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PC Magazine's In-Depth VoIP Review
Voipster writes "PC Magazine has completed their in-depth review of six VoIP providers. The Editor's Choice award goes to AT&T's CallVantage service.
Unlike other reviews that consist of making a few phone calls, PC Magazine uses Minacom's PowerProbe 6000 VoIP testing equipment which provides hard numerical scores for a DTMF detection test, a fax transmission test, and two voice quality tests, PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) and VQES (Voice Quality Evaluation System).
However, after a very detailed analysis of each provider, the calculated scores don't carry much weight as they award AT&T's CallVantage the Editor's Choice and four other services strangely tie for second place."
What will happen to the phone companies that offer dsl and phone service when the cable etc.. companies start offering VOIP. I myself know that when my cable ISP starts offering voip im dropping my phone service from the local provider. Anyone Else?
When I worked at MCI in tech support I was aware of a VoIP service they offered and were planning to expand...
"However, after a very detailed analysis of each provider, the calculated scores don't carry much weight as they award AT&T's CallVantage the Editor's Choice and four other services strangely tie for second place.""
Could you elaborate further?
Hard-wiring additional phones will most likely require an electrician.
I don't know why they always say crap like this. All you have to do is go outside your house the to telephone box, disconnect your phone line from the local network (it's a good idea to leave a note saying that it should remain disconnected and tape the leads, just so it doesn't get reconnected...)
Once you've disonnected your house from the POTS, you can plug your analog telephone adapter into ANY telephone wall outlet in the house! This makes all of your phone jacks live with telephone service from your VOIP connection.
That is, unless of course you have DSL. In that case you should either use a 2-line adapter to run your VOIP phones on line 2, or change your DSL connection to line 2 and plug in your ATA normally.
Anyone else notice that only about 5% of the webpage is the actual article while the rest of it is cluttered in ads and other crap.
Also I love the fact that I read about 5 words and have to hit a next button for the next page. Imagine if magazines were like that? Read 3 paragraphs, turn page, read another 3, turn page...
eWeek has a MUCH better in-depth review of VoIP. I recieve eWeek in magazine print form, and it had a three-part series about VoIP. Also, they have an entire section dedicated to VoIP.
a) That article is 8 years old.
b) AT&T was never one of the telcos in question, or if they were, they were one of the first ones to change their tune. AT&T has been behind VoIP for many years, they were wise enough to see that it was the wave of the future and that it was better to embrace the technology and make money off of it rather than to fight it.
Personally, I'm surprised AT&T won in the Installation and Configuration categories. From what I recall, AT&T uses MGCP (rather than SIP, which everyone else uses), and SIP is much more NAT-friendly than MGCP. The people doing the testing probably never tested in a NAT enviroment, which is probably far more prevalent than a non-NAT environment these days.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
so I would have to keep a basic dialup. Anybody got a solution, ike a wireless repeater for a phone line?
After reading through far too many one paragraph webpages, clicking every five seconds, I have to say that my overwhelming impression is that this is still pretty rough and ready technology.
The lack of a consistent way to connect with real world telephone systems, the sketchy support of 911 services, and the inability of the competing VoIP services to interact make it look as if it will be at least another year before it's viable for most people.
In particular I can't see abandoning a hardwired phone line yet. Internet is still too prone to outages and other problems. What happens when you lose your telephone service because some idiot has launched a DOS attack on Vonage or the Verizon VoIP center?
Or when you lose your main business phone service because a mistaken RIAA takedown notice causes your ISP to shut down your Internet connection?
Until the VoIP services can match the traditional phone companies for reliability and services they won't get my money.
(I admit that Verizon pretty much sets the standard below which no phone service could ever drop, but you get my point...)
Three Squirrels
Why is there no Skype review? This is one the hottest new voip phone services around, I use it for all my long distance calls and all my friends with relatives in Asia and Europe use it. This article seems like it was paid for or something by the big companies. Is "adverprop" a word? If not, it should be.
Striking hard against barbaric Chinese society is the only way to advance democracy and human rights. Here, "Chinese" refers to anyone from mainland China, Taiwan province, or Hong Kong.
To understand how inhuman Chinese society is, consider the following list of donations to the tsunami relief effort.
1. USA, $350 million plus hundreds of millions of dollars in indirect aid (per the military rescue effort in South Asia)
2. Japan, $500 million
3. Australia, $810 million
4. Norway, $183 million
5. China (including Taiwan province and Hong Kong), $80 million
As you can see, Western society is, at least, 1 order of magnitude more compassionate and kind than Chinese society. We can literally measure the amount of compassion in dollars.
