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Free VoIP for Dartmouth Students
dtfusion writes "After upgrading their network infrastructure and doing some testing over the summer, Dartmouth is making free voice over IP available to incoming freshman. It turns out it was costing them more to bill the students for local and long distance than for the calls themselves. What will the success/failure of VoIP on this scale have on telecom?" There's an older story and a newer story from the Dartmouth public affairs office; that second one probably spurred the NYT article. The sysadmin-types are planning to study usage during the rollout.
Here is the no registration NYT link.
http://news.com.com/2100-12-5080449.html
I played quite a bit with H.323 voip via 802.11b, and found that as the article states, it is possible to enjoy quality equal to or superior to a standard telephone call. I was using IP phones rather than the softphone package the students were given.
The price for quality is latency. You need a fairly large buffer to compensate for wireless' retries. I was able to get it to work pretty well, but if the buffer was too large, it was reminiscent of a cell phone call with just enough delay to make you talk all over the other person.
I settled on a 16 kb/s codec and a 250 ms buffer as a good balance between performance and sound quality, and I never had complaints on that front.
-j
Not true!
My friend goes to DM, and she says that few have cell phones at the school. Additionally, if you look at all the major cell phone providers of the USA, none claim to have service in Hanover NH (the school's location). (There is a way you can get service over there via AT&T, but thats another story.)
So what this school is doing works out well.
Sunny Dubey
Yep, the idea is to route the within-campus calls locally, and only give the PTSN the calls that need to head off campus. The advantage of the univerisites doing it themselves (whether it's VoIP or just a PBX) is that the school can route local calls to the local phone monopoly, but can hand long-distance calls directly to the long-distance carrier of choice to bypass the ILEC and save even more.
Most public transit gets support through taxation precisely because the cost of ticketing is so high. For an example of how it is being dealt with, witness how London Transport has recently declared that tickets must be bought from machines before you board buses in central London, and announced price freezes for prepay smart cards and long term passes (which have low collection costs per journey) for 2004, while increasing the cost of single journey fares by up to 25%.
These should help you;
Vonage
Net2Phone
Quicknet
unfortunately, SIP isn't the 'preferred' protocol used by Cisco. Cisco mainly uses it's main protocol, called Skinny, aka SCCP . Softphones only works with Skinny. Only high end phones like 7940 or 7960 support SIP, but with a different firmware, not loaded by default. the other phones works only with sccp or h323. A good idea is to have gateways to support all VoIP protocols, so a linux (or mac) user could use software like gnomemeeting for h323 or kphone and linphone for SIP. As far as I know, there isn't a skinny client for linux. Only asterisk (an opensource pbx) seems to have a sccp channel driver, but is in beta stage.
I was there.
Also happens to be a member of the Avaya developer program, an excellent way to benefit if you want to develop VOIP applications!
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Free your mind.
No, I don't think it does. Not from my lab, at least.