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."
..want to replace the telephone company with our own VoIP solutions?
Or am I reading that wrong.
clifgriffin > blog
Soon enough they'll regulate the hell out of VoIP and similar to save the phone companies. Next thing you know AIM will be ruled a telephone company because of the "talk" feature.
a system with economics with which a traditional local phone company simply can't compete'
How many times have we heard that (insert some innovation here) will lead to the demise of (insert traditional provider here). Look, the only times when large established providers of a given good or service are eliminated by something new is when entrenched management gets hubris and thinks the new thing is not worth their bother. If/when the existing telcos realise they need to get on this bandwagon they will, and with a vengance. You can't count out the resources they can bring to bear until they don't and are truly out.
Perhaps the prevalence of wireless networking equipment will eventually lead to huge mesh networks, so that instead of going from me to an ISP to the destination, my voip calls could go from me to my neighbour to the guy down the road. Obviously there are security and privacy issues, but the and even the Internet aren't really needed all of the time for voip to work, and potentially this could work well. It would also mean we could bypass regulation by simply doing it :)
Game dev and music blog
Although I haven't read the Cringley article, I agree more or less with your assessment of the situation. SecurityFocus.com had a story on VoIP security issues and whether it was worth it for a business to take on the increased responsibility of not only securing their data network, but also their voice network. (Because in essence that responsibility shifts from the Baby Bell to you when you go to VoIP.) The general findings of that article was that VoIP was great, but not without some big risks and time and money spent maintaining such a phone network.
I don't think the Baby Bells will ever disappear, just like the RIAA won't ever disappear. Let's just vote for Congress critters that will be balanced in their voting and not swing wildly to one special interest or the other.
I've setup a Linux box and Asterisk along with a couple Grandstream IP phones. The quality was as good as a landline phone, and we'll probably be rolling out a test next year sometime, putting phones in all the classrooms (we're a public school). One card in the server to get us an outside line and we're set....
As soon as wireless VOIP phones come down in price, I'll be running my own wireless service for myself. I plan on setting up an Asterix server at home plugged into my landline. I can then use my VOIP phone anywhere in the world to call!
Being able to cheaply setup VOIP using your existing landline at home will decimate cell service as soon as more WIFI hotspots get out. IDT is already looking at this as a replacement for cell services.
What, me worry?
And that brings up another problem - who's gonna stop spammers from dialing my VoIP phone from China for the sake of playing a pre-recorded advertisement in my ear?
Ahh, the one good thing about VoIP. Full control over what comes in. I get software that is custom. I get to decide who/what/where gets to call me.
Don't want China ads coming in? Block everything from China. Only want whitelisted people to call you? So be it. Want the phone to ask you if you want to accept a call or block the IP/range?
All doable.
note there's no QoS with VoIP suppliers...
if they've not got a highly resilient route onto the 'net then they are at the mercy of their uplink ISP(s).
Think 911 (or equiv) service going down for days on end as the DSL line driving the VoIP was down.......not good.
I'm a vonage customer. I shed my dependance on the local telco with great pleasure, and a bit of egotisitcal pride. Still, having used it for about 8 months, I've come to this conclusion: it ain't for everyone.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going back. But I can't imagine my neighbors buying into what RXC suggests. First of all, there's a reliability issue. Folks need to have 911 service available. They need to be able to call the power company in the event of an outage. They need the phone to be a *LOT* more reliable than current VOIP is.
For me, when the power goes out in our neighborhood, it doesn't matter that I've got my VOIP device connected to a UPS. When the neighborhood loses power, my broadband internet loses connectivity. No internet, no phone. No phone, no way to call the power company to report an outage. It gets worse if you imagine someone needing emergency services (e.g. 911) during a power outage.
It's a nice theory, but it doesn't scale. And reliability is the limitation. Right now, I (personally) can put up with the lack of reliability because I know that my neighbors have nice reliable land line based phones, and in a pinch, I can pester one of them to make a phone call. (I've got good neighbors, all of whom are willing to help each other out in a pinch.) But if the entire neighborhood were on VOIP, we'd all suffer. VOIP today just doesn't have the reliability to scale. Some of us who are willing to put up with the occasional echoes, inconsistent quality, and lower reliability (in exchange for much lower cost). But we can't all do that. We rely on some of the neighborhood to have a real and reliable phone service. VOIP isn't there yet. So it won't scale as far as a neighborhood. Much less become a "disruptive technology".
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Exactly. The way they'll compete is legislation. Imposing huge fees for operating a telco. This'll come under the guise of protecting national security. You see, if every mom and pop can offer secure voip (public/private key encryption generated per-call), the feds can't wire tap. If you want to offer phone service, you'll have to support some proprietary infrastructure that Verizon or other big bells will be happy to develop for the government free of charge. They'll then be happy to license it to Mom & Pop for $500,000/year for up to 10,000 users, as the base (cheapest) license, then it gets more expensive after that.
But there's only one version of the softare, so unless you're running VerizonOS, you can't run it. Reversing the encryption (which is actually just an XOR against 0x00) will be illegal under the DMCA, and so there will not be any Linux/FOSS versions of the software, because to get there you have to have violated the DMCA.
This software will spring up out of Russia as FOSS, but its use within the U.S. will result in jail time.
Now the nation is protected, you see.
Following this, you'll see a group of FOSSers who decide that such things really should be free, and you'll find an underground network flying right through the radio waves in the air. Users who rebel against federal legislation and establish VoIP networks across the Internet using 802.11 or whatever the broad range wireless standard is at the time. They'll go on in relative anonymity for a while, but they'll all be struck with how very very cool this technology is, and they'll build steam and momentum, attracting other users to the technology until all of the sudden, someone pays attention, and legislation comes in that starts to restrict the use of such things.