Note that Norway has only a population of 4.5 million, is much smaller economically than Taiwan, and does not enjoy the special business privileges that Taiwanese companies enjoy in China to reap billions of dollars of profit in the Chinese market. Taiwan gave a measily $7 million, and Norway gave $183 million.
What is "going down" here? Chinese society is barbaric.
There is a great deal of variability in VOIP provider performance. Unfortunately, I don't think the carriers are cooperating (with tools) in making it clear where the problems are. Whether on their networks, PSTN gateways, etc, or broadband ISPs. They could do a lot to clear this up. Though the potential for the finger to point at them is a reason for them not to do this.
VOIP quality must be measured over time. How is the performance at 8PM EST on Saturday? How many drop outs on a 1 hour call?
This gets more complicated as ISPs compete for service. I know of someone at Cox who was intentionally messing with VOIP provider traffic (and laughing about it).
I switched to Packet8 in September after using Voice Pulse for 5 months. Voice Pulse call quality had become embarassing, even after trying their higher compression codecs. "Mom, can you hear me??"
Packet8 quality has been excellent (much cheaper too). All this on Comcast. I can even run P2P at 10KB/sec upstream with P8. VP was problematic with no P2P.
A friend who lives 50 miles away has tried Vonage, Voice Pulse and Packet8. They all pretty much suck for him. He is on Comcast but it is former TCI infrastructure.
He agrees that the best VOIP he has ever had were when we use Creative Labs VOIP Blaster between Seattle and Virgina for over a year.
Voice Pulse tech support was useless when it came to outages (yes, they had lengthy outages) or performance problems.
My rule of thumb for VOIP is to be prepared to drop them if performance is bad. Don't waste your time. Don't get caught in a contract or a situation that will be expensive to get out of.
And don't become attached to the phone number. VOIP is a commodity, treat it as a commodity.
As these services are running on the Internet, though, they are susceptible to latency, distortion, and other factors that can lower performance and sound quality.
Glad that the reviewed fee-based services aren't using the Internet as well.
Right now there are just too many variables to rely on a review of these services. All they do is give you a starting point. You may be able to use them to decide if some of them are lacking features that you require.
I think you should pick a couple that the most people had luck with, and use their free trials. If they don't work well for you, send back the equipment.
For example, I tried out Packet8, and it didn't work well for me. It does however, work great for others. I sent it back, they gave me back the money.
I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it when trialability is high.
Here's my review of Skype: no charge to use (for now) for Internet only communication, closed source, but it works very well on UNIX clones (at least on Linux and FreeBSD w/ Linux emulation) as well as Microsoft operating systems.
However, both I and my friends noticed that Skype makes a number of highly suspicious encrypted connections to sites in Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates. If that is not enough to make you shudder you should know that Skype is made by the infamous Swedish-Danish duo Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who are also the makers of Kazaa. That's right, they're the same guys who infested Kazaa with adware and spyware and the same guys who used the DMCA to sue the Kazaa Lite guys for releasing Kazaa Lite, the adwarefree and spywarefree Kazaa client.
People claim that Skype sports no adware, but the fact that those highly suspicious connections to those sites are not even mentioned anywhere on the Skype site makes me believe there is a strategy in place to deploy adware, spyware and to even (ab)use Skype clients to act as unwitting spam proxies when the right time comes. Imagine 20 million users each unknowingly sending out 12 spam emails an hour. Launching a spam campaign with impunity has never been easier. As if that was not enough, the infamous duo based their new venture in Estonia. Why? Because of lax IP and privacy regulations, excellent Internet infrastructure, cheap labor ($300 a month for an experienced programmer) and proximity to Sweden and Denmark. Do you still feel good about using Skype?
I've had unacceptably bad audio quality on my Vonage line the past week or so. Though it's hard to tell - over the past year of service, I've had enough problems that my frequently-calling friends probably don't mention it anymore, and the problems almost always affect their reception, suspiciously sparing my reception entirely. After a couple of days I emailed tech support, got an email offer to troubleshoot over a day later, and my immediate email response supplying their requested windows for troubleshooting sessions during the next couple of days went unanswered until past the windows. Then my followup was answered with an apology, but they dropped my response to that with new windows. I haven't heard from them in several days, though they must know there's an outstanding problem; since their Telephone Adapter dropped dialtone entirely yesterday, I haven't heard from *anyone*, and the lack of activity/carrier should trigger something.
