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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)."
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?
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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?
>> Is it just my browser's bad interpretation of arabic letters, or do they actually use blink tags liberally at that www.uruklink.net front page?
I am not too good at arabic, but I suppose the blinking text on the front page says: "We are currently being slashdotted, please try again later!!!"
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..
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.
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"
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.
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