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The Continued Advance of VoIP
A reader writes: "With the recent VoIP ruling from the FCC, it appears that the playing field in the US is ready for take off. There's been some more coverage on that, but companies are begining to wonder about how to manage all of this - but PMC-Sierra (one of the big chip makers) has announced additional support for it."
The girl you fantasize about WON'T call you.
Time to sell your stock in long-distance companies...
My company has been on VOIP globally for a while now. Definitely reaching critical mass now.
The system would not work outside the Western world, though, with the spotty coverage, limited bandwidth and power (electricity) problems that do exist.
Unless more basic infrastructure impovements are made in providing decent bandwidth to these technologies, I'm not likely to enjoy VoIP terribly much.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Why is there so much talk about VoIP? Granted, it seems "neat" but haven't we been doing this for years with programs like Roger Wilco? Of course, we never had the convenience of a phone number being tied to the client, but still... I'll stick to my cellphone, as no cables are required.
C. Griffin
"Can I keep his head for a souvenir?" --Max from Sam 'N Max Freelance Police
This all seems very nice and all, however are there companies out there that offer voip with the services you typically get with a land line. example being caller id call waiting, 911, 411 and any operator service ? This is a genuine question as I am looking into this in the long run for the company I work with.
I am looking at becoming a niche VOIP provider for certain a few very small niches. THese include people in the US who have no other telephony or internet options other than satelite. I am amazed how a business can spend $6000/yr for telephone charges when they only have one line....
VOIP has a few problems and there are many environments where I think that conventional circuit-switched connections offer better value, but there are also times where it is completely indispensable.
However, the rise of VOIP will force, in many places, telecoms to cut costs and become more competitive. THis is extremely good. It will be hard on them because they are used to owning the lines and having monopoly power, and they are no longer a monopoly (they aren't in my county anyway due to the county-owned fiber network which allows a choice of telecom providers and hence lower costs and better choice).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
With the latency and limited upstream of consumer two-way satellite, is this really viable?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Just got the word today that we're installing a VoIP system for our new location. Seeing as this will not only server our user-base but our call center as well, it's a big deal. Coming from a completely Telco/PBX environment, we all scared and excited! Like a Slashdotter on a date! At least, that's how I envision it being....ahemm.
Latency on a satellite is not much greater than it is on a satphone which is the other option for these customers. Yes, there are problems, but with adequate QoS, it is viable for small businesses with 1-2 lines.
Remember that your main latency comes from the fact that you are bouncing data over lightwaves between the earth and geosynchronous orbit (approx 1/8 light second away). This means that for the 4 hops, you get approx 1/2 second delay which is annoying as all get out, but is a fact of any geosynchronous satellite communication.
Now for the upload speed. Depending on the codec used, this may or may not be a problem. We are looking at using GSM mostly because it has good compression and no licensing issues (as G.279 does). With GSM, I don't see limited upload speeds as being a problem provided that our equipment is providing adequate packet scheduling.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Here is an excellent question, and a notion of my own taxation philosophy.
Taxation should be necessary, relevent, and funds garnered from it reused in related affairs. Take, for instance, gasoline tax. This is (should) used to build and maintain roads, an act directly related to the consumption of gasoline. It even makes sense. The more gasoline you buy, the more you are driving, and the more wear you put on the road. Similarly, the more you wear the road down, so too should you aid more in repairing same.
Now, the question about taxing phone service and VoIP. Is this a necessary taxation? Is there some reason why it may be necessary for the government to seek money out of this business? Under what general principle is this money to be used? Are they attempting to compare sales tax (property acquisition) to service sales, something that does not seem to be taxed? (ie: IIRC, my cable internet bill is not taxed, and I don't recall any other cases where 'service' with no product is taxed) Seems to be to be a rather vague and specious reason to tax VoIP "just because" phone service was taxed. VoIP is a completely different breed of service, and by itself does not even require a service provider to function (direct IP to IP calls).
Screw the government if it thinks it needs to tax things just out of principle. This is how taxes should be driven, out of a need by the government to fund a related community-at-large project. I honestly don't see phone taxes as doing anything of the sort. If they can't come up with a good reason why VoIP needs to be taxed, and what that money is going to be used for, then they do not need to tax it.
