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VoIP Beats Conventional Phone Service In Iraq
andyring writes "According to this article at Wired, without reliable long distance or particularly international telephone service in Iraq, citizens in Baghdad and elsewhere turn to voice chat over programs such as Yahoo Voice Chat or other similar programs. Broadband at Internet cafes in Baghdad runs about $1/hr, whereas an international phone call (if you can even get a connection) is about $1/minute. The service is so popular, it sucks up almost all the available bandwidth from the government-run ISP, State Company for Internet Services (site is Arabic)."
Ewww...
The service is so popular, it sucks up almost all the available bandwidth from the government-run ISP (LINK)
It isn't true anymore... from now it is Slashdoters who suck up almost all the available bandwidth...
In India, Broadband is 40 cents an hour, much less than $1 that the Iraqi ISP charges. Indian ISPs still make profits.
The dollar is inflated so much, it renders any comparison useless. Going by the article, Iraq could make more money selling bandwidth to the US than oil. But that would never happen, would it?
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
.. hope they've learned of the awesome power of Miranda.
Didn't try it, but there's an example of a voice plugin.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
Not because I'm in a war-torn area with a flaky tele-com strukture, but simply because I live in Norway and has my girlfriend (fiancee really) in the US. While the quality of the connection cannot rival - or even get close - to that of a conventilan landline, it is offset by the fact that I don't have to pay thru the nose to spend an hour or so hearing her voice.
Voice over IP - it's a blessing in my life!
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Iraq actually still HAS an IP infrastructure? They have no electicity or running water but they can still surf porn sites, huh?
I used to live in a dorm with MBA's from all over the world and it was pretty obvious that the 100mbit switched network was loved most by those from countries with bad phone systems. Many of them bought a webcam, a microphone and were chatting away with friends and family back home or anywhere else in the world. It was cheaper and it gave alot less hassle with delays and operators and the like. Mind you, one does need a computer and dial up tot the internet, so this is only for the semi-richer people and those that can go tot internet-cafe's
:-)
On a related note, once at a RIPE-meeting a gentleman from Africa got a clunky looking phone (bit eighties style) from his briefcase, picked up the UTP that lay there for use with laptops and hooked the phone up to it. Within seconds he was chatting away with someone in Africa... YOu should have seen the stunned face on some of the geeks there.
Use Adsense for Charity
Using something like Yahoo Messenger to talk to people instead of using long distance isn't a new phenomenon. I have personally been using Yahoo Messenger and (before) Net2Phone on MSN Messenger to talk to people in England and India. International call rates aren't prohibitively expensive for me but it still makes sense to save a lot of money by using a free service. Voice quality isn't bad at all- most of the times it seems quite natural in a telephone sort of way. It works almost perfeclty if one or both parties have a broadband connection. Also, I have been talking to and have stayed connected to people who I otherwise wouldn't have been in touch with.
A lot of the people I talk to wouldn't be able to afford international telephony or find it very expensive at best. These people have been using tools such as Yahoo Messenger to stay connected for quite some while now.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
IT is the same in all third world countries, but if the surfing got big really before VOIP it usually wont work because there is no bandwidth left for the internet cafés to use. Instead special phone companies that carry longdistance call over ip has sprung up, but that is expensive about a third of a per minute.
working halfway across the globe, I regularly use yahoo messenger to hold meetings with the US office. we've once even hooked up a machine with a webcam and had an entire department meeting that way.
of course someone had to sit in front of the pc so they could voice out what i said, and sound quality was a bit lacking, but it was a fantastic way to have teleconferencing on the cheap.
plus enabling the messenger's sounds allowed me to generate an annoying "ding" whenever someone said something silly heheh
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
While I have no idea how much of Iraq's infrastructure we took out in the recent war (and, apparently, neither does the CIA, read from below link), I bet it was probably a pretty healthy amount. And seeing as they didn't have that much to begin with, this might actually be a very great thing for Iraq and her people. Since the country's comm. systems were already pretty lacking, and since a presumably fair amount of said systems we're damaged/destroyed, this provides Iraq with a golden opportunity to have a rebuilt, ultra modern communications system. If we do it right, Iraq could very well have one of the most technologically advanced comm. systems ever designed. And the people of Iraq, at least based on this story, seem more than willing to embrace the technology and as such would probably be willing to try out the newest communications technology. This would be the perfect time and place to test new/unproven technologies and if they work well, we could adopt them here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Make the best of a bad situation.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
I work for a large telecommunications company and we have all our internal communications set up using VOIP.
