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Communications The Internet The Almighty Buck IT

The Continued Advance of VoIP 159

Posted by Hemos from the like-a-glacier-coming-down dept.
A reader writes: "With the recent VoIP ruling from the FCC, it appears that the playing field in the US is ready for take off. There's been some more coverage on that, but companies are begining to wonder about how to manage all of this - but PMC-Sierra (one of the big chip makers) has announced additional support for it."
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The Continued Advance of VoIP More

The Continued Advance of VoIP

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  • Who on slashdot needs a phone (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:23PM (#10794379)
    The girl you fantasize about WON'T call you.
    • You've never heard of a call back service? That's half the fun!
    • Yes. But there are girls I can call while I fantasize about them. Too bad they always want credit card numbers first :(

  • It's time (Score:5, Funny)

    by rewt66 ( 738525 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:24PM (#10794389)
    Time to sell your stock in long-distance companies...

    • LD providers run IP, too (Score:5, Informative)

      by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:56PM (#10794592) Homepage Journal

      Most of the big long distance companies have their own fiber and use it to carry Internet traffic. Probably most of the bits in this post travelled over those very lines. Let's see:

      $ tracert.exe slashdot.org

      Tracing route to slashdot.org [66.35.250.150]
      over a maximum of 30 hops:

      1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 10.1.2.1
      2 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 10.20.65.1
      3 270 ms 221 ms 290 ms [redacted]
      4 160 ms 291 ms 260 ms [redacted]
      5 191 ms 230 ms 270 ms tbr1-p012301.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.9]
      6 120 ms 290 ms 200 ms ggr2-p310.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.123.6.65]
      7 170 ms 501 ms 200 ms dcr1-so-3-3-0.Chicago.savvis.net [208.175.10.93]
      8 271 ms 250 ms 271 ms dcr2-loopback.SanFranciscosfo.savvis.net [206.24.210.100]
      9 150 ms 270 ms 281 ms bhr1-pos-0-0.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [208.172.156.198]
      10 200 ms 270 ms 231 ms csr1-ve243.SantaClarasc8.savvis.net [66.35.194.50]
      11 110 ms 291 ms 280 ms 66.35.212.174
      12 slashdot.org [66.35.250.150] reports: Destination host unreachable.

      Trace complete.
      AT&T [att.com]. Savvis [savvis.net] doesn't appear to be in the long distance business.

      Some smaller outfits just lease capacity or resell it, but they're agile enough to figure out what to do.

      • Sure they do. But where do they make their money? They don't make as much on bulk IP traffic as they would have on the individual long-distance calls.

        (Of course, they spend less, too, because they don't have to do the billing processing for the individual call. But I still think that the long-distance outfits wind up with less profit from VOIP than they did from long-distance phone calls.)

        So: If their profits are going to go down, and we can see it coming, then sell their stock.

        (Disclaimer: I am nei
    • The story is this: >50% of consumers will switch to VoIP even if quality and service levels are below current "carrier grade" service - IF the cost is 20% lower. This is easily achieved. But the IXC (Inter-Exchange Carriers - aka long distance providers) have the BRAND recognitition that a skype can only dream of. The ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers, aka Baby Bells) may be hesitant to "eat their own children" and promote VoIP heavily. Expect AT&T to attempt to play the VoIP card in a big

  • Riding the VOIP wave (Score:5, Interesting)

    by aacool ( 700143 ) <aamanlDALIamba2gmail.com minus painter> on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:24PM (#10794390) Journal
    I've had VOIP from Lingo for 3 months now - $19.99 per month - free US & Europe - couldnt live without it. I cancelled my landline after a week. Very satisfied and referred VOIP to many people.

    My company has been on VOIP globally for a while now. Definitely reaching critical mass now.

    The system would not work outside the Western world, though, with the spotty coverage, limited bandwidth and power (electricity) problems that do exist.

    • Will that work thru nat? (Behind my firewall)

      • Re:Riding the VOIP wave (Score:3, Informative)

        by sheddd ( 592499 )
        Whups; browsed their site and couldn't quickly find info so I post then I wonder more and look again... looks like it does; might give it a try. Thanks.

        Lazy man's link [lingosupport.com] to page that says it works behind 'consumer multiport router'. It's the 'alternate' method, not their 'recommended' one.

        Probably hate the tech support with buggy piece o crap routers. (I've been admin'ing vpn for 1st time recently and TONS of cheap routers have problems.

        • I'm running the 'alternate route' - I've had excellent tech support - he helped me set it up via phone - static IP addressing for my network devices behind the VOIP router, which is connected to the broadband router.

          No problem at all

      • Will that work thru nat? (Behind my firewall)

        Yes, but there are some possible quality problems.

