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What VoIP Is Actually Good For
gManZboy writes "One of the things that's bothered me about VoIP is that other than so-so quality phone service at a cheap price, what's the big deal? I mean so you can now deliver voice mail into e-mail because it's all IP packets, does that mean I should ditch my telecom investment. Well in part 3 of Queue's special report on VoIP (here's part 1, part 2) two authors from Bell Labs help explain actually useful things you might do. Now I get it."
VoIP
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
VoIP
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
VoIP is something that I despise
For it means destruction of telephone lines
For it means tears in thousands of executives' eyes
When their trucks go out to remove their telephone lines
Who has tried VOIP? I too am wondering whether or not it's worth making the switch... Anyways, if everyone did switch, under peak hours, the lag has got to suck...
If it were actually clearer than traditional phone lines, maybe I'd consider it.
I had a rather frustrating experience with the Net2Phone Voiceline product. Simply put, no matter how I tried to install it, it wouldn't give the green "provisioned" light or a dial tone.
Their tech support was less than useless at telling me what was wrong... they just processed the return instead.
If you run a modem over VOIP, you can then dial into the Internet without a phone line. Now any computer with a broadband connection can surf the web in luxury at an amazing 56kbps!
When we called VoIP "telephony". Now I don't know if it was supposed to be tele-phony or tele-funny.
--When it's my time, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather -- not screaming like all the passengers in his car
So they have VoIP on computers now...
(1) Long-distance is VoIded ...
(2) It has internet stuff in it
(3) You can claim you're l337er than your neighbor
(4)
(5) PROFIT!!!
Of course, it (the cheap solutions) also limits possible contacts to other users, creating a filter so one is only able and only has to talk to fellow geeks.
Many telcos are using VoIP in parallel with their PSTN backbones, and this is ok - most users don't even notice this behind the scenes VoIP application.
When it comes to services to end users, except for companies like Vonage and a few similar ones there's a huge gap. For example I've subscribed to Stanaphone just to find out that my account disappeared simply because I didn't use it for a month. Well, there's no way these companies can compete with operators if they keep this kind of policies in place. Could you imagine if you're enjoying a 45 days holiday in Europe (or in New Zealand, which is really cool!), and when back home find out your phone doesn't work anymore because of this kind of policy? No POTS operator would do this...
We've put a VoIP unit in our place in the Carribean and it allows guests who are mostly from the US, to make (effectively) free calls back home - something that would be very expensive using the regular telephone system.
The irony is, that the same people who bitch and whine about microsoft having an 'unfair' monopoly by virtue of its market presence (ie "people don't know the difference and/or are afraid to switch") likewise tolerate slashdot despite its poor editing, dupes, trolls (like me!), clearly-in-need-of-repair moderation system and other pretty egregious faults despite the existence of more credible alternatives because, heck, this is where the traffic is.
Having used Vonage for several months I can say I am very pleased with their service and the quality of the calls. Before Vonage my only phone was a SprintPCS phone. When I got Vonage and called family/friends to tell them about a new number most of them commented how much clearer it was compared to the PCS phone I usually call them on.
;)
The only time I have had a 'problem' was when I was downloading some files on bittorrent AND playing FFXI Online and received a phone call. There was a slight echo audible on my end.
I have actually convinced my father and two friends to ditch the local phone company and get VOIP. They are also very pleased with the service and money they have saved, which equals free months of phone service for me!
I am anon... I like how you can connect VOIP to Outlook. Say Fred Burger gives you a call and in an instant Outlook pops up and all the emails you have ever sent to Fred Pop Up, and also all the emails you have ever received from Mr. Burger pop up. That's awesome. Talk about an increase in productivity.
Yeah, why would you want to ditch your regular phone for VoIP. I mean, it's only as simple as plugging an adapter into the wall, then into your phone and getting phone quality (or petter) audio quality from it... and only getting unlimited long distance to america, canada, western europe for FREE, plus all the extra thigns that cost more money but come for free with VoIP, like callw aiting, caller ID, call return, voicemail, three-way, call forwarding ALL FOR THE PRICE OF BASIC TELEPHONE SERVICE ($20, more or less depending on the company).
Yeah, gee. WHy the FUCK would you want to switch from something that costs $75+/mo toward something that is only $20/mo? I can't possibly imagine!!
Stupid stupid stupid fuckign article.
Presumably, like other things that travel over IP, you could encrypt your calls against tapping.
-"so-so quality"
This is simply not true. Voice packets are given the highest priority across the network. If a voice packet does not make it to the destination, it is not resent. If the proper investment is made (you need newer switches and equipment) and the configuration is correct, it really does work great. I think it is ideal for an office with 30 people, especially if it is in a rural area where you may be paying a lot for a frame relay circuit or other connection. This setup can be done using Avaya VoIP phones in just a few hours and is very reliable!!
http://tomgould.com/
Making long distance calls really cheap, that's something to consider... I woud like to have a service like that, a web page that allows me to phone call relatives in another country, for much less the conventional price.
I don't have first hand knowledge of the actual testing that was done because I just transferred here. However, I was told by one of my professors that the school just tried to implement a VoIP system, but the sound quality was terrible. In fact, they've already dropped it and gone back to the regular PBX / POTS system.
Advantages:
Disadvantages
I believe that VoIP and any other "permanent" phone installation is going to pass and mobility will be more important to most people.
I still don't know what it's good for...
Is this one of those nasty blurbs where they try to trick you and force you to RTFA?
A little more info in the blurb, please.
I installed Skype the other day (it's apparently developed by the people who originally developed Kazaa, using "peer to peer" technology, however that works). Anyway, it installed without fuss and works from behind a firewall without me having to open ports. I haven't tried skypeout yet, only skype to skype, but hey, I'm chatting to my friends in the states for free, and the quality is much better than a long distance phone call. Thusfar, I'm impressed.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
w00t Props to teh GNAA and FWD!
When you need cover fire to plant a frag on some fool's camp spot, that crappy voip over is 100X better than typing.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I am kindof with VOIP and would be very happy to make the switch once it qualifies the basic requirements, like it should work with there is no power.
My local phone works when there is a power outage (how would i report a complaint that my power has been cut off otherwise?). Also, VOIP uses the existing internet connection, which means if the internet is down, the phone is also down (so no more backup dialup access or phone line).
The day it gets over such things and guarantee a 99.9999% availability, I dont think i would give up the regular phone. Might consider the additional line of VOIP someday (but who needs 2 such lines when u have a cellphone)
Well, one interesting application is to have the same phone number at multiple places... very easy to do with VOIP, useful for small businessmen who dont have soo much cellphone minutes.
