Slashdot Mirror
Do-It-Yourself VOIP Telco
DamnYankee writes "Robert X. Cringley predicts the coming demise of the landline telco monopolies from the grassroots encroachment of VoIP and Linux on the latest generation of Wifi routers. According to Bob, 'The result is a system with economics with which a traditional local phone company simply can't compete'. With Linux capabilities and builtin VoIP any Mom and Pop can become the local equivalent of a cellular phone company for the price of $79 Wifi router. Now how is Verizon going to compete with that? Get the full scoop from the man himself."
Unfortunately the people that control the bandwith that we could use to support this "grassroots" VOIP campaign have very powerful government lobbies. We aren't going to get very far before the government oversteps its bounds and protects the large conglomerates.
He mentions that the mobile phone markets were a "disruptive technology" against the 125 year old wired telephone business. The single thing he fails to recognize is that the wired phone companies have the largest stakes in the best wireless networks out there (AT&T/Cingular, Verizon, etc).
He then glazes over the billing possibilities as you jump from router to router. We aren't talking about a cell phone here. We are talking about the possibility of a wireless card in a pocketPC to be used as a phone. It's a bit harder for Joe Blow to get a hacked/stolen SIM card for his phone. It's not quite as hard to get a software program that doesn't give billing information that is tracked back to that "phone" user.
The phone companies will compete by lobbying making sure that any startup VOIP phone company has to pay the same taxes and fees, and has to provide 911 and wiretapping, etc.
Don't you need an ADSL/Cable connection to that little router? Yes, I know you can have your packets hop over to the next router and so on, but the article is still pretty optimistic.
(and, yes, I did RTFA)
Let's face it: if the big telcos aren't dead by now, this means they are not going to die anytime soon. I doubt Verizon is quaking in its boots right now...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
happening about the same time that cars use an alternative to gasoline. Big business makes the decesions, not us, not the govt. Its a shame...
so, whats stopping the big guys from buying these in bulk for under $79 (after bulk discount)
if they get it cheap then they can setup quickly, and still gouge you for the profit.
I'm never quite sure just how this is supposed to work. Aren't VOIP carriers actually piggy backing on resources provided by the voice carriers in the first place?
Are we just talking about a segment of the market or what? I don't know all that much about the telco industry, but it has always been my impression that data lines shadow voice lines and are owned and maintained by the same parties. Is that not the case, or is my info wrong? Are there significant data networks in this country that are not in some way owned by or related to major telcos?
To this extent are we talking about big players really going out of business, or there simply being a shift in the market whereby the telcos morph into the owners and maintainers of the backbone and little VoIP carriers pop up at the edges. Then how long will it take for consolidation to cull these little ones to the point where we once again have new telco monopoly, but over a different style of infrastructure.
You can always do it cheaper if reliability and availability are not important. My wireline telephone just works. I've had one outage in the past 15 years. I've never had a dropped call. The switch never crashes, get infected with viruses, or demands that I upgrade to MS Telephone 2.0. It provides battery power to my telephone, ensuring that it still works even during blackouts and storms. It provides enhanced 911 service if I need it.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
But having realised its oversight, even Microsoft relied on getting a product out of the door instead of running to the lawyers to protect it. The entrenched telcos seem far more like the RIAA/MPAA to me; they have this new fangled competitor looming on the horizon and instead of pouring money into R&D are pouring it into the legal department and campaign contributions instead. Only time will tell of course, but I'm not betting on either set of dinosaurs.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Where do you plan to get enough bandwidth to run a public VoIP service? With one or two calls at a time it would be possible, or if a whole group of people combined the routers to make a mesh over the town/city/suburb. But with this king of VoIP implementation, only a few people can make phone calls at a time to areas not covered by the network.
Perhaps if everyone had a 1500Mbps SDSL line and the whole network was load balanced, it would work, but this will never be able to beat the convenience of my 100g polycarbonate phone in my pocket, which can call anyone, anywhere, without any bandwidth limits.
They will have to collect 911 taxes, Federal Taxes and buy business licenses. While VOIP may be nice if there is a power failure everyone with a desktop will be offline and the cell phones will become quickly over loaded. Even during the recent black out in the NE USA the local telephone service worked flawlessly. ISP's will need to have reliable backup genarators which are not cheap to buy and maintain.
