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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.
when you can just get the roger wilco game communication software and communicate by voice during UT2003
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Slackware: fast, stable and secure. The best Linux distro bar none.
Get Slack today: http://www.slackware.com
first po9st
They'll take forever to get an offering out, but it will be the most reliableand dependable!
How soon till be start hearing about people using dial modems over VoIP phone lines for Internet access?
But WHERE is the fiber to the home??
data (phones) or Digital data (voip) its all data. Except of course apparently where the RIAA is concerned where its ok to copy analog (fm stereo) but not digital (cd).
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Am I the only one that doesn't want VOIP to lower costs so that telemarketing can be outsourced to less expensive countries? At least now there are costs keeping the telemarketing volume below the spam volume. That, and they can usually speak English.
I don't want everyone that can hook a phone into the internet to be able to call me.
t
is VoIP?
I don't think so.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he were I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than his might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
I need a phone line from the telephone company so I can get DSL so I can use VOIP to talk to people over the phone?
...I mean, customers - who would be thrilled just to get more than 64k ISDN at home. Maybe they shouldset their sights a little more realistically, eh?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
hmm .. this will be a good time to make a local call to china. woo hoo!
'The future of voice communications will be based on the Internet',
How long did it take these guys to figure this one out? VOIP has been around for a while now and a number of folks have been using it rather successfully. We have been using iChat to video conference from North America to New Zealand for remote collaboration for a while now leading me to wonder which companies are in control of all that excess fiber bandwidth that is sitting around.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I bet the Internet Phone will cause an immense improvement in latancy. (Unless people enjoy speaking with several milliseconds latancy).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
VOIP will radically cut costs for the Telco - the equipement used to operate the internet is much cheaper per byte than the equipment used to operate a traditional phone service.
I'm just really surprised they haven't caught on before now.
Stop the brainwash
would be transmitting over the internet could they be sued using anti "spam" laws? i mean spam is afterall spam.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Cable vision has done something similar, which worked out well, but there are some interesting problems. When the power goes out, you're out of luck. Even with a UPS if the power is out for a few hours, not much you can do about it unless everybody buys a home generator. Also, they where denied 911. Meaning that there is no 911 service because it wasn't deemed reliable enough to host one. Small problems, but you still seem to need another phone just in case.
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.
I want my phone service to cut out everytime a Microsoft worm hits the wild..... I'll stick to current "old phone" technology for the time being, thank you.
when you seen the headline Quest Launches VoIP Trial and the first thing you think is that someone is suing someone.
We need your services now! I just read this on slashdot:
Qwest Launches VoIP Trial
Sincerely,
Morcheeba
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.
If at first you don't succeed, redefine 'success'
Hitler used the 1933 burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) building by a deranged Dutchman to declare a "war on terrorism," establish his legitimacy as a leader (even though he hadn't won a majority in the previous election).
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their "evil" deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first prison for terrorists was built in Oranianberg, holding the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the nation's flag was everywhere, even printed in newspapers suitable for display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation, in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it, that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack on the Reichstag building was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained.
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. Instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as The Fatherland. As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, Hitler's advisors determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, including those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist sympathizers. He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the Fatherland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single powerful leader.
Most Americans remember his Office of Fatherland Security, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and Schutzstaffel, simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.
And, perhaps most important, he invited his supporters in industry into the halls of government to help build his new detention camps, his new military, and his new empire which was to herald a thousand years of peace. Industry and government worked hand-in-glove, in a new type of pseudo-democracy first proposed by Mussolini and sustained by war.
http://c0balt.com/resources/terror/terror.shtml
It's not a VoIP service despite what the marketing droids call it. It's a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) gateway service which is a very different animal. VoIP doesn't require a phone company, just an IP network connection.
What Qwest and the other bells (and Vonage) are doing is allowing VoIP call termination to the existing POTS network.
Everyone's seen the writing on the wall and it says "POTS is dead, long live the packet!"