I'm testing the Cisco 7970G for the local university's Technology Quarters program... It's a VOIP phone, but it's only VOIP across the university LAN. Mostly it's absurd overkill, but you can see how people in a big company who make lots of calls could really use it.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Telco company: Hello, welcome to genericom, how may i assist you. Me: My pho....pho....ne.... is laa...a..aaaa....a..g.... Telco company: Whats that sir, I cant quite understand you. Me: My god....amn....phon...is....lagg... Telco Company: Sir, your going to have to speak more clearly...
does that mean I should ditch my telecom investment.
Don't you think question marks are just the worst.
I mean really, who actually bothers anymore.
However, I've had others swear by their VoIP. It seems to me that there is still just too many variables in the IP infrastructure for the experience of VoIP to be uniform. Not to mention the issues with power outages, 911 service, and the like.
Another thing to note is that having voice mail sent to email is not a feature of VoIP per sey. We are currently implementing an email system that has this ability, given that you have the right voice mail equipment. While there are some features that VoIP does offer that can't be done with POTS and appropiate equipment, many of the features being touted as "VoIP only" features can be done with POTS.
That said, about 5 years ago I was involved in a project to roll out VoIP in a new building (about 300 people, a call center of about 10 stations included). We used Cisco equipment and had two 24 channel trunks come in from POTS (one for local, one for long distance). Once it was up and running, the sound quality was nearly as good as POTS - we did have a slight echo once in a while, but other than that, it was great. We, of course, had complete control over the network, so doing QoS and stuff like that with voice packets was easy.
VoIP, if done right, can be nearly as good as POTS in terms of sound quality, if not better. But given all the variables (phone, DSL/Cable router, your ISP, the POTS/Internet interface, etc), there are just too many places that can cause quality to suffer. And the problem becomes worse if you try and use a fax machine over a VoIP line, which doesn't have a high tolerance for packet delay.
We're doing it for cost and flexibility:
1) No telephones == more desk space
2) No telephones == less money wasted on telephone maintenance
3) No telephones == less money wasted on phone line maintenance (only run one network instead of two)
4) IP == If you log in to VPN you can get calls transferred to you at home
5) VoIP == cheap long distance
6) Other features -- automatic call recording, easy ability to script call-ins, etc.
7) PBX Box ---- WAAAAAY cheap ($1,500 for a build-it-yourself asterisk solution vs $10,000+ for a traditional PBX solution)
Engineering and the Ultimate
I'm still using my commercial Vonage service as my primary home line. It has never had any any audio quality problems or service outages that I've noticed, and it's a steal price-wise. With the activation fees and shipping and everything, my initial bill to get set up and cover the first month was $57.78, and thereafter it's been $16.94 a month (I use their 500 minute plan instead of the unlimited minutes, it's cheaper and I doubt I'd go over that on my home voice line).
On top of all that, I've set my T-mobile cellphone to use my Vonage voicemail service, and I've set both phones to foward to each other when out of service or unanswered (which surprisingly has caused any wierd problems with a call bouncing back and forth yet). And all my voicemails get emailed to me in
11*43+456^2
Does any VOIP provider work as a land line for DirectTV's DVR? I've seen the answer is yes for 'standard' tivo boxes, but as of a year ago no for the ones they shipped with DirectTV.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I am a Vonage customer and use it as my primary line. Not only can you get voice mails delivered to email (great when travelling), but you can, for an additional $4.99/month get a line that is local to someone that calls you a lot, so they can make toll-free (local) calls, even if you're in New York and they are in California.
The feature I like best is that, free of charge, I have my cell phone ring anytime my home phone rings. That way, when I'm away, I still get all my home calls, and don't have to give out my cell number to everyone. This feature can be used for simultaneous ringing on any other number, or it can forward it to another number after a certain number of seconds without answer on the first line. You can turn the feature on/off and the change takes effect almost immediately.
Most of all, all the extras that you pay for with normal phone are automatically included in the Vonage plan. I pay $25 a month for all my phone needs (that are non-cell), and that's a lot better than my old SBC/MCI pairing I used to use.
I don't really notice bad voice quality, but I took a lot of time to set up my Vonage box *behind* my firewall, but then forwards all the ports necessary to have it manage the connection properly for voice-quality. For a more no-brainer setup, just route your connection to the Vonage box first, then to your router.
It worries me that these articles concern themselves so much with matching traditional US PSTN services (like 911 and call centers) and very little with celluar phone services. It's probably because of the lack of a good packet switched cellular network in the US... Since GSM based phones are already packet switched, and can already do packet switched (IP) data via GPRS and 3G technologies, why aren't we seeing a strong push fot VoIP and cellular integration. An additional advantage is that the turnover of mobile phones is much higher than land lines, so technology adoption is much faster. Regards, -Jeremy
more important than all the current porn traffic
Let's stop this crazy talk before it begins!
I'm late to the world of VoIP, arriving just after
the release of Skype 1.0.0.29
Here's what I've got on my To Try list:
Applications for Skype:
Intercom
I'net Dating
Random Surveys
Conference Calls
Lic-free "Ham Radio"
VoIP I'net Phone (free)
Remote [Language] Teaching
Remote Councilling Service
Remote Computer Consulting
Improve Int'l Relations (P2P)
---
Unanswered questions about Skype:
What's needed to use it "standalone" across a LAN?
'Nuff Said.
Okay, for those of you who don't have email: what's going to happen when some genius from Sebansk figures out how to send spam VOIP calls?
Oh, I forgot: the Do Not Call list from the FCC will keep all those zombies from dialing up my cell phone. I can hear it now.... "C14L1S - more best than VI@GRA and you save many dollars to buy with us!"
sigs, as if you care.
Skype seems to have taken VoIP a little further ahead by introducing a better compression and using a peer-to-peer network to distribute the voice packets. How they actually do it is still a well guarded secret currently. But it work behind firewalls (provided the firewall is open to HTTP or a proxy that support port 80). What amazes me is that within a good sizeable dsl line (768 down, 128 up) it can support 4 way conference quite well. I did a bandwidth measurement (using NetMeter) it only uses approx 4k to transfer both ways and the quality is like using your cellphone. I also used skypeout paid EURO20 just to try out. Quality is not bad to areas that have very good network infrastructure like the US, Asia, but got a bad quality in Russia. Possibly not enough users on the peer to peer network. The other thing I found is that the quality depends on the number of users on the network (obviously for a peer-to-peer network). In a normal day I have over 800k users and that allow pretty decent voice quality. However at 400k users, quality is bad sometimes can't even get connected. But the skype network is growing and like BitTorrent, the more popular it gets, the better it becomes... I am sure there are more people who has used Skype here at /.
-m-
It's a way for the Telco to bilk you for more money while not really giving you anything tangible... much like Digital Cable where they don't offer internet as well.
Like where I live.
But oh... it's better... It's DIGITAL!
MadOgre.com
The days of high cost international calls are limited. Here in New Zealand I can use my Vodafone mobile to call various countries (Australia, Canada, US, UK, Ireland) at the same rate as a local call.
