Slashdot Mirror
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."
I don't know about you guys, but I pay more for my cable connection than for my my phone service (as I'm sure many of you DSL users do). It aint anywhere near free, but it'd be nice to consolidate services.
Can I bum a sig?
Internet boom deja vu?
/dev/dsp to speex, through a networked pipe, then back to speex and /dev/dsp? This would be much better than installing KaZaA spyware.
You still have to pay for bandwidth, and both sides have to have a good connection. Now, telephone service is WAY too expensive... I mean, 5 cents per MINUTE??!!?? How much bandwidth is used per minute again? If we really wanted this couldn't we just pipe
My now-wife and I were talking using VoIP almost 3 years ago, between our two computers. While not as slick as these new systems, it is good to remind ourselves that only through the pioneering efforts of such products as SpeakFreely would this technology be where it is today.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
There are few organizations more loathed than the telephone company.
MPAA, RIAA, Telemarketers, car mechanics, McDonald's, DigitalConvergence, SCO, Microsoft, ???
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Just a quick question, since I know KaZaA is rife with it. I'd like to try it out but I don't want to end up with Bonzai Buddy on my desktop eternally or something.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
The problem I have with stories like this is that the calls aren't really free. You do have to have a rather high-speed internet connection to make these calls with any reasonable quality and reliability, and you have to pay that fee on top of your existing phone charges.
A major limitation is that you can only call your fiends who use the same "service". And they are for the most part defining "service" rather loosely, they're more like applications in software and hardware than a service. I know it's only on Mac now, but I'm curious why iChatAV from Apple is excluded from these types of comparisons. It does the same things, plus video and uses the AOL screen name
and buddy list infrastructure.
There's a reliability issue with VoIP, I for one will not cut my dial tone off until I have nearly 100% uptime on my net connection. In all my life I think there was one time (after a hurricane) that I picked up my telephone and did not hear a dial tone. I can't count how many minutes per month/year my net connection is down for one reason or another.
I also take issue with the statement "...They do illustrate, however, just how far VOIP has come - it's actually good enough to offer a viable alternative to existing phones.". I don't think it's the VoIP technology that's improved, I think it's the Internet's infrastructure that's improved. There's finally enough bandwidth that you don't need a lot of buffering to ensure packet delivery order to the audio decoders.
It's still possible and routine to get out-of-order delivery, but no-where as severe as it was even just two years ago.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
or can I use the SIP phone on dialup? ;-)
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
It really doesn't matter which provider/hardware/software/protocol you use to call over the Net. All of them evolved to provide an adequate performance. The weakest link is the link itself (pardon the pun). Delays and dropped packets are the biggest problems of VoIP. Voice codecs also introduce unavoidable delays.
T-Mobile rocks!
While Skype sounds nice, it is another lock-in. That is its main problem.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
He should have included Vonage - more possibilities (POTS access, can call from anywhere in the world with net access or be calleded from POTS, etc - so you can avoid tariffs like nobody business)
Sure, the charge, but imagine having a local, US phone number, in say Europe for calls to the US.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I don't loath the phone company, because I have to pay them every month. I loath the poor service I get from them sometimes, but the reality is that it is better than what I get from my ISP.
the reality is that I will be paying someone for access and bandwidth. The question is, who?
If you compare what VOIP gives me vs. POTS, POTs wins hands-down in relieabiilty, quality, and availability.
Now, I do like what VOIP an POTS competition are doing to POTS pricing. What I want is a plan that offers me a flat-rate pricing plan with a big number of minutes to whereever I call. Charge me $50.00 a month for 1,000 anytime, anywhere minutes and you will have my business.
Yours,
Jordan Dea-Mattson
I pay $20 a month for my phone line. I pay $50 a month for my internet access, and another $50 a month for my cable television. I also pay $80 a month for my cell phone.
I'd describe my land line as down right affordable!
My cable television and internet access cut out at least once a month. I can't get cell phone reception at my office, at my home, in the car, or even next to a cell phone tower... My phone line always works.
I'd hardly describe my phone company "loathed".
There's only one number I really want to be able to dial for an outbound voice call. 911.
If VoIP can promise me that with an uptime comparable to that of my local telco, I'll switch.
I hate my local telco with a passion. (But I hate all other telcos and cable companies with similar degrees of passion. Y'all suck.) But I have to give them credit for providing uptime.
