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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."
People in the UK can now get VoIP from BT with BT Broadband Voice. They are aiming it at people with cable connections. The odd thing is that they recommend still keeping a normal phone line.
It's quite strange to see BT doing something before anyone else.
Steve.
A latent existence
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.
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? 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. 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.
If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.
Of course I now live where DSL can't get to, so I have to live with cable until I can convince someone to startup a Wireless broadband company on one of the many high tranmission towers in the area. That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.
I've been using Vonage as my family's primary line since April. It's not perfect, but it's better than a cell line. Back in the SFBA I was using it over a SBC DSL line; I found that it cost about the same to use Vonage and keep a $80/mo DSL line as it did to use a traditional PSTN line and keep a cheaper DSL line. I think we saved maybe $5 or $10/mo, chump change. But where it really came in useful is last month, when we moved to Wellington New Zealand. We've been using it since our DSL went live down here, and as far as the yankees can tell we're calling from the SFBA. Even with the outrageous prices of DSL (Telcom NZ is a monoploy and they really love to ream it to you) it's still cheaper than international long distance. There's a slight bit more latency than PSTN, but not enough to matter, given the significant savings. Another nice thing is being able to dial US 800 numbers. It's a real bitch from an international line, but on Vonage it's just like I'm callng from SF. And of course when folks call us they pay domestic long distance and ring a phone in Wellington. Good stuff for the ex-pat.
ehintz
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...
In French, Citron means "LEMON"...
Commercial VoIP is an artificial market. By that, I mean that it only has a reason to exist because of a circumstancial state of affairs, the one dictating that commercial phone companies (traditional land-line based phones) are taxed and must maintain their network with the proceed of their sales, while VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.
I mean, apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls (I'm just talking about national calls to simplify). If VoIP companies suddenly were taxed or had to pay a fee to internet providers for the extra bandwidth, this "quickly maturing" market would vanish instantly.
In any case, there's little difference between a VoIP company and a phone company : they both use digitally encoding to transport voice, it's just that the latter uses (and pays for) its own dedicated lines, while the other doesn't.
3 things are likely to happen:
- The feds step in and consider VoIP companies as normal phone companies (which they are), and tax them
- VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it
- Traditional phone companies start providing "free" internet with their phone services, in which case customers have phone and internet for the same price, nulling VoIP companies' value
In all cases, VoIP companies die.
I don't see how VoIP companies will survive in the long run. They're the product of the fact that the internet is much younger, therefore much less regulated and taxed, than traditional phone networks. This will soon change no doubt, and they're actually helping the government realize that the internet is a tax loophole. I think they'll all disappear soon and actually hurt the freedom (free as in beer) of the internet in the long run by their very existence.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While the technical side of VoIP seems rather solid, traditional telcos are making VoIP startups face stiff regulation. As the article says about the technical hurdles being a necessity to overcome for widespread adoption, I see the potential regulatory mess as just as significant of a hurdle, yet the article largely ignores this pitfall for many markets. I don't want to sign up for service today that may face steep service charge increases due to successful lobbying by traditional telcos. I'm keeping my exclusively mobile line.
Been trying out Vonage for over a week now. So far, I haven't a single complaint. Call quality has been excellent, my only complaint being that it is a bit louder than my land line. All the free included features are very nice.
The coolest thing, however is being able to retreive my voicemail from the web ... or have them delivered to my Email inbox as a .wav file!
I got fed up with the fact that I still have a charge on my Verizon phone bill for "Touch Tone Service", and that high-tech features such as "Call Waiting" still have to cost between 4 and 6 dollars!!! Not to mention the slew of taxes and fees that bloat out the monthly nut...
Hopefully this threat of real competition will revolutionize the telecom industry. ...or even better, sink the baby-bells into a pit of despair!
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
I'm with Vonage now, and only having one phone port in the back of the device is a bit of a drawback. However, I found that the point at which our standard phone connection enters the apartment is basically a second phone jack in one of the rooms. Plug this short RJ-11 cable into the bottom of this oversized wall plate, and you have standard phone service throughout the house. So I bought a line coupler, and hooked my Vonage box to that short cable, and now I have Vonage service at every jack in the house. My only worry was that the Motorola VoIP converter box didn't put out enough power for multiple phones at once, but so far, it's worked perfectly, and every phone in the house rings.
