Slashdot Mirror
VoIP Gets A Big Backer And Another Lawsuit
Ungrounded Lightning writes "Time Warner Cable has announced plans to roll out a VoIP telephone service. I see two implications. First: ISPs providing VoIP phone service have a competitive advantage over third-party VoIP/PSTN providers (such as Vonage), who must ride on top of a separate broadband subscription for the packet transport. This could lead to consolidation of this industry segment in the hands of ISPs. Second: Cable ISPs have an advantage over Telco DSL operations - where a VoIP offering would cannibalize their own POTS and short-range long-distance revenue. This implies rollout on cable providers first, followed by harder times for telcos, long-distance companies, and third parties."
chipperdog writes "In this article it is mentioned that the small rural phone companies in North Dakota are filing a complaint against a local VoIP provider, CallSmart. Interesting to see how this one works out, given what happened in Minnesota a few months ago."
Troll. He also works middle-management for Honda and as systems manager at Apple.
#define DRM chmod 000
rofl. pots is more reliable? i think you just have crappy cable.
i have comcast that stays up pretty much all the time. its been down like twice in 31/2 years. plus i get better than dial-up or dsl speeds (3.5x1, yay). and i actually pull those speeds.
i also work for a major DSL ISP/POTs provider (yeah, i dont have it, that should say something) and trust me POTs is NOT more reliable than cable. its down all the time and is usually effected much more so by weather than wonderful cable.
at any rate i no longer have a home phone anyway (cell phone and cable net, w00t) so thats just my 2 cents.
WIth a cell phone, you are automatically "passed on" the next cell when you move. With WLL, you are locked into your service area.
It is a little known fact that cable companies were ruled as not common carriers. That means that customers have very little protection from lack of service, privacy issues... Once we allow them to provide phone service without those protections we will erode those rights even further. $20/month for a phone line is a good deal. Do you think that will last if the phone companies are driven under?
the 'echo' you hear in POTS phones is called 'sidetone', and it is intentional. I didn't know that IP phones don't have sidetone.
We actually use VoIP at my office: www.microoffice.us/slashdot. It works reasonably well and allows us to provide an extremely cost-effective office suite package (office space, phone, high-speed Internet, mail, meeting spaces, etc...) to our customers. Our customers are primarily solo entrepreneurs (e.g., consultants and freelancers) and very small businesses who are price-conscous.
You really have to be careful about the data network though. We have near-dedicated bandwidth from our data provider, which is why quality is good. Forget about trying to serve business class users with VoIP over cable modem or DSL -- the quality goes to hell when someone tries to download a large file. The QoS really has to take place upstream of you (at the point of the bottleneck). Otherwise it doesn't achieve much.
I'm curious to see what alliances will be formed: local governments and the phone company on the same side for once, against cable providers and possibly the FCC. It could be a real dog fight.
[this
No you didn't.
The Cisco 7920 Wireless IP Phone does not at this time do anything but 2.4GHz 802.11b. It has no cell phone functionality, although this has been discussed as a possible next-generation product direction (as well as some possible OEM agreements with PDA makers).
This phone is a pretty solid product, albeit a little light on battery life. This comment is ironic, as the original delays on the product (to the tune of about 10 months) while Cisco worked on the battery life.
There are two main competitors in the Wireless IP Space:
I ditched my landline 6 months ago and haven't looked back. I get tons of free features I didnt get with my landline ( like caller id, etc ), no solicitations at all (isn't this even illegal?), and I can take my phone with my where ever I go (or leave it at home if I don't want to be disturbed).
And to boot, its all about 10 bucks cheaper / month than the landline was ( 300 anytime minutes + unlimited evening and weekend + unlimited long distance - who uses more than 300 minutes during the weekdays? You're probably at work and using the company phone).
Seriously I don't know why people bother with landlines. The solicitations alone were enough to drive me away.
Before someone starts including TC on a Linux router with a pretty interface/enclosure. It's already pretty damn simple with the Arbitrator which (thankfully) the source is open to some extent. I'm sure someone else has come up with something (that is if you don't like cisco/3com or other hardware based systems.)
I don't see how this apparently diverse market of Free/cheap QoS is going to somehow limit VoIP? End to end QOS is necessary, so ISPS will provide it, Why? Because your ISP will be your provider, and if I'm not mistaken, they can run the QOS on the connection they provide you.
Well, no; CallSmart is pushing the rules, quite obviously and quite openly.
Under FCC guidelines (not formally "rules" yet, a phone to phone nonlocal call that crosses state lines is properly treated as long distance, whether or not it happens to use IP, ATM, or smoke signals in the middle of it. The local phone companies are thus allowed to charge "switched access" charges, rather than local; for a rural company, those charges can be quite stiff. CallSmart is claiming that their phone-to-phone service is not what it is. MCI, btw, claimed the same thing about its Execunet service in 1976; that case was eventually settled by the creation of the carrier access charge system that remains in effect. (Before that, AT&T Long Lines and the Bell Operating Companies used a "separation of revenues" formula to pass subsidies to the latter.)
Rural phone companies face very heavy capital costs (often over $10k/line), which cannot be covered by "affordable" monthy rates. So there's an elaborate subsidy system in place. CallSmart is evading it. Now it's easy to understand why they'd want to, but somebody has to pay for those rural phone lines, and monthly bills typically cover less than 1/5 of their cost! The rest comes from bloated LD access charges (what CallSmart is evading) and direct subsidies (that "Universal Service" line item on your LD bill largely goes to rural telcos).
I don't think the current system is right -- it encourages inefficiency, excessively discourages wireless substitution, and leads to arbitrage hacks like this. But CallSmart is not Vonage, which gets by because it requires a computing device (AT-186) at the customer site and is thus not "phone to phone" but technically "computer to phone". And yes, a PBX can be subjected to switched access charges too; I know of cases where that was arranged.
Talk to your VoIP administrator. There should be an option to turn on sidetone and maybe even an option for "comfort noise" so the phone doesn't sound too quiet when no one is speaking.
I was under the impression that all of the VoIP traffic was going to be transit'ed over either the Time Warner Telecom Network or the Aol Data Transit Network.
Now, I'm not sure who's going to do the final VoIP-> POTS integration, or who's handling that...but it was my understanding that Time Warner was going to piggyback this on their DOCSIS network -- one of the reasons they they bumped up RoadRunner to 3 Megs Up/Down bandwidth.
From a Technician's stand point, I really hope that before Time Warner goes to VoIP they do the "One Drop for Life" program that Charter uses. When I was a tech down at Charter, I rarely had to replace a drop, however, I've replaced more drops up here than I'd like to mention. If they forced stricter Quality Assurance testing on the contractors as well as the installers, and paid their in-house technicians a bit more, we wouldn't have the "when it rains my cable dies out" problems (and those are typically bad grounding block issues or bad drop issues).
Eh, just my thoughts.
Ian
I disable sigs...do you?
D'yall know that Canada's Telus has been migrating to VoIP for all its long-distance traffic since July 2002? And that it has launched business service to Ontario and Quebec as of November?
VoIP is already here... it's just that the USA lags leading telco providers by about three years!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.