Slashdot Mirror
Michael Robertson Unveils SIPphone
JimCricket writes "After almost a year of preparation, the person behind MP3.com and Lindows has unveiled his latest venture: SIPphone. According to a CNET article, the new company sells VoIP-based telephones. I wonder what kind of latency you get with these devices." Interestingly, the CNET article reveals the telephones "...can only call other phones that use the same technology."
Does voice over IP mean that it uses packets of data via IP and then convert it back to voice? Kinda like a shoutcast server?
...then it's doomed already.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So, is there some monopoly going on here ?
OK, this was humorous but I keep thinking that if his model is good, it will either replace the existing phone infrastructure, thus forcing all the phone operators to enhance the Internet or it will be counter-attacked by less efficient devices (remember VHS / Betamax ?).
Now, I'd suggest this guy to patent it otherwise he'll get into troubles (MS-Phone ?).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Interestingly, the CNET article reveals the telephones "...can only call other phones that use the same technology."
Can you say "bankrupt" and "insolvency" ?
I nkow some cell phone companies have offers when calling within their network (no use of minutes, extra minutes, etc.), but not being able to call out of the network at all?
As someone said, the thing is dead already.
The only thing I can think of that it might work well for is buisnesses. Think of something like a Nextel walkie-talkie cellular service, but without the 'fear' of employees calling other people.
Other than possibly that, however, this thing will never sell.
Thursdae
600 minutes/month, free nights/weekends, and free long distance on my cel plan... and I can call anyone I want.
After reading the how it works page, it looks like all these phones will use the US/Canadian area code 747. While this jumbo number is easy to remember, I'm asking myself if it would have been wiser to use a new country code instead. Imagine asian people exchanging their phone number, and one of the two has a number starting with +1747... it just doesn't sound right...
Lindows is good advertisement for Linux, but for all wrong reasons - root login, anti-virus etc.. Secondly, Lindows has subsidised the SCO vultures. Despite all the hype about XBox cracking, no one but Microsoft has benefitted from the hack.
It's tough supporting someone who paid SCO.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Even if you could only call people using phones with the same technology locally, surely a solution could be devised to call other networks, as we do with areacodes and whatnot already?
The question rather becomens, does it make sense to do so?
.: Max Romantschuk
It's amazing ... just buy some phones (http://www.grandstream.com/), add a directory services, get way too much press coverage and you're in business. Michael who?
And don't even get me started on the whole sip/h323 issue.
I already read about that a few hours ago on a German newspage and am currently waiting for SIPPhone's sales dep. to answer my questions :)
;)
:)
As you get 2 phones for $129 its not that big problem that you can only call other SIPPhones with that... I might buy a pair and give one phone to my girlfriend as she lives over 200km away from me and a priceless phone connection to her would lower my bill alot
If anyone is curious about the quality, there is some info about that on their homepage saying:
SIP calls typically have very high audio quality. Call quality is much better than cell phones and may even be better than land line phones you're used to - especially over long distances and between countries. SIP uses the latest compression techniques which allow calls to sound their best.
Sounds ok for me
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
This reminds me a great deal of the Nextel "walkie-talkie" service: extremely innovative and convenient as hell, but only if you're talking to another Nextel user, otherwise it's worthless. The "nationwide walkie-talkie" service that Nextel offers is only compatible with other Nextel users; you can't, for example, "walkie-talkie" to a Verizon cellphone user.
Two words come to mind when thinking of SIPphone: proprietary, incompatible. Unless it's adopted by a couple of major corps, it's never going to take off.
--
Rate Adult Photos (Free Pr0n!)
FWD is one way for SIP users to interconnect, this could well be another. Grandstream's are cheapie ip phones, but from what I read on asterisk's mailing list - they do work pretty well for the simple stuff. VOIP /will/ happen -- the protocols need to catch up -- with QOS priority usage, nat traversal issues etc. IPV6 would make these things easy, but even without it people will find a way to make things work. Keep in mind -- people may well buy a pair of these as a "free talk" solution on a temporary basis, but then move on to more sophisticated usage. Grab one of these, set up asterisk http://asterisk.org w/ a one port fxo (connects computer to a phone line for incoming/outgoing calls) card - and you instantly gain a lot of flexibility. This WILL happen -- it's only a matter of WHEN it will happen.
At $129.99 for a set, that seems pretty expensive to me, especially if they can only be used with phones that are using a similar technology which there probably aren't too many of.
Everyone with broadband has a PC witha sound card anyway, so may as well just use Teamspeak.
The unofficial
This business model seems very much like the way we as consumers should be heading.
I am reminded of the failed business plan when faw machines were first commercial (before they were common) FedEx offered a service called ZapMail, whereby they offered 2 hour delivery of documents rather than 1 day. They did this by faxing the documents around FedEx offices.
Of course people realised that for a small initial investment (buy a fax machine) they could do they same thing themselves, cheaper.
