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VoIP Predictions for 2005
phoneboy writes "There was much progress in the VoIP world in 2004, though not as much as Voxilla predicted exactly one year ago. Will 2005 accelerate the pace of change? We at Voxilla think so. In our One Look Back, Two Steps Forward article, we take a peek back at our predicitions we made in 2004 and don the swami cap as we look boldly into the near future of the phone."
There was progress made in the availability but not a lot made in sound quality. My friend has a VOIP phone and when he calls my landline it sounds like he's calling from the bottom of a bucket. Keeps dropping out too. VOIP sucks cocks. Large ones.
Simplicity at its best!
Just incase... ...Here
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
eew man shoulders!
If only I'd bothered to create an account earlier, I might have been able to use mod point on this.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
What the hell does that have to do with VoIP!?!? But yeah. I will admit it. She is hot.
I don't like to sit. Sitting is for people who like to sit.
Well, while it may not mean much in a grand scheme of things, I can tell you that I have plans of setting up 3 offices with a VoIP system, due mainly to the cost of the competitors.
I will be using asterisk on linux. While not as feature rich as some of the other companies' offerings, it does have the benefit of being cheaper.
By an order of magnatude.
So, my prediction is this: If voice companies try to treat this as another cash cow, OSS alternatives ( like asterisk ) will boom, in both features and use.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
VoIP providers will be expected to conform to CALEA. The federal government will try to get VoIP providers to make their software fully wiretapable which will do one of two things probably. It'll either put open source developers using encryption at odds with federal policy or require that we all expose ourselves online.
You know it's sad when your father, someone who spent 27 years in the U.S military and federal law enforcement looks at you dead seriously and says that generally speaking the biggest lie you'll hear from the federal government is: "we're from the government, we're hear to help you." I'll never forget my dad reading about Carnivore and realizing that his reaction to it was probably a good example of why he retired from federal law enforcement under him. How we cheered when Carnivore proved to be a failure.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
you mean "he"
If only I'd bothered to create an account earlier, I might have been able to use mod point on this.
Instead, you'll have to wait and boost your karma through mirrordot karma-whoring. Oh well.
If you give vonage 128kpbs both directions it will be the quality of a cell phone. Not absolutely perfect, but well within the range of acceptable. I've spent hours at a time on the phone with vonage and let me tell you, its leaps and bounds above the good old days of dialpad.com.
So will VoIP be a big player in `05, you bet your ass it will. Considering mainly that landline telephones cost so much more and offer very little justification for it. With VoIP and cell phones, I predict a death for standard copper land lines by at least 2015.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I notice that in America, unlimited VoIP costs $25/month from Vonage. This is quite a sum of money, more than most of my countrymen make in a year. Here in Tirupathi I use VoIP but I use it from my computer using a wireless network card. There are many wireless networks in the nice parts of town and we can connect and use Skype. Much better than paying fortunes for commercial service.
Sadly after the waves came I have no one in the south to talk to but hopefully then will come online again soon.
Having seen smart people struggle to get Asterisk working (cool a system as it is!), I imagine there would be quite a brisk market for a pre-configured, low-power box running asterisk ready for the user to plug in some custom messages, and / or rely on existing generic ones. That is, something truly plug-and-play, providing your have at least one POTS line to which it can be connected.
Such a system needn't be *cheap* exactly in order to be quite a bit less expensive than typical PBXes, which are usually overkill for small businesses, as well as for any but the most elaborate homes. (Should be doable for a few hundred dollars, I'd guess.)
Or am I just missing that someone is selling such a beast already?
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
9-1-1 dilemma--what if there is an emergency & someone needs to use VOIP to call for help? Are we going to create "emergency" packets with sirens so all of the other packets will pull over? Does this mean that network traffic will get worse because all the packets will be on the phone? This sounds like a phony answer to a question packet with problems.
Maybe I might wireless broadband this year? Not likely since I'm not line-of-sight with the _only_ wireless broadband tower and that's only 8 miles away from me.
Paris Hilton has more paint on her than a house and looks like a drag queen. That's a "he" in my book.
...that cable companies are getting into the act. Here in New England, Comcast has been testing VOIP in selected areas of Massachusetts since last year. The plan is to start launching the product this year. This will be an interesting year for VOIP, what with more competition entering the fray.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
can't wait until phone, internet and tv are all delivered on the same line(or signal). imagine the hybrid apps that will come with that.
My consulting group works out of our home offices and we have our broadband/business line paid for by corp. Previously for long distance we were issued MCI phone cards which added up to quite a bill since most of our clients are all over North America. I was the first in the group to switch to Vonage and after seeing the potential savings VoIP has become standard practice in our group.
