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VOIP, The Traditional Telephony Killer? 235

Posted by timothy from the alki-alki dept.
FrenchyinOntario writes "According to an article on IT World Canada's web site, an Ontario-based technology research firm says that 23% of small-to-medium-sized businesses have already implemented VOIP technology, and that traditional telephony companies need to adapt or die (big surprise there!) in order to remain viable. I don't necessarily agree with research analyst's George Goodall's claim that "It may be too late," since VOIP still suffers from troubling security issues as well as the possibility of SPITstorms. It's still too early to tell whether it will be a rehash of ten years ago when the telephone companies (even before the rise of the ILECS after the 1996 Telecom Reform Act) pishposhed the rising popularity of the Internet until they jumped onboard at the last minute."
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VOIP, The Traditional Telephony Killer? More

VOIP, The Traditional Telephony Killer?

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  • Internet Telephony (Score:3, Funny)

    by gsonic ( 885510 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:31PM (#12982370)
    I wonder when we'll get error404s and telephone spyware when phoning.

  • Cellphones (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shudnt traditional telephone companies be more afraid of cellphones than VOIP?

    • Re:Cellphones (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 )
      Nah, most traditional phone companies have money invested into the cell networks. Those that don't have money invested in information infrastructure, so either way, those companies win.

      Where they don't have money invested is VoIP, so of course they're going to try to bury it at all stops due to 911 laws and such.

      While I'm not arguing the unimportance of 911, I'm arguing the fact that phone companies have a lot more to lose by letting VoIP go through, having no financial stakes in it.

      • Re:Cellphones (Score:5, Informative)

        by Reaperducer ( 871695 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:23PM (#12982567)
        Where they don't have money invested is VoIP

        Really? That's the exact opposite of everything I've read, especially when it comes to AT&T. I've read a few articles about how some surprisingly large percentage of their traffic is VoIP, and they only intend to expand further in this category.

        Maybe the big names don't provide VoIP into residential homes where you see a brand name on a bill each month, but from what I've read, they're providing it to a lot of businesses, and do the infrastructure for some of the residential providers.

        Anyone with better insight is encouraged to post references, since I don't have anything better than my scattered memory.
        • Ah, well it's probably the same for me, I've read that most phone companies hate VoIP and doing everything they can to stop it.

          AT&T may be an exception, especially staying alive after selling off their mobile unit to Cingular.

        • Re:Cellphones (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jericho4.0 ( 565125 )
          That could be VoIP where all the IP packets are on AT&Ts network, compared to home VoIP where they just go on the regular old internet. No QoS, etc.

          • Re:Cellphones (Score:2, Interesting)

            by ThJ ( 641955 )
            As I've understood it, Norway's POTS is all IP-based down to every single local exchange, with analog/ISDN to each house, and I imagine that's pretty much the case in USA and other developed countries too. The step to VoIP from that isn't too huge...

  • Traditional telephones can die but FCC prevents it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:33PM (#12982374)
    With low power FHSS .. cell phones can all be WiFi style and routed over the net or each other .. there's a MIT paper on it.

    Cell phone companies can be bypassed.

    • Re:Traditional telephones can die but FCC prevents (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:42PM (#12982401)
      I think the people of America are finding that our government isn't working for us, and we're quite often doing things that are marked as "illegal" anyways, not because of ignorance of the law, but more because of a feeling that the law is not fair. Case and point of the above is file sharing.

      But, I'm not going to go off into that tangent. Instead I'm going to say that we're going to find wireless archetectures being thrown up everywhere until we get to the point that our archetecture overthrows the one the government's trying to provide for us. Of course, cease and desist letters will fly from the government, but I believe that people simply won't listen for the same reason we don't listen to their filesharing BS.

      People want to be connected. This is self-evident by the invention of conventional transporation and cellular telephones. The infrastructure for it is already in place through other infrastructures. I think the biggest problem we're about to run into is federal monopoly laws running aground with the Cable companies. Recently they just passed a law saying that broadband over cable is information only and non-telecommunication.

      It's really time we stand up for what we want, and what we feel is right, and I think in a weird and obscure way, technology will enable us, and disable us. Pieces of technology will let us explain what we want in crystal clarity. Others will lock us down to biometrics and GPS devices. It's really time we start rewriting the Constitution to deal with these things.

      • Your post touches on something that is truth.

        I am a rational anarchist, as in the kind from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. It seems that one of the facets of human nature is a desire to tell other people what to do, and what they may not do, often under the pretext of 'for their own good.

        I dislike laws and government, however, I will accept any laws and government that other people feel are required for their safety and well-being. If I find a law tolerable, I tolerate it. If I fin

        • it seems that one of the facets of human nature is a desire to tell other people what to do, and what they may not do, often under the pretext of 'for their own good... If I find a law tolerable, I tolerate it. If I find it untolerable, I ignore it.