This seems a small venture at the moment and may be ulitmately unsuccessful due to the limitiation of only being able to call other SIPphones, but it is a step in the right direction and may pave the way for other businesses to operate using a similar model.
I see uses for not only businesses but for travellers and ex-patriots. It is increasingly easy and cheap too access broadband internet while costs of international phone calls are still high.
From the FAQ:
Q: Can I use software or what is called a softphone to make and receive calls with SIPphone?
A: Although it may work, at this time we cannot offer support for anything but a certified SIP phone.
Q: Are there other SIP phones I can order besides those offered at SIPphone?
A: The SIP phones offered at SIPphone are designed to work out of the box with SIPphone with zero or minimal configuration. We also work to offer the most affordable SIP phones available in the world. Many SIP phones cost hundreds of dollars. SIPphone sells 2 phones for just $129.99. It may be possible to use the SIPphone directory with other phones, but no technical support is available at this time to support this.
Q: I already own a SIP phone and I would like to use your SIPphone directory service. What should I do?
A: First, you need to sign up with our service at SIPphone Sign Up. These are the settings that you will want to use:
SIP Server: proxy01.sipphone.com (130.94.123.252)
STUN Server: stun01.sipphone.com (69.0.208.27)
NTP Server: ntp01.sipphone.com
TFTP Server: tftp01.sipphone.com (130.94.123.253)
Currently the SIPphone directory service has only been tested with the Grandstream BudgeTone 100 phone. Please check back for further updates on "SIPphone friendly" SIP phones.
Some things are more important than an animated rat
Its great to see VoIP finally starting to take off, it has always seemed strange to me that we should live in a world where most people have a highspeed internet connection and yet our phone system still relies on copper wires and lossy a/d converters. If VoIP really takes off then a fully digital system would mean an end to those crackly phone calls and slow connections.
What might be intereting though is if people set up their own VoIP systems over existing mobiles. Here in Europe we have GRPS which is a high speed circuit switched data system. If somebody could write a SIP client for Symbian then users could run VoIP on the GRPS sytem and cut out the extortianate charges imposed by the telcos.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
but they don't fail. First of all, if you want to remove the restriction for a VoIP phone to only call other VoIP phones in and of itself you have to wire and pay for a phone line in parallel to your Ethernet/IP Networking tech thats already in place. This virtually undermines the idea and benifits of VoIP in the first place. Instead, what we do at Stanford in one of the networking buildings is have a Cisco VoIP system installed thats routed in parallel (read same physical networks, different subnet) to the IP system. Anyone that wants to call inter-system or to previously defined VoIP phones can do so for free (speech). This doesn't prevent the same people from calling other locations, but this is accomplished by a on site server connected to the phone system which routes any off site numbers to the standard phone system. This way only a limited number of phone lines are needed for the entire system, the PABX infrastructure that would be the alternative to VoIP isn't needed, and costs are saved on any calls to offsite VoIP phones. I suspect that the VoIP phones we are speaking of could use the same time of system; however, regarding the VoIP phones in and of themselves, only VoIP-VoIP connections can be made
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
I live in Stockholm and I would love to give on of these phones to my sister in San Diego.
I'm sure the Ethernet part will work in Europe but what about the power adapter?
Some things are more important than an animated rat
Netmeeting with a headset on a laptop with 802.11b is the shiznit for voice over IP.
Hell, what I'd like to see is a device that LOOKS like a cordless phone, is 802.11b compatible and supports Netmeeting/AIM voice chat/etc... If enough people got those and wireless access points, POTS might soon go the way of the dodo.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
that will show that fucker Robertson. Who does he think he is anyway?
Some things are more important than an animated rat
SIP is an IETF standard for voip, surely he just meant it could only phone other SIP phones! no need for any conspiracy theories! SIP is an open standard, and you can even get linux software linphone to use it... Just need a gateway to the traditional phone system and yer sorted.
This is just another thinly veiled attempt at giving my mother yet more bloody methods to call me up and find out why she has no bloody grandkids yet.
I dispare i really do..
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
17:01 7/8/2546
... oh
phone calls are acctually free already.
well IF you have a bluetooth capable cell phone, broadband(ADSL->IP->VoIP) and a bluetooth capable
computer (if not get one of those bluetooth in a USB-device plug-ins).
too bad now one knows how to programm the stupid bluetooth cell-phones.
the lamn customer-care(sic)(evil)
acctually told me that one cannot tunnel voice thru bluetooth. they are black-listed now.
while i was reading their reply to my question "tunneling voice thru Bluetooth" i was also browsing their company web-page reading the specs to their bluetooth wireless hands-free set.
i was just wondering then, how come the headset
uses bluetooth to transmit voice thru Bluetooth
to and from the mobile phone?
soo talk about conspiracy.
must be cool to work for a cell-network-operator.
install a fat antenna (base-station). fire up your oracle-databse server. connect to main headquarter. sync with main database. sit back and enjoy while cashing in on utterly rreeddunddaanntt phone calls
and do not forget to open a cool can of beer.
