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Net Phones Taking Off in the Third World
dipfan writes "Internet telephone technology is surging in popularity and starting to make a big dent in telephone revenues in the Third World, for a simple reason: cost. A call from Honduras to the US over the net is just 5 or 10 cents a minute at an internet cafe, compared with $1+ a minute through a telco, reports the Washington Post, which compares the situation to the US where internet telephony "is used mostly by college students and geeks" who have the time and energy to install the software."
Be careful of bandwith issues. Bandwidth will always be a problem. No matter how much bandwidth you add, no matter how big you make your highways, no matter how much oil you drill, people will always use as much as you make, even if it means wasting it or creating enough traffic to degrade the whole thing. There is no substitute for efficiency. A better license can compensate for inferior technology to only a minor degree.
With enough upstream bandwidth not only will telcos be hurt but also content providers. You think the artificial 128k limit is there for any other reason? There is decades worth of dark fiber just laying in wait till the telcos and cable companies figure out how to charge you for it. The cost of the future infrastructure is mostly paid for though, they'll be sure to get their money back somehow.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I use Yahoo! Messenger to talk to a friend in the US regularly.
I "call" from Denmark, and he is not a college student.
Does that mean Denmark is a third world country or is my friend a geek?
I am not particulary surprised at this.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
And the telephone companies wonder why they are losing customers. They cannot compete against Internet telephony with regard to price. Why the telcos still charge those kind of rates always puzzled me, especially since calls are no routed by computers, at little cost.
This is good for a lot of these countries, since families often have relatives scatteered around the globe, and can use a low cost method to stay in touch (besides written communication, of course).
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
Speaking from personal experience, my stepfather (in Virginia) uses VoIP to talk to his brother in England. And it's not just because of cost (since both of them are senior-level managers at a telco and a hardware vendor, respectively), but also because most of the time, they're online and in front of their computers anyway.
:wq
Living in Germany and calling back home to my folks in Australia, I can substantially reduce my telephone costs from .80 Euro a minute to .05 Euro a minute simply by dialling a code to use a different operator (OneTel in this case)
This is by no means a situation limited to my location, cheap providers of overseas calls exist all around the world. Having experimented with telephone calls over the internet, I found my current option to be far more practical (since I can use it from any landline) and convinient.
All it takes is some quick research to find out the cheapest provider for your needs (a service a local computer mag kindly provides every fortnight)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Actually I think writting off 3rd world debt and for developed countrys ( the USA especially ) to spend a larger percentage of their GDP on third world aid would be a little more help than Jesus in this situation.
So now everyone will have to face the reality that telephone service has been overcharging for years. Not only that but the internet can offer the same service for less money.
Say bye bye telcos. I hope those third world countries really save enough money from these large first world corporations to make a quality lifestyle change. I hope they take this opportunity to manage their own services and dont let USA bully and sanction and threaten their way into corporate control of the new technologies there.
oh my...can we say crusade? help is what they need; love, compassion, and help...leave the dieties/martyrs out of it.
1) Decrease the costs of traditional telephone service because they will need to compete with net based services.
2) Increase the costs associated with connections to the internet, because as people use more, the costs for everyone goes up.
I'm not sure which will actually occur, but I bet with services such as this around, you'll see a lot of broadband companies upset because they will want their piece of the action. If the average user starts using his/her connection for phone services too instead of just downloading, why are people so confused when they hear about price increases such as this. To me, it just makes sense, more people will use it for more things==service costs more to provide.
Now I'm just waiting for some level of QOS to implemented world wide for this sort of thing, that way my phone call doesn't wait for your warez. Know what I mean?
Here in India by telco its around 1$/min but on the net it is 14c and prices are dropping and soon may get to about 5c/min, I just hope quality improves :-)
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seems odd that telco's would look at the popularity of "cheap" online alternatives and be upset, as opposed to altering their pricing schemes to be more appealing to "the populaces" ... ... just my two centabos.
When they attempt to shut it down, will anything like Peek-a-booty be able to come to the rescue?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
The Internet has really turned communication on its ear. I have a friend in the Ukraine that I chat with almost daily and every weekend we set up NetMeeting and have a video conference for a couple of hours. It costs neither of us any extra than what we already pay for our internet connection.
