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NYT Reviews VoIP: Vonage, Packet8, VoicePulse
securitas writes "The New York Times Technology section reviews VoIP services Vonage, VoicePulse and Packet8. A second article rounds up the competition including VoIP start-ups, cable companies and traditional telcos. The review primarily focuses on Vonage and it's an enlightening review particularly because the reporter isn't a techie. Most interesting is the comment from Vonage's CEO Jeffrey Citron: 'We're not that happy with the level of service today.' The outcome of the review and CEO's comments really do indicate that VoIP is still at the bleeding edge - and not for the average consumer - but the technology is maturing quickly. It will be interesting to see if the telcos do any better with their QoS (quality of service) - which has historically been a critical differentiating factor and competitive advantage - when they introduce their VoIP services in 2004."
As a Vonage subscriber, I'd like to mention my experiences thus far.
Excellent!
Although, the service did take over a month to get turned on, now that it is, I haven't had any problems. The one or two occasions that the Vonage VM had to pick up, was while I was dinking with my router, and was blocking everything by mistake. I'm still working on getting QoS to work on my side, and thus improve performance, but so far the only drawk back is that I cannot be uploading at the same time, else it sounds muted when not speaking.
I can download all day long and still recieve excellent quality voice.
The other drawback I see, however, is the ATA. I would perfer a better way to incorporate it into the existing phone wiring, but no good. I've since purhcased a dual handset cordless phone, and no problems since, going forward, it'll be easy to take with me whereever I go. Just get the broadband access connection, and walla.
Thinking ahead, I'm sure I can incorporate it into my home phone wiring, as soon as I get a home, currently living in an apartment, but again, minor.
my 2 cents.
harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
Hilarious! I did the exact same thing as the journalist who wrote the NYT piece: called my mom. My nickname for her is Inspector Gadget because she still gets a kick out of picking up the phone and saying "Hello (insert caller's name)" after having peeked at her caller ID box. She refuses, however, to get an answering machine. ("What the heck do I want one of those things for?")
Like cooking rattlesnake for someone and letting them think it's chicken 'til after they've eaten and enjoyed it, I dragged my mom onto the Internet. I don't know which one of us was more thrilled.
Oh, and the Vonage service is fantastic. I actually called Qwest and told them I was switching to Vonage. Now there I definitely knew which one of us was more thrilled!
Sorry, I keep forgetting to add the tongue-in-cheek emoticon to the bottom of my posts...
The good news is that some new network devices (like VoIP handsets) may avoid the wall-wart syndrome of most modern telephones. IEEE P802.3af is a backward-compatible standard that delivers device power over standard CAT5 ethernet lines. A quick search shows that network gear makers are already selling switches that provide power to connected devices.
It will be nice to return to the days when desktop telephones were powered by their network connections.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Why? I already pay for my internet connection. If the money I pay for my connection doesn't cover the cost of the internet backbone, then my ISP has a bad business model. That's not my fault, is it?
Steve.
A latent existence
This is because if you have no power, your VOIP phone won't work - so you can't call 999 (911).
Apparently, BT Broadband Voice, is more of an effort to compete with cable companies (from here), although being something of a toe in the water as regards VOIP.
However, "the service, at this point, falls short of the feature-rich low- cost offerings by consumer services, such as Vonage" - so not quite before anyone else.
Interestingly however, their solution uses Metaswitch as their class 5 switch - as does Fujitsu's effort.
thats not interesting or informative, its a troll. check your facts before modding posts like this up.
I had Vonage service for about a year, and during that time I had varying call quality. At times it was as good as a land line, and at times it was worse than a cell phone. Towards the end of my time with Vonage, I had increasing problems with one-way dropouts. I'm still not sure whether it was Vonage, my cable modem or something else in my network, but dealing with Vonage support was not a good experience. The worst experience of all came when I finally decided to disconnect my Vonage service. Their number for disconnection service is nearly impossible to reach, and it doesn't allow you to remain on hold most of the time. You are forced to leave a message which no one will ever return. It took me nearly a month to finally get through to someone to disconnect my service. In the end, I decided that a cell phone was more reliable and had more consistent quailty.
The problem you will almost certainly run into with VOIP on a cable or DSL line is support. Your VOIP service may tell you the problem is your cable service, but you can bet your life your cable service will tell you they don't support VOIP (unless they have their own). My advice: keep your land line.
He used one service, and asked 2 other people to use two other services. That hardly constitutes a review. From the complaints about the other people, I would guess the writer is more tech savy and more willing to deal with minor inconviniences than the family members he had look at it.
I use Packet8, and I'm happy with it so far. Sounds way better than a cell phone, easier to use, and $20 a month for unlimited calling. It's perfect because I get lousy cell reception in my apartment and regularly call my parents several states away. I did contact their customer support once via email and was happy with the response times and level of service.