VoIP (Voice over IP(InternetProtocol)) for the demented:
cell-phone talks to bluetooth-device in computer.
computer talks to network-card. network-card talks
to internet. internet talks to your friends computer. your friends computer talks to its bluetooth device. this bluetooth device talks to your friends bluetooth enabled cell-phone.
you're talking to eachother for free!
you see it's a conspiracy.
what's missing? a smart programmer from
the open-source community...
#:|
User has to have internet, even a spare RJ plug. So it can use SpeakFreely or Netmeeting or whatever for free. The recipient has to have the same configuration, too. The main diference is that the SIPPhone is an independent device and rings on incoming calls, for only 129$. I cannot see the meaning of these all.
Oh, and it has been available for a few years now, and it is certainly not the only solution. There are free versions that need only the crappy microphone that shipped with your computer or sound card anyway. Er, they do require broadband and a computer though.
"I wonder what kind of latency you get with these.."
I would assume the same latency you would have with any application that would have taken the same network path as the 'net phone's packets?
Perhaps you are talking about an audio delay? In that case, assuming your ISP has proper routing, there should be no significant delay (around the same as many cell phones) when speaking to someone else in your same country.
I've set up vbrick devices to use two T1's bridged for LAAtlanta conferences and the delay was barely noticable.
Not since dialup on a 28.8k modem have I noticed much problem with audio communications on the web. Definitely better than the telco's international service back in the 80's. I remember talking to friends in Germany and Japan and having to stop for long periods of time between sentences to prevent cross talk.
I think this product is so-so, though. Without a subscription based access from the voip phone to a telco bridge and a real phone number, it's not going to explode in popularity regardless of it's audio quality.
SIP is not limited to just VoIP, as the name says it is Session Initiation Protocol. There already is a reasonable GNU SIP library, so let's make that better, and then we can create an open source SIP capable VoIP-phone that could interoperate with this system as well as others.
Other uses for SIP that could/should happen IMO are (starting a session of) multi-player games and messaging, conferencing software for sharing pictures, etc.
Since SIP is basically just a handshake protocol, doing all those things shouldn't be impossible. Wanna play a game of chess or go with a pal? Just initiate a SIP connection, if their end supports your game and they are available, you've got a connection. No more application specific ports to configure to get a multiuser application work.
Making international call's is pretty expensive, especially in developing contries. In India, we get a device which goes between the phone cable and the phone. You press # twice (on your regular phone), it calls your ISP, goes online, checks your account balance and rings. All in about 2 mins. And then you can use your existing phone and call from anywhere to the USA for about 1.9 cents a minute. Hell, even within the US 1.9 cents a minute is pretty good.
Oh yeah, they've got a ethernet version too. No need to wait for the 2 odd minutes. And the connection is crystal clear. The callee never realizes how 'cheap' the caller is!
As the name implies and the article explains, the phone uses SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol. I did some research on SIP last year and found it to be somewhat intruiging.
SIP is basically used for setting up the endpoints of a human communication channel over an IP-based network. It negotiates what kinds of communcations are supported on each end, and what protocols to use. So if a video-SIP-phone calls a regular analog phone via a SIP-PSTN proxy, the proxy would only support audio certain codecs. The calling video-SIP-phone and the proxy would negotiate to use only audio using a matching protocol and the cal would go through.
And since SIP is a protocol just like SMTP or HTTP, it is very controllable. There are dozens of SIP products popping up from SIP servers to SIP proxies... and now SIP phones. For example, you can have a SIP proxy/server be concious of where a user is logged in and re-route SIP calls to their present location. As a Java programmer, I'm looking forward to the day when I find a reason to write a SIP Servlet.
Furthermore, the latest version of Messenger in Windows XP supports SIP. I would think that this means a SIPPhone could call someone using Microsoft's Messenger on Windows XP. However, I was not able to confirm this with a breif perusal of the SIPPhone site, and they also state this only works with other SIPPhones. That may be an over-generalization to keep people from thinking it works with regular phones, or maybe they did something crazy with it.
I'm crossing my fingers that it is a generic SIP endpoint that can contact any SIP-enabled device.
Creative tried it. with he VoIP blaster. While being fantastic devices and I snapped up as many as I could to use not with creative's services but with fobbit so I could use them without relying on their servers for routing and connecting.
Most people were not interesed in it because it was semi-difficult to use and made you think you needed to buy their service, which you didn't.
I use VoIP all the time. My GF lives 100KM away so that makes it cheaper IF both ends have DSL or CABLE modem. VoIP completely sucks over a dial up.... which over 60% of internet users still have as their only way of getting online.
I wish him luck, but there is cheaper and better hardware out there already (The VoIP blaster is still sold under the origional manufacturer's brand) that is cheaper and much more flexible.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But unfortuntatly other than telling my girlfriend about the idea I did not capitilize on it. Still the idea is not that novel and I am sure there are many that also came up with similar Ideas. the trick is working out how to allow the phone to make calls to REGULAR phones for basically a penny. Something like dialing an internet node which is in the location of the person you are dialing, and having the internet node connect to that person and pass the call back to you.
