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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
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
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
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!
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.
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!!!
Once you try thier VOIP service, you'll love it, too. :)
(No, I don't work for them, just a very satisfied customer).
feh. stuff.
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
A basic feature of VOIP is that while you need some type of bandwidth for it to be available it does not have to be over any particular media, as long as the bandwidth and latency characteristics of the medium are adequate to support VOIP. This can be DSL, Cable, Fiber, or Wireless. DSL is simply a regular phone line equipped with the DSL Hardware at your home or place of business, and at the Telco switching office. DSL will work with VOIP, but so will typically a cable modem, or a WiFi connection to a high-speed backbone. In the first case, you need a phone line to get DSL to begin with. Most of the bandwidth on a DSL line is dedicated to data transfer, the amount of bandwidth dedicated to sending the voice data is only a small percentage, but brings in the lion's share of the revenue. In the second case, you can use your cable modem to run VOIP. No telco landline required, and you still get to have all the goodies of VOIP.
How the economics of VOIP work out for you depends on how you have your telephone service currently structured. If DSL is your only option for broadband, you are already paying for phone service. Unless a VOIP plan makes sense in terms of saving money in long distance calls or the like, then you probably won't save much money.
If however, you also have the option of getting a cable modem, or can hook onto a wireless connection to the net, then VOIP suddenly gives you the option of cutting the cord with the local telco. If you are spending $70 a month for a package of DSL, local phone line and long distance bundled together, then cutting the cord may suddenly make sense, especially if the marginal cost of getting cable internet is low, which may be the case if you already get cable in some areas.
Unless Verizon at least gets DSL to my doorstep soon, I will let their $65 dollar a month noisy excuse for a phone line become just another underground obstruction, and let the cable company bring me HBO, VOIP, and Broadband with the money I save.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
I say good riddence.