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..
I'd like to see how they compare to established services like NikoTel which is fully SIP compliant, works with a free computer app which runs on Windows and MacOS X, works with any SIP phone, and not only has a free online directory, but also has a subscription service for extremely cheap SIP-to-POTS and/or POTS-to-SIP. I'm in no way affiliated with them, other than as a happy customer of their free service.
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.
Hey KD7JZ -
You and your comrades have my thanks. People don't realize what a marvel and gift we have in the telecommunications grid. It is fantastic!
Yes, you deliver much better than 5 9's reliabiilty throughout all kinds of problems. The first thing which came back after the Loma Preita earthquake in 1989 was my local phone service. I couldn't see (my power was out), but I could call and talk to friends within hours of the earthquake.
The local phone guys - and the people that designed this system - are my heros!
Yours,
Jordan Dea-Mattson
They claim Skype has no feedback/echo cancellation and that you need to use either a headset or at least headphones - this is simply not true.
I have used Skype a lot with a 4 speaker setup around me and a free standing desk mic, and I get absolutely *no* feedback or echo, nor does the person I am chatting with. I'd consider it one of Skype's best features in fact. I can sit here and chat totally hands free, and it sounds nicer than your average speakerphone too.
Now if only I didn't have to have to pay for a landline to have DSL. I *never* use it. It's basically a $20 adder on my internet bill. Damn you Verizon!
...Well, how much would it be worth to you to be able to call your friends and family for free...
Which variety of Free are we talking about? Free as in unlegislated, or free as in no cost whatsoever. All the various VoIP solutions out there, from Vonage through Skype rely upon you paying an aditional cost to a broadband provider to make use of them. I don't think that there is anything wrong with that, but it is a non-free requirement.
Likewise you are in all likelyhood someone, possibly even you, are going to have to talk with your legislators to prevent regulations that may make use of your broadband connection in this way illegal. Again there is an underlying cost that has to be considered.
Free as in I download the tool and don't have to pay the tool maker for my use of the tool is a shallow view of free. Though I grant you that is probably the most common use of the phrase these days.
-Rusty
You never know...
Too bad the article doesn't mention how you can reconfigure the sip phone to use Free World Dialup.
p ://www.pulver.com/fwd/index.html
:-). Did I mention that it really is FREE and also has an excellent user aand developer mailing list.
Further discussion about the sipphone is available at
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/voip
htt
disclaimer: I use a Cisco ATA-186 with FWD and highly recommend it (FWD uses lines 2 and 3 on all phones in my house
And if you enjoy paying money and/or want a real PSTN number, check out Vonage, Packet 8, VoicePulse, or any of the other commercial SIP-based VoIP providers. Or install Asterisk or VOCAL yourself (open source) and become your own VoIP company (also note that http://wholesale.voicepulse.com even allows you to connect your Asterisk PBX to the PSTN)
Finally, the article glosses over the whole SIP protocol which needs special help if you use NAT or a firewall for incoming calls (and also for registering or INVITE commands).
I'd write the above there but I'm too lazy to register here or at extremetech.
This was one of the most purebred geeky things I ever did, but we've been role playing lately (V:tM and Warhammer Fantasy) and were short a player or two. A friend of ours in Korea (or is it actually Corea now?) heard about our dillemna and begged us to let him join the session over Skype.
We already had broadband on both ends, so we decided to try it out. (Normally I'm resistant to combine my geekdom tendencies - mixing computers and role playing was dodgy.)
Anyway, we tried it and the biggest problem we had was occasional snap-crackle-pop from cheap microphones. It worked, worked well and the quality was WAY better than phone. With a laptop and a high speed connection it was almost as good as the conference call rigs at work. Next weekend we're going to hook our webcams up to the whole thing and see how well that works. As sadly geeky as this is, I lamented the break up of a good role playing group when we all moved but might manage to overcome geography with technology.
As an add on, our friend's voice sounded beautifully rich over the speakers and sub-woofer. Adds a real element to roleplaying if one of the players is able to speak with the voice of god!
All in all, I was pretty impressed with Skype recommend people who already have broadband on both ends to try it.
Let's face it - none of us like forking over our hard-earned cash every month just to use the phone
Hahahaha. What an entitlement complex? You expect someone to hand you phone service for free? Along with your free cable, free rent, and free groceries?