There have been some embarrassing moments with dropped calls in the middle of a conference call, but they have been few and far between. My only gripe with Vonage is the lousy router I was issued (Motorola VT1005V) which can crash if it is connected to a hub/switch with too many connections. Solved the problem by getting a good main router (Netopia R9100) and putting the Vonage router behind that with port forwarding.
So if you give Vonage 16x as much it sounds just as good?
Oh, will wonders never cease.
I signed up with Vonage a bit under a year ago. When I did, it was $34.99/mo for unlimited US&Can calling. Twice since then, they've dropped it $5/mo. I don't know if it's a matter of their costs dropping with economies of scale or to compete with the cable companies rolling out their own, but I must say that I love the reduction in cost without any reduction in wonderful service.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
"Prediction? ...Pain."
-Clubber Lang
Pricing advantages will be evened out when the individual states tax VOIP into oblivion. The Wall Street Journal had a writeup about state governors eyeing this as a real cash cow (cant re. which issue, between 20 december 2004 and 29 december).
I predict an option for the regular Cellular Phone with VoIP capability to transmit to you nearby vehicle with a VoIP to Cellular Network gateway. That way the Phone on hand doesn't use as much energy to transmit and doesn't have the fear to scramble nearby brains with radio electromagnetic signals. Car to Car networks woulds only increase the likelyhood of this prediction.
About 7 years ago I invested in VocalTec (VOCL). It was the first company out of the block for VOIP and founded the IP Telephony exchange to commoditize billing across international networks. Currently, it specializes in IP packet solutions to large scale vendors. Deutche Telecom is its largest customer.
As the article said, VOIP was just around the corner to riches. Some 7 years latter the stock has plunged I'm out about $30,000. The stock remains flatlined at about $1.40/share and I'm looking to sell at a loss for tax purposes (my patience has run out).
Anyway, I suspect that if VOIP does ever gets off the ground CEO's and other corporate board types and politicans and FCC bureaucrats will siphon off any reasonable profit made by ordinary investors regardless of how large the profit. But for now, at least I am comforted in knowing that they are not getting any richer than I am through their investment in VOIP.
Prosperity may be right around the corner, as the Republican Party campaign ad said. Its just that it is probably a corner of some slum in Bagdad where someone will take an unexpected shot at you (like ie VOIP wiretapping by our new police state masters, who no doubt will make a profit by summarizing calls for sale to corporations who wish to know what kinds of products you are likely to buy so they can send VOIP spam; insiders I know say Karl Rove's gang can already tap into the conversations via Echelon of any democratic party operative in near real time regardless of the phone they are using, so I'm no longer surprised at anything in this area anymore). Its just as well the new torture directives will allow only "severe pain" rather than "excrutiating pain".
I'm not holding my breath for riches any more. I'm holding my breath due to the stink of such silly PR-type stories.
I also predict that business class phones will become more popular in the home with features like xfer, speaker, conference calling etc.
Video phones will pick up slightly by the end of the year, but for the most part they will still be too expensive for general consumer use. I think cell-phone style hands free kits will be more popular than video phones in the short term.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
voip phones that look, *sound* and feel like regular phones.
...come to think of it, why do we have cord heatsets for (regular) cord phones and cordless headsets for cordless phones?
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
filth goes in the garbage, not on the teevee.
For example, the network in one building (government contract on low bid) split the CAT5 pairs: 2 pair to each wall port. (Y'all can argue the technical feasability of using 2 pair instead of 4; but,) In order to implement VOIP in that building, new CAT5e wire must be run to each office. This is a cost which the administration is having a hard time understanding when the building is only 10 years old. (No, we are not going to just re-unite the pairs and put a cheap unmanaged switch in every office.)
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Let me know when you and your rich urban tech buddies take the cash being offered for wireless connectivity that is sitting begging out here in the hinterlands for decent broadband with no copper involved. Been hearing about it for years, ain't seeing it yet. The areas of the nation that HAVE broadband and wireless got it now,overlapped and competetive, the rest-no one cares about it, and it's millions of people. We get copper pair dialup and that's it, so I don't see it going away like you do. The options are satellite based broadband, very expensive hardware, very expensive by the month with limited usefullness, or dialup.
