Slashdot Mirror
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 guess replacing it's easier than legalizing it.
"Derp de derp."
So now someone's telephone can be slashdotted?
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.
" More than 300,000 people have signed up for the service from BB Technologies Corp., a subsidiary of Tokyo Internet company Softbank Corp. That's easily more than three times the estimated U.S. consumer market. The service, which began in April, doesn't require a new telephone. With a book-sized modem, one gets voice quality comparable to that of regular voice lines -- at a fraction the cost.
Subscribers to Softbank's Yahoo broadband Internet service get voice over Internet for free. Non-subscribers pay about $10 per month including modem rental after a $30 installation fee. Users keep their same phone number. The broadband service is an asymmetric digital subscriber line that runs over existing wires."
And it will continue to grow in popularity. The old paradigm of having a phone hardwired in your house may die off completely considering the declining cost of wireless phones (CDMA and analog) and the increasing use of e-mail and VOIP.
The phone companies will soon have to change their revenue strategies completely in order to enjoy the large market they've had in the past. AT&T continues to raise their prices (up to $.17/minute for long distance now) Pac Bell (here in California) now has value-added services galore. Broadband is being pushed hard (they now have stands set up in the grocery stores for crying out loud)
Just as pagers are slowly becoming obsolete so are home phones. They are still handy, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify the ever-increasing cost of having one, particularly when the taxes on them are starting to become almost as expensive as the service itself. You don't have to take my word for it; anyone reading this who lives in the Bay Area (CA) have a look at the taxes you pay on your phone. Ouch!
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
But dial-up access costs a fortune. (Score:1)
by stef0x77 on Tuesday August 20, @05:37PM (#4107654)
(User #529972 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
OTOH, because of the high phone costs, dial up access to the internet in Japan is insanely expensive. An impediment to getting online for many people.
(it's posts like this that made/make me worry)
They provide a Cisco ATA186. The only downsides are:
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.
Fight Spammers!
Many of the international calls that you make are already routed through VoIP systems. Eventually all systems will make their way to VoIP. The cable company I work for offers unlimited (and long distances is included) VoIP use for $19.95 a month and includes all the features my landline does and ends up costing me nearly $40.00.
Lots of people I know only own a cellphone, and don't bother getting a POTS line at all. In areas with cable broadband there's really no reason. Modern cellphone plans have insane numbers of free local minutes and mostly 'local' refers to a larger area than the landlines - for instance my cell is local to San Jose from SF, but a landline call would be long distance.
I have a POTS now, but its mostly for my DSL to run over. When I move I'll either get Cable or a DSL provider that doesn't require a landline. Here's hoping Pacbell goes bankrupt.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
POTS? Don't you mean WOKS?
example.org - powered by Linux!
Cell phones are only usable if your telephone usage style is extremely basic.
If you depend on routing calls around, intelligent decisions based on caller ID and time, etc., then you need something with a standard interface so you can connect to other equipment capable of taking your instructions and acting on them.
In a home, some of this is just hobbyist geekery, but it really does make life easier once you get it going. In a business, it's pretty much essential unless the phone is not a significant tool in the particular line of work involved.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I found that Vonage is more reliable and sounds better than than SprintPCS.
Your $80 figure is only correct, if you are getting DSL/Cable internet only for VoIP. Then you are correct.
Fight Spammers!
If people are changing from my service to one that is more flexible and cheaper, then I am inevitably screwed.
These people need to take a lesson in business! As far as I see it, if a new technology is making my current service/product obsolete, then I need to study this new technology so that I can offer it myself. If thats not an option, well then you buy stock in whatever company is succeeding you! ;)
Seriously though... I do have a question about the "ownership" of the actual lines used to transmit the VoIP- The article states that it will be using existing wires, and users will have to pay a 'line fee' to the company that owns the physical wires. So does that give the owner any control over how it is used?
-ADR
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...
How is this any worse than all the On-Line games such as Quake, Half-Life, Warcraft3, Etc..?
These games send a significant amount of traffic over the internet, yet most people don't bitch about them taking up the bandwidth.