I personally *like* handing over my hard-earned cash for phone service, along with everything else. I choose what I want, I pay for it - it's called capitalism.
If I didn't want it, I wouldn't pay for it.
Well, how much would it be worth to you to be able to call your friends and family for free by using the Internet?
Let's see. To connect to the internet, you must be have a phone line, DSL (which also requires a phone line), cable (which cost more than a phone line), or something even more expensive like T-1.
Yeah, that'll save me money.
I use Teamspeak for gaming, and it does a rather good job. Granted, it's designed for gaming, but use the Speex 25.9 codec, and it's pretty much the same quality as the phone. Isn't a phone's bandwidth equal to 16kbps?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
When I was still using the Windows platform, I used a program called PGPphone to communicate with friends via my computer. A very big plus of PGPPhone is that it uses Pretty Good Privacy to secure the communication, giving the government or any other third party an hard time decyphering. The bad side of this is of course the extra overhead of the data transmit. But still the quality was good enough to have normal conversations, I believe even at slower (dial-up) connections worked pretty well. You can always give it a try.
I don't know if there are any non-Windows versions for this, still need to take a look at that.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
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 pay $20 a month for my phone line...I'd describe my land line as down right affordable!
You have the internet connection and cell phone anyway. $20 a month for a redundant service is not affordable, it's wasteful.
Too bad I can't get my telco to disassociate my data line from my voice line. I realize they are the same piece of wire but I seriously doubt I need to have a voice line just to run DSL over it. My guess is that the voice line is just a pre-qulaification for DSL.
Calls are encrypted end-to-end using 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption, which is nearly impossible to hack
Nonsense, I've been cracking Skype encryption codes for years. Simply tie a string around a telephone pole, hook it up to a soup can, hold the can to your ear, listen away.
We have some low-end long distance plan from MCI.
Total billable calls: $7.29
"Long Distance" portion including fees: $21.34.
The local dialtone is a lot like that as well, with the actual basic fee for dialtone coming in around $20, and all the taxes, fees, and other regulatory crapola coming in around $12.
We need to just eliminate all these fees. If the fucking government wants to tax us, be a man about it and tax me directly, don't sneak it in on the phone bill.
"Let's face it - none of us like forking over our hard-earned cash every month just to use the phone."
What? Is phone service now a (Insert Deity of Choice) given right? I don't mind paying for a service I use. My basic phone bill is about $20. It's the cheapest bill I pay all month, and I get unlimited local calls. I call that a bargain, although not the best I ever had. Still a good one though.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
As the author of Speex, I'm really curious about whether these phones use Speex (they don't mention the codec used). I'm not going to install Skype (don't use Windows anyway), but if someone is interested in checking for me, e-mail me and I'll send you a piece of code which should be able to tell if Speex is there by inspecting an executable or dll.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I've been told that in order to DSL, you need a phone line from the big phone provider no less , I managed to find the cheapest package I could, but I still have to pay Verizon about $15 a month to hold the line I need for DSL. That plus the VOIP cost doesn't seem worth it.
How do you get DSL without a land line?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I heard that they did. Some nonsense about the Japanese changing the "C" to a "K" after they took over before WWII so that Japan preceeded Korea in the alphabet. So during peace talks, N. and S. Korean diplomats threw it on the table as something that really wouldn't be a contentious issue. Everyone agreed and now they're pushing the English speaking world to spell it Corea again.
I heard about it when someone made a crack about "Chapan" saying to go ahead and change the name back, China sitting up to take notice.
Let me preface this by saying Skype has a pretty slick package, but this isn't exactly earthshattering new stuff here. I've been using something like this for gaming: www.rogerwilco.com Microsoft has NetMeeting... there's prob a lot more. This would be much cooler if you could call someones regular phone, not just someone who has skype installed.. thats kinda weak. IMO What ever happened to the free net2phone apps that were out there??? They ones I know charge now.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Wow are you retard or do you just play one on /.? I'd like to see you say the same thing when you child accidentally falls in the pool or slips and hits her head. Hmm or someone breaks into your house and you're locked in a room with only a phone to save you.
Natural Selection only works in nature. Things like inability to cope with changing environment is natural selection.
