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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."
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.
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
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
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!
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
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.
You aren't going to be able to reach the 70ms latency from any where in the world to anywhere in the world.
The speed of light is about 299,792km/s. The cicumference of the earth is about 40,000 km, so the time it takes light to go half way around the world is about 65ms.
Electrons in a wire and photons in fiber don't travel as fast as light in a vacuum and wires/fiber aren't layed in a straight line anyway. Add in encoding/decoding times, and delays caused by going through routers, and you are going to be lucky to reach 100ms.
Moore's law doesn't trump laws of physics.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
I've had packet8 for 6 mos or so. Its good except for the massive latency
That has not been my experience at all.
My first p8 call was to a friend to do a latency test. One person counts "1..2..3" and the other repeats the number as soon as they hear it. That gives the lead surprisingly good feedback on latency.
My sister uses Vonage and doesn't have this bandwidth problem, but she's in NY and I'm guessing there's a Vonage interface in NJ.
I should have mentioned that I am in southern Michigan. A friend who lives 40 miles away had both Vonage and VP. He dumped Vonage with extreme prejudice due to quality. He keeps VP over P8 only because VP offers a local number in his town.
For a couple of years, I used VoipBlasters and the open source Fobbit software to do my own voip between Seattle and Virginia. The quality and reliability were far better than any provider I have used to date. That codec rocked and used very little bandwidth.
What really seems to be lacking is quantitative info on the VOIP performance of various retail providers. The reviews I have read are extremely lame rah-rahs. I have done a lot of searches and there just isn't much good data on the web. I'd love to put together a website offering the info (since I love doing performance work), but I haven't figured out how to even cover the hosting costs. voipreports.com links to dslreports.com, but they don't even have a voip link on their homepage.