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The Voice Over IP Insurrection
Chris Holland writes "Daniel Berninger wrote the most informative article about Voice over IP I've ever read, over at Om Malik's blog. It outlines in great details the history behind the evolution of traditional communication technologies framed within the convergence of various Internet-related technological advances, and the challenges PSTN telcos are facing to hold-on to their shares of this lucrative pie. Beyond mere technological issues, Berninger offers great parallels and insights on past, current, and future governmental regulatory policies. A must read for anyone who's ever talked on the phone."
I had VoIP for about 3 weeks (early June to June 30) before I got too frustrated. It was down pretty frequently; not nearly as dependable as my AT&T line. I got an echo, and the sound quality never was as good as a phone. I just decided to stick to cellular access, and cancelled before I started another month of fees. I'm happy with AT&T.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
"A must read for anyone who's ever talked on the phone."
WOAH! Crap, how did they know? *adjusts tinfoil hat*
A must read for anyone who's ever talked on the phone
Whoa, easy there tiger. Let's just say I find this to be the most ridiculous statement I've ever read. A must read for anyone who's ever had to do anything.
Moo.
Informative article?
On a BLOG?
Full of factual errors and void of any actual useful content?
Nothing to see here, please move along.
--
Save the internet, append -inurl:blog to all google searches!
Hope it helps. Coral link.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
I don't think much else needs to be said about VoIP. It's wonderful technology and saves a lot of money on telephone bills if you're well connected with broadband. I use VoIP quite a bit, so it's worth mentioning a top VoIP reference on the internet, in fact the most comprehensive info directory on the topic I know of. Also of interest is the FCC (keep the boos down please) webpage on it.
I am currently using VoIP, mostly to save money. While the call quality is great, I think the real issue with VoIP is uptime and customer support. And I think the last issue is not accounted for when people talk about the potential savings from VoIP.
:-(
I can't remember the last time I picked up a regular phone and didn't get a dial tone. For VoIP on the other side, I had a number of extended outages (maybe a total of 10 hrs this year so far). There is just so much more that can break with VoIP, which is out of the control for the VoIP company. As a result, VoIP customer support is always busy, and never able to help
---- join dshield.org Distributed Intrusion Detec
There are some major problems with VOIP. For example, if you make an emergency call, rescuers can't automatically locate you. Also, it's a lot easier for people to manipulate this technology to make anonymous calls and thereby threaten and harass others. These are things people need to think about before concluding VOID is good for mankind.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Yes VoIP is huge, but p2p VoIP I think could even be bigger. I just started using Skype . If u thought that quality is a problem with VoIP then the Skype guys differ Here is waht they say in their FAQ
What can I do when I experience bad sound quality?
The PSTN (public switched telephone network) isn't as reliable as Skype-to-Skype calling. PSTN calls rely on traditional phone networks, which may have fluctuations in capacity and quality of termination. Please try your call again after some time.
I tried it out just for the heck of it and the quality is pretty good ( I expected p2p quality to be quite bad). I guess the biggies could jump in soon . Lets see what happens with p2p VoIP
they don't simply expand the pie. Let the PSTN system become broadband, let somebody else handle voice calling.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
From the article: "... For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, AT&T had manned Berlin Wall separating telecommunications and computing, but eventually, these two enormous technology tracks would be unified."
Sadly, this was not AT&T but the U.S. Justice Department which through a series of Consent Decrees required this harsh distinction.
The Consent Decree of 1956 forbid AT&T from engaging in any business other than "common carrier communication services"
Further restrictions appeared in the 1982 agreement.
These restraints were not removed until congress and the FCC asked them to be removed after the passage the 1996 Telecom Act.
" The arrival of VoIP in 1995 corresponded with the arrival of a PC (i.e. Intel 486 processor) capable of managing the encode and decode processing in real-time."
Er, the 486 arrived in about 1989. By '94, the x86 platform was on the Pentium Pro
I don't know about other VoIP providers, but Packet8.net has been great for me. I've had friends use the phone at my house and explain to them that they need to dial 1+area code+number and then when they get off the phone I tell them the call went over the internet.
Usually, they are surprised that it wasn't a "real" phone conversation. I have sold a lot of people on it because it's only 20 bucks a month. I'm switching to BroadVoice when they have area codes in my state, because they give you the SIP username/password so you can use Asterisk Linux PBX.
