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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."
...then it's doomed already.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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
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One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
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.
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
If you bothered to go to the site, you would realize there're no monthly fees. If you have family in third-world countries, it's a very good price to pay for unlimited calling.
If you'll forgive the ad hominem comment, it astonishes me that you haven't learnt anything from all the tech that we obsess about so enjoyably here on /.
Remember SMS messaging? Oh, you're prolly a yank, maybe you don't use it. Well, it was your network only at first, then it was inter-network, now you can send SMS messages to and from the net via a bridge.
If these phones are useful enough for international companies who need dedicated calling tech, then it'll sell. After that, how long do you think it'll be before someone implements a bridge for this to the other phone networks? OK, it may not be cheap, but this is how technology develops.
This could prove to be the first step to VOIP for everything, or it could be Betamax, but it's far too soon to tell.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Can you say Open Standard?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
You should prefer to setup a SIP proxy on the gateway rather than implementing a SIP ALG module.
SIP (as any VoIP protocol) is a complicated protocol with many options and many modes of operations.
Parsing it is somewhat ugly especially if you do it in kernel code where any small mistake will kill the gateway completely (as opposed to killing the SIP proxy only).