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Toshiba Adds VoIP to PCs
securitas writes "PC World/ IDG reports on the new Toshiba SoftIPT SoftPhone software that turns Windows XP-based computers into VoIP telephones. The software features call answering and forwarding, voice mail retrieval and conference calling and costs $200. Now if only Toshiba managed to come up with a version of the software that runs on 802.11 WiFi handhelds like the e800/e805 ... More details in the press release."
The hardware-based options are computer-independent AND cost less... so why spend $200 on a sofware license?
It intrigues me that although many people have a high-speed internet connection nowadays, VoIP does not seem to have taken off on that market in any significant way. Any insights on why that is so?
Details here.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
A similiar subject was discussed last week on Slashdot. Here is a link to the article.
The Toshiba Infinia desktops of several years ago (remember the ones that looked like Darth Vader's toilet tank?) came with an impressive-looking telephone voice-mail and speaker phone and caller ID system: all software through the voice modem. It was not VOIP, of course. It looked great on paper, but in practice it was kludgey and unreliable.
I hope they actually deliver with this proposed VOIP system.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Now when you buy a Toshiba PC you'll have to pay additional telephone tax for the computer. That's exactly what I ever wanted.
THANK YOU !
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
when I use my sprint pcs unlimited data for 10$ a month
for voip- no more voice minutes used.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I'm not trolling, its an honest question. Why does this matter, the article is very short on details (yes, i read it)... I remember using a mic and speakers and free software that all i had to do was plug in his IP, we connected, and chatted...just as I'm seeing this as, only this includes conference calling and can take advantage of some toshiba hardware...
the article says " It works on both wired and wireless PCs running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP."....
why wouldn't it work on both wired and wireless pcs? am i missing something?
Why would someone buy this instead of some hardware only solution or some "phone" that just uses some free protocols over wireless ethernet?
such features as "conference calling, voice mail retreival" etc...thats not exactly anything new here folks!!!
I a phone with a built in vid cam/little screen, that opens up and is a headset with the screen/cam about a foot in front of my face, uses WIFI and i can wander around the house with, connects to ALL the popular messaging systems (aim msn yahoo etc) and lets them view my webcam automatically (which happens to be mounted on my headset out a foot or so) and automatically displays there webcam on my screen (which is a 1.5 or 2" lcd about a foot in front of my face as well, mounted on the headset), AND if the user i'm talking to is on chat but doesn't have the capability to hear my voice, I want it to do some decent speech recognition, I want my voice to integrate seemlessly into text and get sent to someone's IM client. Dont tell me the technology isn't there yet, a directional microphone can pick up my voice and NOTHING else, and folks, dorm-mates of mine were using dragon dictate to type papers with FIVE YEARS AGO... Tell me that wouldn't be a killer product?
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
Ahead, the makers of Nero, have created an IP phone for the PC. It's called Sippstar and you can get a free 2 month demo.
I was using it to talk to a friend on his Cisco IP phone. Took up a bit of bandwidth (8K/sec in both directions) but the quality was fairly good.
Or you could use X-Lite, Gnophone, SJphone, or Diax. All of which are completely free. Add about $15 / month for IConnectHere or VoicePulse account with a phone number and you're done.
-matt
As one might expect, the press release is a bunch of marketing crap, utterly lacking in tech specs. Still, it leaves me wondering how this software will compare to Cisco's Windows-based Softphone. At my company, we tried it out on our laptops, while also using their hardware 7960G. The hardware phone was consistently superior, as the SoftPhone took huge resources to run (you could barely run other apps with it up and dialing). I still use the hardware phone from home today, in conjunction with a company-managed IP telephony gateway, calling folks over a VPN as well as calling others nationwide. Call quality is pretty solid, although only after a lot of mystery codec installation by our IT admin. I also use Vonage at home, and it's clearly better than both Cisco solutions (although it also uses a Cisco ATA 186 analog-to-VoIP adapter).
RW
Now if only Toshiba managed to come up with a version of the software that runs on 802.11 WiFi handhelds like the e800/e805
Toshiba does not provide support for it's customers and even re-negs on advertising promises. Many people will no longer be buying from them - including me, my family and any corporate/educational group that I work for and have purchasing decision power with.
Why do we always have to put up with these putdowns at the end of slashdot stories.
VoIP is cool and it's cool that toshiba have started putting it in PCs. I'm sure if it takes off it'll find its way into more products but if it's not available on your handheld of choice then start coding it....
I want you to really use the studio space man, use it!
WALKEN ON TEH SPOKE!!!11!!!!1!
I can't give up my voice line -- I get DSL on it and my wife would never tolerate it.
But what I want is:
A box similar to the Vonage VoIP bridges that you can plug into your IP network and your voice network. It would sit between your POTS phones and the POTS line. Incoming POTS and some VOIP calls would be routed to the phones as usual. But outgoing calls would be routed over VoIP for certain programmable number sequences; either direct dial to other VoIP phones or to other bridges for completion to POTS lines. With the right authentication, incoming VoIP callers would be able to use my POTS line as a gateway to the POTS network.
With one at work and one at home:
1) Mirror my work phone at home
2) Make work calls and make work LD calls using work's LD provider
3) Make personal VOIP calls to home
4) Make personal calls on my home line from the road
With a device at a relative or friend's house, I could theoretically make free LD calls local to their setup and vice versa.
Does something like this exist? It seems fairly trivial, especially if you make analog call routing pretty basic.
If I read this right its jut for the softphone not for the sevice that will make it work on top of that. If all you want is the soft phone, there are plenty of freeware ones available with the same featues. I've used X-Lite in the past and found it to not suck.
