Qwest Launches VoIP Trial

prostoalex writes "Qwest Communications International, a local phone operator covering 14 Northern and Western United States, launched its first Voice-over-IP trial in Minneapolis/St.Paul area. 'The future of voice communications will be based on the Internet', Qwest's CEO was quoted as saying." Also in the news: some vague plans by AT&T to use VoIP as well.

Comments

AT&T Is ALWAYS vague

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll take forever to get an offering out, but it will be the most reliableand dependable!

So,

[w.p.richardson]

Can the telephone company-like regulation and tax of the internet be far behind?

I don't think so.

Latancy

[penguinoid]

I bet the Internet Phone will cause an immense improvement in latancy. (Unless people enjoy speaking with several milliseconds latancy).

Re:that's all well and good...

[I_Want_This_ID]

only in very limited housing developments. And here in the twin cities, those developments often get sued, because the fiber to every home in the area runs voice, data, and cable programming; the telco's & cable operators don't like their turf being stepped on.

I had a friend that had to go and testify in defense of the development she was moving into because of this very reason.

Since telemarketers

[panxerox]

would be transmitting over the internet could they be sued using anti "spam" laws? i mean spam is afterall spam.

Who pays for long distance?

[-Grover]

It's been over a year since I've had to pay for a long distance phone call by the minute. Almost every cellular plan has free long distance included with it. Between that, e-mail and AIM/ICQ et al. for communication, the consumer is becoming less and less likley to actually pick up the phone and make an hour long phone call across the nation. It's too expensive...

Instead of dialing 10-10-982-21-121321-1231242342 before every call, just pick up your PC handset. Besides that, you'll have the advantange of being able to have your computer monitor incoming calls, allowing you for customization of when your phone rings, who goes straight to voice-mail, and hundreds of other plusses.

Re:Well, yeah....

[Lxy]

Qwest is milking this for all its worth.

Last night one of the local news stations basically gave Qwest the credit for inventing VoIP. They made it sound like Qwest is some amazing visionary company, ignoring the likes of Vonage who offer the same service for cheaper.

I'm glad to see that Vonage and Qwest are now competing, should be an interesting fight and (hopefully) a win for the consumers.

will they really do it?

[defwu]

It will be very interesting to see if they actually roll out a VOIP solution that works for the masses. Vonage has a pretty successful model, but IMHO it has a pretty limited audience : those who have high bandwith connections and are willing to risk losing calls. I mean, how much would it suck if your router went down and you dropped all incoming calls? And since your computer is now your integrated communications terminal, you lose all voice mail capability as well.

I think the age of converged communications is here, and am happy that large telcos are going to start moving that direction, but maybe we ought to think about another model, other than the large telco ("Hey we own the wires!") pardigm.

In Other News...

[tds67]

"The future of voice communications will be based on the Internet, and Qwest is excited to lead the way for customers," said Richard Notebaert, Qwest's chairman and chief executive.

In possibly related news, the Internet domain name "stopvoicespam.com" was registered today.

Not so surprising.

[i_r_sensitive]

And, in point of fact, four years ago the company I worked for was negotiating with AT&T to adopt their VoIP plan, So AT&T may be vague, but they probably beat everyone else to the punch.

The thing is, the best way for the telco's to do this is not to use the public internet backbone, but their existing infrastructure. Consider, they allready have the copper and fiber in place, The could then use VoIP to vastly increase the amount of traffic which they could support.

This also obviates most of the quality issues inherent in the internet. It would allow the telco to continue to provide a high quality service without relying on temperamental internet links. Gateways to the public internet could be used when needed, but their use would probably be best avoided except where no other route existed.

This would allow the phone companies to provide VoIP service without all the potential issues of dropping such traffic into the uncontrolled internet. Consider they will be charging you for this service, they need to provide the best and most reliable service, what better way than to keep it to infrastructure they control or have binding agreements with the controllers of, rather than an uncontrolled medium.

AT&T CDS (VoIP)

[Anonymous Coward]

(posted anonymously due to NDA)

I'm in the AT&T CDS beta program and compared to the other VoIP offerings it's probably one of the best. Packet8 is having some serious growing pains and their service is really starting to suck. AT&T offers more services than Vonage although the monthly cost that is being tossed around during the beta period is $49.99. That is probably the most expensive consumer VoIP service out there but if you use all of the features it may be worth it. One major bitch about AT&T CDS though: They use a D-Link DVG-1120M for a telephone adapter and it's supposed to be hooked directly into your cable modem. It handles the gateway functions, NAT, etc. but it has some QoS rules so that your call always sounds good. Not bad, right? Well, they seem to have some firmware issues with the QoS stuff. If you're downloading something, sendmail email or using your connection in some way when you pick up the phone, it's usually ok. If you're not doing anything but try to open your email, ssh, browse, anything using the net connection and you already are in a call, forget it. They need to work on balancing things a bit. If they can keep the features and lower the price into the same range as Vonage then they'll probably kill the competition.

Vonage

[Docrates]

I use Vonage, pay $40.00 a month and have unlimited US-wide service. My phone number is of the Miami area (area code 786, but I could have chosen any area code) and I use a regular telephone.....And I do all this from my home in Central America.

They give you a little cisco thingy that you hook up to your hub and configures itself using DHCP. I have a 192Kbps connection and NO-ONE has been able to figure out I'm using voip. In fact, voice quality is much better than the regular Cable & Wireless telephony service (wich is pretty good I might add).

Try it, it even has voicemail, caller ID, and all the other regular goodies.