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."

Comments

I like it

[bazik]

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 :)

Re:I like it

[billimad]

Your standard analog land line uses a stream of 64kbps (ulaw/alaw compression) but this is related to the quality of the audio not the latency of the network it goes over. The telecom network traditionally allocates a complete end-to-end circuit for your call - wasteful but guarantees QoS.

I definitely think this [VoIP] is the way to go. This is an preview of the future and as such will have limitations.

A step in the right direction

[fven]

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 who has the directory?

[wfberg]

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...)

Not a problem

[Dexter77]

"...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.