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."

Comments

Re:question regarding 411 and other services.

[calibanDNS]

I just switched to Time Warner's Digital Phone service, and here's the 411 (pun intended):

• I have Caller ID and Call waiting standard.
• I have 911. If the power goes out, the modem has a battery backup that's supposed to last 8 hours. The extra bonus here is that now I can browse the web for an extra 8 hours from my laptops if the power goes out. Once the battery on the modem dies, I have to use my cell or wait or the power to come back on (or rely on my UPS).
• 411 is like a US$0.03 charge each use, but that includes the operator making the connection.
• Standard operator services.
• No long distance charges in the CONUS.
• Cheaper international calls than with BellSouth.
• $10/month off my cable internet access.

Re:VoIP that interesting?

[Paska]

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.

LD providers run IP, too

[RealProgrammer]

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:

$ tracert.exe slashdot.org

Tracing route to slashdot.org [66.35.250.150]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 10.1.2.1
2 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 10.20.65.1
3 270 ms 221 ms 290 ms [redacted]
4 160 ms 291 ms 260 ms [redacted]
5 191 ms 230 ms 270 ms tbr1-p012301.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.9]
6 120 ms 290 ms 200 ms ggr2-p310.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.65]
7 170 ms 501 ms 200 ms dcr1-so-3-3-0.Chicago.savvis.net [208.175.10.93]
8 271 ms 250 ms 271 ms dcr2-loopback.SanFranciscosfo.savvis.net [206.24.210.100]
9 150 ms 270 ms 281 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [208.172.156.198]
10 200 ms 270 ms 231 ms csr1-ve243.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [66.35.194.50]
11 110 ms 291 ms 280 ms 66.35.212.174
12 slashdot.org [66.35.250.150] reports: Destination host unreachable.

Trace complete.

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.

Re:Still not for biz.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

There are commercial grade services and devices right now and have been available for a while. I am currently using such a service/device to patch in an AT&T multi-line Merlin system into a T1 service. Of course, I don't get ALL the cost benefits of VoIP, but the basic service is basically free for me and long distance is dirt cheap.

Latency, not bandwidth

[thpr]

Latency is the problem - getting down to the ideal of about 70ms regardless of where in the world you are going is key. This is VERY difficult today, but possible even through a very narrow pipe (128K) with quality that rivals (or even beats) current "carrier grade" service. Up to 200ms or so is still a doable conversation, over that and you're starting to get a situation where conversation breaks down.

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.