Even their service that rings my PCS mobile while also ringing my Vonage "landline" has started flaking out. And the standard voicemail problems (mostly delayed/dropped/phantom message notifications) continue, though mostly in theory with no calls. Vonage was a great test of the VoIP concept. It's about time to switch to a system that offers something at least approaching the basic reliability of the old NYNEX residential circuit, even if I run the server myself over my redundant cable/DSL connections to my home. If there were a company reinvesting its revenue in IAX datacenters for uptime, I'd jump into my own Asterix server right now, and phase out Vonage. Maybe this review's results will withstand "corroboration testing" research on the Net, but I'd rather get a system that I can fix myself, or hire a contractor to work on. At least it beats slamming the phone down on the table.
--
make install -not war
I got Vonage a few weeks ago at a new house where I had no intention of paying for a landline (went from DSL to cable). My wife was pissed after we learned that our entire end of the cul-de-sac is in a cell hole from hell. We couldn't make/receive cell phone calls for longer than 2-3 minutes in our home. Oops!
So, we debated for 1-2 weeks after we moved and finally got Vonage. Forthwith -- the pros/cons from a new user:
VONAGE PROS:
- easy setup (took 10 minutes to install Motorola VT1005)
- call quality is good so far (using QoS on a Linksys WTR54G router w/ voice terminal BEHIND router)
- no trouble dialing most local and long distance #'s
- straightforward billing
- very clean web interface
- nice basic features
VONAGE CONS:
- voice mail is choppy/hard to hear over the phone
- hard to find the better-reviewed Motorola VT1005 (Radio Shack tried to make me ACTIVATE IN STORE???)
- instructions for using services are in FAQ format mixed with a lot of technical installation stuff
- basic features are limited compared to AT&T
Now, I got Vonage, and then the next day after telling my boss about it, he got AT&T Callvantage for his home business line. He let me call in and access his web-based interface.
AT&T PROS:
- SUPERB feature set -- many more features than Vonage
- web-based interface integrated with phone (click-to-dial -- no outside apps required)
- call quality is good from boss' overloaded DSL connection (some servers behind his router)
- faxing is officially supported, from what I could tell (have to jerry rig it sometimes with Vonage)
- voicemail interface is really powerful
- automatic phone book setup based on incoming calls that become part of account (click on # to add it after you ID the caller)
- WebEx-ish conference call scheduling/notification feature
AT&T CONS:
- web-based interface is buggy (Javascript errors w/ FireFox -- no problems with MSIE)
- cost is higher
- really cool features aren't included standard -- expect lots of side charges
So far, my boss likes AT&T for his business line. He's thinking about getting all of us AT&T voice terminals for our small business. The conference calling costs $.35/minute for 10 people, which isn't really bad, I guess, considering that you're doing it from your own network + an outside call-in line from AT&T.
Vonage seems, to me, to be good for the home. It's simple and works, but I've read many a report of bad customer service and other weird issues. If you don't have to have the features for a business, then it's probably a better deal, but AT&T CV is close with only a $5/month difference for a more fully featured unlimited calling plan.
I did my research on Vonage at http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/voip before buying in. The regulars in the forum are very helpful and have a lot of diverse consumer-grade VoIP experience. For example, I learned that, in my new house, I can unwire my outline phone connection at the box and then plug in the Motorola VT1005 into a jack inside the house to power my phones. Going to try that in the next 2-3 days, I think, barring weather issues.
IronChefMorimoto
Not just funny - but biased too. Price does not all come from the monthly fee or the one time installation fee. International calling is where the non-telco VOIPs shine. For example: ATT charges 60% more to the UK vs. Lingo. ATT 5c/min. vs. Lingo's 3c/min, Vonage is also 3c/min to London.
We tried VoIP from Verizon in November 2004. One important thing that the article failed to mention is that you still have to maintain a regular analog line (and the associated cost of that line) if you have certain services (such as Direct TV) that use an analog line. We decided it was worth the price anyway, so we gave it a try. But we ultimately had to switch back. The VoIP translator provided by Verizon was supposed to grab a random IP when in use, but it always seemed to grab the IP of our webserver (hosted on the same network). We couldn't figure out why this was happening and no one at Verizon could help either. So we cancelled it and went back to the analog line. Interestingly, Verizon didn't want any of the equipment back: apparently once you configure it, it's worthless to them. (?)