I can dial my colleagues in all our offices throughout the globe from my desk phone to their desk phone using a series of short-codes. Of course this is only for fixed line at the moment but it must save us a great deal each day on video and regular conference lines.
The quality and response is noticeable if you know what you're looking for, but to the regular listener it just sounds like you have a clear line.
[yes, this is a repost from another story. but it's a really really good program]
If you are looking for a nice Open Source VoIP client that works on Windows, Linux, and OS/X, try Speakfreely. For linux/osx track down the Tcl/Tk GUI.
encryption, multiple codecs, NAT, the works.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/
The original author and once-again maintainer is John Walker, founder of Autodesk, Inc. and co-author of AutoCAD. (!!!)
note: the debian package is criminally out of date and www.speakfreely.org is depreciated, out of date, and morphed into a commercial site.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I vaguely remember that after the Afghanistan war had ended and people could buy things again, Satellite phones were a hugely hot item, for those who could afford it, since there wasn't much of a land-line network cross country, or cell network outside of major cities. Why hasn't this happened in Iraq yet? I would think it more likely there because they do have more $ in that country than in Afghanistan.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Maybe they want to warn us from listening to those channels
Funny you say that, the data lines that drive the phone network . .
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;)
can be used to drive the data network that is the internet
In certain areas ATM/Sonet OC fiber carries both voice and data
down the same fiber
Packetized voice has been a reality since they completed the step called dial off load
I worked in one of the failed VoIP labs for Cisco in Herndon
Virginia, and helped make a 48 million error free
calls test go down at Sonus on an old test box called an
Inet Spectra before going to work at Cisco.
Companies like Sonus beat cisco in the dial offload game in coutries as critical as japan
Once Cisco realized they had laid a golden egg they start hack and slashing their VoIP projects like a butcher gone mad
The facility in Herndon lost half its staff even though it wrote the only Universal Realtime SS7
International Gateway protocol converter in the world with software . Trying to make it a Media Gateway Controller on top of all that made it very unwieldy
Sonus was smart and held the call state on DSP's that could be dynaically reprogrammed, while cisco tried to hold it in RAM on Sun boxes
It failed miserably for cisco, but Sonus was making 8,000 calls per second on a 1 rack box taking up a little less than half a standard 7 foot rack
It was done at the local office for the long haul
portion , and they are just now sorting out how
the last mile is going to be done
Different companies want to do it different ways
That is why they call VoIP "convergence", it blending
the lines where separation was sought before
As for it being newer, hell it was built on top of
the phone network, the protocols are really the only
so called "new" portion , and it was derived about
22 years ago with early Arpanet
Moving from switched telephony to packet telephony on a
global scale is going to cause a HUGE shake up in long distance
and telecommunications
Think cell phone running on something like Wi-MAX , and ppl
being able to put up their own repeater
I am hoping it is based on UWB if possible
The holy cash cow of long distance has just been sent down
the river, and ridiculous rates are RIP
We are starting to see the turning point, we are seeing it
cheaper to implement IPv6 in third world countries than
the old switched networks
Scale that to 6 billion+ ppl world wide, and yeah its news
p.s.: sorry for the DOT BOMB story, just felt the urge to
share some pain
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Interesting to see how GSM data connections affect voice call pricing. With a laptop connected to GPRS enabled mobile phone it is already possible to use VoIP programs to get voice calls essentially free if a fixed monthly fee data connection is available.
Even with a data limit of 1M Bytes, two hours of voice are possible with 64kbit/s data rate. More hours are possible with compression, I believe GSM phones use about 8kbits/s and voice quality is still acceptable.
With a mobile phone that can run TCP/IP and some VoIP program like GNU oSIP voice calls can be free, so charging current prices works only if mobile operators can ban VoIP.
