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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."
But VOIP can be used for really useful things too. One of my mates has set things up so that when you call his house you can press a button to connect to a specific extension, without the need for installing a half dozen phones in his house. He's rather ambitiously considering the possibility of connecting it to a Teamspeak server, just for pure silliness value. VOIP is very useful, IMHO.
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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.
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How does CALEA factor in when the connection doesn't touch the POTS system though?
Seriously, if they can require *any* VOIP to be tappable, where does it stop? Email? web traffic? IM?
Almsot everyone I call ahs remarked on the quality of the call, not the lack. You don't provide any info but your friend really wants to try locally recording his/her voice to see if the quality there is good. If it's not get a USB headset. If the quality is good they need to look at their net connection and software.
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
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?
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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.
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/.
Speex specializes in low bandwidth voice.
If you have 128kbps to throw around, speex is overkill. MP3 may have been designed to compress music especially well, but it's held up quite well as an all-round codec. (Though there might not be much masking noises - like loud beats that obscure other sounds - in speech, the spectral range is quite limited, and MP3 picks up on that.)
And who says VOIP is for voice only? It's not uncommon for me to want to let a friend hear some music that's playing on mtv or my computer. With speech-optimized codecs, it comes out crap on the other end. Even on-hold music sounds mostly like silence and some blips on a cellphone. In fact, I've contemplated using the GSM codec to identify the speech part of music, so I can use it to produce "karaoke"/instrumental versions of music..
I wonder if there's a software upgrade that enables telephone companies to use 64/56kbps ogg (though obviously mono) codecs instead of G.711/G.723.
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