In fact the connection we get with NetMeeting is by far more reliable than using phones! Phone calls are (in my experience) about 25% likely to be unusable. They are also quite expensive. Even researching the best "10-10" numbers gets you down to about $0.22US per minute. Calling from Ukraine to the US is extremely expensive.
The Internet has made a lot of things possible that just 5 years ago were out of the hands of most people. The economy of calling that far and that cheap is amazing. When I was a kid I always wanted a video phone. The Web Cam is it.
I think the effect of wireless communication and integrated web communication will stall the growth of physical phone lines and we will start to see them disappear in a few decades. It seems to fit the natural order of how technology progressess. With 3G coming to Sprint PCS phones this summer and all the other carriers later this year and next year I predict that even how we connect to the Internet on a daily basis will change. I see the majority of IP traffic coming from wireless devices rather than desktop computers in 5 years time.
Besides, cell phones are often more widely used in third-world nations. They're only luxury goods if you already have a copper network in place. I'm quite sure that if we had it all do over again here in the States, we'd build cell towers rather than run thousands of miles of wire, just as many people are "building" WiFi LANs in their homes rather than running Cat5 through the walls.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Ignoring the rest of the thrid world and concentrating on Africa a moment.
If the usage of net-phones increases in Africa, and the previous story was also true - someone somewhere is going to end up paying more. Seems a loss-maker in the making for third-world ISPs.
nic
PS. This comment clearly side-steps many, many obvious points. (e.g. the super-poor countries with no network connectivity; countries where no-one who can afford a phone-call of any price, etc., etc.) Please don't just state the obvious in any reply.
nic
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
Why are we sending cell phones, a luxury product if ever there was one, to Third World nations
Because if you are starting from scratch it's a lot easier to set up a telephone system with cellular phones than it is to install lots of cable. It's also a lot quicker and cheaper to get a cellphone system back operational following a major natural disater or war.
Telcos in Canada must be up for "five 9's" a year. Thats a law not just a slogan. ISPs do not. Its perfectly legal for an ISP to be up only twice a week for 45mins at a time.
So the reason you pay 0.05$ a minute for a long distance call with your telco and next to nothing with an ISP [e.g. using some VoIP program] is because Telcos are reliable. I mean if I go and call a buddy in British Columbia I am fairly certain of a few things
a) The call will go through
b) The quality of the signal is consistent
c) There is no lag or strong echoes
If I call with an ISP I may not be able to reach him [e.g. local fiber problems.. stupid rogers], or my mic/speaker setup may sound too bad, or worse there may be annoying ping times.
If all you want is an informal chat with a buddy then VoIP programs are ok. But if you need to conduct reliable communcation then telco's are about all you have to choose from.
As towards third world countries perhaps the calls are so expensive because maintaining a relibable connection is costly.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Don't forget Monday were SlashDot had an article about a hardware VoIP unit. You just plug the unit into your DSL or cable modem and your set. For $20 a month you can have 500 minutes of long distance, or $40 a month and you get unlimited long distance.
As an aside: I have mine on order, I should be getting the unit today. I checked my web interface and saw that I have had 3 telemarketer calls to my new number. A number which I have yet to be give out.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Gee...you're so smart, please forgive me for feeling.
I have come to the conclusion that the telecom companies in the US are fighting a losing battle -- trying desperately to milk the last dollars out of a market and hoping that people don't have enough information to know that they're getting cheated royally.
Seriously, I get offers for long-distance in the mail for 7 cents a minute, or maybe 15 cents per minute "anytime", and they're trying to make it sound like they're doing me a favor. Then, when I decide that I'll go with a company like bigzoo for my long-distance needs, then they tack on some very dubious "taxes" and "surcharges" onto my bill to recoup their losses. I mean, I have to pay, not to have a long distance carrier! Is this fraud or what?
The telecom companies know that they're fighting a losing battle. It would be nice if they got on board and tried to lead the technology revolution, instead of getting dragged behind it. But that's asking a little too much of them, I guess. In the meantime, let them get screwed for promulgating such a stupid business model -- preying on people's ignorance.
Well, all the better for students and the less priviliged people around the world. Hopefully, at least in this aspect, the internet will set them free.
I wonder if in a few years, when internet telephony takes off here in the States, we'll see the telco's trying to push new legislation to ban or regulate it to make up for their lack of flexible business model.
You know, like the RIAA is doing? Gee, don't try to embrace new technology and make money off of it, just buy some legislation to make sure you may remain entrenched in your old ways...