State Company for Internet Services = uruklink.net?? Arabic? sounds like the Black Speech, those orcs are wired!
Do you need a website upgrade?
The best move I ever made was getting rid of verizon and switching to Vonage. I have yet to regret it. VoiP Is SO the way to go...even to the door step!
I'm an authority on this subject, because a friend of mine once dated a girl. Actually, we never met her, but he showed us emails and pictures, so it must have been real.
My dictionary defines "fiancee" as "a mother-in-law waiting to happen", which sounds pretty drastic.
I think I'll stick with my geektoys for now.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
While I agree it takes a radical change to bring in new technology the fact is Iraq HAD one of the most advanced communication networks before it was blown up. I understand it's necessary to black out communications when you're at war but saying Iraq's previous systems were lacking is a major understatement.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
What a nice world view. I wish it were true.
There is no desire to create a good system. There is only the desire to satisfy greed. If a working system were the only thing in question, then Betelco would not have been told to turn off its newly installed cell-phone network. --Betelco, a middle eastern cell-phone company, with hard-working gumption and a capitalist's initiative any American would be proud to be part of were it to take place in the U.S. of A., just invested about $5 million to install a new cell-phone network in Bagdhad. Two days ago, they flipped the switch, and residents of Bagdhad were back on-line with working cell-phones, restoring public access to basic electronic communications (which did indeed exist before the US savaged Bagdhad's entire infrastructure.)
But naturally, the corporate favored ones who were first in line to carve up the ripe and newly 'cleared' market, cried and whined. "No fair! No fair!" And so the American military 'urged' yesterday that Betelco discontinue their services.
People starving and dying in the streets? Screw that. There's due process to consider here!
In any case, we certainluy can't have some scruffy upstart (non-American) telco walk in and take the cake after all the hard work the U.S. and "coalition forces", (read: "imperial lackeys"), did to trash the existing infrastructure so that "healthy competition" could be implemented. Heavens no!
Mind you, there is going to be a conference and a tender bidding to see which telco giant will get the juicy contract, and apparently, the Americans only are only represented by one of the three firms bidding. Looks like a PR bullshit parade to me. Smart money is on the U.S. dominating the field. They have the most guns there, after all, and the most dead Iowan farm boys! To the victor the spoils. (Oh, but this was a war of "liberation". How DO I keep forgetting?)
Same is planned for energy, water and, well, all the various corporate money makers a modern western city comes equipped with. Fast food. Televisions, cars and gumball machines all made in the grand old U.S. of A. --(And all to be subsidized by Iraqi oil and the US taxpayers, naturally.)
Oh yes, the corporations love this deal. Too bad a modern city had to be leveled, and women, old folks, babies and children had to be sliced into juicy red ribbons with American flachette bombs and chaotic bullet storms fired by terrified American boys who had no clue what the hell they were doing in the middle of Bush-The-Liar's evil war. Why is it that the innocent always end up killing/being killed in these sickening ploys?
And this is just the gravy. --Sure, it's really all about world domination, but one simply cannot perform the magic without also lining one's pockets along the way. It's the American Way, after all.
And sadly, it really, really is.
-FL
.. blowing up poles, wires, POPs and everything in between!
Liberation, nation-building and infrastructure upgrade in one convinient package.
ok, this is going very offtopic and i really dont wanna make myself more stupid than i already look ;)
anyway, you'll have to realize thats its all relative, to me, sweden is very _very_ far away from what i would call socialistic in the sense of former russia. socialism to me is about stopping people from exercising their right to live the life they want themselfs. to me socialism is evil. socialism takes your rights and generalises you with the rest of the population no matter how good or skilled you are.
if that is what you want to call sweden and europe, god help us.
the swedish system was working until some greedy people from (yeah you guessed it - the "socialist"-party) raised their own retirmentpayments soo much we had to lend money to cover the costs. but if humanity comes at the cost of a can of coke costing 4 dollars, you bet ill be there buying.
what is my point of humanity? its the right to be able to live a life where you dont have to rely on others for food, where you dont have to have two jobs to support your kids, where you can take two weeks of vacation without getting fired from your employeer.
and sincerely, is that what you have in america today?