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New VOIP App. Profiled
sniggly writes "Cnet News.com has an interview with Kazaa co-founder Janus Friis about their latest product Skype. Skype is a p2p VOIP technology that quote '... is addressing all the problems of legacy VoIP solutions: bad sound quality, difficult to set up and configure, and the need for expensive, centralized infrastructure.' Windows only beta client available."
Which, since it's from the same guys as Kazaa, I would certainly expect it to be.
Color me uninterested until accounts of user experiences pop up all over the internet with an overwhelmingly positive response.
I wonder how long til there's a Skype Lite out there..and how long before Google removes links to it. Grr.
No Holds Barred Radio has been using this to replace toll-free call-ins lately. It sounds way better than telephone quality, and it's a lot cheaper than paying for each 1-8xx call.
the telecom industry still hasn't figured out that VOIP is going to take more and more $$$ away.
I wonder just when their lobbyists will get the US congress to outlaw or at least hamper the use of inter/intrastate VOIP?
There are several similar applications out there, the oldest I can remember off-hand is Speak Freely which does secure p2p.
Right now we use Ventrilo internally at work - it's not secure, but we can do conferencing in super quality with VERY low bandwidth! It's excellent!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I've read all of the (completely non-technical documentation) and they don't actually say HOW the damn thing works.
ANY P2P application generally requires at least one open port (typically 6346 or similar) so that other people can initiate a peer connection to you. If someone's behind a firewall - and you have the above port open - a "push" request can be sent in which they initiate the connection to you, then you send them back the data after they've opened the connection.
It's not possible - at least with strong firewalls and valid packets - to make a peer connection when both ends are behind firewalls. Some raw socket hackery might do it, but that would technically be a hack and I'd expect firewall intrusion alarms to go nuts if you did that.
So... if anyone's actually used the damn thing and has a better understanding of it than I do... HOW does it work without end-users opening up ports?
The ability to dial a "real" telephone is exactly what I'm waiting for.
I want a VOIP solution for home. Not so I can call internationally, but for local conference calls that don't tie up every phone line I have. Unfortunately, most of the people I "conference" with aren't on broadband, so for this to work it needs to be able to dial multiple phone lines through a VOIP server.
I'm sure we have the technology to do it.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
So long as it is non-free you'll never know the complete story on what it's doing on your computer. For all we really know, it could have spyware that goes undetected by the masses for a long time. Proprietary encryption is inhererently untrustworthy. Yet again, on practical grounds and on freedom grounds you want Free Software.
But I would not be surprised to learn that reporters are uninterested in talking about free replacements for this. They appear to be uninterested in talking about the groundbreaking GNU Radio project which has been doing interesting things for a while now. So, if there is a free VoIP app out there (perhaps one with strong encryption too), I wouldn't wait for mainstream news to catch up to it.
Digital Citizen
Would that not be Vonage?
If you're not worried about being able to call regular numbers, use a pure VOIP solution like the one in the article above. Vonage is a VOIP product that can call out to (and receive calls from) the regular phone system.
With this we are likely to see a new telemarketting trend if it takes off. Think about it, there's a no call list, but there's certainly no such regulations regarding this technology yet.
I just downloaded and set it up, and had a quick chat with a friend down in California. The quality is very nice and it's super easy to get working. Especially nice is the fact that, although we're both behind NAT connections, we were able to get connected with no problems at all - no configuration was necessary.
Personally, I'd be prepared to pay a fairly reasonable amount for a tool like this, if they decided to go down that route. I live in the US but my family is all back in the UK. I currently spend in the order of about $50/mo on international calls (and that's with a low rate international plan) so something like this could save a lot of money if it was priced reasonably. I've emailed my folks back in the UK to have them download it as well so I can test the latency and see how well it works.
The basically zero effort setup is what really makes this rule though. No worries about forwarding ports, etc. It Just Works[TM]. This may well turn out to be the killer VoIP app. Time will tell!
Once critical mass in telecoms has been achieved companies might start setting up gateways for this; they wouldnt want everyone be able to call just everyone within their company. Also they'll want conference and call forwarding. The whole shebang. Theyd pay good money for that if it means no more long distance charges.
If this does happen to skype (with its proprietary protocol), and it can easily happen because it's easy to use, spyware would poison a large portion of the virality of the marketing campaign, people wouldn't trust it. The very fact that kazaa's revenue model is ad- and soyware driven doesn't mean they'll port that pathetic model to their next venture. But the stench clings.