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
I just don't understand the use of it in a home setting? I already have my cellphone with free long distance.
Free international? I doubt it. The article expressly talks about a call from Japan to NYC
I live in Italy and we have a 10 mpbs internet connection with fastweb which includes unlimited local and national calling. It's all voip without a noticable depreciation in vox quality.
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.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
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)
VOIP is a great idea and all, but what about latency? When I'm on a cell phone, the latency (and echo) is really annoying and noticeable. International calls are even worse.
How bad have you found it?
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Ditch the cell phone and you're only paying $40.
And I'd love to hear about a cell plan that provides "unlimited minutes" for $40 a month. There are about 41,000 minutes in a month, and the sun is shining during most of the ones I want to use.
If you happen to have friends or family in an area served by Vonage, you can pick that area code, and they can all call you for free, which means that you can give them something without having to change their behavior.
Also -- Around here, payphones claim that they won't accept incoming calls, but it's a lie; they do. Using xringd, I call my house twice for two rings each, then it calls me back, then I enter a code and it bridges me a dialtone on the Vonage line (through the miracle of X-10's low-voltage connector wired to a little DP relay). That gives me free nationwide calling from pay phones as long as I have a couple quarters in my pocket to loan to the phone for a few secs.
As I find cell phones to be hatefully annoying, this is a much better deal. I can use the same mechanism to check my messages or have my email read to me (still ironing out the kinks on that one; at the moment I can't interrupt a long boring message).
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
calls on internet
cost less than traditional
users migrating
Look into the Cisco ATA-186. You can plug an old-fashioned $5 POTS phone (or anything else that acts like one) into it. No computer required.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Yes, traditional dial up connection is
/naturally/ cheaper, it is just highly artificial market conditions that make it that way in some places. Bleck. POTS is about as low tech and old as you can get. (of course I am speaking as a US citizen, with the recent trend towards flat rate /long distance/ that is now getting started over here I admit that we here in the US are a tad wee bit spoiled. :-D )
expensive in Japan. but ADSL and wireless
connection became so popular, less and
less people are depending on it. I personally
don't use dial-up anymore.
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that ADSL (which, unless Japan is even more funky then I previously knew about) which runs over POTS, is cheaper to get then just a plain old POTS dial up line?
Bleck, VoIP isn't
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The TIAJ (Telephone Industry Association of Japan) announced that they would be asking the Diet [Japanese Congress] to pass the DMTA (Digital Millennium Telephone Act), which would make VoIP illegal. "These people get all the benefits of telephone service, but none of the profits go to us!", TIAJ chairman Shinji Shinjisan said. "This needs to change."
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Lots of people use email and IM to keep intouch with friends/relatives and avoid phone bills, especially students :) Most windows installations come with Netmeeting which is an audio/video phone and there are probably free/open alternatives. People need normal phones because they are.. simpler. They have an easy interface, they dont need to load up software, they dont crash, or need re-installing and they are cheap. Also, people like to have a handset that they can slam down, and it feels stupid leaning over your desk to talk to someone with a crappy little microphone. If your willing to pay a fee for the priveledge of having a line then they are fine. Also, i wouldn't trust my computer if i needed to phone in an emergency, infact i dont even trust my mobile, it crashes plenty.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
> Isn't this going to choke the internet bandwidth.
Bandwith requirements for VoIP in ISDN quality: 64kbit/s. So it can easily fit into a DSL up and downlink. The backbones for voice can be used for data, too.
They are just a little bit too sophisticated for dumb packet switching.
> If everyone fully utilized their dsl connections theoretical I think we would all be paying more and getting crappier service.
This is true for every service, so lets ban everything, except gopher and a mail programs, except SNDMSG.
Why is there a need for a 3G mobile network? (Well, that's a question one shouldn't really think about it, because it could cost some people their job...)
At least theoretically, more bandwidth for data services.