Chris
Yes, and you are STEALING. The RIAA will be at your door shortly, to install a very small and unobtrusive mircochip in your brain to make sure you pay for all your daily music. Hmm, seems like you're humming "Afternoon Delight", that's another 5 cents...
England is so backwards that you still have to pay for local calls. Does calling England cost more?
I've been to China and they don't even have that, what's up with that? How can you create a socialist paradise without free communication.
If you don't want to receive anonymous calls, then tell your phone to reject non-authenticated connections. (Really just the same as the Spam Problem with email.) Heck, I do that with caller-id at work anyway -- if you're not the boss or a recognizable customer, you get voicemail. With a more open solution, the policies could be much sophisticated and reliable (caller id can be faked).
BTW, back to the Spam Problem.. the only reason there is a problem at all, is that people want to be able to receive email from total strangers. But interactive phone calls are much more intrusive than email, so implementing a policy of "if you ain't whitelisted, you don't get through" isn't all that extreme. Such a policy is very easy to implement, people just don't want it, with email. But with phones .. sure, why the fuck not?
One thing's for sure.. it's time to start getting signatures on your pgp key.
A must read for anyone who's ever talked on the phone....
As one who was recently laid off from a telcom after 21 years of service, I would recommend this also as a must-read for any who work for a telcom (and there are many who do who aren't aware of how present VOIP is).
the only negative experience I've had with voip is that when you are downloading large files or heavy webpages the voices tend to distort a bit.
The Voice over IP Insurrection
Daniel Berninger, an old friend, a seriously smart guy and VoIP guru of sorts, and more recently senior analyst, for Tier1 Research, has been a great man to bounce ideas off. He and I have chatted about many things, and each time I come away learning something new. So last week he argued, "in the battle between Bellheads and Netheads, we're all Netheads now." Could not agree more. Here is his long missive on the VoIP insurrection, the best and most definitive essay you will ever read on this technology, where it is headed and why it is important. This is the second of my guest columns series where I bring the experts who know a thing or two about their respective areas of expertise.
What just happened?
The $3 billion dollar budget at Bell Laboratories did not include a single project addressing the use of data networks to transport voice when VocalTec Communications released InternetPhone in February 1995. As of 2004, every project at the post-divestiture AT&T Labs and Lucent Technologies Bell Labs reflects the reality of voice over Internet Protocol. Every major incumbent carrier, and the largest cable television providers, in the United States has announced a VoIP program. And even as some upstart carriers have used VoIP to lower telephony prices dramatically, even more radical innovators threaten to lower the cost of a phone call to zero--to make it free.
The VoIP insurrection over the last decade marks a milestone in communication history no less dramatic than the arrival of the telephone in 1876. We know data networks and packetized voice will displace the long standing pre-1995 world rooted in Alexander Graham Bell's invention. It remains uncertain whether telecom's incumbent carriers and equipment makers will continue to dominate or even survive as the information technology industry absorbs voice as a simple application of the Internet.
The roots of the VoIP insurrection trace back to four synchronistic events in 1968. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled MCI could compete with AT&T using microwave transport on the Chicago to St. Louis route. The same year, the FCC's Carterfone decision forced AT&T to allow customers to attach non-Western Electric equipment, such as new telephones, and modems, to the telephone network. The Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency issued a contract to Bolt Beranek and Newman for a precursor to the Internet. And in July 1968, Andrew Grove and Gordon Moore founded Intel. Innovation in the communication sector remained the proprietary right of AT&T for most the 20th century, but events in 1968 breached the barriers that kept the telecom and information technology industries apart. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, AT&T had manned Berlin Wall separating telecommunications and computing, but eventually, these two enormous technology tracks would be unified.
Two entrepreneurs barely out of their teens, Lior Haramaty and Alon Cohen, founded VocalTec Communications in 1993 based on the promise of packet voice technology they observed as members of the Israel Defense Force. Most military command and control used the highly survivable TCP/IP distributed data networks since the 1980's. The challenge of transporting voice over the networks arose as an imperative to support certain very sensitive voice commands like "drop the bomb", but the idea of commercializing packet voice did not occur to anyone until the arrival of Lior and Alon. How could slicing voice into 50 millisecond packets improve the telephone business? The tradition bound telephone industry types or "bellheads" spent their time before 1995 improving the Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) not replacing it.
Advances in communication from writing and paper to the printing press, telegraph, and telephone shape human progress. Some might have viewed VoIP as an interesting toy in 1995, but no one presently doubts it will dominate the communication future. The economies of scale assoc
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
Try http://www.skype.org/ -> Free internet telephony.
