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Skype Vs. SIPphone - VoIP Compared
JimLynch writes "There are few organizations more loathed than the telephone company. Let's face it - none of us like forking over our hard-earned cash every month just to use the phone. Well, how much would it be worth to you to be able to call your friends and family for free by using the Internet? ExtremeTech have compared the two newest ways to call friends via the Internet: The SIPphone from Lindows' Michael Robertson vs. the Skype service from the developers of Kazaa."
Skype - Actually not bad. They've got a nice "NO SPYWARE" logo on their download screen which actually set off alarm bells initially. But we started using it a couple of days ago to teleconference with a friend in Korea (or is that Corea now?) and I haven't noticed any new spyware on my system (and I went looking).
Ad Aware doesn't seem to find anything either. Don't count on that being there forever, but my suspicion is that they won't bother with the spyware while the product is still in Beta. They need nerds like us to test the stuff and the last thing they need is SkypeLite coming out while Skype is still a Beta product.
I am an engineer and supervisor at a rural independent phone company. It really pisses me off when people bitch about 'the phone company'. It may be that the RBOC's have poor customer relations etc, but our company is well respected in the communities we serve. We provide excellent service for what we charge. I regularly have to call my employees out at 3 in the morning to go fix things .. drive many miles, work in all kinds of weather. The reliability of the dial tone we serve is better than five 9's..
Okay.. I'm done ranting..
So for $40/month I get:
Or for $65/month I get:
And if you don't want to even pay a monthly fee, but want to pay 2.95/min to call the US (from overseas that's a bargain in many countries) you can get a no-frills account that lets you use ANY SIP client at VoicePulse Connect!. And you still get a real phone number. IMHO, Skype rhymes with Hype for a reason.
I signed up for Vonage and ended up cancelling it after about two weeks. The sound quality was fine, the features were excellent and the price was great. Unfortunately, the latency sucked. Small pauses between sentences made talking on the service very uncomfortable.
I used it through my Comcast cable modem. I may try the service again next year after I move.
Myself and many of my friends use Free World Dialup and Cisco ATA's. You can use any phone you want with the cisco and it is very nicely priced. Now when we want to talk we just punch the phone hands free and talk for hours at a time. The clarity is as good if not better than a regular connection.
We have been doing this for nearly a year now, we all laugh about the amount of money we would be spending (but are not) on a pots connection.
Got Code?
I agree.... I've been looking at a service that my cable company provides though, called Zoom Phone that looks like it lets me plug an adapter into my router and hook my phones to it, then I can call over my cable modem, for a set monthly fee, to anyone with a real phone... Plus they let you have local numbers in nearly every state, and unlimited long distance for less than my family currently pays with our telephone service.... I'm not sure about all the specifics, but this looks like a much better way to go.... Anyone have any experiences with this sort of thing?
This space for rent, inquire within.
Isn't a phone's bandwidth equal to 16kbps?
That's a question that doesn't have a concrete answer. Basically a phone has a high-pass filter at 3000Hz, cutting off the high range above that... in order to accurately represent a 3000Hz frequency, one must sample at at least 6000Hz (for more information google on nyquist frequency)... bitwise representation though is kind of hard to determine. Theoretically, it requires 16 bits... which of course is a bit higher than 16 kbps... however, to get adequate voice quality one can do some smart compression.
GSM phones ("digital clarity") for instance, require a 9.6 kbps transmit rate.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
There are very affordable SIP-based FXS boxes out there that would allow the SIP-Phone to access the PSTN. Additionally, many cisco routers in use are capable of FXS ports (WIC cards). Cisco IOS allows the creation of SIP-based dial-peers and dial-plans. These guys obviously didn't look too hard for PSTN access solutions for the SIPPhone.
It also depends on your life situation and priorities.
I have a wife and three children. If we need to call 911, I want to know that 1) the call will go through, 2) it will be answered in seconds not minutes (in California all 911 calls go to the California Highway Patrol which can take as much as 15 minutes to answer), and 3) they will know where to find me at once.
Cell phones, VOIP, etc., don't cut it. When your life is on the line give me POTS on the PSTN.
Yours,
Jordan Dea-Mattson
I don't believe the review said this...
It didn't say there was no cancellation, it said it might cause problems. Since no cancellation is perfect, I wouldn't be surprised if some users have trouble, even if you don't.