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VoIP, WiFi and the Future of Traditional Telecom
PetiePooo writes "Those of us in the telecom industry have been watching it wither and die in the past few years. Here's why. The Register has an article about the future of mobile communications using VoIP on WiFi. From the article: "... voice over IP would gradually come to be a prime driver of mobile Internet." VoIP has been considered by many for a while now to be the future of traditional telephony. Combining VoIP and WiFi makes a compelling argument for the convergence of voice and data services over a single platform. Here's a previous slashdot discussion on industry's efforts to make this happen."
Here's what I'd like to see replace it. Forget VoIP over WiFi, you still need a carrier. Wouldn't it be great if we could have a mesh radio network, with a suitable self-discovering routing protocol, that would allow calls to be made from any handset to any other handset? Combined with decent encryption, this would put the privacy back in communications.
This is the wrong band for this type of service. The 2.4 GHz ISM band is an RF garbage dump. Unlicensed users, such as WiFi, are at the bottom of the heap. Unlicensed users may not cause interference to licensed users and must accept any interference they get. In other words, if another spectrum user is wiping out WiFi coverage in a specific area, tough shit, you have to live with it. The fact that the vast majority of WiFi equipment is designed to be cheap instead of being designed to have good RF performance, just makes things worse. WiFi is not the magic cure for all ills that some would hype it as.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The fact that you don't know the difference between a WAN and a wLAN makes me wonder why your having trouble getting a reliable wireless network working =) If your having 25% data link layer packet loss then you have serious problems, Cisco gear in a properly configured network (read work with the sales guys to design it, not just slap some AP's up) will not drop any significant number of packets. I used VoIP over .11b for over a year and it was just as satisfactory as the VoIP hardwire phones. Weather conditions shouldn't effect a wLAN indoors, in fact I can't think of how static would interfere at all. Mobile phones will have no impact on a WiFi network because they are on completely different chunks of spectrum 900Mhz or 1.8Ghz, not 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz like WiFi. Basically I think you need to go talk to Cisco or another serious enterprise wireless provider and have a proper system designed, not just throw up a bunch of AP's and expect to get good coverage and reliability.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Unfortunately the handset manufacturers do not sell to consumers, they sell to cellular telephony network operators which then pass the phones on to consumers cheaply. The network operators desperately need bandwidth hungry applications such as video telephony or "multimedia" messages. That is what the phone manufacturers care about providing right now. None of them would dare put anything on the market that takes bandwidth use away from the network operators.
It will happen in at most a few years though; unnatural market conditions tend to fix themselves unless conditions are truly exceptional or the government intervenes.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Ok, I've been hearing that Circuit Switching is dead for a few years now, but I don't see any technology mature enough to take it's place. Mind you, packet switching is great technology, it's just not mature enough to replace what we have in place. That time has not yet come.
When it comes to dial tone, whenever you pick up that phone, you expect to get it - period. We get very annoyed if connection drops or we can't hear anyone on the other end, no matter where we call. The exception to this of course is our wireless calls. It is still a relatively new technology and so we put up with it. We are willing to hang up and retry the call if we get a bad connection. Sometimes we even wait until we get in a new cell on the network, or wait until we get back to a wired phone. The technology is not that dependable yet.
Neither is packet switching. You have already begin to hear of the technology replacing circuit switching on occasion, but we are a ways off from massive replacement of traditional circuit switching. Just as it took a while for electronic switches to mature enough to replace the mechanical ones, so to will this technology have to mature. We are not talking about replacing a few PCs on a network. The Telecom industry moves quite a bit slower. Public expectation is just too great. No, you are going to except that dial tone to be there every time you pick up that phone; even while they are replacing the switch...