Users will cry foul, people will claim this violates their first ammendment rights, and then Apple will release iPhone, with pretty colors, in hardware that looks edible, and whose color scheme wouldn't offend a conservative grandmother on a bad LSD trip. People will flock to this "new technology" and sell their souls to it before they realize that it's the same thing as what they had before, only it's got more restrictions.
Soon Microsoft and Sony will realize that they've been behind the times on this stuff, and they'll release their own alternatives which offer extra features that no one wants or needs. The physical design of the hardware will look like a high school sophomore sketching doodles in the edges of his notebook paper, compared against Apple's Mona Lisa level design. Micorosoft and Sony will have invested several million dollars in to this before they realize that they're always playing catchup, and have never reached the black, financially speaking, on these products, when they discontinue the line, completely stranding those who *had* bought in to it.
Later, Apple will announce a deal where they buy Verizon and several other major telco's, who are now on the financial rocks, and every time you answer your phone, you'll hear a "Bong" and your phone will smile at you to let you know everything is ok.
Soon after this, you'll see Apple G7's booting up with a picture of Steve Wozniak with borg implants badly photoshopped over his face.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I looked at antennas and amplifiers and wireless geek sites. I discovered two things:
At this point, I would frankly love to hear, "hey idiot, you're doing it all wrong! here's a url, here's what you're missing, etc etc." But I have a sinking feeling I wont.
This leaves me with the impression that Wifi is entirely not powerful or reliable enough to get anywhere near the neighborhood/citywide meshes that people (even Cringley, apparently) imagine. Like I said, based on my experiences so far, it's off by an order of magnitude. Even if you can fix that by upgrading your gear, it's not cheap, or easy.
One thing I will say is that I'm impressed with Linksys for going with Linux, and now I understand why I should have bought them, even though they're half as fast as what I bought, and don't support WPA. My DLink router, although it's overcome its notorious problems with 5-minute interval spontaneous reboots, still needs to be rebooted daily, otherwise traffic slows to a crawl. DLink, of course, like most vendors, finds only benign amusement with the fact that their product's firmware is totally boned. It's too late now, but if I could, I would bring everything back and switch to anything that ran linux in the router.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
By the way, your NOT talking about a PPC running VOIP software ONLY. Your also talking about WiFi handsets. Cisco already makes these. Here's the model I saw at hamvention. This is a PHONE that does VOIP over WiFi. Ritron(I think) can also hook a transciever directly into Cisco routers making Nextels obsolete. You just install a transciver at either end and it coverts the radio to a VOIP stream and sends it to everyone on your network. VOIP is going to make not just telcos obsolete but many campuses can switch to IP telephony very easily now....not 5 years from now. You jsut about have it down to only having to run Ethernet and power. That's it.
Gorkman
What a silly question. Verizon owns the copper. The ISP you're getting your DSL from is leasing the pair and a slot in the DSLAM from Verizon. It's not like they're totally cut out of the action by VOIP. If POTS dies out (which I doubt it will), they'll simply shift their business model to one of "last mile broadband provider".
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I already effectively have a whitelist on my phone.
If the number is not in my address book, the phone does not ring, and goes straight
to voicemail.
If it is someone I wanted to talk to, and they left a voicemail, I can return the call at my leisure and perhaps add their number to the whitelist.
Each individual link doesn't have to be 99.999% reliable. Instead, rely on a mesh topology and have parallel (ie. redundant) paths between each node. Say we have 5 alternate routes between two nodes and each route is 90% reliable. The probability of an outage (all routes down) is (1-0.9)^5 = 0.00001. Hence, the network reliability is 99.999%. Each additional parallel route adds a '9'.
Ironic that I use the local telco company for DSL, and my wireless router can be used to take away business from them. ;)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
It's the first free VoIP product for your PC (yes it's a product not a service) that has overcome the treshold of 'cumbersome'.
It's got all I require:
It's anonymous, encrypted and P2P.
Instant Messaging included.
Good sound quality.
Disclaimer: I'm not related to Skype in any way, just a happy user
I read in a technical newspaper (Ingeniøren.dk) that the European telcos are slamming the brakes on anything resembling IPV6. Reason: IPV6 means QoS, and QoS means decent quality VOIP. Bye Bye primary source of income...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I'll try not to make this OT ...
... not a bad little 802.11b router. I figured today I'd try hacking it a bit, see what exactly it is.
... a UK site says my router has a DNS proxy and cache, something I've seen nowhere else. I used nslookup and dig, and sure enough, it answers dns queries. I also can tftp into it. (No idea names of files tho).
.img file for the firmware. It doesn't look like any format I'm familiar with... the linux "file" command calls it a "MS Windows TrueType font" ... well let's run strings on it ... hmm only one word shows up twice at the end of the file "sErCoMm".
I'm insanely jealous that I don't have one of those WRT54G routers. I have a netgear mr814v2
My interest was piqued because I found services (locally) running on the router I was unaware of
So this prompted me to take a peek at the
So I head off to Sercomm's site... and lo and behold they make wireless routers! Namely, I think my MR814v2 is just a rebadged Sercomm IP706SM. I know this comes as no surprise, many pieces of hardware are just rebadged and sold under a brand name. But look at the specs, they're identical! Right down to the dimensions, the Netgear router is only a few milimeters off.
So this is where my hacking hit a wall. Think I might go home and take apart the router and see for myself. Or just sell it and get a WRT54G. (Hey my birthday's next week, you never know.)
FLR