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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.
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).
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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.
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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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.
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.