No, and frankly never have due to its origin
Can you recommend any free service that has better software//available hardware?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I don't really see the point of testing all these features for different VOIP providers. In reality, the hassles we've experienced have all been with our broadband provider. If broadband service goes out, you lose your phone service. The most frequent thing for us, with Adelphia cable modem service, is actually not that the whole neighborhood loses cable modem service for a while (doesn't seem to have happened at all in recent years), it's that our cable modem somehow loses its sync, and we have to power cycle it. This is a minor pain, because we have three boxes that have to be power cycled in a row: the router, the modem, and the Vonage box.
Find free books.
your numbers are inaccurace (or badly out of date)
I think AT&T paid someone at PC Mag...
Poorly written, and comes across as an advertisement for AT&T and not an unbiased evaluation.
If you want Vonage, a great alternative is Earthlink's Unlimited Voice. They are reselling Vonage service. Same pricing yet no equipment charge and the first month is completely free (beer). No $$ changes hands till after 30 days, don't like it? Cancel and no charge as long as you return equipment. http://www.unlimitedvoice.com/
From the story: "... the calculated scores don't carry much weight as they award AT&T's CallVantage the Editor's Choice and four other services strangely tie for second place."
My opinion: Be very careful about anything you see in PC Magazine. My experience is that generally the ratings are paid ads. Generally, I have found, they know the winner in advance, and pick contenders that they can rate lower.
Here's evidence: Can you find a better VOIP service than BroadVoice? (NOTE: Not BroadVox.) Why didn't PC Magazine rate that company?
It seemed to me that there was a time when PC Magazine began selling their ratings, and in the years after that the Magazine became much smaller very quickly.
Other fake comparisons on the Internet:
1) Telephone calling cards,
2) Price comparison web sites. The comparisons are just ways of convincing you to pay more. It always seems that the apparently completely honest Froogle shows lower prices.
I tend to believe they have made some mistakes in the setup of their tests since I know of several people who have AT&T's CallVantage and had to switch to other VoIP providers(Pulver FWD, Broadvoice, etc.) for better service.
Then, prove that they are inaccurate. Put up or SHUT UP.
You judge a society by its foreign relief donations? That is inaccurate on so many different levels. Not to mention you are comparing developed countries with a developing one, nobody says China is as well off economically as Japan or USA. Please be a little less ethnocentric with your arguments.
Afterthought: If you sign up for BroadVoice, it won't hurt to enter this number in the "Referred By" field: 5039145841
From the BroadVoice web site: Compare Broadvoice, Vonage, and AT&T.
Can you recommend any free service that has better software//available hardware?
Well, I'm still researching the options, but I can give you a few pointers. First of all I have to point out that interoperability is one of the major issues for me, I use mostly FreeBSD and Linux and I want to be able to use the software to talk to my Microsoft-infected friends as well. The options so far seem to be:
OhPhone: free to use, open source, based on OpenH323, which means it works with other H323 software (well, at least in theory). I've used it on FreeBSD to talk to a friend who used Microsoft NetMeeting and the sound quality was absolutely horrible regardless of the codecs used, I could not even understand what my friend was trying to say. I would highly advise you to stay away from this product.
KPhone: free to use, open source, based on SIP, which should make it possible to use with friends who use MSN messenger (I know!) through a SIP service like sipgate.de or similar. I have yet to test this...
On a sidenote, I find the review by PC Magazine to be really superficial, they did not even bother to do proper research, let alone test the available software thoroughly. Just take a look at this paragraph from the page on Skype:
Skype is the clear category winner for its wide array of communication options, lower per-minute pricing than Dialpad, and a clean, usable interface that worked consistently.
Clean interface? Anyone who's used it for more than 30 minutes knows that the GUI gets messed up to the point where you don't know if you're still on the line and sometimes you cannot even click any buttons, you have to just kill the client and restart it.
The service works with both Windows and Mac OS systems, and you can voice-conference with up to five people or conduct multiparty chat sessions.
Why is Linux not mentioned? And why do they not even mention the fact that Skype provides AES encrypted communication that employs 1024 bit RSA to negotiate symmetric AES keys? Even an average user would be able to write a more detailed review than this, this is pathetic.
I came to the same conclusion: My opinion: Be careful about PC Magazine
Skype uses other users as proxies to allow people to talk even when both parties are behind a NAT/firewall that doesn't allow incoming connections. The reason you are seeing those connections to strange places is probably that you are being used as a proxy for somebody located there. Conversations are end-to-end encrypted, so it should not be possible for the proxy to intercept the discussion (I say should because I have not reviewed there security, and I have questions about how well there distributed index system could stand up to MITM attacks).
