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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."
That's not been my experience with VOIP. Just FYI. For me it's been superclear and at least as reliable as my normal phone. What service were you using?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I think he means 586, i.e., Pentium.
A blog like any other.
at least as reliable as my normal phone.
You must have crappy phone service. I rely on a land line for my home alarm/fire system. Between cell, VoIP (which relies on my ISP), and land lines there is absolutely no contest when it comes to reliabilty. I have been using land lines for 30 years and can't remember an outage on a land line. As for my ISP and cell, I can't count the number of dropped calls or net outages.
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.
I have also tried using Packet8. While I agree that calls to US numbers are great, calls to India are abysmal. Packet8's quality for calls to India is so bad that it is virtually unusable.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
See, that's a meaningless platitude. Of course, there's always money to be made as a last-mile provider.
The problem is, the ILECs (that's the technical term for the local phone company) aren't always allowed to roll out cable and WiMAX how they would like. Furthermore, if they did try to roll it out, they know very little about it, so it's not a guarantee that they'd end up losing the market anyway. Think of the online book market. Sure, the incumbent bookstores managed to have some web presence, but the real company that ended up as the online bookstore people tend to think about wasn't one of the incumbent providers.
Or think about AOL Time Warner. Time Warner spent a bunch of money to pick up AOL and look where that's gotten them!
The thing you need to remember is that VoIP has very little to do with where the ILECs want to go, and the article points this out. The phone company was dragged kicking-and-screaming into the Internet-DSL market mostly because they wanted to preserve their frame-relay/ISDN/Modem-line market and because the CLECs that they grudingly let into the market were using it. DSL wasn't even invented necessarily to do IP traffic, they wanted to be able to do streaming phone services with it.
So, in the end, the phone companies are generally interested in the data-providers they compete with, not with innovation. If the phone company just provides bandwidth and no value-added services, that just means that the cable/WiMAX/etc. providers have won and they have lost.
See, most people fall into the trap where they expect companies to act logically, as viewed by an external observer. And this is a logical fallicy, because they do act logically, but only when viewed as an insider.
So, yes, it's very clear that the ultimate result *should* be two competing last-mile providers, representing pieces of the phone and cable companies respectively, plus wireless providers, plus companies offering layered phone, data, and video connectivity to your connection. But none of the incumbent providers with wire in the ground are interested at all in this, except to take out their competition.
Gentoo Sucks
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.
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.
So I buy Vonage. No outages so far. Some echo problems, but that's rare. But many benefits--(1) virtual phone number in another area code; (2) use the internet to control voice mail and call forwarding (call forwarding never worked at my old apartment; (3) save about $20/month and still get unlimited calls.
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...