There is no reason why you need these big companies providing services to you, unless it's just for convienience.
After all the internet is not a client server model, it's a peer to peer model. Meaning that when your computer is connected to the internet is as much as a part of the internet as any service provider.
That's why VoIP in it's current form: as a phone call over the internet will die. It's a fine replacement for POTS, but we are capable of so much more.
Full on video/audio connections are possible with the higher speed connections that DSL/Cable provides, also with the rise of WiFi networks in cities and such you will soon get the same connectivity on a hand-held.
My personal prediction is that Voip is a flash in the pan technology. A in between technology that will be replaced by something else within 10 years. POTS will outlast it, but only because of the needs of rural people, and that's were VoIP will end up being used, as a interface between the city people with easy access to wifi and rural communities with no such quick and cheap access.
I just want a simple multiplatform opensource dial by IP voice chat program without the wacky servers and fees.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Thinking of getting VOIP, but I have DSL.
I've heard conflicting reports that you have to have a valid phone # for DSL to work. Is that true? If so, I'm not sure if VOIP's cost effective because I'd have to keep my telco connection and the associated phone bill on top of the VOIP fees.
And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?
Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?
No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.
Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.
All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it's a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.
The next dickwad who says, "It's your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That's right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It's too easy, asshole, they're blue states. It's not your money, assholes, it's fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.
Let's talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It's fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that's right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that's just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.
But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ru
Most of the big long distance companies have their own fiber and use it to carry Internet traffic. Probably most of the bits in this post travelled over those very lines. Let's see:
AT&T. Savvis doesn't appear to be in the long distance business.Some smaller outfits just lease capacity or resell it, but they're agile enough to figure out what to do.
sigs, as if you care.
so what. no business is going to use some voip line (www.vonage.com) for services. I can see asterisk or cisco call manager for businesses but i just dont see why a business would use a consumer grade service. The local lines / LD savings arent that big of a price break for the chance of loosing business...Now if they would centeralize and use asterisk i can see that being good.
Regards, Steven Kalcevich
I just dumped Voice Pulse. I have had their unlimited plan since April. The quality was good for a few months but has been awful since August. This would happen with or without p2p network activity going on in the background. I even tried their lower bandwidth codecs.
VP also raised prices from $35 to $38 when Vonage dropped to $25! What price war?
I have had packet8 for a month. The unlimited service is $20. So far, quality is much better. More impressive is the good quality even with 12 KB/sec of p2p upstream on my cable modem.
Using it at 10$ for a line a month at $0.016 a min is cheep for cellphonish quality for a fone call or for a toll free... now if anyone here know of a muilti line sip iax (* compatible) that I can switch between lines easier I am game.. Also while your at it any decent DID canadian phone companies for voip would be nice.. Its good to see that the opensource community gives the big guys a run for there money.. I see alot of little voip peoiple out there and looks like they are enjoying alot of intrest right now... but who is it that I invest all the money into lol
What I want to know about VOIP is, how do you pronounce it?
Vojp? VeeOhhEyePee?
(Oh, and a gold star to whoever can tell me where this quote is from "I P Freeley". Want a hint? It is phone related.)
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Older corded phones worked fine regardless of local power outages. POTS is there as long as the copper is intact. When the VoIP folks figure out how to line-power everything from the CO, I'll sign up in a heartbeat.
How ironic. In the 1960's, there was a big push for all-electric homes (electric heat, electric hot water heaters, electric stoves) because nuclear power promised to make electricity so inexpensive, it wouldn't be worth metering -- we'd all someday just pay a flat monthly rate to keep the grid and the plants maintained.
Well, we all know how that particular story ended up. But who would have imagined, back in the days of 40 cent per minute interstate calling, that someday telephone service would become so cheap that it wouldn't be worth metering? Unmetered telephone service? Now you're just crazy talking!
I suppose it's somewhat ironic (in an Alanis Morrisette fashion, not true irony) that it's really just people problems, not technology problems, that we have to solve in order to make these things come true.