--- witty signature
I use pgpfone, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's windows-only, but this drawback pales in front of the advantage of having a snooper-proof connection; I don't discuss state-secrets over it - I don't evan know *any* state-secret - but I grin each time I hear about "internet wiretapping" and "more powers to the cops"...
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I can second this, having recently seen a local tour guide happily chatting away on his cellphone... Amidst the dunes of the Sahara, in the south of Morocco.
Nearest land phone was miles away, and would have cost him many times what his cell call did.
i've set it up for my mom, grandma, sister, and uncle.........and myself.....lots of free calls being a poor, geeky college kid doens't leave much money for family communication, the dorm is too small, i want to go home..........i also want to take the 10mb connection with me!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
And at some schools
You wouldn't know if you're phone calls are being transferred over the internet. In actuality, a number of carriers shell out a good portion of their calls to internet telecom companies who then route your call over the internet to the destination. Don't get me wrong, you still get charged the premium price, but the big telco company gets the price break. This is really big for international cell phone calls. Think of the three biggest cell phone companies in the country, at least one of them uses their services for 1/3rd of their calls.
Vonova Corporation was one such internet telecom, but they've since changed their name. I'll leave that to you guys to figure it out.
?
Since it would appears that the govt can sniff traffic on the net, does a web phone fall under the telco wiretapping laws or the internet ones ?
All those people in garbarge-strewn empty lots, talking to the wall may be up to more than you think!
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I've just come back from spending a month in Nepal, a very poor country with limited telecommunications facilities.
In the larger cities (Kathmandu, Pokhara) you could call the UK over the internet for about 25-50Rs/minute. Using a traditional phone line costs 125-200Rs/minute. When I was there 10 years previous it was US$5/min!
The exchange rate is something like 72Rs to US$1.
The costs are differences aren't as much as this posting said, but it's still quite a saving.
Personally I shopped around for a cheap real phone call (125-150Rs/min) as the quality was so much better.
I work on voice over IP telephony products, and I think that the market is ready to switch (pun intended).
SME's are figuring out that they can use their DSL lines to make net calls and video conferencing, and they're starting to ask (big time) exactly why they're paying per minute to make voice calls. And telcos are listening, and worrying.
There is a huge demand at the low end for true all-in-one products that encorporate an ethernet switch, DSL uplinks, a firewall and web server, handle IP-to-IP calls as well as IP-TDM, TWIF, ISDN (yuk), voicemail, door answer, that come with web browsing hardware phones and PC softphones and value added applications like videoconferencing. You would not believe the amount of software and hardware that we have in our current product; think 128Mb RAM, 128Mb compact flash, a 10 GB hard drive and a PCB that would make your head spin, in what's traditionally been a market for small (embedded devices.
And we're not developing this stuff simply because it's fun; there's a real demand from SME's for it. Initially we intended selling these boxes at retail (unheard of for a full featured telecomms switch); we've backed off from that now, simply because telco's are so keen to sell them as part of packages, because they know that if they don't, we will sell them at retail, and they'll lose a stack of voice money.
Note that the features that we enjoy today on residential lines - caller ID, call waiting, three party, callback - all came out of SME private branch exchanges. Telcos just realised that they could make extra money selling them to residential customers as well. They'll dig their heels in (hard) to stop us moving from TDM calls to VoiP, but - bearing in mind that once your call hits the local exchange, it hops to an IP backbone anyway - they can't hold out forever. Sooner or later, a residential provider will crack and start offering realistic VoiP to the home, and then all the rulebooks get ripped up. Roll on the day!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Speak Freely is a program that allows two or more people to conduct a real-time voice conference over the Internet or any other TCP/IP network. It supports a variety of compression protocols, such as GSM, ADPCM, LPC, and LPC-10. The cryptography-enabled version includes IDEA, DES, and limited PGP encryption capabilities for protecting the privacy of important voice conversations.
http://www.speakfreely.org/
I don't know abotu Africa, but in a lot of developing countries, the state-owned telco monopoly is also the gatekeeper of internet connectivity.
I've had personal experience with the Republic of Palau in the Western Pacific. Palau National Commuinications Corp. owns the phone system, and also runs Palaunet, the only ISP on the island. (Good luck getting another ISP in when PNCC owns the access to the lines.)