        Note that I'm speaking from my Vonage experience, but I expect Lingo would be the same.

        Yes, it will work from behind a NATing router/firewall. Assuming you've got a good stateful firewall you shouldn't even have to mess around with any port forwarding. In my case my firewall is a Linux box w/iptables. Works great. If you have a less intelligent firewall, you may have to forward some UDP ports to your VO

    • Re:Riding the VOIP wave (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fiji ( 4544 ) *
      Surprisingly there are a bunch of low cost carriers who route their calls over VoIP when going overseas so they can fit more calls into the same pipe. A lot of said countries are in the third world. Of course, whether you can get decent IP service when you don't have leased T1s is a different story :-)

      Anyway, you can test your VoIP quality from anywhere with IP and a Java-enabled browser at http://testyourvoip.com/ [testyourvoip.com] if you are concerned about your IP quality not being up to snuff, or if you want to see ho

    • Prices (Score:3, Informative)

      by pherris ( 314792 )
      I've had VOIP from Lingo for 3 months now - $19.99 per month - free US & Europe

      $20 per month = Unlimited calling to US, Canada and Western Europe.
      $35 per month = Unlimited calling to US, Canada, Western Europe, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, South Korea and Guam.

      Hey Verizon ... Can you here me now?

    • I recently took my Vonage ATA adapter to Shanghai China and had no problems using it in my hotel or the office. Our company recently deployed (6 months ago) a VOIP solution to connect our US office to our China office. The system works great 99% of the time. The major problem you encounter with connections in the far-east is the latency of packets back to US/Canada (~200-300ms). The latency issues delays the voice transmission, but not enough for you to really notice... Bandwidth in the fareast has not

  • Bandwidth too please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Magickcat ( 768797 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:24PM (#10794391)
    Unless more basic infrastructure impovements are made in providing decent bandwidth to these technologies, I'm not likely to enjoy VoIP terribly much.

    • Latency, not bandwidth (Score:5, Informative)

      by thpr ( 786837 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:57PM (#10794932)
      Latency is the problem - getting down to the ideal of about 70ms regardless of where in the world you are going is key. This is VERY difficult today, but possible even through a very narrow pipe (128K) with quality that rivals (or even beats) current "carrier grade" service. Up to 200ms or so is still a doable conversation, over that and you're starting to get a situation where conversation breaks down.

      Note the 70ms comes from the time it takes for voice to travel across a reasonably large room - a delay the human brain will automatically account for without interpreting it as having a lag in the conversation.

      • Re:Latency, not bandwidth (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wayne ( 1579 )
        Latency is the problem - getting down to the ideal of about 70ms regardless of where in the world you are going is key.

        You aren't going to be able to reach the 70ms latency from any where in the world to anywhere in the world.

        The speed of light is about 299,792km/s. The cicumference of the earth is about 40,000 km, so the time it takes light to go half way around the world is about 65ms.

        Electrons in a wire and photons in fiber don't travel as fast as light in a vacuum and wires/fiber aren't layed in

    • While the sound quality on VOIP is probably not going to be quite as high at first compared to the 64kbps on a POTS line as data networks become more and more powerful and the technology is widely adopted it is likely that sound quality over data networks will someday be far better than POTS.
  • Why is there so much talk about VoIP? Granted, it seems "neat" but haven't we been doing this for years with programs like Roger Wilco? Of course, we never had the convenience of a phone number being tied to the client, but still... I'll stick to my cellphone, as no cables are required.

    • Re:VoIP that interesting? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Paska ( 801395 ) * on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:42PM (#10794515) Homepage
      It's very interesting, you know why? It saves me over $1000/month on phone bills! I work for a US based company that is located in Australia. Before I was paying Hel$tra $1000US/month for all our phone calls to US/Canada and UK. Now I pay Broadvoice around $70US/month, and I get unlimited calls, I get features I didn't even know existed (E.g. Caller Name) and the best of it all, I don't have to pay Hel$tra one single cent. Also the quality over here is absolutely brilliant, and is far better then my Cell phone and local land line.
    • It is getting more and more interesting because the two networks (the PSTN and the Internet) are getting mixed. For example, from my home I can call the office for free, I can call to the local area in the city for a local tariff instead of a LD tariff. And the people in the office can call me for free too.

      We have setup our SIP servers so that anybody can call our office for free. But if you want to call outside the office you need to be authenticated (billing :-).

      It's all a matter of meshing and choosing

    • It's about business, not technology!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thpr ( 786837 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @11:03PM (#10794960)
      VoIP was technically possible in 1995 or so. Just like streaming a movie over a high speed Internet connection is theoretically possible today. It just takes time to commercialize. The reason it is getting so much attention now is that: (1) The networking industry is solving the latency problems that plagued voice (2) Advanced audio codecs are providing high quality voice in much smaller packets, improving service levels (3) data traffic dwarfs voice traffic, so it's possible to put the voice onto the network as "high quality traffic" and get the required throughput and completely avoiding the entire telephone network support and infrastructure cost (4) It's cheap as all get out in comparison to PSTN service.