FlashTalk is another great VoIP type service that actually works. It's totally software, so the direct competition is Skype. FlashTalk already works well, and future versions promise to be even better. It's not free, but it's very reasonably priced, imho.
www.flashtalk.com
to have something that integrated with current technology and offered the same benefits? I find it hard to justify spending 70 bucks on a piece of equipment that's basically useless unless everyone else goes out and spends 70 bucks on a piece of equipment.
Another thing to think about is that some of these technologies have been around for a while. You've been able to chat over AIM (while the sound quality isn't going to knock your socks off) for years now, but it hasn't taken hold as much as you think it would have.
Have used SKYPE several times now. Average session is over 4 hours. Never a drop. Great sound quality.
There is a glaring ommision and minor quibble point in the article.
Ommision: SKYPE is a HALF DUPLEX system. Your buddy starts talking and can get pretty choppy if any sound on your side is picked up by your mic. A good headset takes care of this, but my computer room has a LOT of background noise.
Quibble: Of course the volume level is going to be better in SKYPE: You running it through your sound card, which by nature has great controllable amplifier.
Obviously, that's no excuse for not having a better amplifier in the SIPphone. The audience for that product is going to have worse hearing in the long run.
Now if I can just get it on other platforms (like my Sharp Zaraus on WIFI). Perfect tool to maximize all those HOT Spots that keep popping up.
Well, if I could do voice over IP with my family I'd be a whole pile happier... It costs me anywhere up to $120/mo in long distance fees normally and my cell company doesn't offer much (anything really) in long distance plans... If I could route calls through my home station I'd be happier *g*. (hint: QuickNet :)
Of course I'd be even happier if I didn't have to pay land line costs at all (DSL) but the alternative (cable) was too buggy, slow and the billing was ... surreal...
The 911 argument is and will come every time that VoIP is mentioned mostly due to the huge effort that went into building the system by alot of players. Getting the physical addresses changed and databased was big and kudos to those involved. This 911 effort is now built out and everyone is mapped so now all voice services can take advantage. Do not forget that every cell phone and telephone in the USA is required by federal law to be usable to call 911 out of the box and that no service activation or account holder is required. Disclaimer: I use Vonage, turned off Bell South, and am a Geek.
If it is so good, then their is the problem of finding places that list the ID. why not ad a skype section to slashdot?
-Seriv
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.
In the vein of not wanting my physical usage to change, I'm trying out Vonage and expect to switch over soon and ditch the phone company. This will translate to $20/month savings for our household. :-).
Sound quality is excellent (same as landline, it sounds to me), and none of my friends or family notice the difference (I ask each time I call). I did have to tweak my Linksys router, remapping a couple of ports to get consistent connections.
Vonage is one of the few VoIP carriers who tries to handle 911 - it's not identical, but comes close - you roll back 911 service like it was five years ago, or no change depending in how far behind your municipality is in upgrading their systems
The Skype thing has no appeal to me - I don't want all the reliability of my PC tied into my phone.
I don't know about SIPphone, but I tried Skype and I must say you'll soon find yourself living in the best house on Easystreet if you want to try to pick up strangers from your lazy chair.
;)
Just go to the 'Find a Friend' option, find the advanced button and search for the sex and or age of your choice in the city/country of your choice.
Et voila, the world is on your feet: there's a nice list of many nice people waiting for your chat (some even hint they like to that in their 'About' box, others hint they don't like that. Don't feel shy to contact them anyway: it's just a way to intimidate the noobs).
There are people who are helpful enough to let you know their private phone numbers from their account information. That's in case the Skype chat went wrong and you still want to contact them in another way after they banned you from contacting with Skype I guess, so it saves you the trouble of having to create a new account for that purpose.
Enjoy!
Well finally I must say that the sound quality of Skype is very good even when I talked to someone on a isdn modem from my broadband account it still sounded much better than a normal phone. Too bad you can't make it even better (stereo or whatever) if both parties have a rediculously fast connection.
Well, how much would it be worth to you to be able to call your friends and family for free by using the Internet? Well, if they are going to charge it wouldn't be free now would it? Act now and you get the free phone for only $299 extra!!!
http://www.teamspeak.org/ Most gamers use this bad boy now. It works better than any P2P app voice app I have tested. Switch codecs, admin, linux+win2k, dedicated or client, teamspeak is the best, and free!