My experience is that the quality is better than an average cell phone call but not quite as 'comfortable' as a traditional phone to the ear.
This mode of communication will become much more popular once a major IM service incorporates it (which cannot be done unless the skype developers decide to allow this)
And find a review of all the VOIP tech's so we can all get on the same network.
Heck there are open souce versions for linux already.
Every second we delay the phone companies are fixing to make something that should be free cost money.
And this is a perfect app to include in linux distros.
When it breaks, it's all-in-none.
My printer is my printer. My scanner is my scanner. My fax machine is my fax machine.
If my printer breaks I can still scan; if my scanner breaks I can still fax; If the fax breaks, my printer doesn't care.
My phone line is my phone line. My mobile line is my mobile line.
My ISP line is also unfortunately my CATV. The CATV line is dependent on the electric utility (line amplifiers have batteries that last only a few hours).
I will be switching to ADSL soon. Why? because during the last hurricane, the phone never went out. I lost electric & CATV...no power, no TV, no internet.
All-in-one is buggered. Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong; I often am.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
I was reading this, it seems vaguely anti-corporate tinfoil hat-ish (not that I'm a big fan of corporations, but there are so many evil things they do, why waste time beating them up for stuff they don't?)
It keeps on going on with connotations of evil monopolists squashing the guys in the garages like bugs as being the only reasons it's moved slow. Part of the reason is that you want stability in public utilities. Innovation breeds incompatibilites. If I wanted to, I could buy a 1950's rotary phone from eBay and plug it in and still use it (in the movie Cellular Kim basinger takes advantage that teh network still can use the old "micro-disconnect" signals that rotary pulses were). For overclocking, fastest GPU of the week fanboys that may seem quaint, like using MicroChannel on a 386, but to most people the phone just works. The government actually discouraged innovation by capping profit margins. As a regulated monopoly, the phone company was capped to a certain net profit. New business or old, same profit margin. This discouraged innovation, but encouraged stability. Not so much evil as the upside/downside to a decision that is more complex than people would like to think. I'm not sure if they are currently so capped, there's so much breakup and consolidation since the old Ma Bell days, some of the compatibility is probably gone as well.
Grandparent lives in japan. PWNED!
Just because something is on a blog doesn't make it bad by itself. There's so much junk on traditional media, too. Isn't that pretty obvious by now?
/. may not be particularly high, nonetheless there are some very well reasearched and/or thought out comments amongst all the junk, which in quality easily compete with or surpass anything in the traditional media.
The source is no guarantee as New York Times readers are painfully aware of. And while the signal to noise ratio on
Let's judge each article (news or commentary) by the research it contains and the intelligence of arguments it makes, and leave it at that. Of course, that's more work for the reader or someone who comments - but the truth is always more work...
Can I create a devide that plugs into my broadband network that does VOIP without a service? My dhcp server will give me an IP address, but I don't know if there is a way to access the normal telephone numbers in a free way. Besides all the fancy features (e.g., call waiting, 3 way calling, called ID) what are the services providing besides a transfer between the ip addressing system and the telephone addressing system?
VoIP is hyped to death. Literally. It's hard to peddle something that someone already has, phone service. I remember NetWorld Interop in like 94 or 95. VoIP was going to be so big, I wouldn't be able to take crap without VoIP processing it somehow. 10 years later, it's in almost exactly the same state it was in then.
But many communications companies also provide cable television and phone service as well as Internet access. Plus they mostly own the copper and fiber which would be needed for VOIP. There's a conflict of interests here which is partly the reason Moore's law is not readily apparent in Internet bandwidth.
Why would Verizon, for example, provide customers with the infrastructure for free VOIP and television over IP when they'd be slicing into their own revenue source?
We can all be reminded of just how much these companies reap from the public when we consider Verizon's recent $60B bid to buy Disney. Yes folks, that's was $60,000,000,000. Although you could wire the whole country with super highspeed
access with that kind of money it's better from a business point of view to uphold that status quo of keeping the services separate and chaging thusly.
Look for lots of lobbying and litigation as VOIP becomes a reality. With the kind of money that's at stake, Congress is sure to be involved.
I stopped reading the moment he called Voice over IP the greatest invention since the telephone. It's not. I don't care how learned you are, I don't care how much you know about your own field, when you make comparisons like that you are a fool and I will not listen to you. Voice over IP is a product of the Telephone. It currently runs over telephone networks (IP does). In fact it's an abstraction of the telephone. You take the telephone, then you shove data down it, and in that data you encode voice information, whereas before, you simply spoke down the telephone.