          ...and this from a person with the handle "PakProtector"... the Pak were depicted as the penultimate "we'll make the rules" race. Specifically, you were protected no matter if you wanted to be or not.

          I'm afraid that I have to view your declaration as a

        • Re:Traditional telephones can die but FCC prevents (Score:5, Insightful)

          by radish ( 98371 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2005 @12:44AM (#12983027) Homepage
          If I find a law tolerable, I tolerate it. If I find it untolerable, I ignore it.
          In other words, you do what the hell you like, and if it happens to be legal, well, that's just lovely.

          Don't dress selfishness up as something grander than it really is.
    • With low power FHSS .. cell phones can all be WiFi style and routed over the net or each other .. there's a MIT paper on it.

      Well, heck, if there's an MIT paper on it, then I can't understand why these companies and the government don't throw a hundred years worth of investment and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure out the window and start all over from scratch. After all, there's an MIT paper on it. That makes it golden.
      • Disclaimer: I work for a telecom company, but this is my personal opinion only, except on the rare occasions when they have the good sense to take my advice. The question isn't whether somebody's going to eat our lunch - it's just who, and whether we're going to help them. Moore's Law has been trashing the whole computer industry's infrastructure for years; why should the telcos be any different, just because we used to be able to design for 40-year equipment lifetimes instead of 4-year?

        VOIP could repl

  • Not if (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:36PM (#12982383)
    traditional tel companies can lobby congress to drive up the costs because idiots don't realize 911 won't work, which was told to the purchaser prior to the sale!

    we can't compete, so lets buy leverage!
    • you can still have 911 access w/o the landline. practically everyone has a cellfone now. i mean even my 10 year old cousin has one now. i have friends who don't bother to even install landlines and use their cell phone has their primary contact number.

      some may say that a cell phone service plan will be more expensive than a landline plan, but an unactivated cell phone can still make emergency calls due to some law. just have a cell phone charged up and make sure your location has a decent signal and you'll

    • traditional tel companies can lobby congress to drive up the costs because idiots don't realize 911 won't work, which was told to the purchaser prior to the sale!

      It's really not that simple. For one thing, there has been a lot of work to make 911 service work, and in fact it will. There are several different standards out there, but probably the most robust one involves GEOPRIV (RFC 3825 amongst others).

      But beyond that, were we to accept the above argument that VOIP vendors not provide for the sa

  • I have been using iConnectHere [iconnecthere.com], which is very affordable, but I have problems with not being able to connect, and problems with audio make it impossible to hear the person on the other end. Other times, it works fine though. Perhaps they have too many users?

    • Re:Problems with iConnectHere (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tftp ( 111690 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:51PM (#12982438) Homepage
      I used to have an iConnectHere account, and they indeed had connection problems from time to time. But the killer problem was not that, it was bad audio, and that can't be easily fixed.

      I doubt that the poor audio quality is caused by iConnectHere, it's more likely to be the network from my PBX to them. Packet switching networks are not configured for guaranteed latency; if some are, good luck ripping your ISP roots out and migrating to a possibly better ISP. That would be easily the most difficult option, and with least guarantee of any improvement.

      • Internal versus internet (Score:4, Informative)

        by kingdon ( 220100 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:16PM (#12982748) Homepage
        The confusion here is that VoIP stands for two related, but different, things. TFA was (as far as I can tell) just about using IP internally to your building to replace your PBX and phone-specific wiring. At the edge of your company, the calls would be sent over regular phone lines. The article wasn't very explicit about this, but given comments about things like avoiding two sets of wiring, that's what I'm pretty sure they were talking about.

        Something like iConnectHere, Vonage, etc, are about sending voice over the internet. And in this case it is a lot harder to make sure you are getting the quality of service that you need for voice.

        These two different ways of using VoIP both have the potential to be revolutionary, but in different ways. In one cases it is the PBX vendor in the crosshairs, in the other the long-distance or local phone company.
    • I have been using iConnectHere, which is very affordable, but I have problems with not being able to connect
      So not a very apt name then, no? Maybe iDontConnect.

    • I have problems with not being able to connect, and problems with audio make it impossible to hear the person on the other end. Other times, it works fine though.

      Congratulations. You have discovered one of the main differences between packet-switched networks and circuit-switched networks.

      It's not impossible to get good-quality audio in a packet-switched network, but TCP/IP doesn't really include the features that are needed to do it right. (And that's by design, too -- it makes many things much

      • You're absolutely right. I thought it was just a bandwidth problem, but that turns out not to be true. I had Vonage on a pretty crappy Verizon DSL line, and I many of the calls would have long delays, and occasionally echos.