I'm not saying that it wouldn't be better if it was a standardized open system, but in this case you are just being paranoid.
The Taiwanese enjoy special business privileges (in mainland China) that are denied to Americans. Taiwanese companies, as a consequence, have reaped billions of dollars of profit in mainland China.
Tiny Norway, which has both a smaller population and a smaller economy than Taiwan, donated $183 million to disaster relief. The Taiwanese coughed up a measily $7 million.
What is "going down" here? Chinese society in barbaric.
Of course they're inaccurate and out of date. The number given totaled the US contribution at $350 million. Private contributions to the ARC alone have exceeded half a billion dollars.
But BroadVoice gives you free calling with the $25 per month plan: My opinion: Be careful about PC Magazine.
I've been watching the evolution of VoIP for the last few years as it will impact my job (automated, phone related equipment) and I've noticed that there is an absence of discussion related to the impact of VoIP on speech recognition related telephony functions.
Audio drops seem to be a common problem poor home VoIP connections. Audio drops currently play havoc with speech recognition rates. While there have been a lot of advances in the technology for dealing with limited bandwidth and a variety of noise issues (issues related to cell phones or outdoor use), the improvements for VoIP have been slow to arrive.
Most of the existing focus was VoIP at the business side where quality could be controlled to some degree (or support for poor quality networks could be limited). But VoIP to the home creates a new set of problems. Worse, unlike the older cell phone cutouts that tended to be bidirectional, callers don't know when their speech is being dropped leading to frustrated users.
The technical articles are no better. All discussions of VoIP quality are left to how humans interpret speech, not machines.
They apparently use time travel in their review process. From the Lingo review:
Lingo
REVIEW DATE: 02.08.05
Thanks for the interesting reply
I'm in the situation that most of my friends have cable or DSL broadband and it makes a lot of time to start suggesting they use VoIP to save money by calling computer-to-computer. The clash between Skype (closed, but popular) and SIP (dozens of implementations that don't always talk to each other) and H323 (proprietary clients (Netmeeting, iChat) but poor reliability between versions...)
hmm
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Consider one thing: when you examine the information, you will see that BroadVoice is the best. It's easy. BroadVoice provides Free Calls, as in "you don't have to pay a per-minute charge to other countries".
Yes, it is shilling, but it is also an excellent service to consider. No, I don't work for them. What I don't like is a recommendation that is not the best.
and service has been fine. Getting the LinkSys PAP2 phone adapter and my LinkSys BEFSX41 firewall/router working with my static IP was a challenge. In fact the PAP2 didn't work till I changed to DHCP behind the firewall, then it went like a breeze. The first Vonage tech I spoke with for an hour and a half didn't seem to know this and thought the phone adapter was defective, which I took back to the store and got a replacement. The second guy was more helpful, obviously. I like the service so far, although I haven't used voice mail yet. The $4.99 a month toll free number option is a no brainer for business.
I'd been considering Vonage vs. Broadvoice for the longest time. My preference was toward Broadvoice because it was open and would mesh with an Asterisk PBX, but seeing a cheap Moto VT1005 at Fry's one day caused me to give Vonage a go. That was in July, 2004, and I have had their service since. (I still plan to do the Broadvoice/Asterisk thing at some point, and might even keep both providers so as to have a backup). I've been pretty happy with Vonage, though calls to Canada have sometimes been spotty at the Canadian receiving end. I did not drop my Verizon POTS line, and even kept the international plan I had: calls to Canada were 5 cents a minute instead of 75 cents (ouch!) and the four dollars a month wasn't that much of a big deal. The idea was to keep the POTS like as backup (mostly for 911). I figured I'd save about $60-$80 a month in LD charges and that would easily pay for the VoIP service. I live in (360) and work in (425). Washington intra-state rates are around 11 cents a minute, with a penny discount (whoop-de-freakin'-do) when subscribing to Verizon's international plan. I got a Vonage (425) number to (a) increase my local access area for friends and (b) so as to make calls from work home local to work (not that they care much as long as personal calls aren't excessive). My setup is a bit unusual. I wanted DSL with a static IP, and no nonsense TOS: I like to sink my own email (thus open port 25 inbound) rather than poll for it (though I have a backup MX pointing to a server provided by my web space hosting company, and fetchmail from there). I pay about $45 a month for Verizon's "Advanced Data Services" ATM VPI/VCI