted off and You get flat-rate unlimited Internet access they don't really mean it. This service would be totally unusable for a phone.
Nope, no sig
That's what I also wanted to know--what's the ringer equivalence of the ATA-186? If it's 3 or higher, you should be able to hook up your entire home phoneline to the ATA-186 and service all your phones (provided they're all/mostly electronic and have a low RE).
In Cisco's document:
/ vo ice/ata/ata186/ata186ug/186ugch3.htm
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product
Unplugging the device while the function button is flashing could permanantly damage the device
If the device is configured to find a DHCP server when there isn't one, the function putton will blink forever
I can see my mom with an endlessly blinking IP phone guarding it with a bat in case any tries to unplug it...
- Sig
well... thats the idea, but the point is kinda moot due to their small availability of area codes to choose from.
:)
(btw, check my sig
Need a Catering Connection
Tier Networking has begun offering colocation service to residential broadband users. I've had the service since Friday and the quality is indistinguishable from other providers. It's only $87 per burstable Mb and if you find a better price, they'll beat it by 5%. You can read more about it from their website. It works fine our Linux NAT firewall / router and our monthly colocation budget has dropped in half.
Did anyone find anything on their website about future availability in Canada? I couldn't see anything myself. Is there anything similar to this available in Canada right now?
I noticed there aren't any local area codes for where I live, so if someone calls locally to my number how does it get billed?
Or do I have to switch to their 39$ service?
Why? Because these buggers wouldn't even return my call when I tried to get a job there. I figured they were another dot.com gone bust and now I find out they actually have a product! I guess that means they didn't like me... bummer...
And they are right up the road too... I had dreams of riding a bike to work... if only they had called!
Oh, well. Congratulations, Vonage!
Why not switch to just using a cellular phone for all your calls? Same effect.
Not quite. Way too often cell phone service sucks at your home, away from cities, where broadband is still available. With this, as long as your broadband connectivity is available, so is your phone.
Of course, that's the big uh-oh about this service, too, though. While it hasn't been flaky lately, my RCN cable modem service doesn't have a sterling silver reputation, so... I'd be without phone for the period during which my connection drops. That'd suck. And I wouldn't be able to call RCN to complain, because my cell doesn't work at home...
If you knew me, you wouldn't need this here...
I've searched around and found one app for Linux that does about what Speak Freely does: RAT.
Anyone know of other apps that can do this sort of thing for Linux or other Free Unix-like systems?
This sig is false.
1. While it may be nifty to have a NYC area code and live in Idaho, what about your mom who lives down the street and wants to call you? I couldn't find any information about the long distance charges other people will incur when trying to contact you. Sure your girlfriend might subscribe to the Vonage service and keep calling but I wouldn't call you if I had to pay 7 cents a minute and you lived 10 blocks away.
2. Second, SIP is a text-based protocol similiar to HTTP. One reason your current phone line is secure is somebody usually needs physical access to the line between you and the CO to do any sort of 'sniffing'. Now as soon as you put your voice calls over your broadband connection anybody in the neighborhood can arp poison the switch and intercept information. With SIP being text-based do the phones do any sort of encryption so that your high-tech next door neighbor can't get the latest gossip? SIP is similiar in function to SS7 (signaling system 7) and I think only provides the setup, tear-down and other such functions of each call. Anybody know how the actual data is sent over the link?
3. And the obvious......the cable companies will amend their service agreements to prohibit this activity and then release their own version of it and thus starts the court battles. I hope Vonage has the money to invest in some good lawyers.
I've considered doing that, but wireless service is too unreliable around here (Las Vegas) for that. I've had service through Nextel and Nevada Bell (now called Cingular), and currently go through AT&T Wireless. My sister has service through Sprint PCS. None of them will give you seamless service anywhere you go in town, and the further away from the middle of town you get (I'm up on one of the mountains in the northeast), the worse it gets.