        I moved to a new place with a nice 2 megabit fat pipe on a different provider in a different part of the city, and I get the same problems. That leads me to believe it's not the bandwidth -- it's the implementation.

        Copper is far more reliable than VoIP. At least for the forseeable
        • The problem with Vonage is they don't control the quality of service on the downstream. The Vonage adapter can prioritize packets on the upstream, but your DSL provider, who has no agreement with Vonage and doesn't want one, ignores any QoS request on the packets returning to your phone.

          With business DSL services you often have an entire dedicated line (such as a T1) to your VoIP provider's head end, which allows prioritization of packets in both directions. The branch office where I work has VoIP on a

        • I'm using Vonage on a regular cable connection and have done so for nearly a year. No outages, no call problems, better sound quality than my old Verizon POTS line, and a third of the price. I will NEVER use a traditional phone company again.

  • VoIP not a small business solution (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toddbu ( 748790 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:40PM (#12982393)
    Small business lives and dies by its reputation, and the poor call quality of VoIP can really impact customer perception of a business. After using a VoIP solution for a full year, we dumped it in favor of copper. I know that I didn't like having to try to figure out what my customer was saying, and I'm sure that they felt the same way about me.

    VoIP for personal use - yes. VoIP for small business - not ready for prime time.

    • Re:VoIP not a small business solution (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:56PM (#12982455) Journal
      I think you might be over-stating the quality difference of VoIP. My VoIP phone is nearly indistinguishable from a normal landline, and I'm sure if I had a business-class internet connection, it would be even better.

      You're absolutely right that reputation, and hence ease of phone conversations is important to small businesses. However, one should also consider the fact that VoIP gives a small business the ability to do things they would never consider otherwise. For instance, you could expand into markets in other regions, and not be worried about the innumerable number of long-distance phone calls that this would entail (calling other vendors, distributors, etc. that are not local). So I feel like VoIP may give the opportunity for a small business to "act" like a bigger business, making long-distance phone calls without worries. Depending on the business, this could be a major cost savings.

      I think it's a viable option, and more importantly (as TFA sorta points out) as the technology gets better, the advantages of VoIP will mount (whereas the cost should remain low)...

      Of course, IANASBO (I Am Not A Small Business Owner), so I might be off-base here.
      • My telco offers all-you-can-eat long distance for $20/month. I don't think that they'd do this if there wasn't competition from VoIP and cell, so I'm thankful for that. I log about 80 hours of outbound LD in a month, so I'm saving some around $200/month.
      • Of course, IANASBO (I Am Not A Small Business Owner), so I might be off-base here.
        I am a small business owner and you hit the nail square on the head.
      • I agree with half of what your say.

        1 - No, a business class internet connection doesn't help. At least not always. It's not always about bandwidth, but about the flaws inherrent in TCP/IP. The internet was designed for moving blocks of data around, not real-time voice communication.

        2 - My VoIP phone is SOMETIMES indistinguishable from a normal landline. I've never been able to figure out why sometimes the sound drops out or there are echos or long delays. It all is random, as is the chances of getti

    • Re:VoIP not a small business solution (Score:5, Insightful)

      by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:57PM (#12982459)
      Wow that's amazing, I can't even begin to count the number of times I have had all kinds of bad quality calls from cellphones and yet I have never dropped a vendor or lost a client because of them.

      You must be working with some the of the pickiest most anal customers on the planet.
    • My former employer, a small community college switched their system to the Cisco
      VoIP hardware. It was rare when a student could actually get through to me, so I gave all my students my cell number instead.

      The VoIP phone worked intermittently at best. The worst thing about it was that when (not if) there was a network problem the phones were completely useless.

      I'm not even convinced it's good enough for my home yet.
      • It sounds like in your case the local network was not up to the challenge. My local cable-internet is quite reliable (at least for the last year... it wasn't always!). The connection is fast and doesn't go down, so my VoIP phone has never given me any trouble. The connection is as clear as my old standard phone.

        VoIP is not always the right solution... but in many cases the quality is sufficient, and the cost savings significant.
    • VoIP voice quality is fine as long as you have the network capacity for all the extra packets. Did your company bother to figure out whether they had the bandwidth to run VoIP? Or did they just say to themselves, "Copper is so 90s" and proceed?

