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."

Comments

Informative article?

[timecop]

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!

Re:I don't understand why

[KillerCow]

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.

Re:I don't understand why

[cmowire]

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.

Slashdot needs to get the lead out

[Deliveranc3]

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.

All-in-one is buggered.

[sfled]

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.

Hype

[jav1231]

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.

Re:Hype

[zentec]

You're absolutely right, it's about in the same state it was in 1995. But only because the cost of broadband didn't make it feasible.

But now that broadband is cheap, it's starting to make a lot of sense, especially with companies that have large WANS full of bandwidth. The company I work for has 100 megabits of fiber connected between 8 locations through a company called Telco. They're paying $10,000 per month for the fiber and since the satellite offices need to call corporate a lot, VOIP on our own bandwidth saves thousands on phone bills per month.

Cheap broadband for the residential user makes VOIP a possibility too. I ditched my landline last month and ported the number to my wife's cell phone. The phone in the house is Voicepulse and it's been as reliable or better than the Verizon POTS. You can't tell the difference in call quality.

Six years ago, my local telephone bill was $22 per month with caller-id. My last POTS bill was close to $60. Really, all telcom reform has done for me is drive up my bill to outrageous amounts.

The incumbent telephone companies all have their own VOIP service. Problem is, they think that VOIP is reason enough to switch and they offer paltry savings on VOIP as compared to POTS; if there's any savings at ALL. Verizon's VOIP service was $40 per month and I was paying close to $60 with just caller-id. Somehow they think that phone service should guarantee them a fixed amount of revenue. VOIP offers the very real chance at local telephone competition without requiring new players to build their own networks or rent from the incumbents.

In fact, this has been the whole impediment to local phone competition. The incumbents have for years resisted renting out their networks to competitors. They've tried legislation and regulations to make it cost prohibitive and have pretty much succeeded while giving themselves a paltry profit line in interstate and intrastate access fees.

The gig is up; everyone stands to save money if they don't use the traditional telephone network.

Disruptive Technology

[Mazzaroth]

Within five years, the telco world will have changed.

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 disruptive technology.

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.