So far, VoIP's main attraction has been lower cost calls. THis won't last and VoIP will have to find a better way to justify its existence.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Your phone works when there's a power outage because it's powered from the Telco's UPS. This is only possible because POTS is circuit-switched and centralized. It's really, really hard (i.e. not possible) for your VoIP provider to push power via IP. So spend $35 and buy a fscking power-strip UPS. Problem solved. Runs your ATA for hours, maybe days.
The limitation you see of no backup connection is similarly self-imposed -- there is no one stopping you from having one or more backup IP connections. It turns out the IP traffic is really easy to re-route, even mid-call. Moreover, you can get backup connections on physically seperate lines, which is really hard to do with POTS lines.
And since when does the telco provide a backup line? Or a 99.9999% guarantee? Last month my phone went out on Friday afternoon. They didn't even come to look at it until Tuesday morning, and it wasn't fixed until mid-day Wednesday. By my math that's 1.37% annual downtime, with a single failure.
Phones are easy. Pick them up, dial a number, you talk to the other person.
Email is easy. Type a person's address, your message, hit send.
I don't consider myself a stupid person, but whenever I've had a phone in my office, I've had absolutely no idea how to use any of the conferencing, hold, transfer, or even voicemail features. They vary from phone to phone, and have non-obvious icons. It took me a few moments to realize that the icon that showed a receiver going down didn't mean hangup, but speaker-phone.
I agree that having this infrastructure will make new, better things possible, but a VoIP infrastructure isn't all that more disruptive than already having an IP infrastructure. Some novel applications came out of IP being pervasive, but I see VoIP as a byproduct of an earlier disruptive agent, not as the disruptive agent in itself.
I had the same exact problem with VoIP, except I also didn't like the fact that 911 calls didn't go to the 911 center. However, I've figured out how to get around these problems:
So yeah, that should cover it. If you want more info, chech the Asterisk-Users list under the topic "Vonage, PSTN, 911, and hardware question". I'm planning building a system with this setup later this year.
I couldn't find much info when recently shopping around. voipreports.com takes you to dslreports but they don't even have a voip link on the main page.
I have been with VP since April but they are too expensive and their call quality has decreased.
When Vonage dropped from $34.95 to $29.95 (unlimited), VP stayed at $34.95. Now that Vonage is down to $24.95, VP increased to $38.14.
A buddy has been complaining about Vonage and canceled the day before they dropped their price.
I ordered Packet8 on Friday and on Saturday received an email stating that my hardware has shipped. Wish me luck!
Power outages are a problem, but the consequences can be minimized. I currently use Vonage through my cable modem. I have my cable modem, router and Vonage box on a UPS. As long as I turn off my computer shortly after a power outage, the UPS can give me a few hours of phone usage, and I could get a stronger UPS and/or dedicate a UPS solely for the cable modem/router/vonage. Of course, if the outage is widespread and the cable service is also affected, then I won't have phone service. Vonage does have a function that automatically forwards your calls to a number that you set if you lose your connection. I have this set to my cell number. I can always use my car to charge my cell phone if necessary, so I shouldn't miss any calls unless cell towers are out, which is pretty rare.
Anything that offers consumers more choice in telephone communication will force vendors of both plain old phone services and those of VoIP to make their services more competitive. Whoever wins, we win.
Right now most people have multiple phones a house phone and a cell phone. Some even have a buisness cell phone that their employer has them use. all have different numbers. Some people have family plans with multiple phones each with seperate numbers. Imagine this. You call my phone number lets say its (234)555-xxxx. When you dial that number my home phone connected via ATA, my VoIP enabled handheld with 802.16a and my wifes phone all ring. Just one number. Each phone (although having individual IP adresses with inside my network including my modile which is VPN'd via [insert your favorite flavor of VPN technology] share 1 number. Basicly makeing my old PBX connection dead. So what's bad about this. Granted the quality is a little lesser than my PBX connceted home phone but my cell phone is pretty much worse than both. The reason for this is probably because your VoIP provider lives miles away across high latency cabling. QoS helps yes, but maybe when you have a VoIP provider that lives in the same state as you do you wont have such a bad signal. Besides it's still relitivly new give it some time so we can work out the kinks.
KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!
...it usually means I'm getting a phone call from an international telemarketer.
Last week, I got a VOIP call from a telemarketer named "Steve Dallas". Although you wouldn't think that someone named "Steve Dallas" would have such a strong Indian accent.
I have Packet8 VOIP at home, and I love it. I have a 6 down/768k up Speakeasy connection and I've had no problems.. no outages, great call quality (Linksys WRT54GS running Sveasoft firmware), and I can take the box with me when I travel... VOIP is great, as far as I'm concerned, landline-quality phone (or better) for $20/month...
Michael R. Rudel
Owner, http://www.obhost.net
VoIP is good because AT&T can begin using and save $500 million like that. No, really. It scales incredibly.
Read jack phelps dot net
I wanna stick it to the local phone company that has stuck it to me before. It is not THAT much cheaper (25 bucks a month for unlimited long distance on a phone line I rarely use is not that great) the most useful feature I use is email voicemail on my sidekick (yup it works) plus I get to brag about having voice over IP phone service to all of my geek friends and on slashdot.
Free phone sex of course!
I've have Vonage for almost a year now. I brought it with me when I moved to Argentina in December. Here we have a crappy 512/128 adsl line. I often find the ATA zombified and disconnected from the Vonage servers while it still routes IP traffic. I had to set the call quality on super bandwidth saver so my calls aren't really that crisp.
Vonage does not support the use of their service outside the united states but they dont really care if you have it as long as you have a united states billing address. I can't really complain about having to reboot the ATA once a day and stop any downloads before making a call because it's prolly saved me a shit ton of money and allowed me to do things like call my family on sundays without having to worry about getting a phone card and dialing a million digits. it's also afforded them the same conveniences.
gCombining everything into one handset would be nice. When you're in range of your wireless router, it uses VOIP and you're not billed. When you're in range of your landline base station, and VOIP isn't available, it uses the landline. When neither of these are available, it looks for a mobile phone cell transmitter. Ideally, if all three were out, it'd switch to satellite...
We're replacing our knackered commander system (15 years old) with a bunch of VOIP phones (Snom 190). Also we're splitting our shop into two premises; using a WiFi link (with WEP/MAC filtering/IPSec/L2LTP etc for security).
Using VOIP on our local LAN/WAN, we can share the same PSTN line pool (about 20 lines total) between both shops. If someone dials one shop but wants to speak to someone in the other, we can transfer that call. Very useful, not to mention the other possibilities with Asterisk (caller ID, call logging, stats, voicemail, extensions, music on hold, etc).