Ofcourse this has many privacy implications but works basically something like this:
( represents internet connection : - : standard telephone line)
You Internet node located in Area of your call recepient : - : Your call recepient
Would this work? Thoughts?
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
How long before we start getting automated commercial calls? The hardware cost to set something like that up is minimal and there are no call charges.
Or even worse, how long before someone writes a script to retrieve the numbers from the directory and call them all at random intervals?
My life is one big siesta in which I'm dreaming I wished my life was one big siesta.
Wouldn't a picture of the device SOMEWHERE on their website be a good idea? An artists impression at least!
Can it really look so bad that they want to hide it?
Are they re-using the plastics from 80's Garfield the cat novelty phones or maybe it's a Billy Bass add-on?
Sure, that works. Go to Open H.323 for an overview. What you want is called a gateway.
Of course, the real innovation would be to create a Gnutella-like network of people interested in maintaining a local phone line to donate to such a cause. That's an idea I had a couple of years ago. I decided it would be limited to businesses, because the person would pretty much have to have a *spare* phone line. Also, the system would probably attract a lot of leeches, so making sure that each node contributes would be a problem.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Our company have several Cisco VoIP phones deployed in various departments. We even have the ability for them to interface with the PTSN through special hardware attached to a 5ESS switch.
The only thing that prevents us from doing any massive rollouts is the utter fact that price per user and the nature of data networks make the phones more subject to unusability due to network problems than a normal phone.. This is not latency issues were more worried about something like a OSPF/Firewall or something along those lines wiping out a whole department's ability to communicate.
-
Microsoft IIS is to webserving as KFC is to healthy eating
But I like KFC....
Get your own free personal location tracker
You can pick up SIP phones, and even nice H323 videoconferencing hardware cheap these days from Taiwanese OEMs. Companies like vonage.com or pilmo.nl will even hook them up to the plain old telephone system for you.
The main problem is that each company that sells these things to end users uses it's own LDAP directory. So you can call other people who use the same brand easily by tapping a 'phone number' that's the same regardless of their everchanging IP number, but don't expect to call your buddy who's using netmeeting so easily. Also, if you place a call from one VOIP telco to another, chances are it will travel some distance over PSTN and will be billed in stead of free, despite the fact it could have been an end-to-end-over-IP connection which is usually free of charge.
Of course SIP can work over the real dns just beautifully (using SRV records), but do these phones support entering alphanumeric user/hostnames? And will hotmail support SIP? (Answer, yes it will, and it will tie in with MSN video/voiceconferencing and Microsoft SIP phones...)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
"...can only call other phones that use the same technology."
The article seem to have forgotten to mention that (almost) all 3G mobile phones have native SIP support. It means that in near future all mobile phones, atleast in Europe can call via SIP.
Since Microsoft Netmeeting has SIP support, and Linux has its own SIP stacks, you might be expecting a SIP boom soon.
SIP is probably the future of IP calling. It has some very nice features in it that make it work well with other messaging applications like "InstantMessaging". I'd say put your money on SIP now.
Why would you want to convert your voice into packets and send it using IP when you can just broadcast your voice into the air? Imagine if you were in an area with poor reception. You speak into the phone and... wait 60 seconds... the other person hears you.
And you can only call people with compatible phones!? This phone is going down the tube.
Cool idea, but not practical.
/usr/bin/complain >
What an innovative idea. If only it hadn't occured to Cisco three years ago...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
The article says he sees students phoning home for money, but if the student has DSL wouldn't he already have a phone line?
The Good Life
Can these phones talk directly to each other without going through a WEP?
If not, why not?
The dialling is a bit complicated but you can set up common numbers in the router.
It also has the problem of only being able to phone other VOIP systems but for the home worker connecting to the office (that has a VOIP exchange) it would be ideal.
Zero cost phone calls to colleagues.
who are you going to call on after the big flash?
back on task.
fatal aggression towards innocents/infants must cease immediately.
as previously noted, we're going to let y'all take care of that. won't your mommies be proud.
nothing you can do you say? we beg you to reconsider.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. get more oxygen on yOUR brains. vote with yOUR wallet. that's the spirit.
your intentions/behaviours (see above) will disempower the greed/fear based murderers.
don't waste time, we're in crisis mode.
the Godless blight of the evile georgewellian fuddites is dissolving into coolapps/the abyss at the speed of right.
good work so far. there's still much to be done. pay attention. that's affordable.
If you would like to give SIP a try just try out the latested X-Lite/FWD Client available
here.
Please read the FWD Quick Start Guide to you get familar with our community.
Once you have a Free World Dialup account, you can dial your friends who have a SIPphone account, by dialing **747 followed by the SIPphone number. You can also dial people on other SIP networks.