Result: internet telephone calls are prohibited on Palaunet. (It's easy-- watch for bi-directional high-bandwitdth traffic, instead of uni-directional. So simultaneously uploading and downloading on a P2P will get your account a once-over, but that's life in the Third World.) Instead, you're forced to pay the egregiously expensive long distance voice rates.
Internet telephony only works if you've got an open communications industry. That's not true in a lot of developing countries, where the Government is footing the bill for all infrastructure, and wants to keep control of it for economic or political reasons.
VoIP termination is certainly illegal. Even though the phone company, who also have a monopoly on bandwidth, make money whatever you do. They're getting local call rates (Billed at $2 an hour inc taxes), bandwidth money from the ISP, and they still don't want to lose the international telephony deals, where they make ridiculous amounts of money.
All over Europe, telcos don't want to lose lucrative internation traffic. Real third world countries (rather than emerging economies) have neither enough bandwidth nor the latency required to provide adequate VoIP anyway.
However bandwidth in Morocco is pretty good. Check out www.tiboo.com for a site hosted in Morocco with high visits and reasonable serving of pages.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Oh yea, it sure takes a lot of effort to install one of these programs, I guess i'd better quit my job before I try. Oh thats right I don't have one, but I still don't have the time or effort. It's hard work doing nothing, always have to find something to do and then do that to.
Trouble is, I have a dynamic IP, and I haven't yet found a SIP address registry that works with linphone, and it's a bit of a pain to set up a routine to post my current IP to a webpage form (since I know my non-geek friends won't know what to do with it).
Has anybody found a registry that plays friendly with linphone?
Has anyone found a cheap way to call the Turks & Caicos (British West Indies)? The local Cable and Wireless has a perfect monopoly, being on an island and all. The internet phone services are still pretty pricey.
I suppose it's fitting that it's $0.05/minute to the third-world, and $0.50 to an island of luxury villas...
This is embarrasing. Is the US ahead of other nations in any field now? I've been hoping for some access faster than 56k for a few years now, and I'm hearing that third-world countries can get voIP? Grrrrr.
--Bennett Prescott
Former Lord Of Packets
Specifically Southwestern Bell.
I can go on and on, but I'll tell you this: I do not have a phone at home anymore, and I have long since abandonded my much loved 5 static ips and dsl as well, in favor of dynamic-only port-80 blocked sometimes-slower-than-M$-fixes-security-holes cable modem.
And I'm MUCH happier.
I will never in my life use SWBell's services. If I am running from rabbid wolverines and my only chance of survival is to purchase SWBell local phone service, I'd rather dive into a swimming pool filled with double-edged razor blades, followed by having my face eaten off by said wolverines.
I only make calls through dialpad, ($9.99 a month for 400 minutes). That's all my long distance AND all local calls. No incoming calls. My wife has gotten use to it. Sure beats $50/month for voice mail/caller id/call waiting/call waiting caller id/caller id call waiting calling/made up services to charge you extra in hopes you won't notice (slamming & cramming)/to just look at the caller id, and ignore the call.
Yeah, maybe it's a pain in the butt to connect the handset everytime I need to make a call (that's what wireless+laptop is for), and 911 isn't supported (that's what cell phones are for). But at 2.5 cents a minute, (and best of all NO SWBell), I see no comparison. People just page me, and I call them back. It's a plus, because none of our friends/family have to use long distance to get a hold of us either.
Oh yeah, and no spam calls/wrong numbers either...
I haven't tried this out yet, but it allows you to connect a regular (cordless) phone to your computer, eliminating the wire-fumbling.
OgreInsde
"The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care, right?" -Offspring
This means that something like a net phone is a revelation in terms of cost. I have a friend who has been talking to his brother in Germany with a net phone for a while now. The only problem is that this is illegal because ISPs are not allowed to carry voice traffic! In fact the telecoms monopoly tried to destroy ISPs by citing a law that states that nobody is allowed to resell bandwidth. Fortunately the lost the case, but it was touch and go for a while.
My greatest sadness is that new technologies promise so much for countries like ours, but our government makes horrible mistakes like legislating a monopoly. If we can just learn to embrace new technologies and learn from trends round the world, we can rapidly pull ourselves to the front out of the mire we are in at the moment.