At some point a network effect will kick in when there is a critical mass of VoIP users who discover everyone they call is on VoIP and realize they don't need the bells for anything.
In possibly related news, the Internet domain name "stopvoicespam.com" was registered today.
POTS = Plain Old Telephone Serivce, the basci analog serivce you get from the phone company.
Crazy. I think that there should be a differnt word used. Something like Quest Launches VoIP in test markets. Or something, just don't use the word trial to mean anything other than a court case. It messes with my brain.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Everyone's seen the writing on the wall and it says "POTS is dead, long live the packet!"
I'm looking for a huge shakeout a la the dot-com boom/bust -- because everyone's jumping in to the VoIP market. Here's an example:
An outfit with the unwieldy company/website name of media-streams USA, Inc. set up (at no small cost) at a recent Microsoft Office launch seminar, and passed out business-card CDs of their presentation. I asked in passing about states regulating VoIP, and the response was "Good luck regulating a packet!"
But the website is little more than a rather generic-looking site (nice dolphin, though) with a lot of buzzwords and not a lot of "why I need this". The CD's label features another short selection of buzzwords, including "Future-proof". What the heck is that supposed to mean? And to top it all off, they misspelled the name of their company's city ! Spellnig doesn't count on Slashdot, but in the real world, 100% perfect is a requirement, not a goal.
I don't expect these VoIP cowboys to survive past the initial early-adopter phase. They'll either be gobbled up, or go out of business, or rarely, become the next [insert corporate success story here]. Don't buy stock just yet.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
This is yet just another business model that needs drastic changes based on the networked digital economy. Libraries, Travel Agents, Porn, Gambling, Advertising, Music [and eventually] Movie distribution, and now telephone communication. All going to the packets.
There is something scary about so much economy on the wires, but such will be the Information Age. The telephone companies are one of the larger entities who's cheese is getting moved, and I don't expect them to go down without a crying about it. The RIAA is another who now has to accept that their content will be on the lines to stay.
Once everyone starts using end-point phones that accept not only traditional lines, but ethernet, we're going to see a very low barrier-to-entry for providing phone service, IMO. Once this steps up, all the bells and whistles we again be sold to us (photo, video, messaging, etc). There's a slew of new possibilities that a lot of new players could innavte into such a system. I'm looking forward to it.
Imagine if you will:
- Scanning photos, receipts, etc into your [cell] phone for the recipient, live or to an answering machine. Or sending them a video.
- Getting a message on your phone from your mother who thinks "this commercial, watch this" or "this newspaper article" was really interesting or funny. Ok, maybe this isn't all good.
- Calling your home silently and hopping around the house phones to check their cameras (babysitter, teenagers, security).
- Having a web page served from your phone that holds your recorded messages, images, memos, stored documents, etc. And being able to pull them out of another phone.
mug
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I have been using Cablevision's VOIP service (Optimum Voice) for about a month now. All and all I think the service holds its own pretty well against traditional Telco Service. You can't beat the price and its very clear. Only complaint is that some local #s are not able to get through to us on our VOIP #. Local telcos say there is nothing they can do about it and Cablevision has yet to figure out the problem.
Mabye the recent anti spam legislation will apply to them now too!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
If This Is Freedom, What Exactly Is Dictatorship?
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Let me see if I have this right. In the United States of America:
1. The president now has the unrestricted power to declare war against a country that has not attacked the United States, wreaking death and destruction on both sides of the conflict.
2. The president now has the unrestricted power to round up unlimited numbers of American citizens within the United States and incarcerate them in military brigs or concentration camps for the rest of their lives and keep them from ever again communicating with friends, families, and attorneys, simply on the president's certification that the incarcerated Americans are "terrorists," as he has done with Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi.
3. The president now has the unrestricted power to seize American citizens abroad and remove them to its military base in Cuba, where they can be kept for the rest of their lives and kept from ever again communicating with friends, family, and attorneys, solely on the basis of his certification that the imprisoned Americans are "terrorists," as he initially did with Yaser Esam Hamdi.