Absolutely love the service, haven't been able to notice much of a difference. There is sometimes a slight white-noise-type hiss when you're on the phone and no one is talking, but it stops as soon as there's some activity, and it isn't all the time. The latency is outstanding. Very, very impressive, considering how it's routing the call. I would put the overall sound quality at well above a cell phone, and only a fraction lower than a POTS.
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.
thats not interesting or informative, its a troll. check your facts before modding posts like this up.
All communication lines going to any endpoint (home, business, sensors, etc) are quickly moving to an IP based data network. Unfortunately, there are two problems that governments and current telephone companies face:
:-)
1) Roughly 50% of their voice revenue stream comes from per minute connection charges, other carrier access charges, & regulation charges (govn't). These will evaporate when subscribers move to data driven VoIP (ie: you pay a flat fee for DSL or cable modem bandwidth now, and it can run all your voice calls to anywhere in the world). Eventually the PSTN connection part will no longer be necessary, so Vonage will disappear as we know it today, but it has finally woken up the telcos to what the future will bring.
2) Pretty much the other half of their revenue stream comes from the 'premium' voice feature services (call waiting, text messaging, etc), all of which are quickly moving from the class 5 switch into the phones themselves (aka: free).
What do you do when your primary revenue stream evaporates? Fight it in the courts or with govn't officials. Remember, govn'ts have been taking a nice chunk of that revenue for themselves as well.
We will have to move to a bandwidth & quality of service (QoS) based payment style. A minimum bandwidth is given for a flat rate (which will include -all- voice), and extra bandwidth will be provided on demand at an agreed QoS. The higher the bandwidth & QoS, the higher the fee.
Things to watch out for: VoIP everywhere, SIP phones/services, VoWLAN, current voice carriers moving their infrastructure to their IP networks, and govn't regulations dictating that comm lines (called data services & unregulated) become regulated for QoS.
The companies that move to this model last will not survive. They aren't going to like this.
Unfortunatley, the article only briefly (very briefly) covers Vonage's competition. I'm using Packet 8 and have been for some time now. I've found their customer service to be EXCELLENT, unlink the article suggests - Perhaps the author of the article did not realize that they are based on the west coast, and while many people believe this to be true, the world does not revolve around Eastern Time - Before anyone starts screaming - Im also on the east coast.
Anyway, we had the packet8 service installed about 6 months ago, unfortuntatley before number portablility was available, so we got a fresh new number. I had a minor problem in the begining, since my firewall (sonicwall) had a known incompatibility with H323 packets, This has since been fixed with a firmware update on sonicwall's side, but I solved the problem just by putting the phone directly on the WAN ( I pay for 5 IP's, might as well use them).
Voice quality and overall satisfaction was poor to fair in the first month or two. The phone numbers would come into the caller ID boxes all garbled up, since they would add a "1" to the beginning of the number, making the CID info all skew by one digit.Also, the time CID info was Pacific Time, not local time.
This has all been remedied since then. We've bought our first house and I brought the packet 8 device with me, plugged it into my network and installed a jack in the basement near where my network is setup. Simply plugged the device in, and we were up and running. The big bonus is we don't have to change our phone number, or pay bastard child SNET (SBC) any money.
I'm sure this is where VOIP has a big market - People like me who have been burned hard by the local phone company- you know, the guys that never care about you or me.
So, Give packet 8 a try - I'm happy, and I believe they offer a risk free trial.
Don't Tread on Me
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've also moved from US to NZ (Auckland). We pay for bandwidth usage here. Getting DSL from Telecom NZ that is any faster than 128Kbps costs about 20 NZ cents per megabyte usage over a monthly quota. Vonage says they have a bandwidth limiting feature that keeps their usage down to 30kbps in each direction. That translates to 8.7 NZ cents per minute of bandwidth costs in addition to their monthly fees. Paying more monthly to get a higher quota DSL account with Telecom doesn't change the overal lnumbers much.
I call the US using prepaid calling cards from Chi-Tel at 2.8 to 5 NZ cents per minute depending on time of day. I can buy a card in just about any dairy or liquor store in the city.
How does ChiTel do it so cheaply? They use VoIP. Of course they don't have to pay 20 cents a megabyte for the bits they ship back and forth overseas.
I think this shows how fragile Vonage's business model may be, while still demonstrating the impact of VoIP technology. As some other posters have mentioned, Vonage may have found a niche that happens to exist right now, but that could change as the details of pricing structures, taxes, and regulatory laws change.