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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."
I remember an old Robert Cringely column in which he said that a new technology will replace an old one (or win, or something like that), if it is either ten times better, or one-tenth as expensive. And sure enough, this article explains that the cost of a three-minute long distance call went down to 6 cents (I assume they converted from yen) from 68 cents. I'm not saying Cringely is always right, but this theory of his seems to apply in this situation.
There's one reason why I've always wanted VoIP: traceroute.
At my old home, I had a dialup connection to my ISP. About once or twice a month when I would dial in for the evening, I would hear *static* on the phoneline. I'm talking like a noisy AM radio type of static. I would hang up the modem, dial in again, and the static would be gone.
My best guess is that there was a faulty wire *somewhere* in the telco's network that was causing the static, and I was unfortunate enough for my call to end up on that wire. (Remember, POTS is a circuit switched network, the same set of wires is used for the duration of the connection) Of course, when I called Verizon, there was absolutely no way for me to reproduce the problem reliably, so they couldn't do much to help. Had I some equivilent of a way to do a traceroute, I could simply say, 'the link between switch-5.verizon.net and switch-32.verizon.net is dropping packets, please put that in the trouble ticket so the techs can fix it'.
So yeah, I'm a little giddy about VoIP. Almost makes me wanna get a T1 to my current residence and drop the POTS line I have now... Well, I can dream, I suppose.
I'll stop babbling now...