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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."
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.
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!
You don't think you'll see the same taxes moved to the other communications methods?
sure, some people may enjoy a 'tax relief' but it is only a temporary one.
I know somebody who had his phone line shut off, went completly VoIP and cell. He had to pay about 2 bucks a month NOT to be connected.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
POTS? Don't you mean WOKS?
example.org - powered by Linux!
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...
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
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.
"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.