Where Voice over IP wins is in freedom and price. Running over current Internet networks, Voice over IP does not inflict any limitations on its users as would be inflicted by telephone companies. As it's a software system, it's also scalable without doing mass hardware replacement. It can change every week if it has to.
VoIP is not the greatest thing since the telephone or the radio or the wheel or whatever else. It's simply a considerably lateral evolution of the telephone.
When you think about it, back in the 19th Century we should have come up with data networks, then worked out how to put voice over them. That would be logical. We've come full circle. Voice to data to highspeed data back to voice again. I wonder when dial up users will be using a VoIP telephone to encode their MODEM tones over VoIP. Then I'll just explode with joy at how fucked up the telcoms industry is at the moment.
VoIP should have been done a long time ago, and should not be pronounced "voyp".
grandparent _is_ a troll.
if you are feeling extra brave, search for 'aderkach' on google, and click 'im feeling lucky'. Obvious troll.
Mod grandparent down, as soon as his karma gets good he will start GNAA trolling. I've seen it 87 times before, only posting ac cause i dont care for the -1 offtopic, even though my karma could stand it.
After weighing the options, I decided to get rid of my POTS and go with VOIP. My daughter already has a $10 monthly Broadvoice VOIP account which gets us unlimited in-state calling and 3 cents/minute long distance. I am happy with their service. However, neither my wife nor daughter (nor I) were comfortable with the fact that 911 service is significantly different, if it exists at all. That was a deal killer. To quote from an email I received from Broadvoice today: "We are working very diligently to implement BV911. We understand the importance of this feature, and anticipate availability later this autumn." However, their website still says they expect it this summer - so take it with a large grain of salt. In my town, if you dial 911 and say nothing, they'll send a squad car. I would guess that response is nearly universal. Without the 911 connectivity only my local phone company provides, that level of comfort and service disappears.
but not troll free, am i rite???
From Vonage's own website: ...your call goes to a different phone number than traditional 911 calls. Also, you will need to state the nature of your emergency promptly and clearly, including your location and telephone number, as Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) personnel will NOT have this information on hand.
This is very different than the 911 service I currently have. In this case, it's as if Vonage has set the non-emergency number of my local police department as the speed dial number attached to 911.
Again, I very much want to move to VOIP but this is a deal breaker for me - and I'll bet for many others who understand what's going on.
Why Microsoft. Possibly Linux. Probable choice...FreeBSD ? Isn't this an owl of an idea ? This forum has the requisite underpinnings. The world is represented here. Diversification. Throw in a few dial-ups, VoIPs..WiFi or two. What's the deal with the box ? The OS( operating-system ). Sure. Fine. Argue away all the combined strengths. Do any of you actually believe you own your computers ?
Profanity. The squeaky voice...hmm ?
This prompted me to recently switch to Cablevision (Optimum) for their $90/month package deal of basic digital cable, cable modem service and VOIP (unlimited local/long distance with all the premium calling features).
When I called Verizon to disconnect my phone service, of course the CSR asked me why and I told her because of VOIP. She then proceeded to ask me if Cablevision explained to me about not getting "911" or "0" service, that I couldn't make a call if the power is out, and that since my calls are "going over the internet" it was "less secure" than a regular line. I mockingly replied "Hell yeah!".
I sure hope she does as good a job FUD'ing her own company's VoiceWing service as she did for Cablevision.
On "installation" day, the Cablevision guy couldn't get the VOIP part working. So he calls local support and after being put on hold for 15mins while the tech "looked into it", the tech returns with the brilliant suggestion of trying a new modem. After trying two different Motorola VOIP cable modems with no success and another 10mins on hold the tech transfers him to the national support center. He waits another 15mins on hold to be connected to a "national" tech just to be told by the tech that "field guys" can't talk directly to the national tech guys and that only the local techs can talk to the national techs then *CLICK*. He then calls local support again, where finally a different tech tells him that VOIP has been down for 1hr and doesn't know when it will be back up.
Total time for cable modem and cable TV setup (including running wires, etc.) = 30min. Total VOIP setup time = 90min. (and it still wasn't working when the cable guy left). Finally about an hour later the service came back up.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Take your pick. Either way you lose and it ain't even election day yet...