Just as an example. Comcast, the very company that is talking about larger VOIP rollouts since it has "millions" of customers on its broadband service, can't even keep the broadband service running this morning. They are having nation wide outages. Broadband is not considered by the government to be an Infrastructure service yet, like electricity, natural gas, telco. Thus it does not get the same level of guaranteed uptime. When broadband goes down, so will your VOIP. My telco phone just always works. That is what people expect.
Voice network hacking has gone overlooked by both hackers and security professionals alike. With enough know-how, one can hack a PBX and make long distance calls, copy voice mail, do all kinds of evil stuff. The stakes were raised when they (the voicemail companies) tied voicemail and e-mail together.
I would hazard to say that many companies voice networks are just as vulnerable as their data networks, or even moreso, but they are not targetted as much, so they do not get as much attention.
What about critical services, such as 911 service? Are going to equip all of your customers with backup generators to power their VOIP phones and other network devices (router) during a power outage?
You might say to me, "well, people today use cellphones as their primary means of communications - and they are responsible to ensure it is charged up in the event of an emergency". That may be true. However, everyone does not have cell phone service - or wants cell phone service for that matter. As a common carrier, phone companies have a responsibility to provide dialtone for everyone who wants it - and as a result provide emergency services.
It is also prohibitively costly to provide fibre to every location - particularly in rural areas. Given that, broadband service will not be available to drive VOIP solutions.
If we decide to drop copper as an alternative, then we will lose big when some event occurs that prevents a VOIP user from getting a critical emergency call through - and the resulting lawsuits and regulations will stifle growth and acceptance of VOIP as a viable universal solution.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Would I trade the reliability of my landline (I can't remember losing service in the past ... 15 years ?) for some ghetto rig built on consummer-level equipement running over best-effort protocol to shave a few $ from my monthly telephone bill of 25$ ? Thanks, but no thanks.
:wq
Umm does anyone else here remember the Sears/Gap/Borders are dead stories from around 1998/99 because the Mom and Pop stores would beat them thanks to ".com".
I've read the article and I'm not seeing anything different, and certainly nothing that thinks about the realities of providing secure 911 access and QoS over a WiFi router and ADSL.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
The problem with this is that a big ISP buys $500,000 Cisco routers to keep the internet flowing. If you think a bunch of $70 wireless routers (even $500,000 worth) is going to replace a mega-router, you're kidding yourself.
Our goal here should be to create reliable grassroots networks. I have phone service because if I need to call 911, I NEED to call 911, whether my neighbor accidentally kicked the wall blister of his router out of the wall socket or not. I've got no love for Telcos, but I do like their reliability.
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
Cable broadband customers get yelled at for running servers, downloading big things, too much traffic...
A few things have to change - Comcast and their ilk have to change what they allow or else they'll have more traffic than they can dream of.
I believe they don't like people actually using the bandwidth they paid for, so that needs rethinking.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
But surely one of the major fuctions of a phone is that people can wring you.
How is anyone going to find my phone with a roaming v/ip setup?
Are all those little 400 mz processors with no disks going to implement a CDMA/GSM type roaming protocol? (Phone contacts local base station, via several hops contacts your CDMA/GSM provider and tells it, plus the FBI CIA etc., where your phone is so your calls can be routed to the right base station).
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Sure VoIP looks cheaper to us right now, but PSTN would be cheaper if they weren't regulated so much too. VoIP has an unfair advantage right now because it's not being regulated. It's not a matter of regulating the hell out of VoIP because PSTN has friends in the gov't, it's a matter of applying the same regulations to VoIP that PSTN has seen for years.
Next thing you know AIM will be ruled a telephone company because of the "talk" feature.
Are you suggesting that VoIP companies shouldn't be considered telephone companies?
Even the mobile phone manufacturers are picking up on this trend. By building Wifi into mobile phones we can set the device to use the lowest cost method to make our calls. When a hotpsot is available, use VoIP and drop the cost to next to nothing. Simple economics.
This is not to say the technical hurdles aren't formidable. But hey, my Grandpa publishes web pages and who could've sold me on that concept in 1994?
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
"Public Payphone"
:)
Except that the number of payphones has been declining for the past several years and nothing's going to stop that anytime soon.
Not to mention in rural and suburban areas, where the nearest payphone can be a good walk or even further away...
Besides, wasn't there a movie recently about the last payphone in Manhattan?
"Now how is Verizon going to compete with that?"
You see there are these things that companies buy called laws....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
The difference is that VoIP doesn't NEED to be regulated, because it won't be monopolized.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.