As for actually using a VOIP carrier for outgoing call... no, not yet.
We're setting up with Asterisk and Digium TDM400 cards with FXO modules.
Standard x86 servers, Linux, Asterisk, Digium and Snom phones add up to a LOT less than the integrated turnkey solution we were looking to get from Siemens.
Don't ditch your regular phone yet. If your cable company turns off your cable during the night to do upgrades (it happens a lot in some places), you are really out of luck if you have to call 911.
I actually worked on a massively ambitious convergence project for a Lab (that will go un-named due to NDA reasons) over five years ago. The aim was definitely an attempt to un-tangle the mess caused by multiple devices and addresses, phone numbers, and roles that we all have now. i mean, imagine if you just had your phone number, no email address, no fax number, no work/home distinction. the software just figures out where you are, what's being transmitted, where to put it, and if you even want it. this was five years ago, i've gone, who knows what happened. if any of these labs ever actually get one of these things working, it will change the way we communicate and use technology at a very fundamental level.
--
Try Nuggets , our mobile answer search engine. Get answer to your your questions via SMS, across the UK.
I always thought that if the quality for VOIP was good enough, and if there were no time lags between the send and the recieve, then it would be possible to have orchestras that exist in cyber space. Everyone who is in the group would get a feed from everyone else adn then mix it through their sound system. That is a good use for VOIP. But the bandwidth needs to be there.
Supporting (generally) the parent post, Vonage is pretty good. I've been using them for my main work line for about 2 months now. Quality of service is excellent and the voice sounds quite good (think high quality cell phone) most of the time. You get a ton of great features for not too much cash. I love getting my voice mail as an .WAV file in an email, and it is really easy to foward calls wherever you need them.
The only time I have a problem with a connection is if I'm downloading, or worse uploading (dsl) something big at the same time which is entirely expected. (only so much bandwidth after all) My only recurring problem is that the Motorola unit they gave me tends to drop my PPPoE connection about once a day. Not quite sure why and there aren't a lot of settings to tinker with. I don't have that problem very often with my Linksys WRT54G and I'm pretty sure it's not the DSL provider (SBC in this case) causing the problem.
Anyway if you are thinking of Vonage I can readily recommend them if you can tolerate the occasional (and easily fixed) downtime. If phone availability is mission critical to you or you aren't especially technologically inclined, you might look for a more traditional alternative. But overall it's a great service, especially for home or home office use.
VOIP by itself isn't making modem dialing obsolete - most of our customers do not want to provide an internet connection of any kind (not even VPN) to their production servers. Instead, they're more comfortable with a modem that they can turn on when we need to service. How well does a modem work over an average-quality VOIP connection? Does it?
- People to be polite, and not mislabel traffic for their own advantage. What happens when some bit-torrent users figure out how to double their download speeds by setting the QoS bits on their traffic.
- People to agree on priorities... if there is a late breaking virus, maybe it is more important to download the patch than for fifteen teenagers to share a rave in quadrophonic sound.
- People to be reasonable... I dont care if you do drive a mercedes 500, all your traffic is NOT high priority. (that is, can people buy QoS? If you have QoS then the whole billing question becomes very interesting, and the price of the data will shoot back up to voice network levels, because every intervening hop will, quite reasonably, want their cut.
QoS is a DOA technology on the Internet. The technology makes a lot of sense on corporate networks, where there is somebody in charge, but in the wide world, it just is fundamentally not going to happen because the interested parties have no incentive to make it work.IP telephony will happen because the bandwidth will rise to the point that voice traffic becomes noise to everyone but the last mile. The last mile will have to take care of their own problems (perhaps using a cheapo version of QoS, such as preferring packets on a certain port, but it will not require any action of the network.)
oh... folks were complaining about acronyms, so.. DOA -- Dead On Arrival, the status of unfortunate patients on reception in the Emergency ward of a hospital. Also applies to technologies, ie. MiniDisc, MemoryStick, (oh.. stop picking on Sony...) DAT, Video Disk, (technologies that arrived and died without garnering much market share.)
In the US,company email is the legal property of your employer. Email is typically monitored after the fact as text searches of archives, but there are multiple commercial efforts employing pattern recognition technologies as real-time filters. Add VoIP and voice recognition at the commercial level and you have one brawny big brother at the workplace.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
Inter-office VoIP is great. I can transfer a call from one brance to another. Remote sites call call the help desk by dialing the extention instead of calling an expensive 800 number. Howabout automatic extention forwarding to me when I am working out of office for a week. Even international calls feel like they are right next door.
MiniDisc was not Dead On Arrival (DOA). It might have been a flop here in the states, but it was definitely popular overseas. MDs are also still a popular medium for amateurs recording live audio at very decent quality.
Regards,
Spock_NPA
I can readily recommend [Vonage] if you can tolerate the occasional (and easily fixed) downtime.
. . . Wow. As if the tolerance of Windows BSODs wasn't bad enough, now this? Whatever happened to "you pick up the phone and it just works"? In 26 years of using POTS, the only thing I can recall even approaching an outage is very occasional "circuit full" messages on long distance calls on holidays, and I haven't even heard those for over a decade.
If you can deal with not having a functional phone every now and then, then I'm certainly not going to argue with you, but this casual acceptance of "things break" is rather surprising. And somewhat disturbing, as it reduces the incentive to make things work well. I, at least, would vastly prefer a pencil and paper that "just work" to an electronic notepad that did OCR and networking but a habit of conking out at the most inopportune times; I've got enough stress to deal with as it is.
VoIP for individual use is still young and will grow and become much better but there are some great large scale uses for VoIP combined with SIP. My firm is doing a project where we need to make very large numbers of voice calls in a very short period of time. No! it's not some horrible commercial thing--it's a very large hospital emergency notification system. Think about sending a wav file and a list of recipients to a provider and having THEM make the 500 calls in 30 seconds.
That's what VoIP/SIP is good for.
I wonder how latency can be brought below 100 ms even with QoS. It's probably close to the 230 ms delay you get on phone calls routed through satellites. I find it irksome.
...helping people propogate hideous grammar.
They won't actually increase their download speeds by much (a really tiny amount). The point of QoS is to reduce latency on specific connections (which doesn't really matter for large downloads), not to increase bandwidth.
VOIP saves me about 400$/mo.
When you have someone special in France and you are in California, try calling her 3hrs/day on POTS...
I get a very decent service with Oriunde, a Romanian VOIP provider. They even give me a local phone number for Bucharest, Romania, so that my folks can call me for cheap.
I've got a Sipura 3000 box: it comes with dialing plans, so I can forward local calls to POTS and long distance to VOIP.