FWD now also supports the ability to place
"toll-free" calls into the US, UK and the Netherlands. more Details are availalbe: here.
At the moment there are approx. 44,000 FWD subscribers in 150+ countries.
Call quality is much better than cell phones and may even be better than land line phones you're used to
Our company has its headquarters in North Carolina and the development office is based out of Newfoundland, Canada. To lower costs, we have incorporated IP phones. My desk has an Axxess IP phone.
I'm not fond of these phones at all. They have a monstrous number of features, which is great, but general phone use is left wanting. The caller always sounds distant, and the lag makes phone conversations more difficult, especially with conference calls. Calling someone across the room for example will reveal a disconcerting 1/2 second or so lag between what you hear across the room and what you hear on the phone.
I'm not ready to hail the praises of IP phones just yet.
I'm wrong and so are you.
My girlfriend leaves for Rome in two weeks and i have been searching for a VoIP solution. This is by far the best solution Ive found. Anybody know of any similar products I should consider?
SIP stands for session initiation protocol. It is only used to create the connection. Most people don't even hear about me, I'm the RTP protocol. SIP just make the connection, without me these SIP phones would be useless. I am there for suggesting the name RTP/SIP for all future references to SIP phones. Let's not let another "Linux" happen again. Give credit where credit is due.
I don't see any information on the website about privacy. If one SIPphone can only talk to another SIPphone I wonder why they didn't throw in some type of encryption.
Make way for the carnivore of VoIP.
At last a phone for men... the women have had it so good for far too long! ;-)
I thought slashdot was supposed to be full of people who knew what they were on about? More than half of this thread is rubbish! "Doomed, we're all Doomed!"
Saying that SIP is dead is like saying that, ooh, UDP will never take off.
It's been around for ages, and it's not just used for phones; it's a generic session establishing protocol.
Essentially, you want to set up some kind of media session between two endpoints; what you do is you send a SIP INVITE message through proxies etc. and attach another kind of protocol message (such as SDP) which describes the requirements for the session. The endpoint receives this, and establishes the session directly (without the proxies etc. in the loop). In very short.
It's just another protocol, like DAP.
SIP phones have been around for ages too - Pingtel's offering is probably the best one.
That said, I don't see SIP phones as taking off in the home, or for personal use; they're much more suited to being used in small enterprises etc.; much lower cost than a PBX. You'd have to have some kind of PSTN interface with the outside world - perhaps phone companies will start providing softswitch capabilities so that people can make their VoIP network speak to the outside world?
What you CAN do at the moment is have a mixed network - VoIP which talks via a router (Cisco 2600 for example) which then talks to the PBX which talks to the PSTN in the usual fashion.
Does anyone sell an unencumbered VoIPPOTS bridge for 1-3 analog lines? I guess I'm thinking of a box with an ethernet jack, line jacks, and extension jacks. POTS extensions go in the extension jacks, POTS lines go into the line jacks, and ethernet into the ethernet jack. Device allows POTS extensions to make POTS or VoIP calls, terminates VoIP calls on extensions or bridges them to the POTS network, or allow POTS network originated phones to make VoIP calls.
I could see that being very useful as a starter device; it'd let you use your normal home phone lines and phones as usual, over IP, terminate VoIP calls to your regular phone. More interestingly is the ability to roam to any IP network with a soft phone and make POTS calls.
I think Vonage's device is like this, but it's encumbered; you can't just get the device can you?
The magic with VoIP seems to me to be in having a way to bridge to the POTS world.
I'd take your mom asking about kids over my mom supporting gay rights for everyone and ignoring her straight children.
if we swap, you won't ever have to worry about a mom who wants grandchildren. let's talk.
EOM
And yes, FWD is free.
It appears that SIPphone is a new service of some sort - As there's nothing new about the Grandstream BudgeTone phones except for the price (They used to be $80-90 each last I checked, Robertson is selling two for $129.99.
The hardware WILL work with other SIP services - I believe the BudgeTone is popular as a SIP client for use with the Asterisk open-source PBX software. In an Asterisk setup, you can use the phone as a normal PBX extension phone.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I tried to order one, but the shop simply doesn't work :(
Keep in mind that the Asterisk open-source PBX includes SIP gateway support.
And the phones that Robertson is selling are already tested and known to work with Asterisk. (These phones aren't new, although $130/pair is - They were $80-90+ per single unit last time I checked.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Not quite accurate; SIP phones can call POTS lines and vice versa assuming whomever is running the SIP gateway has a land line.
My buddy's company, Vail Systems runs a completely SIP based network at this point. They are definately making calls to people using standard telephones.
Most cellular companies now either offer affordable unlimited calling plans, or unlimited calling between cell phones on the same service. You are no longer tied to your desk, and for many, that means they no longer have a desk, once you add 802.11a/b/g to the mix.
People are cancelling their land lines at a significant rate. This is just another landline. The paradym has changed; the phone number is no longer associated with a fixed location, but rather a mobile person.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Check their page, the phone is compatible with those services...
