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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."
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?
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
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
My now-wife and I were talking using VoIP almost 3 years ago
Maybe it's time you two meet face to face ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are required to give things that 911 uptime by law, if memory serves.
Actually, this is a good thing. As long as cable, or the Internet in general has no such legal requirements, wireline voice will always have a place. In some places, wireline voice is already called lifeline voice.
A lot of people get upset when they see the charges for 911 service on their monthly bills. I doubt many realize the effort required to keep 911 working and current, both on the telcos' and local government's parts.
Sig??? I don't need no stinkin Sig!
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?
"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.
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.