      I once worked a help desk at a hosting company. Every once in a while, you'd get somebody you could barely hear, which meant you had to diagnose their phone problem before you diagnose their hosting problem. Most often the problem was the customer using VoIP and lis

    • I work at a small office and we recently moved into a new office. All the phones throughout the building are all VoIP based. Except for rare packet scheduling issues, the quality is indistiquishable from a regular phone system at a portion of the cost.
    • I live in Japan, so a lot of my landline calls up until last year were overseas.
      Even before I was using VoIP, (Skype where I can,) it turned out that a lot of the long distance providers were using VoIP to route the calls and the quality was simply terrible.
      It was so bad that I would have to keep trying different services until I found one that wasn't overloaded and dropping parts of the conversation all over the place.
      It won't be long before they're doing that for local calls here as well.

      Now, for 90% of
      • For what it's worth, I'm on YahooBB, and I find the quality to be as good or better than copper to copper in the States. Anytime I hear fuzziness on Yahoo's VoIP, the blame can usually be put on the cellphone in the States that I'm connecting to.
    • This seems like a gross generalization of all VoIP services. You know if one VoIP service is bad, you could always switch to another and try them.

      And this is the brilliance of VoIP, you can switch to a new voip system very easily. The wire into your building is your internet connection, and its the same no matter what VOIP system you use. Perhaps you should have tried other VOIP systems first? I'm not a small business owner but I have Vonage and the only connection problems I have ever had I had confir
    • My employer is classified as small to medium business but we use VoIP all the time between our offices. All our calls to London and NYC are routed over VoIP to our offices first and then dialed from there as a local call. VoIP for internal calls will probably be the direction of growth for now.
    • I consistently get the worst telephone lines when I call the customer service of my phone companies: Bell Canada (POTS) and Fido (GSM - alias Microcell, now owned by Rogers): The voice of the rep cuts out, first and last syllables get lost, or there's half a second of lag. Very annoying - I always have to spell my name three times before they get it right. Quite ironic that my VoIP line has never had any of these problems - and that one's talking to a provider on the other side of the Atlantic...
  • We have a lot of power outages around these parts. I kind of like how my telephone works even if I want my telephone tied to my Internet which is tied to my power. I suppose I could get a UPS for my cable modem and phone, but is that really optimal? Any battery source eventually dies.

    I was just thinking to myself today that it sucks that my cordless phone doesn't work when the power goes out.

    For me, power outages are a minor annoyance. But for companies? How can they deal with virtually all lines to
    • Well, wouldn't a wireless system stay just as powered as a wired solution? Power is maintained by generators and such for the telephony system (remember, those are electrical too, you know). Do the same for the wireless locales and it'll do the same. The reciever end can be crank powered if absolutely nessicary, but I think a good charged battery is always the better convenience.

      There's really not much stopping us from dropping old telephone lines and VHF/UHF tv, but much of America is afraid of change s
      • wouldn't a wireless system stay just as powered as a wired solution?

        If you are talking about the cellular network, then all base stations, on all poles, masts and roofs, must be equipped with generators; that's tens of thousands of them. Compare that to a single switching center which services tens of thousands of customers. Such a center can afford to have one really good generator, and some batteries, and service for them.

        • I would think economies of scale would pretty much deal with this problem, but you never know.

          Secondly, don't government agencies like FEMA continue operating radio systems in case of natural disaster? Wouldn't that require an arseload of generated power?

          I dunno, I really could be wrong, it just seems like we have the technology to keep a wireless grid running just as well as a wired grid. While a wired grid would lose less power due to dissapation and ineffecienty, I still think a comparable situation
          • would think economies of scale would pretty much deal with this problem

            Look at the prices of cell phone batteries - they are more expensive than the phones. And we are talking about HUGE volume here; cell phones are probably the most popular electronic product ever sold.

            The reason is that our chemical batteries are archaic, and only minor improvements (weight) were made in last 100 years. Pretty much the lead-acid battery is still the champion (you have it in your car).

            don't government agencies like

    • For me, power outages are a minor annoyance. But for companies? How can they deal with virtually all lines to their associates being cut?

      If the power goes out to a business you have a lot more troubles than just the phone. Most business rely on computers - oops, they're down. Many newer office building have a lot of interior space that doesn't get natural lighting - oops, everyone's in the dark.
      • If the power goes out to a business you have a lot more troubles than just the phone. Most business rely on computers - oops, they're down. Many newer office building have a lot of interior space that doesn't get natural lighting - oops, everyone's in the dark.

        True. But they could still get on their landline and say, "Hey Fred, that file I was supposed to send you might not be sent for a bit..." Or conference calls could still go through. I mean, things can happen without power.
        • I hit the submit button before I finished posting. One more thing...

          Most business are running on some kind of PBX. Either the PBX has backup power (in which case VOIP will probably keep going) or they can't make phone calls anyway.
    • (Unless someone has a solution for constant power outages?)

      Yeah. A gas powered generator. If power is that flakey in your area, you need to buy one.

