Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
It's very interesting, you know why? It saves me over $1000/month on phone bills! I work for a US based company that is located in Australia. Before I was paying Hel$tra $1000US/month for all our phone calls to US/Canada and UK. Now I pay Broadvoice around $70US/month, and I get unlimited calls, I get features I didn't even know existed (E.g. Caller Name) and the best of it all, I don't have to pay Hel$tra one single cent. Also the quality over here is absolutely brilliant, and is far better then my Cell phone and local land line.
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.
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.
Lazy man's link to page that says it works behind 'consumer multiport router'. It's the 'alternate' method, not their 'recommended' one.
Probably hate the tech support with buggy piece o crap routers. (I've been admin'ing vpn for 1st time recently and TONS of cheap routers have problems.
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
It depends what state you live in. What you are wanting is called "naked" or "dry" DSL. It is available in GA and NC but not SC (yet). I don't know about other states.
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.
Got news for you - most long distance phone traffic is VoIP. The large Telcos all use the technology for their backbone systems, they just don't advertise it much.
Oh well, what the hell...
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.
You enter your address information as part of your Lingo configuration. That information is routed with the call to the appropriate 911 center.
You got me curious, so I checked my manual and it turns out that yes, I do have E911 support. Entering your location is part of the modem setup, which the cable guy handled (the manual does show how to confirm it, which I did). Thanks for the heads up, I'd be pretty upset if I dialed 911 while choking or something and they couldn't find me.
$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
Once everyone is on the internet, you'll just be able to "phone greg@home.com" and a currently non-existent protocol will resolve that to whatever communication Greg has on hand, by talking only with Greg's own equipment, not that of any provider.
Good thinking.
The protocol you envision has been around for a couple of years now, and it's called Session Initiation Protocol - SIP. It uses a URI like to find the party you are calling, and after it has served it's rendezvous function, the media is sent peer-to-peer via RTP.
There are also plenty of soft- and hardphones using SIP coming out, some even with video.
So, yes, if everyone were using SIP and the internet, the Telco's would go the way of the Dodo bird with their current business model.
Unfortunately, a lot of what is called VoIP these days uses SIP, but just to emulate the PSTN, often refered to as PoIP, PSTN over IP.
As long as SIP [terminals|clients|user agents|phones] don't allow URI dialing, the telcos will have it their way, and the VoIP industry will profit just like the telcos, using a business model based on artificial scarcity. So make sure whatever SIP phone you buy supports URI dialing.
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...