In my admittedly limited experience with internet telephony, I have found that latency has been more of a problem than bandwidth. Presumably, your cyber cafes or universities are going to have enough bandwidth to support people using the internet for telephone use. After all, file sharing consumes more bandwidth than streaming voice does, and practically every geek on campus has been exploiting that technology. Compression of telephone-range frequency is good, because the frequency range required is not broad in the general sense of the term. I'm not pretending to be an expert here, but this is the impression I have gathered from my readings (so flame it up, if you have to)
However, IMHO, I have found it annoying to speak with people over the internet for the reason that the tempo of a conversation is often broken by having to wait for the person on the other side of the line to hear what you just said. I've taken this to be a latency-related issue, but hey I could be mistaken. At any rate, I'll stick with the telephone for now.
Here is what I want:
I want a service which will let me make phone calls to real phone numbers over my high speed broadband connection, using my existing telephone equipment (rj-11 cordless phone, etc.)
In addition, I would like to be able to recieve calls on it, using a number which would be free for people who live close to me to call.
Does such a service exist? I don't use my phone very often, and hate paying Verizon every month. I have a cable modem which usually gets very high thruput.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
Depending on which country you're in YMMV, but I have found that using the canada direct service is fairly reliable and cheap. Basically you call 1-800-222-0016, and that gets you a line in canada, from there you can just use a calling card to place the call. So basically the call isn't going to cost more than a call within canada.
THe cool thing is seeing on the phone bill $50-60 in savings on a call that costs $2.50
The Cayman Islands has a phone monopoly protected by the government. I lived there for 3 years. In US dollars it was close to 1.50 per minute to call the US. We quickly learned to send our relatives money and have them call us at .30 - .50 per minute. The Cayman Islands likes to brag about being upscale by having the highest number of fax machines per capita. The reason for the large number of fax machines is due to the cost of a phone call. Nobody calls the states to get put into voice mail hell. They send a fax instead. Now that internet has reached the islands, I expect e-mail to replace fax unless spam gets too expensive to receive. Long distance charges are a good fax spam filter.
.30 per minute US. TOS prevented voice over internet. Needless to say very little browsing was done. Eudora was popular as the only client on many machines as a cheaper fax alternative. Connections were just long enough to send/receive mail. I never composed online. You can check out the current rates and terms of service at www.candw.ky The prices are not US dollars. 1.25 US will buy one CI dollar.(/RANT)
(begin RANT) Even 800 consumer service numbers are billed. I picked up my first copy of Windows 95 upgrade while there. (it was a few years ago) After installing it, it couldn't find the CD drive it was installed from, the modem, or the sound card. At 1.50 per minute for service, I simply chose to wipe the drive and recover the old OS from backups. I finaly upgraded after I returned to the US. An hour on the phone would have cost about what the upgrade cost. Dialup internet was about
The truth shall set you free!
I used to use dialpad when it was free, it wasn't too bad with dsl, but still you had to pretend it was a radio with a 2 second lag in it, when talking. Otherwise it sounded choppy and you would talk over each other and break up. Now adays i just get the 3.5 cent/min calling card from Costco. Just over two dollars per hour, and you don't have to pretend the people you are talking to are orbitting the moon.
My Weblog
I want my computer to be a single point of access to phones. I want it to automatically choose the cheapest method for me, whether it is a local call over standard phones, VoIP, or something else.
There has to be some hardware involved, for instance, I guess I need a card that is capable of making a call over the classical phone lines. Could a modem be used for this?
Then I could have a single front-end in my house, for example, I'øø have a Bluetooth access point, connected to the computer. Then I have a Bluetooth headset lying around. If I put it on, there is voise recognition, so that I can say "call ma", and if the cheapest call to ma happens to be a local telephone call, the computer will use the telephone card to make that call. If it happens to be VoIP, it makes a VoIP call, if I have to call on her cell phone, it dials that number.
This "while-we're-waiting-for-VoIP" card that I have in mind, anybody know if that's easy to make?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Damn... I have to pay 10 cents a minute to call (via telco) the next state which is only a few miles away. But I can cut the middle-man and call the drug smuggler directly in Honduras for the same price! Mmmmmmm.... technology...
Developers: We can use your help.
I recently read a short article that was written by a Jamaican back in 1995 or 1996. It discussed the availability of e-mail in Jamaica at the time. It turned out that e-mail was mostly being used to contact people outside of the region, and it wasn't being used to communicate locally.