Yeah, all your phone calls brought to you by the number one most untrusted, bandwidth-hogging, spyware installing company, KaZaa! Thats right, download our software free today! It may not have our spyware package in it yet, but just wait until everyone is using it! Our new 'enchanced' version 2.0 will come complete with our enchanced features such as:
SaveNow! This tells you how to save money, even though you weren't going to spend it anyways!
NewDotNet! Yes that's right, you too can be mislead into believing that every web site is linking to one company! But that's not all! We're also including a URL hijacker that sends you to the wrong website!
Seriously though. What do the people at KaZaa think they're going to do to make money? Of course they're going to advertise with it. They may not have it yet, but I don't think the original KaZaa had any spyware in it either, just banner ads. Nothing put out by them will ever be free IMHO.
That's a 17.5% tax rate! EOM
Labatt Blue offered free calls in Ontario this summer using VOIP services from Onlinetel.
I signed up to save the cost of calling across the city of Ottawa. I live in the west end of the city and my parents in the east, only 20 KM away and long distance.
Anyway the quality is fantastic and saved me a bundle. The offer is ending November 1st, but they now have a calling plan that will cost $20 a year in for calls in Ontario.
The way the Blueline service worked is you call a local access number (listen to an ad)enter the number you want to call they transfer it using VOIP to another station that is local to the person you are calling.
Extreme tech failed to recognize that SIP phones can call regular phones or cellular phones: basically any phone with a phone number.
This is achieved uding SIP/POTS gateways. There is nothing magic about it. It works just as h323 protocol gateways.
But SIP is much more lean and faster than the h.323 protocoll because the h.323 decribes an enourmous amount of facilities rarely used.
If your child falls in the pool then you did something stupid by not watching your child, or not enclosing the pool to prevent such a thing. You're genes should not be propagated.
If someone breaks in to my house I am perfectly capable of handling the situation myself. In fact I have done so. Calling 911 does not prevent any damage, or injury to my person or family.
The police are not crime preventers or stoppers, they simply clean up afterward.
Natural selection works everywhere that technology doesn't interfere with it. Stupid people should be allowed to die when they do something really stupid.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I'm on a college campus. We have to use phone cards or COLLECT or similar to make long distance calls from here. I'd MUCH rather just do it this way, with my wonderful connection (about 10Mbps in practice) that I have no choice but pay for.
What we really need is an exchange service to route POTS calls to VoIP. I see no reasons why this could not be done.
Company A sets up the exchange, customer gets a normal phone number and says logged in with proper client, VoIP software, mobile device, or what-ever, and is responsible (to him-/herself) for standing by.
The aunt Annie would be very happy to dial the good old land line (?) number.
POTS and VoIP should only be considered as techniques to transmit data. Customers use devices with handsets, microphones, and ear plugs. What's in between should not matter.
Company A could also offer a web (or email) access to additional modern services like voice mail and fax inbox (which are already available for mobile phone users, though).
Wake me up when it's done, +358nospam505566677.
*blink*
I'm as pro-gun and Social Darwinist as anyone. But since when could you use a gun to put out a fire? (Unless it's a Really Really Big Gun :-)
911 is like insurance. You "use" 911 every day in the sense that if you witness an immediate danger to life and health, you can pick up the phone and call it in as soon as you've done what you can to solve the problem yourself.
And unlike insurance, it's cheap enough on a per-user basis that it's more efficient to have everyone pay $0.xx per month, than it would be to manage individual billing of individual 911 subscribers.
Perhaps the best model for 911 is vaccination/immunization. It's not just cheapest, but it's most useful when every phone in the country can be safely assumed to have it.
The blackout in the northeast US in August showed some that land-lines and non-cordless phones still have uses. The lack of power rendered cordless phones useless and the cell phone network was packed beyond capacity. But old fashioned wired phones worked fine.
It's simple, with Skype, you are replacing one monopolopy (the telco) with Skype, and selling your VoIP soul by buying into their proprietary world. If you use SIP, you are building a common user base of like minded people who believe open standards are good things.
C'mon people, have we learnt NOTHING from the IM "wars" - what should have prevailed was an open IM standard - and what do we have ??