With Sprint sending all sorts of bogus calls through to my home number (pick up and no one's there) and with the majority of the remaing calls coming from fscking telemarketers who've gotten my number at some point in the past 10 years, this new service sounds attractive. I've had very few reliability issues with my cable-modem service (just need to make sure my website doesn't get /.'d like it did over the weekend when I mirrored that page with the Gigabit Ethernet NIC roundup :-) ), and they're only charging $5 more than I'm currently paying for phone service. Factor in that the 500 minutes can be long-distance (at the nickel-a-minute I've been paying, that's potentially a $25 value right there) and I'm strongly tempted to give Sprint the heave-ho. (Sprint also isn't helped by the fact that today they fscked up DSL for nearly everybody in Vegas who uses it...good thing we have both cable-modem and DSL service at work. Those idiots can't keep a DSLAM running to save themselves.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Maybe not!
I have a residential line and DSL, but because of my distance to the CO, I had to get a dedicated pair for the DSL service (for $15 a month). If I replaced the existing telco service with local toll, for some $5 a month, I could still have 911 emerency service, service during a power outage, and service to "outlawed" NXXs (why 540 is outlawed, I don't know -- I used to have a 540 residential NXX).
They don't list their toll rates to Quebec, CA, though, and their voice customer service line appears down now (the first slashdotting of a phone line?)
Still, this is VERY intriguing.
You could've hired me.
Why hasn't VoIP sans stupid telephone integration freely proliferated? This can't be that hard to do...
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Well AOL/TW has a controlling interest in Roadrunner, and I've not heard of any policy prohibiting filesharing apps on the RR network.
wow, i live in ireland, but i still have friends in the states. got a nasty phone bill today thanks to a telco screwup, so this story was timely. how does the cisco kit deal with 220v? does vonage like international customers? personally i think it would be quite amusing to have a us number again.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
When you call 911 your area code is used to route the call to the local 911 operator. If you live in Ca, but have a NY area code, "Which this service allows" the call will go to the wrong location. Same problem with cell phones. Any phone can dial 911, but you do want a local 911 operator.
Get a free ipod.
If you look at Cisco's website on the device (listed in the article), it's simply a VOIP-to-POTS converter, so you just plug it into your phone patch.
The packet switched network has been, and in my opinion works best as, "Best Effort" routing. If a line gets congested, packets get dropped regardless of source, destination, or content. Lost packets are spread out over all users of the link so that no one service is unduely impacted.
This means maximum effort can be placed on line utilization, while remaining completely content neutral. It's also good for sales, because if you want to gurantee your throughput, you have to pay for a bigger pipe.
On a LAN, QoS is far more practical and avoids crushing critical services during a broadcast storm (for instance). But if your WAN link is saturated to the point that you have to worry about QoS, you have a utilization management problem, for which QoS will act merely as a mask to hide the underlying problems that never get solved.
There is also the question of what you mean by "Meaningful". Meaningful to whom? To you? To me?
Do you really want to grant the power to determine content to every service provider in your data path, so as to make sure someone elses voice traffic gets priority over your Napster downloads? And if they "monitor" for quality assurance? Can't complain, they're just providing the service you asked for.
I like to use the comparison of "dumb network smart hosts" and "smart network dumb hosts". QoS invests smarts into the network equipment to make up for deficiencies in the hosts, and I consider this a very BadThing(tm) indeed. It ties your network equipment to single vendors or single protocols, as the recent example of Cisco routers crashing because of the CodeRed virus showed there are very real dangers in adding "services" to the network infrastructure. It forces your network to be adapted to changes in particular host technology, also.
When the network is dumb and the hosts smart, the hosts deal with retransmission of lost packets, which at human interaction speeds like voice is very easy, the hosts deal with interoperability of protocols and styles, and best of all the hosts can be added/dropped/changed at will without the network equipment requiring any reconfiguration at all.
Yeah, "Meaningful" QoS would be nice, but for me "Meaningful" would be not to spend the money that a dozen single-source super-routers with QoS would cost, instead spending it on fast and simple network hardware and much faster inter-router circuits.