Vonage has a service where they give you a router to plug a regular phone into. The router is then plugged into your cablemodem/dsl/whatever and voila, you have a VoIP SIP based phone. They also provide you with a phone number (in just about any area code) and give you great rates on long distance. No need for a Pingtel or SIPhone.
An odd thought, many legal issues, but still interesting: Suppose someone starts a service that is like file sharing, but is actually time sharing a local POTS connection. i.e. For every x minutes that I donate my land line to the cause, I get x minutes on a gateway somewhere else. Not quite like open access points but similar. Of course there are many kinks (restricting long distance calls, people pranking on the system, hacking, etc) but the idea of a non-fixed, free, distributed POTS gateway is somewhat interesting. The best/worst part of IP telephony is that there is always going to have to be a last mile connector. This means revenue. Somehow though, I see the charges for IP2POTS calls ultimately shifting to the person *being called*. i.e. AT&T allows IP phone to be able to call your cell as a service. Evil, yes, but until IPv6 comes out, the billing models in place work that way. Course right now someone could make some dough with little Mom and Pop gateways... So many options!
SIP/VOIP is something I have researched a lot about. Basically, this guy set up a server has a just enough bandwidth to do the directory lookup and is selling the phones. Yippie. Thats it. No VoiceMail or advanced Unified Messaging services. He doesn't even have a way to get back to POTS. Here is how it should be done. Like Vonage but make it free from device to device over SIP, then minimal cost back to POTS. Then we want advanced services like TellMe. Oh and use the Cisco ATA 186. Like Vonage, because the thing supports 2 lines and ANY phone.
ALL you need to do is replace everyphone in the world (uhh, $5-$100 dollars US) with and internet connection (still needs standard phone line), a computer, and one of these new handy dandy VoIP phones (conservative total around $600-$900 dollars US)..
do you have the capital to do that all yourself?
Linux: Helping nerds look smarter since the late 90s.
The next step is to plug one of these phones into a wifi connection. Now you have a virtual cellphone in any Wifi Location. Do this at an office where you may have a WiFi building and you're golden.
I'm also pretty sure that IBM has already realeased something like what I have mentioned.
You can already do the same with GnomeMeeting and the ILS server or any gatekeeper. That's just using H.323. Moreover it works with any H.323 hardware or software, with Asterisk PBX, but also with any PC-To-Phone gateway...
So how about a WiFi sip phone to really cause some problems with the cell phone business, I can see it now,free mobile phone service! maybe advertiser supported,hey i could stand 60 seconds of ads for an unlimited free call! bye bye cell phones!
You can call other SIP users, from the SIPphone website:
"SIPphone lets you call users on other popular SIP services like FWD and Iptel as well".
Also, these are regular BudgeTone model 101s from what I can tell...they're not made by SIPphone, there's no "technology" involved on their part, they're just selling someone elses hardware under their 'brand'.
-psy
A couple weeks ago I remember reading something on here about how the poster gets free phone service through their cable modem by plugging a regular phone in their modem jack and using some sort of proprietary(?) software to operate the thing.
Does anyone else have any more info about this? I would love to know more (especially about free or cheap alternatives for those of us who can't get phone service through our cable) but I can't seem to find the original comment...
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Maybe in your country. Here cellphones are more expensive than ever. Digital cellphones were supposed to be better digital quality, cheaper because there were no contracts, billed by the second, and the phones had better battery life. for a while they were. Now all but one company is back to billing by the minute for digital calls. 2 & 3 year contracts are the norm again. you might be able to find a plan with a lot of minutes but there's no such thing as unlimited for anything
.. haven't you noticed they all stop using the phone quickly? the phone's always off because the owners have discovered that if you actually rely on these crap things you'll have to replace your $120 lithium battery every 8 months.
Quality is down the toilet for digital. It has really dropped, and on top of that rates are higher than analog used to be, no service or feature offered comes in an unlimited form now unless you're an old customer who's paying the rates dictated by a 2+yr old contract.
I can find half a dozen better deals for long distance calling on landlines than the 10cents/minute the cell companies claim is a deal.
Oh yes, all those people who switch to cell-only and drop their landline?
What a deal! NOT!
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
"...can only call other phones that use the same technology."
:)
Two tin cans and a piece of string
SIP phones have been around for a while, and they have only been able to call other SIP phones, that is nothing new or interesting... its how VoIP works. If you want to call a PSTN phone, you can through a SIP phone if you have a gateway on one end that has an actual phone line plugged into it to dial out over the PSTN network. slashduh
Now add Wifi support, and you can have free mobile phone services!
After that, add a hundred geeks per city who buy a 500 wifi-station, and you have a mobile phone which works for free and has usefull coverage in the city you live! All you need the telco's for then is as ISP's, nothing more.
Think of the money saved and the change in the way we think of communication...