3 or proprietary camps - each trying to steal users from the other, each inoperable unless you jump through technological hoops to have 3 or 4 different IM protocols running concurrently.. Why contribute to Skype's cathedral, when you can be adding to the SIP bazaar ??
The entry to to the Skype domain may be free, but the key point is not to be free, as in beer, it's about being free as in speech (and standards...)
I think that any difference in voice quality, ease of use etc etc are all beside the point, you could have said the same type of thing a few years ago about :
Open Office v MS Office
Windows vs Linux etc ..
remember.. with enough eyballs all bugs are shallow...
this debate should be a non-starter for the /. crowd - go SIP, go open standards, go and be free !!
Now if only I could get DSL without having to pay Verizon for a full featured phone line :P
Surely it would make more sense to compare Skype with, say, Linphone. I'm sure there must be others. Has anybody made such a comparison?
I played with Linphone a while back (over a year ago, I think) but gave it up in the end, as the people I would use it with most are not au fait with that kind of technology.
So that is a very interesting question to answer. I've been playing with VoIP since 1993 (Remember Vocaltec?) I've long expected VoIP to become more mainstream before now. However, with cheap long distance that transformation from switch public telephone networks to packet based didn't happen.
When the FCC allowed for competition of the last mile that created an interesting problem for Telcos. They no longer had an advantage because they owned the wire. In fact it was hurting them because they were regulated and many alternate companies competiting with them were not regulated the same way. This created an uneven playing field and has hurt the telcos bottom line badly. Enter VoIP.
The Telcos are fervently looking at packet based technologies to get to the same playing field as their competitors as far as regulation goes. Enter the FCC again...
The FCC and local governments will probably recognize that they are no longer getting the revenue they once did off switched telco lines and start taxing data communication lines at a flat rate. The government will get their money some how... but in the end everyone will be competiting at the same level.
Now... to your question about the Do Not Call list. One of the interesting things with SIP is that it is extensible much like http. You can customize the signaling for your own application. Many companies out there have recognized this and are building in a lot of user controls into how calls are handled. For instance.. if I want all calls from "president@whitehouse.gov" to go to voicemail I can do that. However at the same time I can write a rule that would send "warren@berkshirehathaway.com" to Simultaneously ring my SIP phone, my cell phone, and my work phone.
Another item to toss into the mix to think about... if telcos really do switch over to packet based technologies... are phone numbers really needed long term? Of course.. you'll need numbers to call grandma because she still has the same phone she's had for 50 years. There could come a time when you actually will pay extra to get a phone number and it will be because you have someone like grandma in your life.
Think about it... SIP could be as significant to communications as the web was to the internet.
-jonmck
One thing I didn't make clear about the Do Not Call list... just like you can have rules for people... you can create a rule for everyone else, or "Anonymous". Those people could be send directly to voicemail or simply hung up on.
-jonmck
The parent poster is the creater of Speex, which is a kick-ass audio compression format designed for speech. See here: Speex
-- I speak only for myself.
You do understand that children are human and that like all humans they are creative in finding solutions to problems. Problems like a fence getting in their way of swim time. You can not watch a child 24/7. You have to sleep, and you have to go to the bathroom. Ofcourse you can teach your kids but kids don't always listen.
... ). 911 is absolutely needed, I don't you anyone but you would have it any other way... and thats probably because you're too young to know what its like to have a family and children to worry about all the time.
I agree with the other poster that 911 is like insurance. It's there just in case.
Also things happen that are out of your control (ie: my little sister had a seizure in the middle of the night during a summer camp
Jabber and H.323 with Speex
The two major problems I have with VoIP is that there isn't one open standard, it is all different networks, it just seems it could be unified somehow. Also, every VoIP program I have used, including skype break up, and there is always a good amount of delay. If you are on tradition phone with someone, ask them to say ping, then you say pong, it will take no time at all, but with Skype, etc this is a whole new story with a lag of 1-2 seconds. I don't know when or if these issues will be completely gone, even though it is better than it used to be.
Sig: I stole this sig.
...thus it is bad
does it interoperate with gnomemeeting or run under wine?
See FAQ:
"Can I connect to a SIP server with Skype?
No you can't. We have crafted Skype with a proprietary technology that
is not compatible with SIP. SIP was simply not good enough for us."
I'm by no means young.
