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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!
Just incase... ...Here
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
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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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.
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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/.
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
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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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