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
This is a good price for SIP phones (I've seen the same model for sale for $75/phone, which is $150 for two). You can use these phones for any SIP stuff, I would recommend that people check out free world dialup which has been doing this exact same thing for a long time, and has been doing it as a community service, instead of as a company. This isn't anything new, but it is good that it is getting press... the more people who have SIP phones, and use something like FWD, the less I have to pay in long distance charges to those who are stuck with PSTN.
Yes and no. The phone can only call other SIP devices, but there is no reason that the SIP device cannot be a gateway to the PSTN. Mr. Roberton's service includes the ability to call other sip directory networks, including Free World Dial-up.
Free World Dial-up already has the ability for USA and UK PSTN phones to call a FWD phone number (see the "3rd Party Inbound" section at http://fwd.pulver.com/index.php?section_id=78 ). In addition, the same page explains how to call USA nationwide, UK, and Neatherlands Toll Free numbers from your FWD SIP phone. Since SIPphone can call FWD, they are able to do the same.
So, maybe this is not so useless afterall... ;-)
Free World Dialup has offered the same service for several years, but for free. Maybe it's just me but it looks like the service is just an extension of that model. Or am I missing something?
Check out http://www.tnl.net/blog
This takes me back to my early days on BBSs, before most people had heard of this crazy e-mail thing. The thought of sending a message halfway around the world in a couple of seconds was absurd. Enter the FIDO Net. For those of you who don't remember or weren't in the shit, the FIDO net worked similar to FedEx's ZAPMail idea, which leapfrogged faxes between offices until it got to its destination. FIDO capable BBSs would spend a couple of hours every night calling other local BBSs and synchronizing their FIDO mail. While this wasn't nearly as instantaneous as e-mail, it was certainly much faster than snail mail. Once The Web and E-mail caught on, FIDO drifeted into the annals of history.
I expect the same fate for these SIPhones. They will hit hard and be well used until someone comes up with something better, faster, cheaper, etc. and will then be relegated to the "Hey, you remember *blank* from Back In The Day?" heap. In short, I think they are a great idea whose time has come.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
Free calls are great, until you realize that telemarketers can take advantage of it too. And if it gets a decent share of use, it will be the next spam channel.
And since VOIP isn't regulated like telephone networks, there's nothing to protect you from it. The US do-not-call list doesn't apply.
I'm interested in what measures are in place to stop telemarketers from abusing the system.
I can't see a difference. No lag or anything. We use cisco phones and they are pretty neat (sorry about the plug)..
I can't wait to have one at home. The only problem is the gateway between VoIP and "normal" phones.
-- Leeeter than leet
On ebay you can get headset for even less than that. That's what I use to call home (tiny town in Southern Russia with slow dial-up connections). It works really well and saves me and my wife at least $20 every month (and that's if we used Net2Phone instead). We've been using this for half a year already ($120 in savings).
You don't necessarily have to pay for the line yourself. You can connect through a service like Packet8 or Vonage that has the PSTN gateways which will route the calls into PSTN for you. So, you can get a cable modem, then use Packet8 to make calls anywhere in the world using SIP/VoIP. No PSTN connection is required in your house at all. It also works great and lets you have multiple phone numbers from practically any area codes! And you can plug the DTA into any broadband connection and keep all of your phone numbers with you. People I talk to over my VoIP DTA can't tell a difference from my old PSTN line.
I knew the lindows man was going to branch out to another silly/lucrative market as soon as he could, as lindows seems to be going nowhere. (see:post.goingdowntheline) He doesn't actually care about what he's doing, he's just trying to make himself the top of a somewhat niche market.
Many Thanks,
Luke
Packet 8: $19.95/mo with unlimited US calling or $5.95/mo with 8cents/min
Voice Pulse : $34.99/mo unlimited, $7.99/mo with 4cents/min
Vonage : $39.99/mo unlimited, $29.99/mo with 500 long distance minutes.
The only restriction with the first two of these services right now is the inability to call 911, but they are working on it. Vonage already has the ability to call 911 and it won't be long before the others start offering it too.
If you really want to save some money on your phone bills and you make a lot of long distance calls, I highly recommend looking at Vonage.
Why would you pay $129.00 for a phone that can only call other SIP phones from when you can go to Vonage and signup, they send you an ATA186 that you plug into your router and ANY phone and you can call anybody you want. I do recommend using a newer phone, old junkers seem to have problems.
I have had a Vonage account for over a year and the only time I had problems was when I had Adelphia as a provider.
Latency is fine the only thing that I have seen affect QOS is bad upload speeds.
Highly recommended, and no I don't get kick backs.
Take a look here
http://www.asterisk.org/
This is a GPL'd PBX system that supports SIP and
many others types of VOIP and standard analog
lines, T1/E1 lines and so on. Using asterisk you
could connect any number of SIP phones to any number of analog lines or T1 lines.
These SIP phone and asterick would make a nice
small bussiness system for say 100 employees
Or a VERY nice home system.
