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Japan: VoIP for the Masses With 050
securitas writes "Red Herring has a brief article about wide-scale VoIP deployment in Japan with the introduction of the new 050 area code. The new area code 'allows plain old telephone service (POTS) to seamlessly transition to voice-over-IP (VoIP).' Japan is now the largest country to deploy VoIP. Six companies have bought 8.5 million VoIP phone numbers, with 68% (5.78 million) of the new numbers owned by Softbank BB Phone. At $.010 for a three-minute call, the cost is three to eight times less expensive than regular wireline service."
Hopefully this means that Japan will put more force onto the US government to switch to VoIP. The system is so much more efficient than plain analog lines. Japan does tend to set trends for the US.
If nothing else, DDR Shows us that much.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
Your points are very valid. This is an odd scenario though, people don't need much support from the Telcos to move to VoIP, they just need IP to their home (by whatever means). The TelCos pretty much have to drop their revenue streams or risk losing customers to completely different companies. I personally switched to Vonage about 3 months ago which allowed me to drop my relationships with Comcast and AT&T. In return I've picked up a phone service that gives me all the same facilities that I'm used to, allows me to manage it all over the web and costs me less money monthly. The final boon is their marketing program, they let me (and will let anybody) put a link on my web site that can be used for friends, family and passers by to sign up for the service... if they do they get a free month, I get a free month and we get eternal unlimited minutes to talk to one another. For a startup company the business model looks pretty attractive, minimal hardware, minimal bandwidth management... very different to migrating a fixed line phone business to VoIP. My company pays for the broadband connection to my home, being able to overlay my phone service has been one of the better technologies that I've played with during 2003.
I've been using vonage.com for quite a while now and it's just as good as my old phone but cheaper! I get all the extras for a fraction of the cost.
Whenever there is a story about VoIP I allways hear people saying "it's not good enough to be mainstreem yet" but I've been using it for a long time and it seems pretty damn good to me. I think the people that say it isn't good should give it a try before they shrug it off as a sub par system.
If you want to see how well it sounds just give me a call at 480-282-8517, It's exactly like a POTS phone call in every way and I can wire it through my existing phone jacks if I like.
(I'm not a naive user, I've worked in a datacenter for a good 5 years and I am experienced with almost everything Internet)
increased costs to cover the 'equipment' for this upgrade, then the companies will rake in the profit from the new system without EVER even thinking about passing on the saving unless it becomes a price war. Just like the US networks took advantage of HDTV's expanded signal, to cram 3 times as much low definition stuff into the same bandwidth, triple their commercials, deduct the costs of upgrades, AND increase the cost to users under the guise of a better service which is actually pixelated and inmany cases worse than the analog we had before :(
WTG King George 'FreeMarket' Kickback Bush
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?