I just wonder if this technology would do anything to foster local communities, rather than just connecting people over great distances. Certainly, talking to a relative who is away is important, but it's important to look at what can be done to improve the local infrastructure as well.
Please don't use the term "Third World." It has roots in the 19th century racism and is derogatory at best. It refers to the time when Europe colonized much of Africa, Asia, and South America, and thought of the natives as little more than slaves or animals. A more accurate and humanizing term is "developing countries."
Also, for what it's worth, technically Europe is the "First World," and North America is the "Second World" or New World.
Baloney. That's just rather narrow political correctness.
If it's so bad to use Third World, then why do The Third World Network and The Third World Academy of Science and The Third World Quarterly and Friends Of The Third World - all worthy institutions - all feel able to use the title without being derogatory or racist?
Here in the U.S. internet telephony will probably take quite a while to catch on. Why? Because landline rates are cheap (at least compared to the rest of the world). Also, the quality of American landlines tends to be high, at least better than internet telephony.
So why is it so cheap? Because of the large installed base. The most expensive part of the infrastructure -- the copper "last mile" -- is already in place, and has been for nearly a hundred years. For the most part, that copper is already paid for. Plus, there is a lot of competition.
By sake of example, my long distance carrier, Opex, charges me $0.045/min for interstate and $0.09/min for intrastate calls. International rates are reasonable.
In third world countries, there isn't a very large installed base. The cost of installing new copper is high, and in many cases equipment is still being paid off. Plus, many countries have telco monopolies that charge whatever they feel like. So naturally, people will turn to promising alternatives such as internet telephony. When I was in Guatemala two years ago, it seemed there were more cell phones than landline phones. Cell towers were everywhere, it seemed. (On a side note, I walked thru a village where the houses were mud huts with no running water... but they had TV's and cell phones... priorities???)
Summarizing: U.S. landlines are higher quality than internet telephony and at reasonable cost; 3rd world landlines low quality high cost; might as well try VOIP.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
You don't need rj-11. You need a good net connection (check out wireless), and a good voice connection.
Seriously, I pay the same amount as a voice line for a phone that has a number not where I live, but where the people who call me live, and free long distance anywhere in the US, free roaming (but no service outside of cities, but still everywhere I travel) I get caller id, unlisted number, and voicemail included, all of which are extra charge for a regular phone.
I don't care who provides my service (though if I have a choice I will choose someone who isn't lobbying goverment for laws I don't like) I care that I get good service. One number to call that always reaches me is nice. (I do not always answer the phone).
When I was in Kiev - I used several VoIP - especially the options which dialed numbers in the US for almost free (AolPhone and another which I forget)
Obviously they intenede to mke money on Ads - but the demographics - Third World Cafe users - probably aren't very promising to advertisers.\\This must explain the restructuring and otherwise discontinuation of those systems.
In the US - most cellphones are National Plans with cheap rates at night - I presume the people who would have wanted to chat cheap here - just use their cells - I do.
AIK
am sure the press is quite proud of being called "the fourth estate".
Calling Third World something else will not change their plight, and using North / South moniker will probably upset people in Australia and Argentina.
Four weeks ago I was in zambia, and met the looseing major presidential canadate in the most recent election. When I asked him what his plans were now, he said that since looseing the election he's been getting in wireless communications. He proceded to gush about the benefits of cell phones and how zambia was deepley in need of a rural cellular network. It was a bit etherial to be hearing this in the midst of a country where starvation is not uncommon.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
My father also uses a Sam's Club card. Here's what he did to get around the extra fees for not having a long distance provider: he signed up for the Verizon SmartTouch plan, which is a prepaid calling plan. It's basically the same as using a phone card, except you don't have to dial an access number or PIN.
Here's the interesting part: He never actually uses it. He just lets it sit there so that he doesn't have to pay the extra fees you were talking about. There are no per-month fees or maintenance fees with the plan, and as it says on Verizon's web site, "per-minute rate includes all surcharges, fees and taxes."
So basically, he just signed up for the Verizon SmartTouch plan to avoid the fees, never uses it, and continues to use his Sam's Club card as usual.
IANATE (i am not a telphony expert) and hardly use voice telecommunication myself, but i have heard of the usage of calling cards, which can be really cheap.
or their net-brokered equivalents, like bigzoo.com and probably many more.
Wow. The things you see when you read all the trash.