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What about bandwidth? From what im seeing, the required upload stream is at least 90KbitsPS+ http://www.voicepulse.com/learn/TechnicalRequireme nts.aspx and in some cases more(although they say 40K can be used with degraded quality). I cant speak for all the broadband users but in my own experience with comcast, they only offer 256K and i know of others that only offer as little as 128K up. Now, for the person who *uploads* alot ;), how is this going to work out? Is there a switching technology built in that allows the uploads on your computer to decrease when a call comes in? Now the obvious solution would be to get a faster internet provider, but sadly, that is all that is offered in my area [OC,MD]. The broadband needs to offer more before the masses(of geeks anyway) will join up with VOIP. Other then this lil problem, i think VOIP is amazing and will one day take over regular phone tech.
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
When I can talk to my friends in the US (who only have cell phones) from my Mac in the EU with having to become telekom engineer (or pay the zillion euro per minute charge I get from my cell) because none of us have land lines...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
GSM is very little of the bandwidth. Probably 10% of it. The rest is overheads - to keep it in real time, you have to do FEC and other nasty nasty things which require heaps of upstream.
You'll need about 100kbit/sec upstream for each line.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
You'd think the slashdot crew would have figured out how to automate dupe supression by now. Aren't they supposed to be perl wizards or something?
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
Please note for the record that I don't own stock of any IXC and certainly don't intend to buy any. :)
Note the 70ms comes from the time it takes for voice to travel across a reasonably large room - a delay the human brain will automatically account for without interpreting it as having a lag in the conversation.
What will further delay VoIP from entirely killing the PSTN, smong other things, are (1) The vendors (bad vendors!) are doing a Microsoft-like embrace-and-extend of SIP (the session initiation protocol used to set up a VoIP call) (2) Meeting regulations like CALEA (the law enforcement act that gives the government the power to tap the phones) (3) Truly connecting Voice Over IP "islands"... because how to you share IP addresses of phones and maintain privacy (like suppressing caller ID)... and the best savings come when you can remove the PSTN (public switched telephone network) entirely.
I doubt it. Location determination is very difficult. Part of the value of enhanced 911 is the fact that if you call and don't talk, the emergency dispatcher can still tell where you are. I'm not aware of any VoIP system that works with enhanced 911 today - although I'd be pleased to have anyone correct me if that's incorrect.
You might want to supplement your satellite based option with Champion Communications which is a quick and easy way to make some money from selling VoIP service. It is an MLM but the people who started it are known to me (they are also in Greenville, SC) and they have absolutely sterling reputations. Google for "Leighton Cubbage", "CTG", and "iOnosphere".
The service is not the cheapest but the quality is very good because the parent company is a PSTN company that has used VoIP for carrying their own traffic for about five years. They are also expanding into offering DSL and cell phone services.
Disclaimer: I sell Champion Communications products.
As far as disappearing to be replaced by something else, that's a problem too. An analysis of FCC and industry data will show you the lifetime on such telecom equipment is VERY long - in many cases longer than a decade. So it will last, if for no other reason than "something else" isn't that much better, so it doesn't cost justify.
The real key here is that POTS is in trouble. The number of lines is going down (due to wireless) and the corporations are in a rush to Voice over IP. Why? Becuase it's cheaper, and the amount of voice traffic is now dwarfed by the data traffic. Thus, you can carry the voice traffic on the data network and completely eliminate the voice network. You can even do it with high quality of service for the voice, and it works because it's such a small percentage of the total network traffic. Expect some big announcements over the next year.
Small business will be delayed - for the reasons you mention. However, in another post I mention that I think you will see AT&T and some of the existing IXCs (inter exchange carriers, aka long distance carriers) enter into the VoIP market in a big way. Expect them to use that as a lever to displace the local carriers if they can. It will come, but it won't be the little guys who bring it to the business world.
Phone sex will only cost 4.99 now instead of 5.99! Excellent
US$6000/year? A company I know of pays AU$3000/month for our phone service (eighteen lines). That's US$27300/year.
Go VoIP - nah. Our local telco is being _most_ unhelpful with VoIP, and continue to insist that ISDN is the way of the future. Riiiight.
For all the faults of the US telecomms system, at least you have some competition instead of a single private company (gov't owns 51 percent, but like to pretend they don't) that basically owns the system.
How is voice over IP any different than having a microphone in yahoo messanger? Except the fact that you get a phone number, and are able to access non voice over IP locations. A FCC ruling could clamp down on already free services like yahoo messanger who have been free for years! Think about it, FCC ignorance could control things like all voice communication on the internet (video game, messanger, etc).