Fact is that humans have survived quite nicely for quite a few thousands of years without a 911 system.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Their signalling and call setup algorithms are also proprietary and undocumented, which is also lame, although they may be interesting.
Their encryption is vaguely described, but since it's closed-source there's no way to evaluate it, which is super-lame.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's not just that their source code isn't Free as in Beer or Free(tm) as in politically correct RMS-style speech, it's not even semi-Open as in "Source Available so you can read it and figure out what they're really doing".
For Crypto use, the closed source code and proprietary protocols render it Untrustable. They have some good buzzwords in their documentation, and they're using some good building blocks, but doing useful crypto means getting *all* the pieces correct and documenting them in a way that people who understand the technology and its weaknesses can verify that it's ok. For instance, it's really nice that they're using AES and 1536-2048-bit RSA, but are they generating random numbers for the keying competently? Are they using Diffie-Hellman or other Perfect Forward Secrecy techniques? Are they doing the padding correctly on RSA parameters? Are they reusing keps carelessly? Many other companies with better funding than Skype have screwed this up badly, including the entire GSM phone networks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Funny how the review just parrots the Skype claim that it uses "strong encryption". It probably isn't; designing strong cryptography is hard and requires peer review. They might be able to manage the former, depending on the skill sets of their developers. They certainly can't manage the latter with a closed protocol. Government security services have the determination and resources to do it, while invariably corporations don't, even ones the size of Microsoft.
Everyone thinks that governments are scared of Skype because it has "strong encryption". In fact it's probably the other way round. They're laughing because people think their Skype conversations are private, when they're not. This is much better for the government than a normal phone line, which can be tapped, but everyone knows it can be tapped.
It's commonly said that open source is more secure and less likely to contain spyware or trojans. If you can look at the code, they are plain for you to see, and they only work when they are secret. However, we can take this a stage further. A company like Microsoft is limited in what it can do. If they sell software with spyware which is too blatant, they could get sued, and their reputation could be damaged. They would not want this, because their reputation is one of their major assets.
For a company like Kazaa/Skype, this is irrelevant. If you know how to sue them, the RIAA would like to hear from you. Their reputation is already rock bottom as far as spyware goes. There is no incentive to stop them putting every kind of privacy-violating application in Skype. Perhaps you talk about cars on the phone, and next time you're using Kazaa you see adverts for cars...
I think it's a pity that the RIAA's antics have allowed the Kazaa (and Napster) inventors to dress up as Robin Hood. In fact their business model has been making money out of other people's content. This is, to my mind, much more unethical than using Kazaa as an end user, to share copyright files without the thought of financial gain. I don't actually know whether I consider it unethical to use Kazaa as an end user, that's a much harder question.
By doing this, the Kazaa inventors tell us that they are dishonest, unethical people. When someone tells me that, I try to make it a rule to believe them, and keep clear. It helps me avoid being cheated.
Finally, it's worth remembering that Skype want to create the kind of proprietary lock-in so limits the usefulness of text IM. We need VoIP to be free: free as in email, not free as in AIM.
Sounds very 'rational', but:
If you - as a member of a social group - help to increase the survival chance of other members of that group, then your group as a whole will prosper, including you.
So it will also increase the proliferation of your genes.
I'm forced by the uni to buy their telephone service in order to have dsl. I'm in a cable modem area, but they have a deal with the uni that doesn't let them sell me service.
oh well, at least the uni dsl is fast and cheap 4mbit (little slower during the day) for under $30/month, INCLUDING the voice line.... so I guess I should quit complaining.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Unless the people that are allowed to survive "artificially" by technology or social help will in the end weaken the species.
Humans (and all other species) are as resilient and strong today as they are because all the weaker, less intelligent, defective samples were killed off or died as a result of their lesser condition.
There's several inherited diseases that are starting to have major increaseses in occourance. The reason? Before all this "everyone must live" crap, they died before they could breed. Now they are given all the medical care, drugs and support they need to survive against the rules of nature. The result is that these people breed and pass the genes/disease on the their offspring.
The children in turn may or may not exibit the disease, but they carry it and pass it on. Instead of fighting disiease by allowing it to die out naturally we are allowing (forcing) these people to live and instead spending billions to sove a problem that would solve itself if we just stopped trying to eliminate death.
But we've gotten way off the topic of VoIP here, so lets just end all this now and agree to disagree.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people