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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?
is $.010 some 3133+ way of writing 1 cent?
It could be $0.0109!
Nobody paid for the call directly. But someone had to be paid to mine the dilithium that powered the warp core that drove the the communications array. And someone else had to be paid to build the communications array. Its called trickle down economics. Do you think that all the LD companies are suddenly finding it in the goodness of their heart to offer flat rate LD? Not bloody likely. One company did it to get a competitive edge, the rest had to do it or risk losing business. Even at flat rate, they're still making a killing at $24.95 a month...it costs them a fraction of a fraction of a cent to terminate an LD minute.
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 was in an IT position in a national wireless call center environment back in the mid-90's when VoIP was just starting to ramp up. Things have improved since then I will grant you but compared to traditional telco voice service it still is way behind.
Look at all of the things that can (and do) affect Internet data. DDOS attacks, primary global DNS server exploits, BGP/RIP route poisoning, etc. Awhile back Cisco had to distribute a patch affecting practically every IOS version due to some exploit. Plenty of network engineers were patching away at the very infrastructure of the Internet.
The POTS concept might seem old and passe but it's reliability can't be argued.