      What will further delay VoIP from entirely killing the PSTN, smong other things, are (1) The vendors (bad vendors!) are doing a Microsoft-like embrace-and-extend of SIP (the session initiation protocol used to set up a VoIP call) (2) Meeting regulations like CALEA (the law enforcement act that gives the government the power to tap the phones) (3) Truly connecting Voice Over IP "islands"... because how to you share IP addresses of phones and maintain privacy (like suppressing caller ID)... and the best savings come when you can remove the PSTN (public switched telephone network) entirely.

    • Well, programs were fine if everyone you wanted to talk to had a computer and if you were willing to use a computer to talk through. VOIP in its current form frees us of this requirement.
      I just recently subscribed to Vonage (a VOIP provider in the USA). Having moved recently from a city in Canada to the USA, I knew my wife and kids would be calling home often, ramping up my phone bills. So, I ordered up my Cable modem, ordered my Vonage and 3 days later opened the box that FedEx dropped off at my place and


  • This all seems very nice and all, however are there companies out there that offer voip with the services you typically get with a land line. example being caller id call waiting, 911, 411 and any operator service ? This is a genuine question as I am looking into this in the long run for the company I work with.
  • I am looking at becoming a niche VOIP provider for certain a few very small niches. THese include people in the US who have no other telephony or internet options other than satelite. I am amazed how a business can spend $6000/yr for telephone charges when they only have one line....

    VOIP has a few problems and there are many environments where I think that conventional circuit-switched connections offer better value, but there are also times where it is completely indispensable.

    However, the rise of VOIP will force, in many places, telecoms to cut costs and become more competitive. THis is extremely good. It will be hard on them because they are used to owning the lines and having monopoly power, and they are no longer a monopoly (they aren't in my county anyway due to the county-owned fiber network which allows a choice of telecom providers and hence lower costs and better choice).
    • With the latency and limited upstream of consumer two-way satellite, is this really viable?
      • Latency on a satellite is not much greater than it is on a satphone which is the other option for these customers. Yes, there are problems, but with adequate QoS, it is viable for small businesses with 1-2 lines.

        Remember that your main latency comes from the fact that you are bouncing data over lightwaves between the earth and geosynchronous orbit (approx 1/8 light second away). This means that for the 4 hops, you get approx 1/2 second delay which is annoying as all get out, but is a fact of any geosynch

    • You might want to supplement your satellite based option with Champion Communications [championco...ations.biz] which is a quick and easy way to make some money from selling VoIP service. It is an MLM but the people who started it are known to me (they are also in Greenville, SC) and they have absolutely sterling reputations. Google for "Leighton Cubbage", "CTG", and "iOnosphere".

      The service is not the cheapest but the quality is very good because the parent company is a PSTN company that has used VoIP for carrying their own tra

    • US$6000/year? A company I know of pays AU$3000/month for our phone service (eighteen lines). That's US$27300/year.

      Go VoIP - nah. Our local telco is being _most_ unhelpful with VoIP, and continue to insist that ISDN is the way of the future. Riiiight.

      For all the faults of the US telecomms system, at least you have some competition instead of a single private company (gov't owns 51 percent, but like to pretend they don't) that basically owns the system.

      • Go VoIP - nah. Our local telco is being _most_ unhelpful with VoIP, and continue to insist that ISDN is the way of the future. Riiiight.

        For business voice lines, ISDN is *really* nifty. It is actually my technology of choice in this area, but nobody offers BRI's anymore because there is no reason for such small scale ISDN setups. Here the only ISDN we can get is PRI for about 600 USD/month. We haven't decided yet, but we may be offering actually ISDN->VOIP bridging, as it may end up being less expe
        • Don't get me wrong - I think IDSN is cool. It is _not_, however, hot new tech or the way the world is going. I expect IDSN to be around for a _very_ long time, and it's an eminently sensible technology to choose for current and future deployments.

          Telstra, unfortunately, talks about IDSN like it's the new hot thing, and prices it to match. Until very recently they were pushing BRI IDSN as an "ideal broadband solution". Sweet gems in their business PRI ISDN pricing include timed local calls with an initial c

          • It looks like it'll be cheaper to get eighteen (!!) individual lines and use business-grade ADSL for 'net access rather than get PRI IDSN. Isn't that really rather lame?