to my ISP, Blarg!, which charges about another $35 a month. It isn't cheap, but I wasn't interested in the "Intarweb", and ISP droids bitchin' if I'd SSH into my own box to admin it remotely. Also, considering the LD savings less the VoIP service costs, about $35 of that $80 is recouperated, so, in effect, I'm paying $45 for 1.5Mx384k DSL and a static IP (I think I can get up to 4 or 5 if I can justify them for the same price) with no TOS headaches. No, I do not run an open SMTP relay. A plug for Blarg!: they accomodate savvy end users who know what they are doing -- with power comes responsibility. Hardware-wise, I have an odd setup too: I didn't have a router that would do QoS, so I rolled my own: a cheap Fry's $200 special running Fedora Core 2 derivative with three ethernet ports: one upstream to Blarg, one downstream into the home net, and another downstream into the DMZ, where my VoIP ATA sits. IPTables handle all the firewalling and traffic shaping for me (though trying to shape downstream traffic is always dicey). The box sinks my email and serves public and private (though not sensitive) data. While I have faith in IPtables, and SSL, I have a bit less in Apache. If it ever gets overloaded to the point of not being able to do QoS for VoIP traffic properly, I plan to offload some services. The really secure stuff, of course, is on the home LAN side of things. The uber-secure stuff is not accessible in any way from the public internet, of course (private keys, etc.) Yes, an SSL or Apache root exploit would be bad (but Apache does not currently run as root, Duh!). So far, this has worked well. Even with all the cruft in the VoIP path, I still get good service. Eventually, I'd like to run Asterisk on the box, perhaps with a Broadvoice connection, and likely serve private data elsewhere. I have been thinking of retaining the VT1005 (locked to Vonage), and trying to get Asterisk to work with Vonage by sitting "in the middle" of the ISP to ATA path, and spoofing one to the other.
You could've hired me.
I'd been considering Vonage vs. Broadvoice for the longest time. My preference was toward Broadvoice because it was open and would mesh with an Asterisk PBX, but seeing a cheap Moto VT1005 at Fry's one day caused me to give Vonage a go. That was in July, 2004, and I have had their service since. (I still plan to do the Broadvoice/Asterisk thing at some point, and might even keep both providers so as to have a backup). I've been pretty happy with Vonage, though calls to Canada have sometimes been spotty at the Canadian receiving end.
I did not drop my Verizon POTS line, and even kept the international plan I had: calls to Canada were 5 cents a minute instead of 75 cents (ouch!) and the four dollars a month wasn't that much of a big deal. The idea was to keep the POTS like as backup (mostly for 911). I figured I'd save about $60-$80 a month in LD charges and that would easily pay for the VoIP service. I live in (360) and work in (425). Washington intra-state rates are around 11 cents a minute, with a penny discount (whoop-de-freakin'-do) when subscribing to Verizon's international plan. I got a Vonage (425) number to (a) increase my local access area for friends and (b) so as to make calls from work home local to work (not that they care much as long as personal calls aren't excessive).
My setup is a bit unusual. I wanted DSL with a static IP, and no nonsense TOS: I like to sink my own email (thus open port 25 inbound) rather than poll for it (though I have a backup MX pointing to a server provided by my web space hosting company, and fetchmail from there). I pay about $45 a month for Verizon's "Advanced Data Services" ATM VPI/VCI to my ISP, Blarg!, which charges about another $35 a month. It isn't cheap, but I wasn't interested in the "Intarweb", and ISP droids bitchin' if I'd SSH into my own box to admin it remotely. Also, considering the LD savings less the VoIP service costs, about $35 of that $80 is recouperated, so, in effect, I'm paying $45 for 1.5Mx384k DSL and a static IP (I think I can get up to 4 or 5 if I can justify them for the same price) with no TOS headaches. No, I do not run an open SMTP relay.
A plug for Blarg!: they accomodate savvy end users who know what they are doing -- with power comes responsibility.
Hardware-wise, I have an odd setup too: I didn't have a router that would do QoS, so I rolled my own: a cheap Fry's $200 special running Fedora Core 2 derivative with three ethernet ports: one upstream to Blarg, one downstream into the home net, and another downstream into the DMZ, where my VoIP ATA sits. IPTables handle all the firewalling and traffic shaping for me (though trying to shape downstream traffic is always dicey). The box sinks my email and serves public and private (though not sensitive) data. While I have faith in IPtables, and SSL, I have a bit less in Apache. If it ever gets overloaded to the point of not being able to do QoS for VoIP traffic properly, I plan to offload some services. The really secure stuff, of course, is on the home LAN side of things. The uber-secure stuff is not accessible in any way from the public internet, of course (private keys, etc.)