If you are planning on trying packet8, search for "packet8 coupon code" on Google - there are a number of $20 off or 1 month free coupons out there.
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Actually, it hasn't all been remedied. Packet8 still does not support number portability so you have to get a new number to use Packet8. See here.
Full-Featured GPL Web Hosting Control Panel
An actual Vonage user for about 3 months now.
I signed up with Vonage back in October, or maybe the end of September, of 2003. The intial experience was not bad at all, and in fact the Cisco ATA-186 worked flawlessly with my netfilter configuration once I setup dhcp. The intial customer support was great, with fast, meaningful responses.
I opted to transfer my old POTS phone number from Qwest, so I had a temporary Vonage phone number for incoming calls on that line. My Qwest phone number appeared as my outgoing caller-id number on the Vonage line, which was nice, since several of the people I call use caller-id and/or distinctive ring features.
Then the trouble began.
To transfer the number, you have to submit a Letter of Authorization along with a current phone bill. I asked them if I could scan and email the docs, and I got an immediate response with instructions to email attachments of the documents to a particular email address and they would print them out. I thought this was great!
First attempt, scanned them in at a resonable resolution, sent them in, got a response that they were not legible. No more informative than that.
Scanned them in again, this time at 300 dpi greyscale and sent them as TIFF documents. They looked excellent, if I may say, but the response once again was that they were not legible. I suggested that there would be no way I could fax documents at a higher resolution using any fax machine I had access to, so they cancelled my transfer.
At that point, I was a little ticked, and a couple of days later I learned that someone finally printed out the documents and they looked just fine (as expected), but then nobody got back to me and told me this (I have this email thread stored away in the Stupid folder...). But, once the process is cancelled, it has to be handled manually, which means as slowly and painfully as possible. Oh, and there was absolutely no way to get them to put that to-be-transfered number back as my outgoing caller-id number, so everyone would answer with "what number is this?" or "where are you calling from?" or just not answer (I get that enough when they know it's me...).
On November 19, 2003, my number was transfered. Okay, actually on November 20. Well, actually on November 21. Wait, it was done on November 22. But remember, I had that Temporary number, which meant that even thought my Qwest number was now transfered, it didn't work. My outgoing caller-id was wrong, and my incoming calls would go to voicemail okay, but then my voicemail box was assigned to the temporary number. The email notifications of this process were not useful, and in fact they never sent a final email when the transfer was "complete."
It took a good week of emails, and finally I got on the phone for 75 minutes (timer running, that's the acual elapsed time) with a tech support person there who actually asked me for my login password (which I did not give him-- so they simply reset it on their end and logged in anyway). By the time I was on the phone, just about nothing was working according to plan.
In the end, I lost access to my voicemail box twice, had this number transfer go completely sour, had a very negative experience with the number transfer person (I have her name but won't bash her here), and presently my main issue is the intermittent and extremely annoying echo on my end of the calls. The Vonage FAQ suggests this happens with some handsets, but as it happens, one of my best buds from college is a VoIP developer at Cisco and gave me the 411... basically, Vonage has to fix that little feature, but I don't fell like spending an hour hearing about how the FAQ spells it out for me (incorrectly).
To be fair, Vonage service is lower in price than Qwest service was for residential use (in Arizona) and the feature set is fine. I pulled the outside wires from the phone junction box (they're rj-11 plugs) and plugged the Cisco ATA box into my house wiring, works without a hitch (before
I picked up Packet 8 two weeks ago at home. I just fired the phone company. Packet 8 is easy - works fine and appears to be pretty damn reliable. The only real issues I've seen are:
* Doesn't work with the power out.
* Dependent on the cable company.
* If I take my terminal adapter with me, 911 will dial the response center close to my phone number.
I also like the way the bill breaks out:
$15 - basic cable service - from the cable company
$35 - high speed internet - from the cable company
$20.90 - Packet 8 + tax
----------
$70.90 - Total cost, phone, cable tv, interet
Before the bill was ridiculous:
$15 - basic cable
$35 - hs internet
$27 - local phone line
$30 - long distance
$15 - taxes on local phone line and long distance
-----------------------
$122 - Total cost, phone, cable tv, internet
Basically, I am now not paying for a bunch of marketing, slamming and marked up taxes!
-- $G
Depends. How small do you propose this low-def TV clip is?
G729 is defined as generating 8Kb/sec. At 50 pps (what Cisco uses), 2 samples per packet, this comes out to 160 bits (20 bytes) per packet. IP/UDP/RTP overhead is 40 bytes.
So a typical G729 call is going to burn up 60 bytes per packet * 50 pps == 3000 bytes/sec == 24000 bits/sec
That's AFTER IP overhead, as you can see in my math.
Ignoring IP overhead for a moment, I'm unsure how you propose a low-def TV clip is going to be any smaller than 8Kb/sec. The audio alone would probably be encoded higher than this.
