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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."
Simplicity at its best!
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.
Just incase... ...Here
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
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.
Santa's suicide mission go!
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!
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/.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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 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.
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
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.
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