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."

Comments

Re:Progress

[Will_Malverson]

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.

And ironically enough, that's where VoIP could shine -- imagine transmitting your voice with 128kbps MP3 encoding. It might not matter quite so much for personal use, but it would kick ass for speaker-phone teleconferencing.

One prediction that I hope doesn't come true

[ShatteredDream]

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.