You go ahead and juggle QoS on your 90% utilized T1, and I'll do best effort on my 10Gigabit fiber link.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Since 802.1q is the spec for tagged VLANs on ethernet switches, I somehow doubt that's going to apply to phones :)
for that matter, most cable networks have pretty decent bandwidth. since Qwest is starting to roll out DSLAMs that are fed with T1(s), your DSL connection and your 70 neighbors DSL connections going into a DSLAM with 4 T1's isn't going very far. I'll take my 4Mbit cable modem any day over DSL.
EOM
Speak Freely is voice over IP software that runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME, Unix and Linux and interoperates between them seamlessly.
It uses encryption if you want it, too.
There's also VoicePGP if you want to talk to Mac's, and who knows what other software out there that I don't know about.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
bah enough with the wires, things in my place only move towards wireless. Best bet is that it'll die out like the others for lack of necessity. Make something i need and can't live without, or at least make it a super deal.
"i can never say no to anyone but you"
I think VoIP makes great sense as a home phone, with the understanding that for emergencies you have a cell phone.
The cost savings of the VoIP for normal use well offset the cost of a cell, especially if you buy the "pay for every minute of use" options and then only use it when you actually need it.
For "emergencies" a cell phone is far smarter anyway, since your "emergency" can happen anywhere and not just at home, near a phone.
Put a cheap cell phone in your safe-room, and that should be pleanty.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Since it's just IP, you "connect" from anywhere to your VoIP gateway. It doesn't matter where your gateway is.
And for cheaper service, some cut-rate mom&pop VoIP-ISP will put in extention numbers and put ten thousand different people on the same "number".
"If you want to get in touch with me, call my office in Washington DC, extension #1218."
You could have lots of different numbers this way too, just subscribe to multiple services.
Gee, just like voice-based IRC. Yep.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Lots of ISP's cave in to pressure to put sniffers on their systems without court orders.
But remember that the 1995 law required a system that could re-route any POTS call anywhere in the country back to the FBI in Virginia for monitoring. Provided a court order, of course. Hahaha.
Here's the rub: There are specific judges whos job it is to issue wiretap warrants. They don't turn the requests down, so having a "warrant" is merely an issue of paperwork and has nothing to do with the validity of the case anyway.
If the FBI or other Fed.Gov agency wants your data, nothing will stop them from getting it. John Gotti's PGP keys were trapped by a keyboard logger they installed on his PC in a black-bag op. His lawyer tried to say that it should have had a wiretap warrant, but that argument didn't impress the trial judge.
Have a nice day.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
In your office, install a VoIP gateway. Use a VoIP phone at home, and log into the office gateway with it.
If your office network is integrated into the same switch, your own office extention will ring your VoIP phone when ever you're logged in with it. Conversely, calls you make are made from your office number for caller ID and billing purposes.
Does this answer all your questions?
Caviat: Any services reachable from the outside world can be hacked. Encrypt your VoIP traffic, use secure tunnels between firewalled LANs.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no doubts that they'll eventually move to "protect" the content that their subsidiaries sell.
If they are registered as a telephone company in the US, they have to route E911 calls to a local PSAP (public safety access point). Its one of the first tested requirement before turning up any commercial voice telecoms equipment. Every one of the 50 states PUC's require it before the first customer makes a call.
:-)
Something is very fishy about this. Perhaps they are counting on the DSL line still having a working phone which can call 911. I can't find them listed as a registered telco in the US either.
Look at their customer FAQ. There is a long list of area codes they can't call, especially all toll numbers like 1-900, and all competing telco access numbers like 1010-att. I have a sneaky suspicion they are not hooked into the national SS7 network, but instead have some kind of simple interface into voice trunks in a few places. Their international rates are the worst I've seen in years, US$0.35/minute to belgium. Ouch.
There may be a problem with their non-geographic use of area codes. Since they have purchased blocks of phone numbers from a bunch of area codes, maybe it would fuck up older PSAPs if they get delivered a non-local number. I can just see a police dispatcher in Oregon freaking out because she has a call coming in from a New Jersey phone number (hold on sir, we'll have someone there in three days
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on