  • I lease a T1 for voice and data. The line is run trhough an ADtran voice/data router on my premises. To my phone system everything looks like POTS but in actuallity its all voice over ip with bandwith being dynamically allocated as neccesesary. I know this is becoming very popular in my area because it drobs the cost of a full service business line from about 60/month net to about 40/month net and it allows for t1 data access at about 300/month.
    • I really hope that you paid Mr Stoller [slashdot.org] to use *his* word in your subject line. If not, you should be expecting a call real soon from his lawyers.
    • T1 does offer guaranteed latency, and indeed you can allocate time slots as needed. If that's how the router works, then you don't have VoIP because there is no IP involved; IP for your Net access runs in free time slots, in parallel to the synchronous virtual circuit that is carrying the voice.

      • Re:Theres always stealth VOIP (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tmack ( 593755 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:37PM (#12982618) Homepage Journal
        T1 does offer guaranteed latency, and indeed you can allocate time slots as needed. If that's how the router works, then you don't have VoIP because there is no IP involved; IP for your Net access runs in free time slots, in parallel to the synchronous virtual circuit that is carrying the voice.

        Nope, I work for a company that does almost exactly what the parent said.. Remember, this is VoIP, the voice traffic is all IP data packets going into the router. All 24 timeslots on the T1 are allocated to data. The cisco/adtran router filters out the incomming voice traffic packets (which are addressed to the router itself anyway), processes them via onboard DSPs that connect to FXS/CAS/PRI voice cards to talk directly to the existing office/home phone systems (or passes the SIP stuff on to the lan to connect to IP phone systems), and does it all in reverse for outbound (injects the packets back into the T1 addressed for the central callswitch, or SIP phone). The bandwidth is "dynamically allocated" in the sense that voice packets share all the same channel space/timeslots on the T1 as your internet data, but voice has higher priority via QOS, so the fewer calls you have, the more bandwidth, no rechannelizing T1's necessary.

        tm

    • Sounds exactly like the method my employer (a medium-sized reigonal telecom) uses.

      If that is the case, they probably do what we do... your VoIP stream is routed directly to a softswitch and converted *back* into POTS!

      So, why don't we just send out VoIP streams over the internet? Because we simply couldn't offer any sort of QoS if we did. The way we have it, VoIP allows us to have flexibility that ATM/Frame does not, but by converting back to POTS at the edgo of our network, we also get the base reliabilit

  • Not in my neck of the woods (Score:5, Informative)

    by PuddleBoy ( 544111 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:46PM (#12982416)
    "23% of small-to-medium-sized businesses have already implemented VOIP technology"

    I work in CLEC telecom sales, and there is nowhere near that penetration, at least not in the Northwest. We find most businesses are very reluctant to use a technology that may present their business in a bad light to potential customers. eg bad voice quality, even if only occasional, can create an impression of a 'cheap' business, unwilling to spend the resources needed to be professional.

    Lots of business owners ask about VoIP, but very few seem to adopt it.

    (Note that I am NOT talking about personal or home use - just a traditional, brick-and-mortar business.)

    • Gotta agree w/you, esp. about reliability. Having worked in tech support for a large ISP, and hearing people pleading to have their VOIP line fixed, I'm staying with POTS at home (at least until someone decides that residential VOIP should get top QOS status).

      I've been thru entire hurricanes where the Ma Bell line never died. Cable went *phhtt* at the first gust over 50 MPH, electric soon after. I got my internet stuff done with a laptop & cheapo dial-up for the 3.5 days the Cable was down.

      Yes, I lov
  • The 23% of small business probably were never Avaya/Nortel/{favorite} PBX customers to begin with. All the big vendors for large to enterprise size customers have offered Voice Over IP for years on separated networks protecting them from SPIT and VOMIT. Busineses will adopt VOIP at the same rate they adopted digital sets. That is, when it is time for an infrastructure change. Most companies with older digital sets have some remote workers with VOIP already through ISDN lines or remote sourced IP connectivit
    • All the big vendors for large to enterprise size customers have offered Voice Over IP for years on separated networks protecting them from SPIT and VOMIT.
      SPIT and VOMIT, eh? Sounds like a great Verizon or other POTS company advertisement. Who would still have trouble resisting the low cost of VoIP once they learn it will cause them to be spat and/or vomitted upon?
    • OK, I know what SPIT is, but what's VOMIT in this context?

  • VOIP over Non-corporate VPN (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bimo_Dude ( 178966 ) <[bimoslash] [at] [theness.org]> on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:49PM (#12982427) Homepage Journal
    I have been considering setting up VPNs with my friends internationally, then putting an asterisk box on everybody's local network. Then, we can just call each other's extensions nad not have to pay for the international calls. That's similar to what the major corporations do, so us "little people" should too. Just bypass the telcos altogether. :)
  • Businesses need "as good as copper - or better."