Frankly, VoIP is a pretty small burden on IP networks, at least as far as bandwidth needs go. It's need -- and where you typically have issues over enterprise networks -- is consistancy. Jitter is the enemy of VoIP, and right now, most serivce providers offer no SLAs for this particular metric. This will change over time, and people will begin to demand differentiated services for their different types of traffic.
Look in to Cisco's V3PN (Voice and Video-enabled VPN) program for information about how they propose to build and deliver end-to-end QoS to their SP customers:
http://www.cisco.com/go/v3pn/
I never realized that you could plug the VoIP adapter (Analog Telephone Adapter or ATA) into a phone jack to make the whole house live. However, Vonage's Web site says that the Cisco ATA only has enough power for (I think one or two phones). Also, at least here in Canada, people have a Network Interface Device on the side of the house. If you disconnect the RJ-11 plug from the Bell side and plug it into the ATA, the whole house will be live
Works VERY well, as long as your service provider has some sort of NAT traversal mechanism, or you are on the public network.
Many companies manufacture these devices. Many work REALLY well. Others do not. (I'm biased -- I work for one of these manufacturers).
Google has information about these products.
The Vonage box puts out 5 RENS. Traditionally, 1 phone used to take 1 REN, so you would expect that should power 5 phones. These days, phones often run on 0.0 to 0.2 RENS, so you would expect that to power every phone you could possibly plug in. All phones have their REN value on a sticker on them somewhere, check the bottom.
Just make sure you don't accidentally jack the Vonage box directly into the POTS network - disconnect your outside phone connection wherever it comes in, and you're set.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line?
Ahem.
The FCC never required that the phone company allow you to get a line for free. What they repealed was the set of laws that said that they had to offer just DSL without telephone service.
Have a look at your phone bill. (If you have DSL, look at a friend's instead, but the author i'm replying to says he doesn't.) You already pay for the line and for phone service seperately. That's something the bells fought to be allowed to do. Then, the FCC turned around and said "hey, you're charging for the line and service seperately; now that you're offering this new version of ISDN that goes over POTS, you're not allowed to sell them the line then require phone service to run other services."
People which got unbundled DSL weren't getting free phone lines. They were not being forced to pay redundantly for phone service. That's for people which live on their cell phone, or who have alternate voice like a PBX system.
I say that they get to wholesale it, and frankly that the Baby Bell's should be like power companies, you get a contract to maintain the lines for X years, you get paid Y dollars, and have to maintain Z services.
That's exactly how it works right now, except that instead of X years, it's X months.
On top of that you get to call them "your" lines, except you have to wholesale (wholesale purchases get to pay taxes just like you do, but they just get a circuit.) At that point states/localaties get to choose competition.
You seem to be confusing the bells with AT&T. Utility companies are granted federal monopolies to prevent infrastructure redundancy. The reason you don't have an alternative to Bell Wherever (though they've all changed their names now) is that there's only one phone network.
As far as selecting competition, again, this is exactly how it currently works. The easiest example is your long distance, which didn't work that way until the early sixties. You didn't used to be able to choose between AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et cetera. That said, you can actually do this with your local line service, too. Everywhere I've lived in the united states, there's some company which advertises in beeper stores, dollar outlets and check cashing places that they'll turn your phone service on without requiring you to pay off your existing bill to someone else. They're just gambling on a high-risk crowd; anyone can, in fact, open that loop for you. It's just that the amount of leverage Bell has by putting the bulk of the cost into the loop prevents anyone from competing on economic terms; the only companies which can are the ones which can afford to charge higher rates, like risk group service providers, commercial bulk providers and high-end providers.
If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.
This is the way they're handled in about half of the country. Many states don't allow deregulated grids fearing that cost cutting will cause unacceptable risk, which was recently rubbed in our face in the northeast. It's much more common for the other utilities: water, gas, and refuse.
That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.
Ruby Ranch did this some years ago at surprsingly low cost, and has maintained a working and marginally profitable (it's not meant to make money; they're setting aside a war chest for upgrades to hardware, et cetera) network at prices that were for the day dirt cheap. They have extensively detailed the process, including startup and recurring costs; it's a valuable resource for planning. Do remember that these prices are years out of date, and reflect line costs to the middle of nowhere; this is a lot easier in metropolitan areas which can't get broadband, such as condominiums with antiquated PBXes and private cable systems.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not.
The article discusses how Vonage works, and Packet8 works pretty much the same way. You don't have to fire up your PC to use it. You get a "terminal adapter" - you plug an ethernet cable from your router to the terminal adapter, and a POTS phone into the rj11 plug on the terminal adapter. You then use the phone as any normal phone.
As far as sound quality, Packet8 is way better than the quality I got on my cell, especially considering my apartment building is like a giant faraday cage (steel beams, brick walls, iron bars over all the windows). And it's 20 a month, while I would pay $35 just for a local POTS line, and $50 or so for something like MCI Neighborhorhood "all you can eat" is $50.
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