See the positive side-effect:
All the unused reserves in bandwith for voice and data are then shared.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Yeah, I have one next to my bed (my personal workspace tends to stay cluttered, and my roomate was complaining). Girls... anyway, the server got moved out of the living room and into my bedroom a week ago, along with a few other boxes. The fan noise you can tune out, but you really do notice the heat. Of course, this is the same girl that ran up $400 in calls to France and Ireland last month, which has me shopping for VOIP service... maybe she should be more tolerant of the overflowing ashtray and CDs everywhere since I'm trying to save HER money... nah, never happen.
On my home phone, I get telemarketing calls maybe 2-3 per day. On my cell phone, I don't get any. In my inbox, I get 40-100.
Seems to me we've crested the peak and are heading down the other side of the spam curve.
What's the point of getting this if you already have a cell phone? You can already get unlimited minutes for $40 a month. Why pay a total of $80 for a $40 service?
Long distance. No cell phone plan gives you unlimited long distance minutes for $40 a month. And even plans that give you unlimited, unrestricted "local" minutes must be pretty rare -- there certainly don't seem to be any in metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York. Most ~$40 plans in NY or LA give you a few hundred "anytime" minutes (that includes long distance of course) and a few thousand (not unlimited) "night and weekend" minutes. In many plans your "anytime" minutes are used up, even at night and on the weekends, before your "night and weekend" minutes take effect, rendering the whole deal little better than an advertising scam.
If you make lots of long distance calls, Vonage is fantastic. I am on the phone, LA-NY, at least an hour or two every day. With my AT&T "One Rate" cell phone, I was paying almost $200 a month (with taxes, fees, etc.) for 1500 minutes, with frequent billing errors, every one-minute dropped call charged for, plus outrageous overage fees of $0.25/minute if I went over the 1500 minutes -- some months I had a $350 bill. And AT&T Wireless is one of the slimiest companies I've hever had the displeasure of dealing with. Sprint, Verizon, etc. aren't much better.
Now I have Vonage and never have to worry about how long I'm on the phone. Of course I've kept my cell phone, on the minimum plan, for when I'm on the road, but I'm looking forward to giving AT&TWS the finger -- with wireless number portability, it should soon be possible to keep my phone number and switch to a wireless provider I hate less.
Vonage is particularly good for my purposes. Most of the people I talk to are in New York, whereas I'm in Los Angeles most of the time. Since I can have my 212 number while I'm in LA (I did this with my cell phone too, of course), there are no toll charges for anyone whether I'm calling or being called by my New York friends and relatives. I can take the Cisco box anywhere there's a broadband connection, so nothing has to change if I move. And the ability to forward calls is a major advantage. When I travel, I forward the phone to (e.g.) my hotel number -- I can do this on the webpage from anywhere. Then, instead of wasting cell phone minutes or using a calling card or (God forbid!) paying inflated hotel toll charges, I simply tell people to call me on my Vonage number and it rings for me in the hotel!
Vonage might not be for everyone, but I would argue that anyone who makes a lot of long distance calls should consider it seriously. I know that there are other alternatives -- even "traditional" long-distance companies such as MCI seem to be getting into the act, with package deals including unlimited domestic long distance. I for one would rather deal with Vonage than with MCI! (Vonage's plan is also cheaper, has no installation fees, and no contract period. On the downside, if your broadband connection goes down, your "dialtone" does too -- so it's not for "five-nines" telco-style reliability).
I imagine that, sooner or later, there will be cell phone plans out there with unlimited long distance. But right now, Vonage is arguably the single best option out there for the heavy long-distance user.
Kiscica
It's cobbled together from shell scripts on top of vgetty.
I have a USRobotics Sportster Voice 33.6 modem which was a giveaway because nobody wants 33.6 modems anymore, but they work great for voice. I'm sure you can find them at those suburban computer flea market show things.
The two phone lines (one real and one from the Vonage box) are bridged using a little relay and some resistors from Radio Shack and this X-10 box, in conjunction with the Firecracker set they gave away for $5 a couple years ago (and which I learned about from Slashdot).