Heard slashdot story rumors of 802 whatever blah blah blah and sky-fi and wi-fi and wimax and wi-turbo and blimp delivered and meshed with your peers and 2G and 2.5 g and 3G and G this and that and quantum teleportation implantable wearable supercomputer games and chat videophones and flying cars and such impressive market speak noise like that, but no real action except in a few places. Partly, I think anyway, because it's changing so fast, who really wants to invest in expensive gear and renting tower space or building towers and everything like that when two months later there's another "new shiny industry standard" and technique that "looks better"? The short term profits based VC loot is going to the same old top 100 or 200 major urban areas and short distance suburban leakage and that's about it. I mean, we have a cellphone and the local company loses our subscriber name every month. I have to literally go through and help them find out that yes in fact we have authorised service we signed up for a long time ago and here please take the money and they fail it. And this is an alleged "big player" verizon. I asked them about cell based data service,and get a blank stare at the customer service desk, they have *no clue*. I say "internet" and they don't get it. I've checked with T mobile and speakeasy and the others in the area, bottom line is if you can get basic talk on a plain vanilla cellphone you are lucky. You ain't getting any broadband, wired or wireless, no one is interested in it. And I am only an hour or so outside Atlanta, this isn't like it's some place in the middle of the amazon or anything.
So, just not seeing any "high tech" replacing plain old copper telephone wires all over real soon, not every place it ain't. But I'll keep reading the stories about it, same as I did the popular mechanics stories in the 50s.
A simple process called a legislative amendment. All it would take would be for some government-lovin member of Congress to attach a rider to a piece of legislation such as an appropriations bill and all of a sudden, VoIP is covered under CALEA. It wouldn't be that much of a stretch either. They'd just call it "bring CALEA into the 21st century" and most people would just give two thumbs up and not care.
Btw, with a court order, all of those protocols you listed can be intercepted.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
"Skype's technology is quite good"
Talk about damning with faint praise!
Skype isn't merely quite good: it's a global sensation whose success is outstripping every other VOIP program available. And it deserves every bit of it. Superb qualitity, clean interface, cross platform and simple for Joe Average to set up and be using it in seconds. And totally free for computer to computer users. This is the kind of innovation that makes a laughing stock of Microsoft AND Apple. Even their excellent iChat isn't cross platform - and should be.
Anyone have any word of the state of prior art for that? I know some guys who are invested in it(watched their stock value plummet %80 this year), who keep trying to tell me they're going to clean up. I disagree, but I'd love to find out how it's looking in the preparation of sinking that patent. Anyone have any info?
I use a VOIP system at home, as my girlfriend is Eritrean and it costs almost $2 per minute to call Eritrea from Australia.
VOIP is supposed to offer cheaper than phone services, but calling a third world country like Eritrea (where broadband doesn't exist and personal internet connections are illegal) makes a joke of VOIP. You have to connect through to landlines and these countries have huge termination fees. The cheapest phone calls to Eritrea (in northern Africa) are slightly cheaper with VOIP, but still way too expensive to make them "cheap" per se.
Anyone know a way around this problem?
I signed up for Broadvox Direct's unlimited plan - $20/mo to the US & Canada.
Got it all set up a few days ago. Quality is great. Apparently there was an outage (not sure how long, perhaps under an hour) on New Year's Eve, but I wasn't even home when it happened.
I can't really say I'm saving much money, as my land line is only about $15, and if I include long distance calls using my calling card, the total is probably still under $20. But with all the added features I get - some of which aren't available on regular lines - I've got no complaints.
Am I happy? You bet!
Beetle B.
I will talk to someone somewhere using VoIP... oh wait I do that now...
this actually is not "stupid."
cell phone companies nearly never have unlimited weekday daytime plans during business hours, so a business call to Canada for 2 hours would be TAD expensive.
with 3G data plans being unlimited data at USD 80 / month, a corporate America company can simply give a traveling businessman a 3G data card, sign him up with the $80 plan, and make calls to Canada and heaven forbid, India, for as long as he wants.
I want to buy a GSM cell phone terminal that has a regular RJ-11 jack and convince my cell phone company to add it to my plan. Then, using the "unlimited talking to other people on the same cell provider" I will dial my home computer and make calls through an unlimited vonage account. BINGO unlimited cell phone usage for about $50/month. With asterisk, you can create an extension that starts a regular ppp session (you specify the parameters) so I could also have unlimited dial-up speed internet too
As of early 2005 VoIP will be legal in South Africa. There are a lot of refences at google. Now, if only we can get broad band Internet at affordable rates...
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Skype will come to Nintendo DS, 10,000,000 little kids will get it.
:P
Their parents will be forced to get it to maintain communications.
The telico's will fall and everything will be nice
except in some small isolated segments. There likely never will be (in a general sense) with current methods, as it would entail trusting end users to mark their own packets. If you can do that, is anyone who knows how to do so _NOT_ going to mark all of their own stuff for high priority? QoS works in private networks. On the Internet, you take your chances, just like everyone else. The real issue with E911 is location services. If you can place a call from a laptop, which can be moved anywhere, then a means of identifying physical/geographical location and then using that info to route 911 calls to the proper local authorities along with that location information is needed.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I am only an hour or so outside Atlanta, this isn't like it's some place in the middle of the amazon...
No, you're just in the south.
"Alright, no more slaves. But we still don't have to read books!"