The problem is that it's much more expensive to engineer complex protocols that provide guaranteed qualities of service-- both in startup cost and maintenance in the long run-- than to just expand the pipes until the link utilization is low enough to make latency problems of IP disappear. It is a simple and stupid solution, there is no sexy protocol design that gets papers published, but it works well enough and is cheap.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
The cellphone could very well be the medium in which the goals you speak of are accomplished. Already there are reports that next generation CDMA technology will be able to far surpass the 3G data transfer speeds that we see today. Imagine a 1.5M connection to your cellphone that can also be transferable to any wireless device you have(provided you have the proper equipment installed). Now imagine that you can install a wireless hub of sorts in your home that turns all of your home phone lines into wireless lines that work off of the same phone number as your cell phone. The technology is available. It's just a matter of time before the telcos start to roll this out. I admit that I don't keep up much on the GSM technology, but it looks like in the US, Sprint and Verizon made the proper network infrastructure decisions when it came to deciding between GSM and CDMA.
The existing celluar phone system has very low power requirements. I don't think we can expect any of the existing wireless lan technologies to deliver the stable connections and long battery lives of cell phones.
The real holy grail of wireless tech is not needing wifi repeaters at all. I know a guy at CMU who is working on wireless devices that communicate with base stations and each other. That way, bandwith and power are conserved by each device broadcasting over the smallest area possible. Within densely populated areas like colleges and cities this could focus as a serious competeditor to celluar service, while in more rural areas phones and computers could switch back to the more traditional celluar and wired services.
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. --Phillip K. Dick (remove SPAM to email)
Until a plane flies overhead and knocks your mobile phone off the air as it's dependent on a WiFi connection.
I'm cabled today in instead of using the wireless right now as planes flying overhead do disrupt my WiFi--something I never expected.
MCI is also trying to find a way to dig itself out of the grave it dug. What I find ironic is that MCI was allowed to pull off this return to the sector with basically a "slap on the wrist" penalty from the SEC. Now they're coming back into the sector and trying once again to start the price war that effectively put the telecommunications companies where they are right now. It would be much easier (not saying that they would necessarily do it, but it would be easier) for the telcos to be upgrading their networks if they didn't have to continually be concerned about competing with MCI. While the consumer may have suffered on long distance rates for the last decade, imagine the state of the telcos today if the Worldcomm disaster had never occured. I would venture to say that investment into WiFi technology and VoIP would be much greater. Unfortunately, the money the consumer saved on long distance rates has cost them some advanced technology down the road. It's just too risky right now for the telco's to be investing in comprehensive VoIP and WiFi technologies. Take the Sprint ION service for example. A comprehensive voice and data package that saw data rates up to 8Mb/s with multiple lines using VoIP technology flopped because they couldn't afford to take the hit on revenue during a time when the telco industry was at its lowest. Only recently are we starting to see the telco get brave again in innovation. Sprint is trialing Voice over DSL and Verizon is putting WiFi hotspots in pay phone stations.
Having spent the last several years watching 'telecom implode', I would observe that that has largley been the result of tulip-mania style business decisions.
Those VERY few telcos that stuck to sound business decisions avoided chapter 11, and are laughing all the way to the bank!
That being said, VoIP, properly implemented, is a very strong contender going into the next 5 years, because more and more businesses are looking for a 'silver bullet' for ALL their comm needs. The carrier that hands them a magic box that serves their internet, voice, VPN and PBX needs will retain the business of the Enterprise customer, and be successful.
This hasn't really been possible until about next year, when we reach a critical mass of clue in the Enterprise world. IP PBX vendors are already starting to clean up, because, contrary to what voice only guys tell you, or data only guys tell you, IT IS AMAZINGLY EASY to get a VoIP PBX going, if you have enough bandwidth (and most anyone can afford enough bandwidth in their office), and it is SLIGHTLY LESS EASY to get it delivered through a smart carrier, who will bring you a multi-megabit facility to handle your voice and data needs...
Bottleneck removed, Class of Service (via MPLS) built in, works seemlessly...
The key, as always, is access and bandwidth.