The whole thing is an unsightly mess, both physically and software-wise, but it hangs together. I haven't made any changes in a while and I'm a little afraid to mess with it, though... The vgetty stuff was tricky to get right.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Yes, I do. It came for free with a 1-year Vonage contract, though. And I see one on eBay for $40 at the moment.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I recently helped set up a cybercafe in Akure, Nigeria. Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure has been in a dismal state for a long time, and it seems people are eating up new technology as fast as they can whenever it's available. People want to communicate ... and wherever there's an alternative to the POTS, they'll rush for it.
... one could easily make a significant profit by offering international phone service to the US over VoIP, charging approximately 40 cents/minute. Net2Phone, the leading carrier here, charges only 10 cents per minute. I once saw someone walk into the cybercafe wanting to place a call to Lagos (in the same Nigeria), even though it would cost him 200 Naira per minute (about $1.45!).
For example, it was only recently (about a year ago) that cellphones were introduced to the market. Despite the fact that government regulatory bodies have made it unnecessarily difficult for companies to enter this market, there are already 3 operators, and within a year that industry has injected well over $1 billion into the economy. People don't bother getting land phones now...if there's cellular/GSM available they'll use it.
Cybercafes are starting up at an almost alarming rate in cities all over Nigeria. One of the big markets that these cybercafes cater for is VoIP
At the rate at which this market is booming, I can imagine what would happen when broadband access becomes widely available for cheap prices. VoIP could all but replace the POTS as the standard means for international telephony, with mobile phones for local/long distance calls. By the time there is a solid national communications network in place with enough bandwidth, VoIP could even become the dominant means for local and long distance phone service, especially since it's already gaining serious popularity. The POTS could easily become totally irrelevant!
As far as I know, the situation in most African countries is similar to that of Nigeria, although many of them may not have the level of development in the comms industry that we do. But I believe that this continent probably has the largest potential market for VoIP (and mobile phones) right now.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
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.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Customers aren't ready for quantum leaps.
Besides, I'm not holding my breath for next generation wireless. Actually, I believe slow pickup will be its savior, because I just don't believe the bandwidth is there even with 3G to support the beautiful things the telcos had been promising consumers (128 kilobit/sec of data to your handheld? Either the per-byte charges will be insane, or the bandwidth will run out as fast as you can say "porn").
Telephone poles will be there for a long time in locations where burying the cable is not an option. And as long as a cable pair will bring a fast consumer connection to the Internet equivalent of a CO more reliably and cheaply than wireless, I think "fixed wireless" is a lost proposition. Until the next quantum leap in wireless comes around. With wireless, the bottleneck is measured in gigabits per square mile. With wires, it's measured in megabits per cable pair. It just doesn't add up, per square mile.
Wireless is nice as a supplement to wired. That's why i-mode is so popular: it fills an important low bandwidth niche.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Uh, the theoretical maximum for ADSL is 8mbps, and that's only achievable over short distances. To get 12mbps you need HDSL or VDSL, but those are even shorter ranged.
Perhaps you're thinking of something else? Or maybe you're getting scammed? :)
It certainly is no worse that todays phone system. Every US carrier has tapping equipment (that you pay for), ostensibly for law enforcement only.
Your tax dollars at work.
With Internet, you at least have the chance that your calls get routed through China, South Korea Brazil or other rogue countries. Besides, there is way too much Internet traffic to look at.
A friend of mine worked at a big Dutch ISP, and our equivalent of the feds came and insisted they'd be allowed to place a wiretap. He showed them to the multi-wavelength fibers and wished them luck.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
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.
Could someone please enlighten us as to what POTS is since the /. editors are too incompetent?
Thanks.
See subject.
Fast ADSL, 11.something MBps.
"Have you rebooted your computer?" and "Let's check your dial-up networking settings..."
No, it won't make any difference.
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'.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
With a book-sized modem, one gets voice quality comparable to that of regular voice lines -- at a fraction the cost.
They forget to say, "and with a hundred times the random dropouts."
Granted, I haven't personally tried the service so I can't say anything from personal experience, but here in Japan the Yahoo BB! (ADSL) service is widely recognized as the worst in the country in both connectivity and customer service, and I have to admit I'd be surprised if they can do much better than that on VoIP. Thanks, but I'll stick with my 7c/3min NTT phone line for now.
