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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."
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!
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.
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 $0.22US per minute. Calling from Ukraine to the US is extremely expensive.
The Internet has made a lot of things possible that just 5 years ago were out of the hands of most people. The economy of calling that far and that cheap is amazing. When I was a kid I always wanted a video phone. The Web Cam is it.
I think the effect of wireless communication and integrated web communication will stall the growth of physical phone lines and we will start to see them disappear in a few decades. It seems to fit the natural order of how technology progressess. With 3G coming to Sprint PCS phones this summer and all the other carriers later this year and next year I predict that even how we connect to the Internet on a daily basis will change. I see the majority of IP traffic coming from wireless devices rather than desktop computers in 5 years time.
Telcos in Canada must be up for "five 9's" a year. Thats a law not just a slogan. ISPs do not. Its perfectly legal for an ISP to be up only twice a week for 45mins at a time.
So the reason you pay 0.05$ 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.
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/
And on top of that our voice quality is US toll quality or better, even with the quater second delay. If it were not illegal I would interconnect to the Indian PSTN and sell a calling card using excess capacity on my system.
It *is* possible for the telcos to embrace VoIP or a similar packet voice technology and integrate it into their SS7 or ISDN networks. Other than corruption of the PTTs I don't see why it isn't being done to lower costs and improve quality where appropriate.
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.
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 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.