(Hell, don't ask me why she is there and I am here, it's about that stupid yearly GC spouse quota)
Speech coding techniques used in VoIP are well tuned to human speech, for which it may still have poorer quality than ordinary phone lines in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, but sounds about the same quality to the human ear. When a modulated signal is fed into a speech coder, you get way poorer SNR than a telephone line, so the transfer rate you can achieve is generally much lower than the 33.6kbps achievable on a phone line, and definitely much less than the size of all these VoIP packets generated, so there is no point anyway.
I didnt want to pick on Sony... I like their stuff. I have a digital camera with a memory stick in it, but it is clear, with their new gear, they are dropping their proprietary media for compact flash & friends. MiniDisk had a good run, but it is good as dead now, I dont believe there is a followon format, so in a few years the old media will be unreadable. OK, heres another vendor example: How many folks have been thrilled with their IOmega Zip drives in the past few years... how many people can still read them !? so CF, normal CD-RW & DVD, usb key drives, these are all relatively open versions of things that were formerly the realm of vendor specific media.
formats with broad industry support will always smother single vendor ones, given time. So when a single vendor format comes out, it is pretty much guaranteed to be DOA, but folks might not know it yet (because they fall for its nifty special features.)
The "part 3" article on VoIP sucks as badly as what came before. This time the idea is that VoIP somehow majikally enables k3wl "services" like distributed call centers. And golly gee it sometimes separates calls signaling from the call path.
Well whoop-de-doodle -- that kind of thing was being done over the TDM-based (circuit) telephone network in the 1980s! In the public switched network, call signaling was divorced from the bearer path in the 1970s to 1980s, with CCIS, and in the 1990s with its replacement, Signaling System 7. (ISDN does something similar to the subscriber, but usually just on a separate channel, not a separate physical path. SS7 is a separate network with diverse physical routing.)
What VoIP does is take a step 30 years backwards, putting signaling and the bearer channel on the same path (inband signaling) 99+% of the time! As modern as touch-tone, maybe, but I saw that at the 1964 World's Fair. SIP and H.323 are both based on inband signaling. MGCP usually is.
But more importantly, the creation of an enhanced service, be it a call center, unified messaging, or anything else for that matter, has no dependency on the bearer path's being over eye pee! Since signaling can be out of band and between computers, it's possible to do all of those services with TDM channels, ATM channels, or whatever other channels (bearer paths) you have. Just because a Cisco IP phone has a slick cellular-like display does not mean that you need VoIP to have a slick display -- that's the control circuit, totally independent of the bearer channel.
It's like comparing the economy of the United States and the economy of Mexico, and coming to the conclusion that El Norte's wealth is caused by speaking English. It's a cargo cult.
There are of course a few handy applications for VoIP, but most boil down to clever parasitic applications of bandwidth, and to regulatory arbitrage.
Problem: lame, underprovisioned ISP. You can dial-in at 56 kbps, but your downloads always go at 14kbps because hes got a million clients on a single T1.
Solution: Dial your ISP, Use VoIP to open a connection with a demarkation point somewhere on the net (maybe very cheap because you can do the demarkation in software.) now you have guaranteed 56 kbps line coming out of your ISP (if the lame ISP claims to support VoIP, then this has to work.)
uh... why wont everyone do that?
People who complain about VoIP quality don't really know what they are talking about. I have been working with a vendor for the last few months who distributes the Cisco AVVID line and quality is generally not an issue at all. Certainly not on any modern network.
The real problem with VoIP these days is the fact that the proliferation of standards (usually a great thing) has led to an insane amount of configurability in H.323, QoS, and unified messaging, and this means that support is deeply complicated by the overwhelming number of options.
So not only can VoIP deliver good quality, its main fault is the startlingly huge number of other things it can do.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
How much is that PBX in the window? ok, so Id like an SS-7 switching network, and I aint a phone company, oh? cant have one? have to run my own wires? hmm...
Separating control from data only makes sense if the network is smart. Smart networks only make sense if the manager of the network is your friend. Usually, that is not the case for anyone except the phone company. The whole point of IP is to make the intermediate network a non-issue. make it stupid so that there isnt any value there, and it can be replaced by any number of technologies or providers. That is always going to be cheaper for end users, but not the phone company.
backgrounders:
how does one "reduce latency"... hmm... I would think that that would cause the entire network to forward packets faster, more consistently for that traffic. So.. if there is no network congestion, then don't tag the packets, they'll only slow down. If there are bottlenecks, who is going to get a better transfer rate, with or without the QoS flags?
There are a couple of point's I'm going to make in response to this.
Does that clarify my statement sufficiently?
Since there is skype for pocket pc it makes any pocket PC into a mobile phone.
What's more it is only useful when you are making outgoing calls or expecting an incomming one so there is not that annoying incoming cell phone buzz.
People will switch entirely to IP telephony and it will be free eventually, the hardware to implement it will become powerful enough.
What's bogging it down? No standards. Same as Webcams there simply is no way to get everyone onto one system except to get them to abandon their old system, something the telephone network never had to deal with.
If there are modem ISPs on other countries, or places etc where you can dial to using voIP...
what do you get? anonymous proxies! Sorta...
It's just a thought, but I'm sure a hax0r would figure out how to use VoIP to transmit data packets undetected.
1. Vonage's VOIP technology is based on a system that is FAR more complicated and less tested than POTS. [...] Less reliabile is unavoidable.
I'm well aware of this, and not arguing the fact. I'm just puzzled as to why such a complex, untested system is seen as a sufficient replacement for a simple, well-tested system.
2. For $20 a month I get features that would cost me nearly $100 using POTS. [...] Vonage gives me WAY more bang for my buck.
If the reduced cost is worth the inconvenience, then I guess that counts as a reason. Personally, I'd get a POTS phone line for phone service and a separate data connection for Internet service--but then again, I live in Japan where they already have fiber to the home in major cities, so maybe that's not an option for you. (I also don't subscribe to the "cheaper is better" theory, so that may by itself put me in the minority.)
3. As an engineer I'm not happy unless something "just works" but I also recognize how rare that really is.
It doesn't have to be. Pencil and paper (or charcoal and hide, if you like) "just work", for an extreme example. Bridges "just work". Even POTS "just works". Certainly the latter examples have had a lot of effort put into them, but declaring at the outset that stability, "just works"-ness if you will, is rare--and, by implication, not a feasible goal--seems overly pessimistic, and is certainly disappointing to hear from an engineer.
I'm not going to stop using a new technology just because all the bugs haven't been worked out.
Nor am I suggesting you do--I'm just expressing surprise that you'd stop using a tested technology just because a newer one exists. I certainly wouldn't want to be in your place if a burglar broke into your house and you couldn't call 911 because your router was on the blink . . .
Tm
/obvious
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
"...but the sound quality was terrible."
Did everything come through in a baritone?
babysitters
Wait until someone starts putting 2 and 2 together and getting taxes (and long distance) charged to your VoIP service.
