Internet Phones Replacing POTS In Japan

prostoalex writes: "CNN reports on growth of Internet phone services in Japan. The high cost of telephone calls, which many saw as an impediment to spread of the Internet is right now actually a menace to plain old phone companies, as more and more people are switching to VoIP services."

Comments

Great service with Vonage.

[www.sorehands.com]

I have been using Vonage for a few weeks and it has been great.

They provide a Cisco ATA186. The only downsides are:

• You need a home network, but I had one and a DSL router works.
• You need a DHCP server, not a static IP network. It was easy to set it up, but they don't say so in the documentation.

The advantage over cell phone is that there are no minutes! It is $39.95 a month and you can choose which area code you want a phone number in. You can forward it to a cell phone when out, or any other phone that you may be at.

Bandwidth? keep VOIP off my ethernet

[slashnot007]

Isn't this going to choke the internet bandwidth. either at the back bone level or the plain old router level. I mean I would be steamin' mad if some idiot sharing a router with me was streaming a video phone while I'm trying to mount a remote hard disk. While the internet backbone may have excess bandwidth local switches dont.

Furthermore isn't Voip ultimately more expensive if you actually had to pay for it? I mean the reason internet service is so cheap right now is that I dont gobble bandwith 100% of the time. If everyone fully utilized their dsl connections theoretical I think we would all be paying more and getting crappier service.

Re:Bandwidth? keep VOIP off my ethernet

[fidget42]

Isn't this going to choke the internet bandwidth

Actually, voice is very low bandwidth. You should be more concerned of someone mounting a remote harddisk while you are trying to talk to someone. Getting hit by a DoS while trying to call 911 would be a bad thing, too.

Vonage DigitalVoice

[grahamsz]

I've recently signed up to vonage digital voice and the techincal service is fantastic.

With some wrangling i've since taken the ata-186 router back to scotland with me. I work for a company in the USA and this gives me a californian phone number and (once i upgrade to the $40 service) unlimited minutes across the usa.

Latency doesn't seem to be a problem although i'm definitely with one of the better uk broadband providers. I'll also soon experiment with setting up QoS on my network to ensure that my 1024/256 doesn't saturate to the point that my voip packets drop.

The main downsides to vonage are:
- They dont let you have the password to the Cisco router which YOU have bought from them - meaning you cant use the second line or easily connect it to a h232 gatekeeper to do intelligent things with.

- They wont bill any credit card which doesn't have a US billing address and wont ship outside of the US (and guyana for some reason)

Re:This has been a long time coming...

[qnonsense]

I was going to do that as well... but pacbell/sbc *requires* that you maintain "basic monthly service" on a telephone in order to be "eligible" for DSL.... pricks.

hmm.... anyone want to join a class action law suit against pacbell / sbc with me?

• No, this makes sense. You are using
• their lines for the DSL, so they have to be connected even if you're not going to make a single phone call. If you get DSL with a company other than your local telco (PacBell for me, I live in Santa Cruz and have DSL through Cruzio), your ISP must see a telephone number for you in order to determine if your line can carry DSL. In other words, it's not too agregious for PacBell to charge a few bucks a month for the telephone line, even if you're not using it for telephone.
  
  Don't get me wrong, it still sucks, you just couldn't sue them for it.
  

interesting features

[AssFace]

I worked for a company that wrote software for a Japaense company's VoIP phones. Those things had some cool features - you could download pictures off the net and use them as icons on the phone's display, and you could download mp3s and use them as the ringer - a different one for various callers, as well as different "lines".

it was neat to see since really nobody uses them here in the states - but apparently it is really big over there.

Re:Great service with Vonage. .. Latency??

[dolt]

UDP isn't the primary contribution to latency.

The largest contibution to latency is the encoding and decoding codecs -- that is, the translation from an audible analog signal to a digital signal and back again. The more compression that is desired, the longer this takes. The actual transmission over a network -- using UDP or anything else -- is negligable and has little to do with the packets being UDP or old-world "TDM" voice.

Of course, those UDP packets (the VoIP traffic) can be prioritized over non-VoIP traffic, if the routers support such prioritization and there is a way to mark high-priority packets. DIFFSERV is one such mechanism to do this.