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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."
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.
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 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. ;)
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