This would of course be totally badass!
However at some point you have replaced the whole palm pilot or phone but oh well.
VoIP was mentioned briefly on Jeopardy as a $2000 clue today. "VoIP stands for this kind of Internet Protocol." "What is voice?"
$20 per month = Unlimited calling to US, Canada and Western Europe.
$35 per month = Unlimited calling to US, Canada, Western Europe, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, South Korea and Guam.
Hey Verizon ... Can you here me now?
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
Actually, you are wrong. Savvis does sell long distance but in the form of VoIP.
i ce s/voice.php
http://www.savvis.net/services/application_serv
There's not much difference in an LD carrier and any one of the big network companies nowadays. They both do pretty much the same thing--just in different markets. Thus the whole hubub. It's a bit of a blurry situation.
Now a consumer oriented LEC is a different story, but we are talking IP and LD now aren't we...
Show me an IP or LD carrier who hasn't already rolled out VoIP and I will show you an IP or LD carrier who is in a big hurry rolling out VoIP.
Like telecom companies haven't already cut costs??? Back in the dot com boom, a T1 of Internet could fetch $1500 a month. You can pick it up for about $350-500 now. Fact of the matter is, you stamp internet on anything and every drone under the sun wants it to be FREE. Enjoy your cheap phone calls while you can. It won't last. One way or another, the prices HAVE to go up because these companies will not be able to stay in business if they do not. It's just basic math and economics. Everybody talks about savings...well all those savings are great. One slight problem though...money people save as consumers is money lost to corporations. If services fetch less money today, and less again tomorrow, all that lost revenue has to be accounted for in some way. What will happen is the majority of these companies will go bankrupt within the next 5 years.
Go VoIP - nah. Our local telco is being _most_ unhelpful with VoIP, and continue to insist that ISDN is the way of the future. Riiiight.
For business voice lines, ISDN is *really* nifty. It is actually my technology of choice in this area, but nobody offers BRI's anymore because there is no reason for such small scale ISDN setups. Here the only ISDN we can get is PRI for about 600 USD/month. We haven't decided yet, but we may be offering actually ISDN->VOIP bridging, as it may end up being less expensive than reselling DS0 circuits for PSTN termination. ISDN will be here for a long time to come.
But regarding BRI ISDN (for residential and small business use), it is dead in the water. Telco's like it because it si a platform for the sales of other services. But nobody really likes it outside the telcos. If you only need 2 phone lines, why go with something as powerful as ISDN? I mean, that would be like putting a V8 on your lawn mower.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Back in the dot com boom, a T1 of Internet could fetch $1500 a month. You can pick it up for about $350-500 now.
Tell me what outfit in the U.S. is selling nailed up, fully dedicated, no bandwidth cap T1 lines for $350-500 per month. It is popular to quote numbers like $350-500, but all I've seen so far are those lines are capped at 10 GB per month or so. Full lines have been at about $1000-1500 per month ever since the dot com days, and have not trended down at all.
QOS at the router level (for a home/small biz) will do most of what you need. Cheap routers have quality of service settings now... or at least a Linksys WRT54G - with the stock firmware too.
Prioritize the voice traffic, and it should get whatever upstream bandwidth it needs. This won't do much with the downstream traffic, but for most folks it isn't a problem.
I say good riddence.
small biz will more likely use VoIP internally, with PSTN gateways for outgoing calls.
That's how we're set up, and it's WAY easier for IT to manage than a local POTS system. There's more too VoIP than cheap LD service...
Lingo has just been dreadful is my experience. Check their website for the list of free calling countries in western Europe. Then --on the same page-- use the International Rates calculator and see that there are per minute charges. I just discovered tonight that they are charging for calls to Western Europe, even if you're on the unlimited plan! I was charged for calls to Australia that were free when I checked their rate calculator seconds before the call. As near as I can tell they changed the rates several days later, and retroactively billed me! And did we mention the undertrained, overstaffed customer service who won't escalate anything? I'm going to use up my free months then find a VoIP company that can at least live up to their advertisements.
