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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."
Informative article?
On a BLOG?
Full of factual errors and void of any actual useful content?
Nothing to see here, please move along.
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Save the internet, append -inurl:blog to all google searches!
Perhaps the big savings is in the corporation side rather than on the individual customer side. Big corporations are also big spenders in the telephone business, and not so individuals. Often this corporations get special deals regarding support, sometimes in site.
It could be that this is not yet prime time for home users in the VoIP arena.
I don't understand why they don't simply expand the pie. Let the PSTN system become broadband, let somebody else handle voice calling.
Because change threatens existing business models.
Who gets to lobby government? Existing businesses.
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.
Because, you are requiring a company that has been making money for the past hundered years on the PSTN network suddenly drop everything and go towards something that may or may not actually make them money.
Remember, the more VoIP comes out, the more able you are to write off your current provider. With VoIP, you can just have a cable modem or WiMAX service and no phone line at all. That's not good for the incumbent PSTN providers.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
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.
Same here. I tried Freeworlddialup, which lets you call toll free POTS numbers for free. The sound quality and lag weren't as good as a regular phone. My friends on Vonage are pretty satisfied though, so maybe you get what you pay for. From what I've seen wireless is replacing landlines more than VoIP. With good signal at home my Verizon Wireless phone sounds as good as a landline and has never dropped a call at home. With bad or no signal it's useless.
Actually, you should have kept reading. For one, hyperbole is standard in this kind of literature.
Two, he makes the argument (quite well, I think) that other than providing a similar kind of service there isn't any similarity between POTS technology and VoIP. He points out that PSTN is an almost intentionally neutered technology, and VoIp isn't.
You sayd VoIP should have been done a long time ago - duh! We've established you didn't read the article, so of course you missed the reasons why VoIP is growing and has taken this long to get here (namely the fact that it's a different technology, and so interfacing with PSTN is hard, especially hard considering the desire of most telco's to keep VoIP out).
As for pronouncing it "voyp" not only is your claim silly, but the article is text m'kay? No pronunciation invloved.
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.
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
>POTS persisted for business reasons associated with monopolization of telecom and not technology or sound quality.
The guy who wrote this article is failing to appreciate some of the technology goals of plain ol' telephone service (POTS). For example, reliability of telephone switches is in the multiple-nines percent uptime. Analog lines provide streaming without packet-loss, and the entire network is self-powered. All run over plain copper wire.
In other words, the phone network has opted for simplicity and reliability over innovation. It is no surprise then, that digital land-line service has made few inroads in ten years of widespread internet use. Sitting in front of a bulky computer praying for the software to work is simply too much overhead for most people to bear.
While digital may become the dominante media for voice in the near future, there will remain a market for direct voice connections. Just look at the popularity of Nextel cell phones and you will see that direct connections have big market appeal.