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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."
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...
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.
- 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.
There are a couple of point's I'm going to make in response to this.
Does that clarify my statement sufficiently?