    A VoIP company that can provide guarenteed quality of service plus 911 will be an even match for phones. If this service isn't here yet it's coming soon.

    The third issue of VoIP - dependence on AC power - isn't as big an issue since many businesses already depend on power for their digital phone systems anyways. Cell phones are good enough for calling the electric company to report an outage.

    Here's what I see happening:

    Big-boy long distance networks will
    • Wait, wouldn't that mean that ISPs could be then considered a "telecommunication" system and be subject to taxable double jepoardy? I don't think I'm the only one who sees that happening, and thus Big Boy Long Distance is probably going to fight tooth and nail against VoIP as they already have with 911 laws and such.

      Hopefully what will happen is someone at the FCC will wake up out of their pile of old papers and dust and realize what's happening around them. The old POTS system is getting phased out by c

  • Creative business plan (Score:5, Funny)

    by SquareOfS ( 578820 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @09:56PM (#12982456)
    traditional telephony companies need to adapt or die ... in order to remain viable.
    Dying to remain viable. Gotta buy me some of that stock.

  • Hehe :) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mac Degger ( 576336 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:04PM (#12982496) Journal
    I'll tell you one thing. It was about the turn of the millenium maybe, maybe 2001 at the latest, and I had a friend doing his thesis at the strategic center of KPN (dutch telecom, the one which had the monopoly). When I first told him about VoIP, and how I thought that a few hackers (in the old sence of the word) could kill the traditional telecoms by setting up a few (yeah, I know) Wifi nodes per city, using cable only for city-to-city and trans continental transmission, gues what his first response was.

    First off, that department he was working in, which made strategic decisions for the company, had never heard of VoIP. But his first response was this: 'Well, isn't that illegal?' And he was serious. Even a slight monologue on the free part of the spectrum didn't convince him.

    Ever since, I've been forwarding articles like this to him :P

  • What is a SPITstorm? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:07PM (#12982512)
    What is a SPITstorm?

    Google on spitstorm and voip returns nothing, not a single hit.

    • Re:What is a SPITstorm? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dacarr ( 562277 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:25PM (#12982572) Homepage Journal
      SPam over Internet Telephony. It's the second to last entry on it over on Everything2 [everything2.com].
    • SPam over Internet Telephony ... storm ..

      I fail to see how this is relevant though. Using VoIP can mean many different things. For example, a business can use VoIP to link their phone system between branch offices, and use it to make free calls between them. This is as opposed to getting point-to-point links (like T1s) between the buildings, where you pay the telco loop fees, usage fees, etc.

      A business can use VoIP to make long distance calls, usually at a fraction the price of even the CLEC long distance
        • Really Cheap Global Calling - Nigerians can call you for nearly free. Telemarketers who aren't total scammers can also call you for nearly free (the telco costs are already much less than US minimum wage, but foreign workers can be cheaper.) US Don't-Call-List laws don't have jurisdiction over non-US call centers, though they do cut down on the products that can be sold that way. A couple of years ago I got a call from a Nigerian Scammer using the Deaf Relay Operator services (which are free, and have I

  • VoIP Quality (Score:2, Informative)

    by wallior ( 617195 )
    I have noticed a lot of people complain about the quality of their VoIP service. What I haven't seen is the equipment they are using. Are they using a dedicated VoIP phone (ie Cisco 79xx) or are they running it through their PC.

    In theory - VoIP has the potential to be of higher quality than regular copper. The copper still has to go back to the exchange - then jump off on a T1/E1 back bone. That reduces the data used per time slot to around 64Kbit (E1). VoIP bandwidth requirements depend primarily o
    • I use a regular Vonage hookup with their Motorola SIP adapter. I typically call people on regular POTS phones and they have no idea I'm on VOIP, the line quality is just as good as normal (in fact, I'd say it was better).

  • regarding 911 and small business (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've had my Vonage service for over 2 years now. No interruption in service, and my 911 has worked fine for as long as I have had the service. If you can't read that you need to register your address to get 911 to work....well, maybe you are too stupid to live anyway.
    And yeah, what that other guy said about cell service, once it is wifi...

    For small business....why not, as long as you have the upstream to handle it, go for it. Considering most small business in the US anyway consist of less then 50 emplo
  • My neighbor has VoIP from our cable provider. It goes out a couple times a week.

    A friend several miles away has Vonage. It always sounds like she is stuck at the bottom of a well.

    Local phone companies still have VoIP to the curb beat. Sadly.