Don't get me wrong - I think IDSN is cool. It is _not_, however, hot new tech or the way the world is going. I expect IDSN to be around for a _very_ long time, and it's an eminently sensible technology to choose for current and future deployments.
Telstra, unfortunately, talks about IDSN like it's the new hot thing, and prices it to match. Until very recently they were pushing BRI IDSN as an "ideal broadband solution". Sweet gems in their business PRI ISDN pricing include timed local calls with an initial charge that's as much as a normal local call (local calls in Australia are normally flat-free untimed) and expensive timed data calls.
It looks like it'll be cheaper to get eighteen (!!) individual lines and use business-grade ADSL for 'net access rather than get PRI IDSN. Isn't that really rather lame?
It actually looks like it might be worth getting fibre trenched out to our premises as there's a fibre profider with a run nearby, then using VoIP. I'm not enthusiastic about that - IDSN is reliable. Phones need to be reliable. VoIP is unlikely to match the reliability of IDSN. On the other hand, ISDN from Telstra (pretty much the only option) is _most_ unattractively priced.
I've been doing a lot of research for the past 2 day and the Wisip phones are what your talking about. I've been drooling ever since I saw it.
Since SIP phones seem to be pretty damn cool (open standards, I guess companies like Lingo and Packet8 use proprietary hardware which can spell limited choices and hardware lock-in) Wisip phones seem to be the way to go (it helps that they've got that tech-fetishist look going on too!).
Pulver Innovatoins
Xiologix
An added bonus of using a SIP based service is you can use plain old computer hardware to connect too, which means even if you don't have the extra change for the Wisip, you can schlep your laptop with you and when you plug it into a (broadband) network you can access your phone, make calls, etc.
I don't know anything about any of that though, because I just started doing research. Maybe someone can jump in, I'm curious how well (or not) this all works.
So far my favorite company seems to be BroadVoice. Anyone have any experience? Is Vonage SIP based?
Quack, quack.
Is it possible to have the communication encrypted?
Will there be something like GnuPG for VoIP? Would that be legal for phone calls?
Think of all the terrorists and liberals out there!
But try Skype. It works on Linux and Windows, its basically like an IM program, Skype to Skype calls are free, you can IM other Skype users (its got all the basic IM features you see on a IM program), sound quality is about that of a cell phone, and computer to POTS calls aren't just cheap, their extra geeky.
Quack, quack.
Almost a year using our IP Phone and we love it. We just bought a standard phone with cordless handpiece and it plugs into the router. Nothing to do with the PC. The building has an optical fibre connection and so we have never had any trouble with data dropouts, voice clarity. There is however, one BIG problem. The telcos here (Tokyo, Japan) have no setup to redirect calls from outside the country to IP phones. We can call out, just no-one can call us. We figure they just can't work out how to make money out of it yet.
that the playing field in the US is ready for take off.
And the playing field is now approaching runway 1 ready for take off. Will all football players please fasten their seatbelts.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Yeah, it works fine behind a Cisco PIX firewall at least. :) That's what I use my Lingo VOIP with. Of course, if you don't forward the ports right it will cause problems.
I'd perhaps recommend against using a Pix though, as it doesn't support QOS.
My SO is in the UK... So for me, being able to talk as much as I want every month (think a few hours a day) is a huge bonus. On top of it my cost is like $20 a month for this...
My mobile gives me $0.06/min, but that isn't -near- as cheap.
in particular, backdoors to any encryption will be built onto the major chipsets. Make sure portable, open-source soft phones remain in your communications arsenal.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Tell me what outfit in the U.S. is selling nailed up, fully dedicated, no bandwidth cap T1 lines for $350-500 per month.
www.tds.net. Granted, we have our phone service through them also, which I think is why it's cheap and unlimited, but there it is.
What are the telcos choosing? for this?
This seems like such a natural fit for IPv6, don't you think?
It looks like it'll be cheaper to get eighteen (!!) individual lines and use business-grade ADSL for 'net access rather than get PRI IDSN. Isn't that really rather lame?
Here I can get a PRI, 20 DID's, and 5mb/s internet for approx $620/mo plus taxes. Remember that you can have 23 voice conversations over ISDN (it uses basically a T1, with one DS0 for signalling).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I was just trying to be helpful. You, are and asshole.
Quack, quack.