There are far too many liberal socialist politicians that need revenue for their pork barrel social welfare programs. Taxing the $hit out of service like this is one way for them to leave their legacy to the US citizens. I'm surprised also that Big Business isn't screaming bloody murder about the "abuse" of VoIP. AT&T should be crying about their loss of long distance revenue. Heck, I'm surprised that the RIAA and MPAA aren't in there bitching about new technology ruining their business model.
The thing that makes a real-time application seem laggy is that someone else is downloading a big file: your packets have to wait in line for all of those other big chunks of data to get through. With QoS, some packets get to be 'bumped up' in line. The same number of packets get through, the same number of bytes get through, it's just that the ordering is different.
Overall, yes, the QoS'd application would, on average, get slightly more bandwidth. But let's say that your VoIP application is using ~20kbps (that's just a wild-ass example... I dunno the real bandwidth). If the bitTorrent is saturating the rest of the line, getting ~500kbps, then having it on a higher priority isn't going to give it much more bandwidth. (And if the VoIP were using a connection-oriented protocol, like TCP, then all of it's packets would eventually get through anyway, so, in that case, the torrent wouldn't gain anything at all...)
I think that, in most situations, there would be a fairly small benefit to fooling the router.
> What happens when some bit-torrent users figure out how to double their download speeds by setting the QoS bits on their traffic.
At that imaginary time, whatever stupid ass ISPs turned on QoS for all customers with no extra fees or access restrictions or planning will learn a hard lesson. Then they'll turn it off by default and make you pay extra for the privilege of QoS. Or, more likely, that scenario will never happen, because ISPs will only let high-paying customers use QoS, and those high-paying customers won't waste their expensive guaranteed bandwidth across the whole ISP's network on BitTorrent traffic, when they could just let that be "best effort" packet traffic at a near-zero cost.
QoS is not a magic "I get to take all your bandwidth" bit that you can set that will trick all the intermediate routers into putting your stream first. It's not something that ISPs are just going to open up to every customer for free so that the l33t h4x0r kids who know about it can fuck up the network. Or, at least, most ISPs will be smarter, and the ones that aren't will get nailed and figure it out pretty quickly.
I'm currently running an automated information line for a small non-profit in the UK using VoIP. The only cost is running the server, which hasn't made a major impact on outgoings since the server was already there. In the UK, we have the special 0845 and 0870 dialling codes which are local and national rate respectively, regardless of where the caller is located.
The benefit of these numbers is that when they are used a slice of the call charge goes to the callee, meaning that there are companies willing to provide free services related to these numbers. One such service is for mapping an 0870 number to a SIP endpoint, although frustratingly I can't remember their name nor find them again right now. Asterisk is listening for incoming SIP connections from the incoming PSTN provider and then running an AGI script to deal with the incoming calls.
One nice thing about this is that this organisation has many PSTN lines and the non-profit has none, (well, except the one they make phone calls on!) so many calls can be handled simultaneously with the available PSTN lines shared between several SIP endpoints. The peak number of concurrent users has been five, though, so this is not a major thing I'm talking about. If you're going to be dealing with hundreds of concurrent calls this solution is probably not for you.
If 911 on the fixed lines doesn't work, you just grab a random cell phone.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
You're stupid to have your money in anything other than precious metals, i.e. gold.
That's right kids, gold, part of the only market that will never ever crash. (Even finding a huge golden asteroid would do nothing to the price.)
Telecoms rarely beat expectations by any impressive margins, have very little future growth potential (unless they start doing the ubiquitis-service-provider thing, which is already a saturated market), and frankly I'm surprised it's even a question to a slashdotter to dump telecoms like a bad habit. You of all people know that telecoms are data-pushers and that's becoming a very hard market to stay competitive in.
Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, and if you want to diversify your portfolio plenty of cobalt and TUNGSTEN. Tungsten is in a very interesting place right now, as most economically exploitable tungsten is gonna run out by 07, but other deposits in developing countries could continue 1995 levels of use to continue well into the 21st. However in the short term as the easy supply dwindles one will see a large upward price adjustment that should be rather easy to exploit.
(My tungsten numbers from http://pubs.usgs.gov/pdf/circular/c930-o.html)
I have read the three articles and here what I understood. Services, integration, converging, IP,packets, QOS, call centre, server, node and I can go on and on ... So what is it good for? What benefits does it bring tothe masses? Anyone there knows the answer with a practical application?
thanks
I'm well aware of this, and not arguing the fact. I'm just puzzled as to why such a complex, untested system is seen as a sufficient replacement for a simple, well-tested system.
The main advantage that I can see is the ability to upgrade the system for dirt cheap. With POTS, every time they've wanted to upgrade the system (upgrading to fiber being the most recent that I am aware of) it's been a $billions dollar investment, and small towns have always suffered. OTOH, if you're using VOIP over a cable connection, upgrading the system is just a matter of replacing a box on your end and the VOIP provider doing software upgrades on their end. Cheap by comparison, which means the technology can evolve much faster and incorporate many more uses. The IP network itself is well-proven and as solid as POTS. So solid, in fact, that many POTS providers are *already* passing some of their traffic over the IP network.
If the reduced cost is worth the inconvenience, then I guess that counts as a reason. Personally, I'd get a POTS phone line for phone service and a separate data connection for Internet service--but then again, I live in Japan where they already have fiber to the home in major cities, so maybe that's not an option for you. (I also don't subscribe to the "cheaper is better" theory, so that may by itself put me in the minority.)
Having had POTS, cable internet, and a cellphone all at the same time, I think I can say that the most reliable performance I've had is from the cable internet. Outages were few and far between, and usually associated with the last time I had paid the bill. POTS (in Bellevue, WA, not exactly rural America) was fairly unreliable. Calls would frequently not go through and had to be dialed several times. Also frequent (especially bad on holidays) was the "no line available" noise. And this doesn't count the fact that at least once every couple of months I"d pick up the phone and *not* get a dial tone. And don't get me started on Verizon's shittier-than-shit smeg-sucking cell phone service.
I just got my box from Packet8 today, and I immediately claled my dad to test the service. I'm happy so far. :)
It doesn't have to be. Pencil and paper (or charcoal and hide, if you like) "just work", for an extreme example. Bridges "just work". Even POTS "just works". Certainly the latter examples have had a lot of effort put into them, but declaring at the outset that stability, "just works"-ness if you will, is rare--and, by implication, not a feasible goal--seems overly pessimistic, and is certainly disappointing to hear from an engineer.