  • It's still too early to tell whether it will be a rehash of ten years ago when the telephone companies (even before the rise of the ILECS after the 1996 Telecom Reform Act) pishposhed the rising popularity of the Internet until they jumped onboard at the last minute.

    I distinctly recall another company that pisposhed the Internet and jumped aboard after the last minute. Namely Microsoft. You could see it in Windows 95, which as initially shipped lacked even an IP stack. Instead, they had all these propr

  • Which part? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Srass ( 42349 ) * on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:34PM (#12982607)
    Would somebody mind clarifying which part of telephony they're talking about? VoIP doesn't seem to pose a threat just to traditional phone companies -- right now, VoIP carriers, from what I can tell, offer all of the call quality of cellular service, and none of the convenience.

    The real threat, to my mind, is to traditional PBX vendors, thanks in part to efforts like Asterisk, to say nothing of commercial soft switches from non-traditional players like 3com, Cisco, and Snom. It's possible that a company could "deploy VoIP" and still use a traditional phone company outside its walls. Unlike a call that goes over the open Internet to reach its destination, one company can manage its own network well enough to ensure that, for the part of the call that's VoIP, call quality isn't impacted. On top of this, remember that open standards like SIP and H.323 mean that a PBX vendor will have a harder time locking a client in to its own proprietary telephone sets. I'm kinda thinking intra-organization VoIP might be the thrust of the article, since they mention Nortel and Avaya (switch manufacturers) rather than, say, Verizon and SBC (carriers).

    • Re:Which part? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 )
      I think you are right. Avaya offers VoIP equipment. It has the same unbelievably high price and astonishing lack of quality as Avaya's other equipment (attention Intuity engineers: I'm looking at you). Meanwhile Cisco offers the same or better quality at low prices and without the bad service and clueless support.

      It's inevitable that the netheads will bury the bellheads. The only question is: when? 2007? 2020?

    • Re:Which part? (Score:5, Informative)

      by shitdrummer ( 523404 ) on Tuesday July 05, 2005 @12:52AM (#12983052)
      I am the PABX Administrator for a medium-large (over 1500 staff) organisation. I work in the Comms section under a Comms Manager who only has a Data background, not voice.

      My manager is constantly telling me that our traditional PABX will be replaced by IP Telephony, and soon.

      We had one of our core data switches fail the other week. Our network has redundancy built in, but everything slowed to a crawl. I asked my Manager how Staff would have felt about not being able to use their phones if they were using IP Telephony. His response was that when IP Telephony is introduced, it will be connected to a physically separate network to our traditional data network. This is required because phones are an essential part of our business. There is no way that duplicating our data network to service IP telephony is going to save money vs. a TDM PABX.

      Our PABX has NEVER had any down time (apart from scheduled after hours maintenance or changes) in over 15 years. None. How many of you can say the same about your Data network at work?

      I see huge benefits with using VOIP, but in the right situations. Got a small office at a remote location that doesn't critically rely on phones? IP Telephony is the solution for you.

      Large organisation where phone services are critical to day to day operation, why risk it with IP telephony?

      Where I have used VOIP is for voice trunking over our data network to remote sites. Works great and can save a fair bit on phone calls, depending on the distance and your call rates of course.

      By the way, I also help to support our data network as well so if we do finally go IP Telephony I won't be out of a job.

      Shitdrummer.

  • The article is about business solutions... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @10:35PM (#12982608)
    ...Not about home users. At work you've got a 100Mb lan... at home you've got a 6Mb down 1Mb up (if you're lucky), and you're pretty far (latency) from wherever you are calling, and I doubt that the routers/switches your provider are configured to give your voice traffic good QOS.

    However, in a business, you do configure VOIP traffic to have higher COS.

    Maybe home VOIP traffic isn't there yet, but as a business solution, its pretty slick. Phones are upgraded by centralized management. Heck one day I had a 'camera icon' on my phone display, and the next day I could order 'ball camera' and now if i call somebody we can set up video conferencing.

    Moving phones involves carrying it with you to your new location. Heck, I can even use my PC at home to act as my desk phone by using SoftPhone and my VPN. People call my desk phone and my computer rings.

    Anybody tried this with a PBX based system?

    • Anybody tried this with a PBX based system?

      Sure. I hit the "Forward" button on my Lucent digital set, punch in my phone number, and any calls to my desk ring my cell or home phones. No flaky VPN nor softphone required. The PSTN is many things, but featureless is not one of them.

