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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."
Just incase... ...Here
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
Speakfreely had a gsm mode at 16kbps and sounded as good as your microphone was. You don't need 128kbps (that's overkill for voice) you just need a decent codec and about 16-24 kbps (mono).
But it's all about the money and the more channels you can cram on the bandwidth, more profit for them.
Why? As I recall, MP3, ogg vorbis, and the like aren't meant for compressing voice data. They're much better at dealing with music.
There are codecs specifically meant for speech, such as http://www.speex.org/.
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.
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.
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
I believe Voxbox, from a software point, does pretty much what you are looking for, now if you can just find someone to package it with small hardware platform for a decent price...
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.
Vonage offers 30, 50, and 90Kbits/sec. I use the 50 Kbps setting and I don't notice much difference over my land line. I have to say that I am also pretty happy with their service. My phone bill was $58/mo with no long distance, I save $43/mo with vonage, that alone covers the cost of my cable modem.
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.
Why wouldn't you just make a regular VoIP call to 911? Why would an emergency call need to have its packets classified any differently than any other phone call?
Here in Canada Primus is already offering VoIP service with 911 available in all areas.
Also, the VoIP hardware devices themselves perform QoS a both ends to ensure that the rest of your network traffic doesn't get in the way. Yes IPv6 has the ability to allow different priority of packets, as well as different modes such as isochronous (which will be useful for media streaming). But seriously, it's not really needed. As long as the hardware does QoS, the packets will just get routed along the way, and as long as your (and the servers) connections are fast enough... 911 is certainly no dillemma with VoIP.
"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.