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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
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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...
#:|
"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.
Can you say Open Standard?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
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.
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.
Looks like a picture to me :-
e r% 20Now
http://www.sipphone.com/tiki-index.php?page=Ord
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but don't forget that there are still issues using SIP across NAT gateways/firewalls.
On the plus side, even though the Grandstream phones have had some flakiness issues, Grandstream has been very responsive, releasing firmware updates regularly.
They also seem to be committed to working with open source projects like Asterisk, perhaps even supporting Asterisk's IAX protocol - a replacement for SIP that DOES work (and work well) behind/across a NAT firewall.
In any case, anyone interested in this stuff really should mosy over to Asterisk's website (asterisk.org). A lot of progress is being made putting together a very powerful open-source PBX system.
I've been using Cisco IP phone for the past 2 years. Never had any problem with voice quality or lag. At one time we tested another IP Phone from some other company (don't remember which one). The phone was so bad that you had to wait 1 or 2 second when awsering the phone before talking because there was a delay for the microphone to be activated. The sound quality was also very bad.
Looks like the premium you pay for a Cisco phone is worth it (they are still overpriced IMHO).
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... ;-)