I'd rather ditch POTS. I pay the same for my cell phone as for POTS, and I get more minutes than I need. Sure in theory POTS is unlimited, while the cell phone limites me to 1600 minutes a month (1000 weekend only too!), but in practice, I don't use the phone that much anyway.
Remember everyone is different. I haven't used my POTS line yet this year (I only keep it because I have to have it to get DSL, though other broadband should be here anytime now). Other people use the phone more than me, and a cell phone won't work. I used to move around a lot, and my cell phone number never changes, while the POTS number would change each time. I'm single, so that is a factor, I'm not trying to save money by sharing a line and phone with a family.
Depends on where you live. For me, the numbers work out like this:
POTS with unlimited local: $42/month
Cell phone with free LD: $44/month.
The cell phone looks like a no brainer. Sure it isn't unlimited talk time, but it is more than I use, and while I don't use the LD often, it is nice to have. It also work more places than the regular phone. Did I mention that voice mail, and callerID are included in the cell phone, but extra for POTS?
Hint: There is no law or moral requirement that you answer the phone. In fact, it is immoral to have your phone on in church. (If you are on call you can get away with it on vibrate) It is immoral to answer the phone when you are having a face to face conversation with someone else. (unless you warned the other party you are expecting a call, and then use callerId to take no other calls) It is immoral to answer the phone at dinner. (unless you are expecting a call, including being on call)
When you realise that you are not a slave to the phone, then the cell phone becomes a nice convience. When you are a slave to the phone, jumping when it rings, waiting for a call, then you will hate a cell phone.
Not really. For every VOIP call, you can take away one analog call, replacing it with a digital call. Digital allows you to put several calls on one wire, so in theory, if everyone moved to VOIP, then all those analog wires could be used for digital, and there would be MORE bandwidth than before.
Note, in practice, the phone companies moved most calls to digital except the wires closest to the customers. The theory applies though.
Yes, VoIP has been around for a few years now... however, it's only just now getting to the point where it's not a toy. I remember a couple of years ago playing around with DialPad. I was seriously considering dropping my long distance carrier for the free DialPad as a means of offsetting the cost of a cable modem connection -- that is, until I actually used it. DialPad was so wretchedly awful that it killed my optimism for the service (and I *really* wanted to make it work). There was an echo on the line and a 2 second delay, in addition to the obvious drawback of having to always use a headset plugged into your computer to make phone calls. (Now there are IP phones that don't need to be plugged into a computer -- nice!)
/. stories about this happening...
Anyway, it's very difficult to justify the savings on long distance when the quality is so bad, and traditional long distance in the US can be had for as low as 2.9 a minute if you shop around.
Also, keep in mind that you won't be eliminating one bill, but merely shifting your money from one vendor to another. As the need for broadband becomes more prevalent, I believe you'll see broadband providers tax usage more and more to pay for their infrastructure. There's already been
So, no, VoIP is not yet a clearly better choice for the American consumer. give it another 10 years, I say. And by that time, maybe the POTS providers will be the ones leading the charge.
But a 3G wireless phone might one day replace your microwave oven. Assuming you have enough talk time to cook both sides of the terriyaki.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
And how much is 64kbit/s when downloading a CD-image,
"apt-get upgrade" or "emerge --world upgrade"?
At least for me, it's much more than I would telephone in a month.
At a local telco, the ISDN-"router" collapsed because of the number of data connections, not voice.
They were introducing a flat-rate in a region, where previously a state-monopol provided the only access.
>not neccessarily on the backbone.
Where then?
The access point? A dedicated set of 2-4 wires.
From the curb to the provider? Still dedicated lines to a dedicated splitter (assuming line-sharing), which splits the voice from data, to the DSLAM of the provider.
Now, it's all in the provider's backbone.
The provider? Every user must be able to at least use the web marginally and simultaniously with others, without disturbing the other users.
On a 12Mbit/s DSL connection, which qualifier would be most appropriate to describe 64kbit/s?
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
If anyone else needs a referral then let me know - 40 bucks in it for each of us :)
Or if you have any other questions then i'll try, although i've shared both the good and less-good about vonage.