YOu mentioned you were in Japan already, so a lot of what you see as POTS "just working" is probably going to be stuff that isn't true in America. Forgetting for the moment that Japan typically adopts technology faster than America (along with the rest of the world). Also forgetting for the moment that Japan has had a wired POTS network that is the envy of every major industrialized nation for years. Laying out cable and running new fiber and so forth in Japan isn't nearly the same scope of a project as doing the same in just hte 48 contiguous united states. Add in Alaska and Hawaii and you've got a project that'll drive anyone to the loony bin. There are still wide swaths of rural America that have the copper lines and switching from the 70s. It wasn't so very long ago that the little shit-hole town I spent my high school years in still had echos on the line of other callers. If you got quiet, you could pick up a fair amount of the town's gossip. This was in 1990, I might add. Now they offer fiber, but the baby bells aren't nearly as fat and complacent as they were in the 80s, so it's coming along.
We've still got last mile issues in many areas to just bring POTS up to the same level of service and quality the rest of the country enjoys. We've still got last mile issues in many areas getting high speed internet. But cable goes almost everywhere. In fact,
Like what I said? You might like my music
With QOS you can specify "low latency" or "high throughput", but not both.
One place this gets interesting is when there are two links between the same two routers, one may be a 2mbit land connection, the other a multi-Gbit connection via three satellites. In this case, the router could be set up such that low latency packets go over the 2 mbit connection, with a ping of 10 ms, where the high througput packets go over the satellite link with 3 seconds ping time.
Now, changing your file sharing application to "high throughput" is not going to get you the file faster, unless it's under about half a megabyte. (2 mbit/s x 3 seconds = 6 mbits including headers, to make it easy, we'll round down to 4 mbits of data, or half a megabyte). As soon as your file gets bigger than that, the Gbit link will still win, as the amount of data transferred is much bigger.
It's just like the old "stationwaggon full of dat tapes" argument. High latency, but one hell of a througput.
I recently installed Skype after having it recommended to me. Within 2 weeks I had cancelled my phone line. I work and live in Japan, but since my family is back in the UK it's invaluable to me. I can speak several times a week long-distance at no cost (this would burn a serious hole in my wallet if I was paying for the calls). For people back home who don't have a PC or reliable internet access I use SkypeOut and the cost is almost negligable. It helps that I have a 100 megabit fibre connection into my home (you gotta love that Japanese 'net infrastructure!) but it's a real blessing for me. I've never yet had a problem with audio quality.
Too much of what I see with people talking about VoIP is a focus only on the phone at your house being a VoIP phone. That's not where VoIP is going to have it's biggest impact, at least not in the short term. In the short term, VoIP is going to have it's impact at the major telephone companies, who are currently overlaying two networks (one voice and one data) to provide you with both phone and internet services. They're interested in VoIP because: the more voice traffic they can move into their data network, the less equipment they have to maintain and the fewer employees they'll need to maintain it. So: 1. Add VoIP to network 2. Eliminate equipment and jobs 3. ...
4. Profit!
That "last mile" may or may not get converted to pure data, but either way, the telcos will save just by having the single data network at the core.
You call this a signature?
Since security breaches will be able to disable both voice and data applications, techniques to protect critical business networks from denial-of-service and other attacks will be deployed.
What logic! I want x , therefore x will occur.
Except cell phones cost more than $20 per month generally.
I would like to create a VOIP phone system a the school I work for. We have and existing 100meg network, wired to the classrooms with pretty good gear. Can I just buy IP phones (Grandstream), set up and asterisk server and away I go? We have consultants telling us it is very expensive, but I am inclined to think otherwise. Any experience out there?
1) If a burglar broke into your house, you're better off running to your neighbor and calling 911 rather than sitting there on the phone with them.
2) Any and all phone jacks, even if they're not turned on, are required to allow 911 to be dialed. With my cell phone, I'll be able to call the power company if the lights go out. Why do I need to pay Verizon $25/month for something I'm not going to use?
Don't forget a UPS otherwise you're still screwed if the power goes out.
I don't know how much you make but for me cutting 2/3rds off my phone bill (and still dropping last I read) is a HUGE deal. that extra $50 or $60 a month is really nice. Not to mention that I don't have to fill out all those expensive reports for LD calls when I work for home.
Yeah, could you imagine what would happen if ISP's let all their customers connect to remote SMTP servers by default. Just think of the rubbish the unscrupulous side of the internet would make!
Heh, good job they were on the ball and only allowed those who asked for it!
Oh, wait..
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
We are looking at purchasing a new phone system for our 100+ employee company. All of the systems that we have seen a demo for can support VoIP, but you obviously don't have to purchase that capability.
Whats more, most of the systems have something generally called "Unified Messaging" that will allow you to listen to your voicemail from your email without any VoIP functionality. It also allows emails and chat sessions to be put into Automated Call Distribution Queues (ACD). All of this without the use of VoIP.
The only senario we could come up with for using VoIP was that if our branch office in another city wanted their people to be seemlessly integrated with our phone system. You would just get two of these fancy phone systems, network them together and you could be at either office and it would be as if you were sitting in the same building as the person 800 miles away. Even under these circumstances, though, I don't think we would have to use VoIP.
Asside from cheap (and poor quality) long distance, we have not come across a good use for the technology.
user@host:/usr/bin$ whatis
java: nothing appropriate.
But the arguement isn't about latency vs throughput. The arguement is about my packets being more important than your packets, so on a congested link, who gets priority? Your analysis is correct if you are the only user on that network. If, however, both links are running over 50% capacity, and you want your VOIP/Streaming Video/Internet Radio and I want my Bittorrent, who is gonna win? With QOS set it depends on who's packets are labelled as higher priority. Now you are right that I can set my torrent to be low priority, and not affect your streams, but I can also set mine for low latency, and compete with you for the terrestrial link, or I can set for high priority on both, and compete with you for both data paths. The routers in the middle have no idea what is in the packets they are transferring, they just know what to do with QOS labelled packets.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Damn, now that's true hacking!
But wouldn't it be easier to just buy a couple of used cellphones, keep one on each end of the house, and use those to dial 911?
Steven v>
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I saw 2 really smart comments on fixing 911 so it calls your local 911 center (One getting the bare minumum free phoneline that only dials 911 (by law you are allowed to have this) and Two just keeping around an old cellphone [again, they by law must atleast be able to dial 911]).
:P
But my question is, does throwing your VOIP box and DSL/Cable modem on a UPS solve the power problem? I recall that power has gone out and I've been able to remain on the internet with a UPS on my cable modem and PC but is VOIP more susceptible to problems during powerouttages? I haven't seen a specific post confirming this one way or the other.
Course BPL users would lose voice, internet AND power all in one fell swoop if they did VOIP over BPL
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Maybe not "average", but certainly this works with Linux.
I thought that all phone lines had to be alive enough to let you call 911 (emergency) and 611 (set up new phone service)? Dial any other number and you get an immediate busy signal, or maybe a recording explaining? That's the way it was in all (I think) of the apartments I've lived in.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I connect my local POTS lines and Vonage line into into Asterisk using Digium FXO ports. Then we have a Cisco ATA 186 programmed at home. As well, we have Asterisk connected to SimpleTelecom as SIP provider.