You're majorly fucked up, you know that boy? Meds are what you need, and lots of them. I'm surprised aren't already in a locked-down facility.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Finding Jesus is the only way out of the cycle of poverty and he ain't reachable by cell phone.
Given that he's verifiably dead I'd hazard there's a good reason you can't reach him by cell.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Funny, the way that the 3rd world is leading the charge in this particular area of new technology: VoIP.
It reminds of what was going on back in the early 1990s, when cell phone markets in India and other countries were booming, largely because cell phones provided so much more reliable service than the creating infrastructure of their land line telephone system.
I've heard that the cell phone business in many African countries is still lucrative, screwy government policies notwithstanding.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Prior to the breakup of AT&T in 1984, telephony in North America was governed by monopoly conditions similar to what you see in many "third world" countries today. The network, lines, and (for a long time) even the phones were property of the telephone company. You paid a lease charge and could only use the equipment in ways which were profitable to Ma Bell. There was even a case where the phone company sued to stop the sale of a plastic cone (to cover the mouthpiece and block out noise) because of the damage it might cause to the network.
It should not surprise anyone to learn that, also up until about 1984, the state-of-the-art in telephone switching equipment was, for the most part, still compatible with equipment state-of-the-art for half a century before. (The difference is roughly equivalent to the technological differences between an 80386 based system, and one based on a Pentium; a little more speed, a little more capacity, a completely new math co-processor on the same chip, but the same tired engine underneath it all.)
Several things happened in 1984 with the AT&T consent decree: for one, competition was mandated back into the market. Legislation was introduced mandating that all calls (yes even ones carrying data over 2400 baud modems) had to be treated the same. (the Common Carrier laws) Also, special protection was created for "Data services"; which the telephone companies were prohibited from offering, even though they were (at the time) in apparently the best position to offer those services.
The effects were both immediately apparent, and blindingly unobvious. The expected part was the drop in long distance rates when Sprint and MCI entered the long distance market and offered real competition. But the unobvious part was the effect the telephony deregulation had on data communications. It's no coincidence that modem technology, home computing, and the Internet all took-off at about the same time. The Internet we enjoy today is the direct result of deregulation that occurred 20 years ago. But it would have occurred even earlier if Ma Bell had not had a profit incentive to prevent it from occurring earlier.
This is not to say Bell Labs didn't advance the state-of-the-art in telephony. Anyone living through those times will tell you that most of the innovation within that industry was coming from the company holding the monopoly control over it. But looking back, you have to wonder if, but for the Ma Bell monopoly, we might have had the Internet revolution back in the 1960's.
Don't just knock the phone companies. They are doing what any business with a monopoly must do; use every trick in the book to prevent challenger technologies from getting a foothold and knocking out their cash cow.
In the interest of full disclosure here, I should point out that I entered the telephony industry at the start of that deregulation wave, rode it hard and long (and profitably) and now find myself part of that industry in danger of being routed by these voice-over-IP interlopers.
But what really concerns me is that we're seeing the next wave of monopolies being built today, using the same tired tricks, and to the same disgusting ends. If you believe your Internet Service Provider won't block H323 (voice over IP) and start charging you for it just as soon as they can be sure you won't jump to their competitor when they do, you're dreaming. If you think AOL, or MSN, or Earthlink, or whomever won't terminate service to "unprofitable parts" of the Internet just as soon as they've gained monopoly control over the rest, it's probably because you've never lived through it yourself. (Wasn't that you asking them to block SPAM from Asia?) You can bet that the majority of "computer software innovation" for the next little while are going to be coming out of Redmond. But if you think that's because noone without an M$ badge can understand computers, you're falling into the same trap your grandparents fell into 80 years ago.
We're seeing the death of the Telephony monopoly in these very days, and many say it's about time. Don't feel guilty taking pleasure in the breath of fresh air it provides; you have paid dearly for it, and waited far too long. But neither let the lessons it teaches escape your grasp. In the AT&T case, their 100+year monopoly may have been well deserved. After all it isn't easy to run a twisted copper pair to every household in North America, and give it five-nines reliability. We're not talking carpet bomb the whole nation with install disks hard or strong-arm the OEM's against the competitors hard. We're talking back breaking, ditch digging, sweat dripping, pole climbing, mile after mile after mile hard. If they had a monopoly over the telephone network, at least they earned it.
