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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."
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.
(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...
Presumably, like other things that travel over IP, you could encrypt your calls against tapping.
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
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.
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.
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
There is no real reason why international dial-up calls have to be expensive and VoIP ones cheap. Once dial-up calls hit the first exchange (in most places) they turn into digital soup anyway.
If you define "most" as medium to large-sized cities in major industrial powers, then this is correct.
However, in reality "most" countries are relying on copper telephone systems from one end to the other. Some countries and territories don't even have real-time telephony unless an outsider brings a sat phone. Heck, there are parts of California where there is no land-line phone service -- only radio relays.
There are around 200 countries in the world, and in "most" places in those countries they are using 20 to 30-year-old technology and "internet" is something the kids do at university, not back on the farm.
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- 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.)
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.
Most telephony roll-out into third world and rural areas is based on digital. Approx 15 years back now I worked at Plessey. One of the projects there was making microwave-based phone links with the idea of being able to place a network phone booths in 3 world villages without having to roll wire etc. Apart from the cost of actually laying wire, there was a huge problem with the wire ending up being sold as scrap metal.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just a question - what *are* your non-cell needs? I haven't had a landline (other than a year where I had a stripped-to-the-bone line for DSL purposes) in about 5 years now, and haven't really felt the need at any point during that span. I'm curious why people maintain a landline.
Because I can't afford a cell plan that gives me 4000 minutes per month, and my company won't pay that much either.
Those of us who work from home, yet still need to collaborate closely with team members, spend a *lot* of time on the phone. With a good headset you can forget about the fact that it's a phone call and get pretty much the same effect as yelling over the cubicle wall: "Hey, John, what's the name of that class you wrote that refomats whozits into whatzits, did you commit it yet?"
And then there's conference calls... especially those 90-minute calls where your presence is required but your attention is not. I do three or four of those every week.
Actually, with at least one of my coworkers, I do use my cell phone quite a bit, because we both have Verizon phones with unlimited in-network calling and free long distance. Since I'm in Utah and he's in Massachussets, it's actually the cheapest option (or was, I just got Vonage service, so I can now call his land-line for free). For everyone else, however, cell phones are just way too expensive for the number of minutes I'm on the phone.
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There are a couple of point's I'm going to make in response to this.
Does that clarify my statement sufficiently?
> 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 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,
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The grandparent was merely pointing out that cell networks are easier to rebuild than fixed line networks - which, you'll notice, are also run by corporations.
Slashdot posts, like hurricanes, are not usually out to get you personally.
Mobile Carriers Ready Cells-On-Wheels in Case of Outages or Network Overloads
Government actually requires carriers to have these things, just for emergencies.
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..
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