Now if only Toshiba managed to come up with a version of the software that runs on 802.11 WiFi handhelds like the e800/e805 .
They could call it a "cell phone".
you can use voip to talk to people using POTS. Have you done even an inkling of research?
CINCINNATI BELL IS TEH SUCK.
I'll stick with skype.
Computers consume significant power. Leaving a 100 Watt computer running all the time would cost you extra 21c a day electricty bill, about $75/year.
Electicity cost of leaving computer all day power on
Not that little, compared to say $40/month vonage bill.
Two and a half years ago I played with the Cisco version of this product. Just as previous comment spoke about, this is not news, it offers nothing special. In fact, theCisco SoftPhone is not only a standalone IP phone, but it can also be used to control the 7960, 7940 or 7910. Although that was marginally useful, the java app (I can't remember the product name) that let our receptionists use their computers to monitors lines and transfer calls was really cool. Just open up your browser, login and then enter the extension of your phone. Bang instant operator. Once they got into it (3-4 days) they were handling twice the load they were before...it rocked. Softphone was more of a novelty than anything else though. People seem to like the idea, but either a real IP phone (even a barebones one like the 7910) or even the Cisco ATA 186 analog to ip phone adapter is was more useful than a softphone for most people. And if you want to be untethered, check out the Symbol NetVision phone. (Note, it came out two years ago!)
This is all old news. And by the way, no I don't work for cisco, nor do I work at a company that uses IP telephony now.
...these machines to get owned, so I can start looking forward to getting telemarketing calls from zombie PCs, instead of just spam?
A basic 4 analog plus 1 S0 internal PABX costs under 300 Euros at the moment. I realise that you can do a lot more with Asterisk (incl. VOIP), but remembering that you need to tie up a PC for it, I would like to see the line cards somewhat cheaper.
I think a lot of folks are like myself.... I know the basics of the VoIP concept - but I'm still a little fuzzy on just why this technology would be beneficial to the home user at this time?
As others have pointed out, there are plenty of tools around to allow voice chatting over the net. I guess the idea of having a standard protocol for the purpose is a good thing - but realistically, it doesn't seem like it's offering much value for the end-user just yet.
The telephone is popular mainly because it's dead reliable and EASY to use.
I use VoIP all the time. I live in the UK and vonage give me a regular Denver phone number which here connects to a regular phone.. so i can make international calls to my collegues and fiancee for free.
But then again not many people are in my position.
It already supports VoIP. Toshiba includes software in them, the only problem is you need a separate service subscription.
Some simple and relatively inexpensive (maybe $50 or so) combination of PC hardware board and software.
The PC board has two RJ-11 jacks - one POTS phone line in, the other POTS phone line out. The incoming phone line is attached to phone in and a normal telephone to phone out. When a call comes in on the phone line, the board passes it through without alteration. When a normal outgoing phone call is initiated, the board first checks the number dialed to see if it has a VOIP connection that it can make instead. If it does have one, the call goes VOIP; if it doesn't have one, the call goes over POTS. If the user wants to initiate a VOIP call, he/she indicates so by entering the IP address in the form "nnn*nnn*nnn*nnn". The board recognizes that format and does a VOIP call.
When a VOIP call comes in, the board rings the phone - maybe with a distinctive ring for user recognition.
The software captures incoming and outgoing VOIP numbers and the GUI provides a way to map POTS numbers to VOIP numbers.
That's it.
I work for a Toshiba telephone dealer, and we went to an extremely dull marketing meeting a few weeks ago where these phones were discussed.
It's not entirely clear from the article, unless you already know what they are talking about, but the SoftIPT is meant to interface with a Toshiba propriatary PBX system. If there's anything cool about it, it's that it gives you nearly the full functionality of a Toshiba digital telephone out of the office.
Without interfacing with a Toshiba CTX, it's of no value. If your company uses a Toshiba PBX, though, it may be pretty nice.
Toshiba E800 uses PocketGPhone as SIP phone
"It's now revealed that Toshiba is bundling VLI PocketGphone Wireless VoIP Software with these PDAs. Combined with VLI's service GphoneOnline.com, the Toshiba e800/805 becomes a device that can make calls from public hotspots and Wi-Fi environments worldwide.
VLI is announced the bundling of their Gphone Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony software with Toshiba's e800/805 Series Pocket PC handhelds. Gphone adds the ability to place phone calls over IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless LANs reducing costs and adding convenience."
Compare the cost of a Cisco VOIP gateway (96 ports), with the cost of a PC equipped with a 4-port PRI interface running asterisk. And people are complaining?
So just how much is such a GW from Cisco, $30K.
In all fairness, you would probably need a healthy system running Asterisk to keep up with 96 simultanious VOIP codecs, but still.
I personally think that Digium is doing themselves a bit of a disservice by not shipping a hardware-less / VOIP-only config as a stock distribution. This lets you play without any hardware at all, which is what it takes to get up to speed.
Anyone remember dialpad.com ? looks like they are still around, but a paid service
I remember it like 5 years ago you could use dialpad.com to make a phone call to anywhere (in usa?) for free with any internet connected computer, if you had a microphone and headphones (speakers caused echoes of course)
I used that thing to make so many prank calls, I loved it! and the conecept of talking to someone's POTS telephone using only your internet connection was neat
This is nuts! Xten.com has been building award winning telephony software for Windows, MACs and even CE for several months. The features surpass this Toshiba softphone, it's open standards-based AND it's FREE! Where's the beef?
You can assemble a system to adequately run this for about $500-$1000.
My understanding is that 100 VOIP channels with non-trivial codecs is Dual-Xeon land. While this is not "exotic", it is usually above the $1K land.
For 20-50 channels, you can run $50 AMDs.