Yes, an SSL or Apache root exploit would be bad (but Apache does not currently run as root, Duh!). So far, this has worked well. Even with all the cruft in the VoIP path, I still get good service.
Eventually, I'd like to run Asterisk on the box, perhaps with a Broadvoice connection, and likely serve private data elsewhere. I have been thinking of retaining the VT1005 (locked to Vonage), and trying to get Asterisk to work with Vonage by sitting "in the middle" of the ISP to ATA path, and spoofing one to the other.
You could've hired me.
It seems that they have a great selection of metrics that they use in this article for measuring voice quality to call logs, which is great, but they forgot one major thing: service. All the call logs in the world won't help you when your ATA breaks (like mine did on my Vonage account) and you end up talking to some script reading tech in another country that you can't understand (after holding for 30 minutes or more of course.) It took me forever to get this tech to realize that the ATA was broken (I knew this from the start of course, I think the lack of dial tone, ping or access to the dial menus gave it away). Finally I got someone in the states that listened to me and said, yep it's broken we're sending one out.
To me service is one of the biggest things, because at some point it's going to break. Some things that would be considered would be hold time, knowledge of techs, etc. which would be useful to mention in this article.
I've been using packet8 for about 6 months now. The quality is nearly perfect for me, and there is no "lag".
The price is good also if you live in the states and have to call Canada. I have the regular residential plan for 19.95 a month. It includes unlimited calling in the US and Canada, also has many extras.
The bandwidth requirements for packet8 are lower than Vonage (not sure about the others)
I want to know where these companies have their gateways. For example if I'm using the service in London, then anywhere in the US is fine but form Australia, I need to be able to use a gateway in the San Jose area and from Africa I'll want a gateway close to MAE or CIX East.
Does anyone have a list of of the different VoIP providers and where their gateways are?
PC Magazine is the equivalent of a women's fashion magazine. The ads are the content.
I have had VoIP service thru vonage for about 5 monthes now. Haven't had any problems or any power outages. I know the concern when the power goes out but with a cell phone as a standby I am all set. I pay about $28 a month for unlimited calls and can take my router with me if I go anywhere in the country and make/receive local calls from anywhere. I would strongly suggest get VoIP if you can. Send a mesage to Verizon that we wont pay HUGE amounts for phoe service!!
otter_D "A computer without a MS Windows OS is lika a dog without a brick tied to its head"
In my experience Vonage has been amazing. I got the service after reading that I could take the box overseas and give it to a friend in Australia who I spend at least $100/month in long distance talking to. I figured it was worth a shot and got the service and tested it for a month or so here at home before I went down to visit. As long as I wasn't using a great deal of bandwidth at the time the call sound quality was great - and I received the linksys box which was supposedly the lesser option. I then took it with me when I went to visit Australia over the holidays and after getting a 240V Universal AC/DC adapter it worked without a hitch down there too - and behind two routers/NATs as well. My Australian friend now has a US local phone number and I have unlimited calling to them for $25/month saving me a fortune. If you have friends or family overseas who have any sort of broadband (she has a pretty limited speed DSL and it works fine) you will find this is the sort of innovation in technology that will really and truly make use of the internet to save you gobs and gobs of money.
With Skype, there's currently no way to contact someone who only has a regular telephone, nor can those folks with regular telephones contact/call you.
One possible alternative is this Kontext software from http://www.generalvoice.com/ They have P2P software that is similar to Skype but does not contain spyware/adware. It also does multi-user conferencing and speech-to-text transcription if you have an optional speech engine installed. You do have to pay a one time fee to get the software but they have a free trial available on the web site.
I have a VOIP system set up in my home in Australia.
What gets to me is that while it is fairly cheap to use it to call Western Europe or North America, it still costs a substantial amount (about 70 cents per minute Australian) to call places I speak to a lot - Eritrea and Ethiopia.
I know there are hefty connection fees to these countries, and they will probably never be as cheap to call as those in the West, but I can get phone cards that will call these areas for as little as 25 cents per minute. This indicates to me that VOIP providers are making quite a lot of money from people phoning the third world. Yet again, the people with the least ability to pay are the ones most likely to be paying more.