Yes, the telcos will milk you for everything they can, but what most people out there don't realize when it comes to the telco industry is that they are currently fighting for their lives. The cable industry is destroying them in high speed data revenue, and with the cable industry getting into VoIP, they are looking to take a huge chunk of the telco's market share on voice related services. The telcos have to find a way to either increase their market share in high speed data to account for the market share of voice services they will lose to cable providers, or they will need to offer a comprehesive voice, data, and video package which is commonly referred to as the "triple-play" among both telcos and cable providers. Sure, telco will always exist in part due to their business class services and internet backbone infrastructure, but the days of having to own a telco operated phone are possibly coming to a close...unless the telcos get off their tails and compete with the cable providers. I'm amazed that more telcos have not gone after partnerships with the Satellite providers. I've heard of some deals that have fallen through, but you would think that it would be much cheaper to offer a telco-branded Satellite video service packaged with local, long-distance, and zDSL service all on one bill, rather than spend the money on developing what most see as a doomed-to-fail video over DSL technology. Sorry to get off-topic for a bit, but to bring it back into perspective, the telcos have no choice but to innovate or die at this point. They will innovate...they will most likely do it slowly, and they will do it kicking and screaming...but they have to in order to servive.
Telephony might just be where you see IPv6 being deployed first.
Telephony is by definition peer-to-peer so you are stuck if you are hidden behind a NAT. Even if you confined VoIP to a class A network like 10.255.255.255 you would only have a little more than 16 million available numbers.
IPv6 is also prepared for QOS which will be a good thing for telephony.
As a consultant to the telecom industry, I have to pay attention to what works, not what sells papers. This year's big hype is WiFi, which was designed for room-sized LANs but somehow seems to have captured the imagination of the public as if it could actually hurt the telcos (ILECs). VoIP has been hyped since '96 or so, and has eaten tons of vulture capital, and while it has nice niche applications, it is still no substitute for the Real Thing.
Yes, you can run voice over IP. Yes, you can run IP over wireless. Heck, 16 years ago I was running IP over 1200 bps Aloha AX.25 packet radio links. Very instructional, because Phil Karn's NOS let me watch a decoded protocol trace of passing packets, and they came so slowly that I could study all of them in real time. Think about it. The point is that you can't run voice over *any* IP, just some paths.
Circuit-switched telephony is cheap to build. Sure the existing telco networks are made of gear that they paid a lot for, but ILECs depreciate gear over 20+ years. So the Lucent 5ESS and Nortel DMS-100 are VAX-era hardware. What did a MIPS cost when the 5E was designed? Modern circuit switching (which CLECs and some small ILECs buy, not to mention the PBX market) uses modern parts. The switching hardware is only a little costlier than IP stuff, and it sounds better. All the sexy call control features are in the control software, which in a modern system is agnostic about physical-layer protocol. So you can do nice things on circuit, ATM, or IP. Just a different card in the switch.
WiFi's limits are obvious -- there's finite spectrum, and it's shared with domestic cookers (microwave ovens are right in the middle of its band!), cordless phones, VCR "multipliers", baby monitors, and all sorts of other crap. WiFi5 is cleaner spectrum, though the lower-volume gear is costlier. The 5 GHz band will benefit from a recent FCC rule change that adds 275 MHz more bandwidth. But unlicensed still means low power, and either very short range *or* directional antennas (which take more work). And you have to worry about things like hills and trees.
I'm always looking for alternatives to Bell wire -- that's really a big part of my job! But WiFi ain't it. There are non-WiFi radios that are better for "last mile" purposes (and slower, because they have to trade speed for range -- see Shannon). The FCC is contemplating making some additional frequencies available, and in rural/exurban areas, especially flatland, wireless can do wonders. In hilly or woody areas, it's tougher. In urban areas, spectrum is too limited. Fiber optic bandwidth is infinite -- there's lots of sand out there, and only one radio spectrum.