4. The president now has the unrestricted power to kill American citizens abroad solely on the basis of his certification that the killed Americans are "terrorists," as he did to Ahmed Hijazi, the American who was killed with a U.S.-fired missile in Yemen.
Pardon me for asking the following two indelicate questions:
First, if all this is freedom, what exactly is dictatorship?
Second, after the Iraqi people are freed from dictatorship, would it be asking too much to do the same for the American people through the adoption of the following two amendments to the U.S. Constitution:
"The Congress shall have the power to declare war, and this time we really do mean it."
"No person shall be denied life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and this time we really do mean it."
Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Increasingly i have witnessed a flood of American refugees who come to Canada in order to escape their oppresive government.
After the 2000 election it became apparent even to the most trusting of observers that the political process is non existant in the United States, and that anything short of a miracle means that America- as it were, no longer exists.
In its place is a highly organised structure which is a conglomoration of special interest fronted by egomaniacs who dont even pretend to represent the people anymore.
Recently, after 9/11, many Americans have flooded Canada with their families seeking a more sane way to live. Only some of them realise that Canada is just behind the United States in terms of governmental corruption, and it is only a matter of time before we too fall victims to what has become an open source conspiracy- a systematic, economic and social coup by the global elite.
Some of them are escaping the wildly outrageous drug laws in the US, some for gay marriage, some for other, broad reasons which have to do with escaping the shame that they carry with them as being part of and a contributor to what has become the American nightmare.
Most recognised years back the level of governmental deception and corruption that took place, but felt disjointed enough from the federal government that they could survive on pure apathy. After 9/11 the disease of lies infected the public conscience within a matter of hours. No long could stand having their children grow up in a country where 2+ 2= 5.
One man I spoke to really couldnt quantify why he and his family escaped from America. He as a well paid federal contractor for the FBI. He had no specific knowledge of anything outside of the open source pertaining to 9/11, but he and his friends heard and observed certain facts about the structure and mandates that could not be ignored. Speaking out meant being labelled a traitor and a terrorist. This wasnt what he wanted for his little girl, so he left his high paying job and moved the family to Canada.
Another person I know wasnt so lucky and got caught at the border. Someone in his car was found with a bag of marijuana one night while they were driving to a resteraunt one night. State law required mandatory sentencing for both of them. Being a law abiding citizen, yet knowing he could not win in court with his resources, he went on the run north, towards Canada. He thought he had almost made it until the police tracked hm down one night after he used a computer to contact some friends. Using the Patriot act the authorities obtained information as to his whereabouts and arrested him just hours from the border. As far as I know this good person is rotting in jail somewhere in the southern US, facing multiple charges stemming from someone in his car havng a 20 dollar bag of marijuana in his pocket.
Every week i meet someone else who moved to Vancouver so they could escape the embarassment and shame that has become of their country. They say there is no point fighting something so intagible as the United States government. Where do you start? Where does it end? A democratic president would be slightly better, but just slightly, America has become a nightmare for all those who do not adhere to the belief that ultimate security is tatamount to patriotism, unquestioning patriotism that makes so little sense to those of us who are still able to think.
I dont know about brainwashing or global conspiracys or the rest of it, but I do know that America has become an overt police state, and things are slated to get worse if there is another "terrorist" attack.
Thousands if not more will be rounded up in the days subsequent to any attack, and they will most likely indefinitly held for a long time. The remaining population will become further enslaved as the last bastions of privacy crumble against the massive demand for the security that the population wants so so badly.
My advice is to escape america while you still can. All the signs are
Darn, SCO isn't responding.
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.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Mod down this troll.
If you want to sign up for ATT's VoIP trial, goto talk.att.com. It takes about 2 weeks and then you get a D-Link router that does the VoIP for you. Seveal of my friends and myself have signed up for it. It's free (including calls) till Feb 29.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
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.
my Player saying 'Die Bitch!' while on the phone with a female..