<cartmanesque>Kick Ass!</cartmanesque>
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
...it's the services.
There's not doubt that what we are witnessing at the moment is the start of the next telecoms revolution, the last bastillion of analog technology - the phone - being brought into the digital age. The embryonic development of the VoIP world has seen the emergence of various protocol such as H.323 and SIP and slowly as the adoption of these tools and technologies the wrinkles in the make up of things to come get ironed out.
Just as we saw with the dot.com boom, there will only be a handful of real winners in the hardware side of things, where the real meat will be will be in the value added services to come as people start to pick up on this technology. VoIP technology does to telephony what Open Source software did for the Internet, which is that it makes it easily accessible for the little guy to turn something into nothing because unlike before in the traditional telephony world the little guy doesn't need $,$$$,$$$ worth of equipment to get their ideas going.
I think we're going to see a lot of waste out there initially, think back to the start of the web when it was "cool" to have a web site that had flashing text & MIDI files playing in the background...the same is going to happen at first with VoIP, but over time, the wheat will be separated from the chaff.
In related news, I released the Voice over Styrofoam-cups Protocol. Unfortunately, at this time customers may only communicate with other VoSP nodes.
http://www.denounce.com/lindows.html
I'm surprised that noone mentioned Asterisk yet. Its a soft pbx that handles sip/h323 and even pri/t1. We currently have a 4 port T1 card with a 23 voice channels on 1 T1 with a bunch of Cisco 7960 phones loaded up with SIP firmware. It works great, and we saved a bunch. (I don't work for digium, btw)
You could possibly install Asterisk and use this sip service as a gateway.
I know that I'm not going to spring real news on anyone here when I timidly remind everyone that Apple's iChat AV uses SIP.
About every other night I do a video chat with my dad, 240 miles away, for free. Until we get sick of each other.
He has a home router and I have a home router (different brands) and didn't have to do a damn thing to get it working.
SIP is described by RFC 3261.
How about this fact:
H.323 standard is 1,400 pages long.
SIP standard is 250 pages long.
Which would your rather code for?
Yes, H.323 specifies (does) more, but then that's what makes so rigid.
I say, out with the old and in with the new!
--Richard
bah! That's just an analog adapter.
This thing has hold, transfer, forward, and speakerphone; and it can be completely configured to use whatever SIP service you want.
Businesses should be drooling all over this. I think I'm going to order a couple and add it to a Linux server to make a phone system. Now all I need is a salesman...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Big Deal.......I've been selling this stuff online for months....much greater variety than their single SIP phone, which happens to be a very budget oriented phone. There are much better phones to chose from in the SIP world. http://voipstore.atacomm.com (Yes, a lil shameless self promotion).
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
Japan already has VoIP using a standard phone which can call any other phone. The system is being deployed by DSL providers, and was first introduced by Yahoo! BB Japan. The entire service, including my 12Mbps DSL connection, costs about US $30 a month (up to 24Mbps if you're within a mile of the DSL node.) Calls to the US are 2 cents per minute, and sound just fine. Calls to any other phone within Japan are also cheaper, and calls to another Yahoo! BB subscriber are free (go figure; companies can't resist putting that little hook in.)
Everything is handled through a standard DSL modem; you just plug your current phone into a jack on the back of the modem. It also has an optional wifi card option to allow you to connect with your laptop. I already have an Airport network, but at this point, it's my bottleneck.
I could go with 100Mbps fiber for about US $55, but I'd lose the VoIP, and I need it for calling the folks at home in the US. Besides, the internet can't keep up at that point (for most daily applications), so it's just a waste of money for the near future. I'm getting the same sort of transfer speeds I was getting back at my university in the states on an OC3 connection.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Sure, Pingtel phones which each cost as much as a computer have been around for a while, but these phones are finally cheap enough to go mainstream.
Let's see, there's already Vonage, Packet8, and iConnectHere. Can Michael Robertson beat them on price?
1. Look for stuff someone has already invented.
2. Steal idea - add moral spin.
3. Sell.
He's such a champion of techonology.
They basically work as advertised; pick up the receiver, punch in the number and you're connected within a sec or two (considering that the call is routed from Germany to San Diego and back, not too bad). Voice quality is OK.
It seems SIPphone is just reselling preconfigured units from Grandstream; they have a full manual online, as well as a current firmware image for your phone to boot off. SIPphone apparently did not customize the firmware, or lock any of the settings, so you can do whatever you wish with the phone.
As I suspected (but the SIPphone FAQ or docs don't mention), the phone has a built-in web-server for configuration purposes, with an easy-to-guess default password; so if you're going to put this phone up on a public IP, make sure you have a decent firewall in front of it.
The SIPphone directory just works; no frills, but works.
As my employer has two offices at opposite ends of the country, we're probably going to get a couple more, and look into open source gateway solutions. We've wanted to do that for quite some time, but we couldn't find cheap phone to try this with, so this offering almost perfect for us.