      By the way, "PBX" and "VoIP" are orthogonal, not exclusive. You can have a VoIP-connected PBX just the same as you can have a T1 or POTS or even a cellular-connected PBX. The PBX is just a telephony device that doesn't ca

  • ...is if the VoIP that companies are switching to is for internal only, or actually using VoIP to talk to the world... Case in point: A regional retail chain that I worked for until recently had several new locations open this year. All of these new locations had Avaya VoIP phones (desk phones and cordless, using the WiFi access points installed for other use as well). Along with an Avaya box that prioritizes the VoIP traffic over any other network traffic, we never had an audio quality issue in the time
  • Ok, I use and deploy VOIP ALOT.
    What the hell is a SPITStorm?
  • omg omg this is such a novel concept

    no one has ever predicted this would happen!
  • Last week's SC decision guaranteeing cable monopolies for data access practically creates this busines from the ground up. Cable companies will move into telephony big time now that they have protected markets and phone companies do not.

  • Consolidation... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:17PM (#12982760)
    Letsee, the business owner has to manage two distinct networks, IP and telephony. However, any way you slice it, if you can come up with a technology that will enable the business to reduce the number of networks (components, cabling, management frameworks, admin personel) and hence expenses. This is a Good Thing (TM). The same holds true for storage arrays, operating systems, server vendors etc..

    If you've already got people to manage your IP network, why not just extend them to include voice?

    Traditional PBX doesn't even offer me the choice of reducing expenses.

  • some clarification on the RBOCs and 1996; and VoIP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jsailor ( 255868 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:33PM (#12982819)
    The RBOCs didn't miss the boat and jump in at the last minute, they slowed the industry and got in cheap. They had a war chest full of cash and the upstart IP and DSL providers didn't. By continually making it extremely difficult for CLECs to access their copper facilities, the RBOCs made providing DSL a slow, expensive process - which in turn made it a horrible product for consumers. (Any guesses why cable modems flourished much earlier than DSL?) After the RBOCs starved out the CLECs, waited out the IP providers, tortured the IP equipment providers, and studied their operational models, the RBOCs began building and acquiring IP networks in earnest and at a small fraction of the cost.
    In their minds and business models, they had to slow the adoption of broadband because they hadn't depreciated the 5E's they bought to handle the surge of modem lines. (They were forced by regulations to support POTS lines).

    Believing that they were to dumb and arrogant to recognize that the Internet existed is just false. The RBOCs/ILECs sold the damn modem lines and local loops for T1's and T3's that the Internet ran over. They knew it was there and they knew it was too fast moving and expensive for them to engage in. So they starved their competition and waited out the storm.

    Don't expect VoIP to be much different. Most RBOC and IXCs are offering some form of VoIP now.

    Also, the VoIP that most people are commenting on is not what the article is referring to. It's talking about in-house IP-PBX's not IP Centrex or similar. Examples of an IP PBX are Cisco's Call Manager, Nortel Business Communications Manager (BCM), Avaya's IP office or Communications Managere, etc., etc.

    Also, EVERY major PBX manufacturer is and has been focused on VOIP for some time now. NONE of them are developing TDM features, phones, etc. At the last VoiceCon vendors were asked whether they would even sell a non-IP system.

    In summary, I found the article and commentary to be relatively wanton and uninformed.

  • VOIP Quality Concerns (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CokeJunky ( 51666 ) on Monday July 04, 2005 @11:56PM (#12982880)
    My company gave it a shot, and in two months switched back to traditional telephone lines. The problem we faced is that the small provider we were working with could not provide the proverbial 5 9's of uptime -- that is to say that even once we picked up the phone and did not have a dial tone. Telephones truly are critical in this business world -- the our internet connection could go down for an afternoon and it's only an annoyance. When the phone goes down an afternoon, its thousands of dollars of business. I strongly believe VOIP providers need the same level of regulation and responsibility as traditional providers because telephone is usually the first and most important link to emergency services, business contacts, friends and family, etc.
  • With things like Skype, and Gizmo Project [1], I really don't see the need to use land lines. I haven't had a land line for almost a year now, and never missed it. I pay $0/month in fees, and pay low rates only when I call (I use Merit Call for VOIP).

    [1] http://www.gizmoproject.com/ [gizmoproject.com]
    review: http://www.techcrunch.com/?cat=45 [techcrunch.com]
  • AT&T.

    Read about my experience w/ AT&T here: AT&T VOIP review [blogspot.com]

    Not sure that I understand how the bells aren't 'getting' VOIP - AT&T not only has a rate competitive service w/ standalone VOIP provider Vonage, but they've had the 911 issue resolved for the duration of my coverage with them, much longer than other VOIP providers have.
  • Yeah, VOIP will kill off traditional telephony just as soon as Comcast figures out how to make my connection stop cutting o^^^^NO CARRIER^^^^
  • It will repace ISDN based telephony in businesses long before it 'kill' trad telephony. Isn't VOIP a form of telephony anyway?

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