I use to work for a company that supplied Motorola with small 911 telephone systems until they dropped ups about four years ago. We were nearly all layed off just over three years ago. I'm still trying to get back into the electronics buisness so Motorola doesn't exacly rate high on my list of companies. Pass me that spoon when you get through.
Within five years, the telco world will have changed.
... It's a disruptive technology.
We will observe a strong fragmentation of the telecommunications world as many small companies will try to get their share of this multi-bilion dollars market. And just because of the low entry cost (look at asterisk, Convedia, Ubiquity, Appium, and many other players way too numerous to list here), you don't have to be a huge company to deliver services in that emerging market of VoIP services (here, by VoIP services, I don't only mean providers, but also secondary services like voice recognition, IVRs, vertical markets services, unified messaging, value-added access resellers, etc.). Maybe after, the market will reconsolidate though.
VoIP is to telco what PC was to computing, what the Amiga Video Toaster was to TV productions, what Napster was to RIAA, what iPod was to MP3 music, what Internet was to information access, what Word, Excel and Powerpoint was to corporations,
It's a fact; those who can't adapt to their changing environment will disappear. And new dominant players will take their place in a new order...
I wonder what my phone (ok, communication device) will look like and will allow me to do in 5 to 10 years from now.
Lots of history is missing from this post, and you need a score card to keep track of it all. The telcos are of a different mindset than datacom people; the two are distinct disciplines. Telcos have had the luxury of 20yr depreciation tables for vast amounts of infrastructure. The analog PSTN network got a boost with ISDN but it took telcos a long time before they'd test the water, and with good reason-- the payback was short for them. Then came DSL, and tested the fabric of their infrastructure with datacom signals that they were clueless about. They had ATM infrastructure because ATM was reliable and 5-nines reliability means $$$ to them....it should to us as well. The VoIP networks that are mushrooming can take advantage of less latency, but the standards are few, security sucks, and while SIP is a wonderful idea, DNS has to be fixed before it can be relied upon as a public switch with the same kind of reliability that Nortel, Lucent, Mitel, Seimens, and Ericsson have built in to them. VoIP has to be paid for. It can't be free as in beer. It uses real materials and has real costs associated with maintenance, service, upgrades, and so on. Add in SIP security problems, add a dash of latency and/or OSPF nightmares, sprinkle with QoS that really doesn't exist, and it's a recipe for unreliability. Want spam voice mail that's exempt from all of the bozo FTC and state rulings? Want your VM box filled with the same tripe that you have on your inbox? Is that how you want voice? There's a lot that has to be done before VoIP becomes a useful replacement for the PSTN, no matter how much you hate the carriers-- I hate them as much or more than you. But their infrastructure is built to a different standard, and is bereft of the lack of forethought problems that we have on the Internet today. Will your phone get rooted? Want a virus on it? How about a pop-up sex call invite? How about a SIP spoof so that we can re-route your calls to your competition, or your ex-mother-in-law? Think about it. VoIP suffers from freebie-itis. You can't really save money on VoIP unless you control your infrastructure. And while you're running VoIP on many long distance calls, it's because those networks are bereft of the madness on the Internet-- these calls run on private networks-- they don't transverse the Internet-- they're behind NAT!
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Buy a firewall NAT/firewall with dial-up
/
backup. They currently cost very little
more then a standard NAT/firewall. I have
one from Netgear at it works great!
(As noted elsewhere, if you have no power
how does the rest of your computer
communications hardware work?)
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/20/2 211213
Try going to www.packet8.net they use a lot of Level3's infrastructure and so long as you area is covered by L3 for $3.00 p.m. you can make 911 calls which identify your location. All-in-all there are many god features in VoIP and it's much less inexpensive, espeically for overseas calls, than POTS lines because the Baby Bells over charge ebery which way. Me I have one POTS line and my VoIP line so I have the best of all worlds. Oh also if you are worried about VoIP have worse connectivity than a POTS line well some people in Florida would disagree with you. Try reading this: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040920/sfm107_1.html Here is some of it: ADVERTISEMENT According to Dr. Alan Lefkowitz, a subscriber to the Packet8 VoIP phone service, while traditional phone systems in the hard hit region were disabled from the storm, his broadband internet phone service not only kept on working but experienced no degradation in quality or consistency through even the worst phases of Hurricane Frances.
In order to receive the benefits provided by the Skype Software, you hereby grant permission for the Skype Software to utilize the processor and bandwidth of your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between other Skype Software users. You understand that the Skype Software will protect the privacy and integrity of your computer resources and communication and ensure the unobtrusive utilization of your computer resources to the greatest extent possible.