And if its not the next killer ap, well, they can always consider their options :)
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
I've been using this app for about 2 days now, and initial thoughts... this thing kicks some major ass. I've played with the MSN voice thing, and the yahoo one, and the quality of this is astounding.
I spent like 3 hours chatting with a friend in England yesterday. Other than a couple of program crashes (and it is beta software remember) we were able to talk as easily as being on a telephone.
This is astounding to me considering she's on a crappy dialup connection.
I'd be intersted to hear how dialup-dialup connections work. Oh, and if there is any ad or spyware included, its brand new stuff Ad-Aware doesn't know about it.
While I'll agree that the entrenched players are using 911 and service during power outages as tactics, it's still true that the landline and cellular telephone networks are designed to be immensely reliable, while the TCP/IP networks are designed to "usually work". This is one of the reasons that VOIP is so much cheaper; they don't have to make sure that every single component in the system is battery powered, for example, so that it can operate independently of the primary power grid. The telco's are required to provide that level of service by law, along with universal service, in return for their monopolies.
:-)
That's not to say that VOIP is bad, of course, but there are a lot of corners cut in data networks that should worry you when you think of scenarios involving people dying in case of system failure.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
An interesting editorial regarding this CNET story run yesterday on Voxilla.com.
Being one of the people singled out in the story the good news is that since the story ran, I spoke with Janus and Free World Dialup will be working with the Skype team in interconnecting our respective networks.
What concerns me more than this story is that last Friday it was first reported that Wisconsin
joined the growing list of US States that is taking action against VoIP.
VOIP will always be just a toy without having a seamless way to answer and make regular telephone calls.
/mo for unlimited internet, anyone tried to do VOIP with a smartphone?
I've been looking around for some open source gateways for voice modem to h323. Is there really nothing like this out there and were stuck with this?
Alot of cell providers are doing $30
Give me one single robust protocol and the apps to run on it can be many and slendid. Just make sure it has everything useful from all the other IM apps out there. Even if the execution quality is poor, lay out the groundwork.
a) decentralized
b) secure
c) video and audio
d) messaging
e) file transfer
f) file browsing
g) open protocol
h) whiteboard
i) multiple logins j) basic multiuser functionality(a la IRC)
I am certain I am missing something. But I really didn't expect things to take this long... I know hypertext took a long time to turn into the www, but that was a bit more pioneering. This is largely a technical issue, since every feature above is offered by On of the big IM's, Skype or Waste.
Obviously, the Major businesses are not intersested in developing an interoperable standard. However, it is the technophiles and pedestrian Internet Users who would benefit from this. So it should be seen to by us to create one protocol to implement such an awesome app. And even if you couldn't call POTS from it, it would catch on. Hell, if it was open, the major IM providers would probably build gateways to access it or eventually leave their existing systems to jion it, increasing it's already immense value.
At least then I wouldn't need to have Trillian, ChatZilla, IIP, Waste and Shareaza all at once (and Y! Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM and ICQ installed) just to share a few annecdotes and family photos with friends!
Please, coder people! Help us out!
Looks good for your age..
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Granted there are still situations where this may work well for some; calling someone who is already on-line, a co-worker perhaps, or quickly calling someone overseas and asking them to get on-line.
When they have the ability to connect you to a "regular" telephone there will be charges -- some local telco will want their termination fees after all... And now, suddenly, without ads and spyware, they need billing systems, support, etc. And they are suddenly competing with folks like Vonage and capturing the attention of regulators, again like Vonage.
On the whole, however, the *masses* don't care that their calls are carried via P2P VOIP or some other technology. They'll put up with a little work or invonvenience to get a deal on rates so long as the quality is there (and I'll give these folks the benefit of the doubt on that) but most folks generally aren't at their machine 24x7 to make and receive calls.
On the other hand, they already have a service that is always on, requires no waiting for a system and software to start, requires no presence awareness/coordination, that works well, and has a very simple interface. (i.e. Their existing landline or mobile phone.)
You may have to pay for services like Vonage, but it's a good deal and once it's set up it "just works" from what I understand. It looks like AT&T is going to affer a similar service as well.
Thus, in the end, I think this this will be mostly used by folks avoiding expensive international tolls, or co-workers from time-to-time, but not much beyond that.
1) The automatic selection of a non NAT proxy to relay packets between NAT parties can eliminate the NAT direct connection issue completely. This could be part of the service agreement, such as "supernodes" in the Kazaa architecture being elected from service users with large pipes.
2) Many network programmers have been playing with a clever exploit based on sequence number prediction to route back into a NAT obscured host, and this exploit works through a surprisingly percentage of deployed NAT boxes.