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Qwest & Cablevision Launch VoIP Service
securitas writes "Qwest announced that it will be the first RBOC to offer VoIP service to its customers, starting with Minnesota. Not to be outdone, Cablevision launched VoIP service for its '1 million high-speed Internet customers in the lucrative New York market.' Cablevision's Tom Rutledge said the company plans to take advantage of last Monday's FCC local-number portability ruling that lets customers keep their phone numbers when switching service providers. Qwest plans to challenge the local-number portability ruling. It looks like the disruptive technology hype that surrounded VoIP in the late-1990s is about to see its first real litmus test."
The consulting firm that I work in has been observing the ebbs and flows in the VoIP market for the last 12 years, ever since Corel released "RemoteSpeak" has trial version in Newfoundland, Canada. At the time the quality of the data was fairly poor due to latency in the early stages of the Internet (certain conversation were packed in taped and shipped to Oceania for instance) but it showed some great promise in the BBS world of FidoNet.
We are now agressively working towards a partnership with AvenTail to compete with Netscreen and Cisco. Our goal is to make phone access a commodity; we will target the content of the phone conversations as a potential revenue source or provide it as medium for advertisers. Our initial research showed that people were willing to tolerate commercials of certain amount of length in return for crystal-clear free (or very inexpensive) long-distance calls.
We have the product and with some luck we'll be able to get the cooperation of smaller CLECs in the mid-western area for a pilot.
Which is nice.
Has VOIP missed it's window of opportunity thanks to the continued proliferation of cell phones and favorable calling plans? Both my wife and I have unlimited long distance built into our cellular plans which eliminates one of the biggest "plus's" for VOIP (international calling not withstanding). So for us, VOIP is an utter non-issue. A few years ago, it would have been since we both have family scattered about the US that we called frequently. And with unlimited night/weekend minutes and scads of "plain ole minutes", it makes it even less compeling.
So have the telcos won due to the long gestation period of wide spread VOIP. Other than international callers, or those who shun cell phones, what reason would one have for going with VOIP. Personally the one thing that keeps me attached to my land line, is more of the "comfort" of having such an old tried and true technology around "just in case" (redundancy good). That and it still serves as the "family" phone number for inbound calls. And with cellular home distribution gadgets coming online, even that use will slowly be eliminated.
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This isn't new. I worked for a company here in Kansas City that was doing basicly VoIP three years ago. The customer didn't need a special phone or anything. The company ran their own fiber and heavy coax in the city, the CPE stuff was pretty basic, and was very reliable. It worked much like this:
From the cable node or repeater on the telephone pole behind someone's house a new cable was ran (This isn't some Time Warner thing). Then the customer gets a new box put on the back of their house, the NID. The NID did all the frequency splitting and stuff, and has an IP address in it. All we had to do was hook up the already exsisting cable lines that were in the house and telco lines to the NID, and you had VoIP. You even got high speed internet access.
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....