Sigh, I thought it looked too good to be true. This is from the terms and conditions. It's a little vague--I suppose more details would be over the heads of most laymen. Maybe they're honest, though. Have you checked your CPU utilization while running it?
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Or rather BT have finally caught up.
For domestic customers, BT Together offers free *national* calls for £16.50 (~$29.50) per month (off peak) or £25.50 (~$45.80) per month (any time of day).
I dunno how this compares to the US for pricing (I suspect you're going to tell me we're being ripped off :-) but it's a step in the right direction.
Of course, you're always free to stick with metered calls and cable operators will usually let you call their own phone networks for free (not that I'd ever, ever again let Telewest near my house)
Yikes!!! Typo -- my bad. "Early 70's"...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
It's been out since about '95 or '96, is totally free and can work over TCP/IP or direct dial. And it encrypts your communications.t ml
Here's the download page: http://web.mit.edu/network/pgpfone/pgpfone-form.h
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
An acquaintance of mine just discovered that his required home router firmware upgrade hosed his VOIP modem interface.
He is hisown telco customer support function. Is that the job we really to have? Is that where we see the phone company's general level of service heading?
I don't know. I'm sick of monolithic bastards in control of my situation. I'm currently doing vonage over a 3mb/608 wireless dsl and I couldn't be happier. Cable and dsl are available at my residence but I'm getting better faster service {better customer support and other goodies} from smaller independent companies. The shamefull thing is ... SHHHHhh, I'm the dsl manager for a different isp.
Of course VOIP and 911 don't get along - 911 was designed to work in a landline environment, with communications architectures tightly tied to Class 5 telco switches and database architectures designed for phones that stay in one place, and the 911 folks haven't been willing to adapt their systems to accept VOIP connections even though it wouldn't be that hard. VOIP, like wireless, presents some new technical challenges because the equipment is portable, and if you bring your VOIP box on a business trip with you and have to call the fire department, you want firetrucks showing up where you are, not back at your house. But there are ways to design around it, whether you do something with GPS or adapt your DHCP servers to pass you geographical info or whether you have the VOIP box/software/etc. let you tell it your address.
Complaints about VOIP and 911 are usually a cover for real complaints about VOIP and wiretapping. The folks who like wiretapping are annoyed that changing technology makes their tools obsolete, and want to force the technology to adapt to them, rather than the other way around, and they tend to use 911 as a lever to do that. After all, you want an ambulance to be able to find you if you're hurt, but you probably don't want the police to be able to locate you within 10 meters and follow you all day, so that's not the motivation they advertise for mandating that new cell systems provide user location. Similarly, the wiretappers _really_ don't like peer-to-peer flexible technology, and they're used to having hooks into traditional telcos to control them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Google franchised public WiFi access points called...
Wait for it...
GSpots
I use Lingo (www.Lingo.com) and get UNLIMITED US, Canada, and Wester Europe for $19.
I've had really no problems so far except for setting up my second TIVO box. You need to dial-out on the initial setup and it doesn't work over VoIP. I had to take the box to my office to do the setup.
Other than that my VoIP has been a great experience.
My two issues with VoIP are quality (which you can test using free sites such as http://testyourvoip.com/). Mine isn't too bad... but...
I am always concerned about safety. My phone works when the power is out and is Federally mandated to be up more than 99.999% of the time. VoIP has no such requirements. The counter-argument is that if you have a cell phone then that will work if the power is out.
The cool thing about VoIP phones (in this case Vonage, but I don't think that matters) is their geographical independence. My Dad took his to Greece on vacation and coordinated his house sale over the VoIP phone (so it was a local call for the other parties). It also turned out to be cheaper to make calls over the VoIP phone (via the US, so paying Vonage's low long distance rate to Greece) than it was to make local calls from the hotel!
And now he has moved from the US to the UK, but took his Vonage box with him, I can call his old local number and it rings in England!
Oh, and the other neat thing is that his voicemail messages get emailed to him.
-ben
I saw the handwriting on the wall 2 years ago. Too much animosity between the old TDM guys and the VoIP guys so I'm caught in the middle and am not able to get any cross training in VoIP. My boss is an old TDM, Crossbar, Panel guy who refuses to believe that VoIP will make traditional 5ESS, Nortel switching platforms unnecessary.........back to packing up my office
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