I asked this in the SmoothWall story from a couple of days ago but I didn't receive a reply regarding Vonage usage. So the better question is, has anyone used any of these VoIP services?
Just to note, Vonage is using a new Motorola adapter that plugs directly to your cable modem now...it was covered on Gizmodo the other day...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Just wait until Microsoft jumps in on this game. There is a reason why they are building in VoIP support in Longhorn. Sure, office-wise, Longhorn Pro will target the business clients, but I'm sure Longhorn Home Edition will offer a VoIP service as well.
.Mac services... Are you listening, Mr. Jobs? (or, for that matter, AOL?). An "iTalk A Lot" for the teenage female audience...
As a matter of fact, I would bet Apple will build this first into OS X 10.4 or in the next push of
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Why would you trust them with your high speed connection and VOIP, they can't even run a phone service? My guess is they'll force you to pay for the DSL and in order to have DSL you have to have a phone line attached. So to figure this out it's $40 -$45 for local phone, $40 for the DSL, and then you'll be charged for the VOIP trial. Then look at your bill, I figured out my bill last Dec and had $16 in taxes and paid $14 for the basic line phone service. Sounds like a bargin to me. Then you can plan on being down for about a month at least a year because they'll f*ck your dsl line.
I live in Mpls and canceled qwest DSL and Phone after very poor customer service over a 2 year period. Use Vonage and Cable and you'll be much happier long term. I'll make a prediction, within 5 years Qwest is going to file for Chapter 7. I'm cured and will Qwest free coming up on a year in Jan.
Telephony, Dec 22, 1997n ues_retail/
http://telephonyonline.com/ar/telecom_qwest_conti
"Qwest Communications last week announced that business and residential customers in nine markets will have access to phone-to-phone, voice-over-Internet protocol service by the end of January."
VOIP customers will have broadband available to them which will obviate the need of a modem for internet access.
But it WON'T obviate the need for a FAX modem - either built into the legacy fax machine or for receiving FAX calls.
The compressed protocols won't carry FAX.
Uncompressed G.711 will (AND will carry 56k modem signals, too), but it puts extreme requirements on the clocking at the receiving end (or the FAX MODEM takes hits and keeps switching downspeed).
The third alternative is a FAX modem and protocol conversion in the gateway DSP's firmware. But the chip vendors I've looked at so far treat the DSP firmware as a vendor-supplied black-box and don't supply that feature.
So I'll be VERY intereste in what they actually use for their implementations.
If they're selling VoIP as a POTS replacement, people will expect to plug in their legacy FAX machine, their dialup modem (for visitors with laptops and for when the DSLAM isn't talking to the network properly), and any number of other devices with built-in modems (such as satellite TV settop boxes, TiVo, etc.). If these don't work they're going to get a LOT of trouble calls, which will make a big difference in the cost of providing the service.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Level 3 has been doing this for how long, now?
Except of course apparently where the RIAA is concerned where its ok to copy analog (fm stereo) but not digital (cd).
Actually it wasn't OK with the RIAA for you to copy FM radio to analog tape. But the courts made them allow it, by identifying a right to make a personal-use copy for listening to the broadcast program at a time other than that of the broadcast ("time-shifting").
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I live in a town in Oregon. Qwest runs the phone lines here, and has us by the nuts. We pay around $100/month to them just for two phone lines. We use no long distance.
Plus, their equipment is dated, and it's nearly impossible to get ADSL because of them.
Burn in hell, Qwest.
hey!
Maybe it's time to stop reading so much /.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
i recently called to drop qwest and my csr was in india (the phone connection had the characteristic delay and echo).
i urge all qwest customers to drop qwest and any other company that does this. Like American Express.
Excuse me, but is this a cool way to get people back to low audio bandwidth while charging them the same or more?
And you can look at your phone log in a browser!
Yipee.
VOIP over DSL...
Who would have ever thunk it?