But we're also building new monopolies even as we speak. Without legislation mandating that AOL (or whoever eventually wins the fight) provide common-carrier type service, you can bet everything other than web and email will be like DTMF dialing: an extra $3.95/month premium service. If the Microsoft antitrust settlement fails to preserve competition in the computer software market, we may spend another 50 years or so (how old will you be then) getting incremental technological advancements to Windows, and still be using menus and mice before it's finally over. Slashdot may be remembered not as news for nerds but for the glimpses of technology which might have been but never were.
We have a choice here. (At least I hope we still do.) We can nip these monopolies in the bud, restore competition to the market place, and begin reaping the Internet equivalent of 3 cents a minute long distance, or we can forget the lessons of the history we're living through, and let our children 30 years hence talk about this 'new fangled internet service that lets you create your own programs, compile them, and even share them with others, without having to buy a license or anything.
If it's anything like I'm thinking, someday people studying history will look back to the turn of this century and say "How could they have lived through that and not seen what was going on. It's so blatently obvious!".
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Bandwidth is just a matter of migrating bottle necks. As local access continues to build, the places that excess capacity today will be the bottle necks to tomorrow.
If a company digs a big expensive hole for fiber, they better be smart enough to be planting more than current capacity demands. It will be expensive to dig the hole again. When that hole becomes a bottleneck it will be extremely expensive to upgrade.
BTW, the fact that companies digging expensive holes for fiber planted more than current needs that maybe there might be a little bit of hope for American companies after all. We will find in a few years years their foresight was probably not enought.
protophoto
Although this is nice for ppl living in cities where the cost of connecting to a data network is fairly low, the article does point out the difficulties faced by telco's that urban users need to subsidize users where it is not cost-effective to provide this service. I come from a country where "the right to a phone" - even a payphone has become more important and govt's should consider the problem of VoIP cutting into this cross-subsidy.
my 2c
While long distance carriers are already in trouble telcos that own the physical plant (the actual phone lines) are still in good shape. While their margins may shrink we still need them to maintain the plant.
Smart telcos will stop differentiating between phone and data service and provide one pipe with a protocol that supports both high latency/high bandwidth applications like internet access and low latency/low bandwidth applications like telephony. DSL is already kinda like that, except that it is viewed as an add-on rather than an integral part of the service.
The key part is integrated billing, where the bandwidth is not differentiated between data and phone services.
I am from Honduras, there is a law here that says that Hondutel (the only goverment telecom company) is the only one that can regulate international calls. Internet cafes can sell internet access, but they cannot sell phone calls, most of them are charging for phone calls not internet access, they could me banned and closed.
This is a monopoly created by the government.
There have been cases in which some people install a satellite link between honduras and the USA, install local telephone lines in Honduras, and sell phone cards in the states.
The long distance called would only costs the local call price (2 cents a minute plus the satellite link) and you could charge 40cents a minute for a long distance call from USA to Honduras. So you only need 20 local telephones lines and a satellite link to make a lot of money (if you dont get caught)
You can make up to 1 million dollars in 6 months..
Sorry for my english...
rb.
Sorry for the bother, but it grates on my eyes reading that.
The thing is that a lot of people are doing this.
Considering how most monopolies behave I'm not surprised.
You are aware that some fiber is wound around a metal core? For strength, but power could be sent as well.
Cheaper too. Which is easier in a "developing country"? Run some wire, or build a cell tower.
True , but the cell phone network is susceptable were the NOC (I believe) connects to the land network Destroy that, bye, bye cellular.
If you want to implement a VoIP system, there is a bunch of open source software at www.vovida.org that was put there to help make things like this happen.
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There is SIP proxies and registrars, B2BUA for prepaid billing, MGCP to SIP translators, H.323 to SIP translators, voice mail system, SIP, RTSP, OSP, COPS, TRIP, RTP, RADIUS and MGCP stacks, and much more. It has been tested with phones and gateways from almost all major vendors and most of the smaller SIP vendors. It can be set up in with no single point of failure and has been tested up too 500 calls per seconds (that's a lot per day - you do the math)
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There is also some good infromation at www.iptel.org
Except for really intense use periods like festivals or during the evening the latency issue is not really a problem with a half way decent sound card and most of the cafes use good cards to attract customers.
And about being annoyed, its something you get used to really quickly once you know how it works. Besides speaking slowly and getting momemnt inbetween allows you to think clearly before speaking .