Once you have Asterisk running, all the call features are free. My kids like music-on-hold, extention to extention calling, three way calling, and call transfer.
And, then of course, when we go out of town, we take the ATA with us and all the telecom services follow us where ever we go (provided there is broadband).
VOIP has alot of advantages . . . mainly, it is very adjustable . . . to meet your needs.
Digital and VOIP are much different issues - traditional circuit-switched communications depends on relatively centralized intelligence on relatively old-technology switches, and while phone calls _do_ turn into digital when they hit the first telephone exchange, that's 64kbps digital, and it mostly stays that speed except for international circuits where voice compression pays off. There are some VOIP services that use 64kbps, but it's pretty common to compress to 8kbps or so. Depending on how you handle IP headers, this can inflate to ~25kbps without header compression or ~11kbps with header compression. Compressed voice doesn't sound quite as good as telco-quality voice, but one thing cell phones have taught the market is that people will put up with that, and your VOIP phone can sound just fine since it has a decent microphone and you're not using it in a car with traffic noise in the background.
The costs of switching equipment are substantially different - for VOIP, you do a database lookup at the beginning to find your destination, but after that, it's all IP routing, and routers have not only become dirt-cheap and scale very far, but all the heavy lifting really gets done by the CPUs at the caller's phone or PC, and the prices of wholesale internet transmission have been in total free-fall for a couple of years, especially including international transmission.
Another major change is VOIP-based PBXs, which have taken advantage of the PC hardware commoditization curve better than traditional PBXs have - if you're building a new office, there's usually no reason to use a non-VOIP PBX. It might or might not pay to spend the capital costs to rip out your old PBX - that depends a lot on features, which depends a lot on whether your old PBX was made by a stuffy clueless telco or by somebody who understood that open systems are critically important for their own developers even if they're not giving out the source code.
Here in the US, the big pricing anomaly for VOIP is that traditional wireline telcos charge about 2 cents/minute for delivering calls to a user, so a VOIP company has to either do per-minute pricing or else charge a high monthly flat rate and hope they win statistically, even though their costs of the long-distance part of the connection may amortize to 0.1 cents/minute. Also, a huge amount of the current long-distance switching infrastructure's complexity is to support call-center features for toll-free calling, which is something that people cared a lot more about when phone calls were 25 cents/minute than when they become 0.1 cents/minute.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you do your own VOIP and your own IPSEC, yes, you can prevent wiretapping. If you use a VOIP-to-Telco carrier like Vonage or AT&T, there might or might not be encryption on the IP segment (and you've definitely got no control over it), but they have to support wiretapping at the head end of the connection. If you do Skype, there's definitely encryption available, but the protocols are proprietary and closed so you've got no way to be sure, and SkypeOut is in a fairly similar position to other carriers. If you're using other types of emerging VOIP service providers, anything that the FBI can get its nasty little claws into has wiretapping features (hint - what's the difference between a wiretap and a 3-way call to a voicemail system? Encryption isn't going to help you there.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Don't forget a UPS otherwise you're still screwed if the power goes out.
From the parent:
Get a double-pole-double-throw relay. This basically connects one line through when there is power, and another when there isn't. Let the line from the Asterisk server go through when there is power, and the unmodified PSTN line go through when there isn't.
Maybe you should read mmkay? He doesn't need a UPS to make outgoing calls on this setup when the power is off.
The point is not the last mile. Many times downloads proceed at 6 kB/s when the link and the server at the other end are both capable of far more. In that situation, there is a choke point somewhere on the net. Your download bandwidth will be limited by the chokepoint. If you get more priority at the chokepoint, you get faster downloads. In the extreme case of your ISP being badly provisioned, the idea is to get a greater share of the T1.
... oh... an encrypted compressed movie being shared.
The article also held out the hope that this is the tip of the iceberg. Imagine videoconferencing in HD with stereo sound, half a dozen end-points. now 6-20 mb/s of bandwidth is about right. that is a reasonably attractive amount of bandwidth for a downloader. given multi-point connections, and a conference lasting a few hours, how is this different from a bit-torrent session?
Priority is priority. It will be abused. plain human nature. Now folks will say "but we won't let people do that" ! How? This will become a new hack. You've got NAT'ing firewalls at both ends, and arbitrary software (oh, you want to lock down MY computer?! ) hopefully, these streams will be encrypted, so how in your preferred deity's name will you be able to differentiate encrypted compressed multi-media conference from
This is way too hard a problem. It will never be cheap, the folks, like Vonage, that don't bother with it, will be far cheaper and kill anyone who tries to do QoS. Consumers will just learn that that is the way it is, and most of the time, it will be great, but the reliability will not be the same. tough. It's a converged network, that is what it means.
keep that thought. I want live in finland and want to phone my Aunt in Australia. What are the chances that they use the same ISP? you want QoS? What are the chances that whatever your ISP does will make the slightest difference once it leaves the realm? Oh.. the ISP's will need to co-operate and all be nice enough to treat eachother's QoS traffic with the respect it needs. OK, what's their cut? oh, you need to bill by the bit, oh, by the kilometer too, oh... welcome to the phone company's world. forget free calls, forget the "because it's cheap" argument because it won't be. Got that?
Now let's be Vonage. Forget QoS, don't bother talking to any ISP's. You get to market quicker, have far wider "coverage" (don't care who the ISP is), can charge less than half what the other guy does, and still make a killing.
I am in a company that began outsourcing to India 10 years ago. As such, we have already established a lot of global infrastructure. We save major ca$h using VOIP for India to US calls.
Also, many developing countries do not have reliable telco infrastructures. Since India began using VOIP, the quality of the calls has improved and the lost connections has dropped dramatically.
Perhaps this is a real-world example of how the original design goals of TCP/IP have improved communication. If you plan for unreliable communication, you can actually make it better.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
YOu mentioned you were in Japan already, so a lot of what you see as POTS "just working" is probably going to be stuff that isn't true in America.
Just for the record, I lived in the US (Maryland, near DC) for 21 years before moving to Japan, and what I said about my POTS experience includes (in fact is mostly) my experience in the US. I do recall a nightmare trying to get an ISDN line from then-Bell Atlantic at one point, but that was administrative, not technical.
The problem is not that the ISP's don't block their customers from doing it (I wouldn't want that), it is that some ISP's/organisations have publicly available SMTP servers that run unchecked of who or what uses them to send mail. This fact alone is one of the main causes of internet spam.
The difference is that QoS is something extra you have to tell routers to do, the same as packet filtering. NOT blocking port 25 is easier, but some ISPs do it anyway because spam is such a problem. They let you send on port 25 if you pay for a more expensive "business" connection than if you just want the el cheapo personal connection.