Has anyone had good experiences with a VOIP provider who can provide cheap access to the Ethiopia and Eritrea?
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
I briefly met him at Comdex Las Vegas 2003, where he lead a round table discussion over web services.
He claims J2EE,
He's unwilling to accept the and FOSS or GNU Tools have any uses in web services.
He's very detached from reality in the tech world. I think he just gets along with a certain circle of CIOs in the industry... I don't trust his judgement.....
Matthew
I would like to know which of the services allow a user to connect their own hardware.
For example, Voicepulse allow a user to connect an Asterisk box to their servers. No problem. This allows for a local PBX, instead of a Centrex style system that most provide.
Anyone know of large providers that allow connecting your own switch?
You can use skypeout to call POTS lines. Matthew
As someone else pointed out, PCMagazine's ratings are for sale.
PCMagazine ratings are, in fact, worth next to nothing.
My experience: I took their "editor's choice" advice to go with ValueWeb for business web hosting. Everything about Valueweb sucked! They overloaded too many accounts on a single server. Furthermore, they refused to update the e-commerce software running on their servers to the latest version. When I complained that my site was running slow, they said it was my fault for creating slow web programs. When I better researched a good webhost, the same site was blazing fast.
I'm a a recent subscriber to AT&T's CallVantage plan, and I have to say that this article is either very late to press (how late is acceptable considering it is a web article) or it is poorly researched and written. I can only speak to AT&T's service, but I found numerous errors in the article:
CallVantage's conference calling is NOT free, it is 0.35/min.
CallVantage DOES have a comprehensive call log, including incoming, outgoing (missed calls show as incoming). The call log is not searchable but it is sortable and you can dial a number from the webpage, one of my favorite features.
CallVantage DOES offer call forwarding and call 'hunting' to 'outside' numbers and is configurable to work with a set list of incoming callers. The author states that two other providers are the only ones that offer this feature.
CallVantage also offers a default number. If for some reason your ATA is offline, then it forwards all calls to the number you specify i.e. cell phone.
Although I have not tested it, CallVantage very clearly claims to support Fax Machines, modems and PVRs. Claims can often be over stated, but the author does not even acknowledge the claim.
The author also claims that Broadvox and Lingo are the only vendors to offer secure web interfaces which is grossly untrue. I am looking right now at https://secure.callvantage.att.com, scratching my head in wonderment...
The author does not mention the 'Do Not Disturb' feature, or the fact that call filtering is available for $2.
It's just unfortunate that people will make their decisions based on this 'In-Depth' article...
I have to say, I have been very happy with my service. No one I have called yet even knows that it is a VoIP line. I am recommending this to everyone I talk to.
Sims TV show? I thought we already had Married with Children? :/
[%] Cingular Ringtones
we recently got the att service and had a hell of a time setting it up. The TA didn't like my router, and they were both dlink boxes.
The customer support was competent, but not responsive. I had to keep calling them for support to get the TA to work out. My case had to get "escalated" to a higher level of support.
In the end it finally was hooked up and working most of the time. However, for some reason, the service was occasionally spotty and the cable modem would spontaneously reboot when we received a call.
It turns out that the new 5.8 GHZ phone that was right next to the modem was causing all the problems. We moved the the cable modem under the desk, and now everything is working perfectly.
Thank goodness for Google, where I found that someone was having a similar issue, otherwise I'd never have thought to move equipment around for troubleshooting.
Try Firefly from Australia. Been using it for about 6 months and preferable to Skype
www.freshtel.net/firefly.
I will stop being an Anonymous Coward after a bit more time spent lurking here!
This is a late post, so might never get seen, but I've been using Broadvoice for six months and have been as happy as can be. The ONLY con about their service is that the name on outgoing Caller-ID is not sent (the number is, however). Their E911 service is also "coming soon". I have a $9.95 in-state only plan, which is fabulous, and they also offer a $19.95 International unlimitied plan. I purchased a Sipura unit seperately, and they will provide SIP username and password upon request to use with Asterisk, or any generic SIP phone.
I don't have any affiliation with them, just a very pleased user. (Course if you sign up with them because of this, let me know, I think I'll get a spiff)
Covad has been running an ad for their VOIP service on KCBS-AM radio here in the SF Bay Area. The announcer pronounces it "voyp" rather than spelling out the acronym "v-o-i-p". I'd never heard anyone do that before.
How do you say it? Spell it out or all one word?
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
for teh win! Speakeasy