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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."
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.