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Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng
Anders Bylund writes "Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring, adding Voice over IP features to the upcoming Yahoo Messenger release. With way too many players on the field, there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?"
The more, the better. The IM/VOIP market is one of the few markets where we have true competition. If Yahoo! is going to make a better app with VOIP than what I currently use (Google Talk), then I'll switch.
Been using Skype for a while now and it still beats everyone else for 2 simple reasons: All advanced features work through a firewall with zero configuration, and it's fully encrypted. Yahoo, MSN, etc, talk to us again when you can boast these 2 features.
When calling overseas, it would be nice to forego the international rates in favor of much lower data packet rates on my cellphone. If there was a service that ran on my cellular phone that used VoIP data packets at a reasonable cost, that would be a huge step forward.
Sitting in front of my PC with a headset is not convenient.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I wonder if this is a step towards making VoIP basically a free tool, much like the web is today. It would be interesting if Yahoo or another VoIP provider go to an advertising model to support free VoIP.
I think it would be interesting to have ads while a call is being connected (i.e. ringing). It seems like they could pipe audio ads down the wire during the inevitable pause while the system tries to track down a cell phone, or the long distance call is being routed...
A company like Yahoo could also put a phone front end on to the search engine, I'm thinking along the lines of directory assistance, but instead of limiting info to just addresses / phones numbers, the Yahoo directory assistance would search the internet and speak the results (and a few related ads) over the phone.
They might even have the CPU power to do adequate speech recognotion. All told it is pretty easy to imagine a system taking adavtage of the newest phones, with enhanced SMS, web interfaces, along with a voice interface. It would also be cool if you could specify where you want your search result output to go. Maybe if they had VoIP and some type of phone based interafce you could have your results displayed on your phone, pda or spoken. With a viable VoIP perhaps you could have the results faxed to you at a hotel. I'd also like to see the option of having the results emailed.
All told these relatively small technical advancements, would be large strides in making Yahoo even more ubiqutious. Non-computer users and casual users would have another resource to get and retrieve information in the "real-world".
Folks, this is getting interesting. VOIP is starting to explode. With projects like skype and asterisk, along side with the chat clients building it in, the phone companies ( well, ok, SBC/Ma bell ) are starting to get jittery.
For example: I recently placed an order for a p2p ds3 from sbc. The "market executive" went out of his way to make sure that the line was more than suitable for everything I'd need. Not two minutes later, he said it isn't recommended for voip applications.
Mark my words: We are going to start seeing legislation barring voip in any meaningful way.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It even had the pc-to-phone feature back in 2001. So what is the news here? A press release advertising old features?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,55259,00.asp
The concern I have with VoIP going forward is interoperability. This is on two levels:
1. voice data transfer, and
2. signalling transfer
Essentially the world telcos today send voice around the world at 64Kbps (or a slightly lower rate for the robbed-bit signalling format used by some Northern American telcos). They can encode their data in two companded formats: A-law and mu-law.
VoIP, on the other hand, can be transferred in a number of different codecs including G.703, G.711, etc.
When sending VoIP over the internet the biggest problem is having to use two identical clients that speak the same data transfer encoding. But getting agreed standards on codecs to use is simple compared to agreeing on signalling formats!
Let's use a call from Australia to the UK for example. Say that a telco in Australia sends a call from Australia to the USA on one fibre hop. Then a provider in the USA switches the call to the UK over another fibre hop. Will the data that I sent, compressed in codec A, be uncompressed at the US provider and re-encoded before sending to the UK?
What if I need to make a call that traverses 3 or 4 providers! Compressing and uncompressing using lossy codecs equals a lot of noise introduced into the signal.
Now, what if I want to make a VoIP call initiated by Yahoo! or Google or MSN or Skype or some other client desktop.. (dare I say Cisco or Nortel or Lucent or Alcatel?). If I want that call to, at another stage, enter another network there are so many compatibility problems to be sorted out.
*pulls out hair*
There has to be a common infrastructure; in this case the different IM backbones need to be connected, addressing needs to be tackled (I have the same alias on AIM and Yahoo, e.g.). For this to happen, a lot of the leaders are going to have to cooperate and conform to an open standard & directory. This isn't going to happen as long as they still harbor ideas of become the IM standard.
And the issue of VOIP is similar. Often it's tied to the IM systems - this is about Yahoo Messenger - (which is why I brought those up), although I suppose it doesn't have to be. But the issue of needing common backbones and address routing remain constant.
What I find interesting is the idea of using VOIP as a bridge between different "standard" voice systems. For example, in US law enforcement and emergency response there's a big push happening to create interoperable radios between jurisdictions. The existing radios function on different frequencies, standards, etc. The dispatch centers could tie themselves together using VOIP as a common medium in order to connect their field users on whatever frequency they happen to operate.
It would be useful to mention that by saying "VoIP" it means that voice transmission capabilities will be added to it, and not that it will interoperate with current VoIP telephony standards such as SIP, which by the way, Google Talk has plans to add in a future release.
The article mentions Vonage and SIPPhone alongside as "competitors", which gives people the idea that somehow they will be able to use it to make calls.
There already are standards. SIP. 711 ulaw/alaw. IAX to a lesser extent.
The problem is these new players want to carve their own niche and lock them in. They have MS envy, in essence.
That's why I love asterisk.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Diversity and competition do not always lead to a "shakeout." With any luck, however, it will lead to a better situation than exists with the current (stagnant) telephone service.
/dev/random
Yahoo! Messenger did have Pc-Phone calling through an external provider, Dialpad (which the company recently purchased). But now this feature is embedded completely on the new client.
But the big news here is that now you have the option to pick a local POTS phone number and when people call that number it rings on your Y! Messenger.
there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?
No. Has there been a shakedown of IM clients? No the only thing that seems to be a long time coming is a voip gaim equivalent. A cross-platform cross-protocol client. When someone steps up with a voip client that can talk to yahoo and google talk and vonage and whatever else, then we'll have something newsworthy.
But even there, things can go wrong. Vonage locks down their users' SIP boxes so they cannot receive direct VOIP calls, only over the Vonage POTS bridge. Bummer.
Sometimes I wonder how the Internet ever got big without getting strangled and destroyed by competing business interests. But I guess it's never too late for that.
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