            Here I can get a PRI, 20 DID's, and 5mb/s internet for approx $620/mo plus taxes. Remember that you can have 23 voice conversations over ISDN (it uses basically a T1, with one DS0 for signalling).
  • Just got the word today that we're installing a VoIP system for our new location. Seeing as this will not only server our user-base but our call center as well, it's a big deal. Coming from a completely Telco/PBX environment, we all scared and excited! Like a Slashdotter on a date! At least, that's how I envision it being....ahemm.
    • Verizon is saying they will provide voip but not in my area yet. I will not use voip until I am still a local call to my neighbors. Therefore I need to have my local area code. It has been over 2 months since verizon stated that they have voip and they already provide dsl so I do not know why they can't provide voip in my area. If I buy several of the same cordless phones and connect one of the bases to the router than use the other bases as chargers only will I be able to use all of the phones?

  • Voip will be a flash in the pan. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:42PM (#10794510)
    There is no reason why you need these big companies providing services to you, unless it's just for convienience.

    After all the internet is not a client server model, it's a peer to peer model. Meaning that when your computer is connected to the internet is as much as a part of the internet as any service provider.

    That's why VoIP in it's current form: as a phone call over the internet will die. It's a fine replacement for POTS, but we are capable of so much more.

    Full on video/audio connections are possible with the higher speed connections that DSL/Cable provides, also with the rise of WiFi networks in cities and such you will soon get the same connectivity on a hand-held.

    My personal prediction is that Voip is a flash in the pan technology. A in between technology that will be replaced by something else within 10 years. POTS will outlast it, but only because of the needs of rural people, and that's were VoIP will end up being used, as a interface between the city people with easy access to wifi and rural communities with no such quick and cheap access.
    • Got news for you - most long distance phone traffic is VoIP. The large Telcos all use the technology for their backbone systems, they just don't advertise it much.

    • You are SOOOO wrong (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thpr ( 786837 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @11:13PM (#10795000)
      Many real companies, governments and other organizations are looking into and deploying Voice over IP. It IS happening.

      As far as disappearing to be replaced by something else, that's a problem too. An analysis of FCC and industry data will show you the lifetime on such telecom equipment is VERY long - in many cases longer than a decade. So it will last, if for no other reason than "something else" isn't that much better, so it doesn't cost justify.

      The real key here is that POTS is in trouble. The number of lines is going down (due to wireless) and the corporations are in a rush to Voice over IP. Why? Becuase it's cheaper, and the amount of voice traffic is now dwarfed by the data traffic. Thus, you can carry the voice traffic on the data network and completely eliminate the voice network. You can even do it with high quality of service for the voice, and it works because it's such a small percentage of the total network traffic. Expect some big announcements over the next year.

      • Re:You are SOOOO wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

        by anon mouse-cow-aard ( 443646 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @11:41PM (#10795176) Journal

        You don't need a provider to do deploy VOIP. The only essential thing that a provider is giving you is an interface into the POTS network. Once everyone is on the internet, you'll just be able to "phone greg@home.com" and a currently non-existent protocol will resolve that to whatever communication Greg has on hand, by talking only with Greg's own equipment, not that of any provider. The internet is Peer 2 Peer.


        Sure, you will still be doing Voice over IP, but it won't be any kind of huge revenue generator for VOIP companies, and, as commercial entities, they will shrivel and die. But I wouldn't worry, they probably have a good ten to twenty years of good times before people figure that out.

        • Re: You are SOOOO wrong (Score:4, Insightful)

          by thpr ( 786837 ) on Friday November 12, 2004 @12:14AM (#10795330)
          I wouldn't worry, they probably have a good ten to twenty years of good times before people figure that out.

          You have more faith than I do. Once we have a way to link the "islands" of Voice over IP that corporations and individuals are creating, I would expect Voice over IP to turn into a product, (think fax machine) rather than a service. Buy a Linksys device from your local electronics store and plug in. There will be NO revenue involved except for the "bit carrier", and that will be a race to the bottom between cable carriers and DSL providers. I would say that happens sooner rather than later. I think 10 years is generous.

          • how long before grandma gets off POTS? Until "everyone" has it, you're going to need these intermediaries. I'll stick with my estimate.

            Thanks for those who mentioned SIP. I've heard of it, but had no idea what it did.

        • Once everyone is on the internet, you'll just be able to "phone greg@home.com" and a currently non-existent protocol will resolve that to whatever communication Greg has on hand, by talking only with Greg's own equipment, not that of any provider.

          Good thinking.

          The protocol you envision has been around for a couple of years now, and it's called Session Initiation Protocol - SIP. It uses a URI like to find the party you are calling, and after it has served it's rendezvous function, the media is sent peer-
      • Thus, you can carry the voice traffic on the data network and completely eliminate the voice network.

        From this article: [computerworld.com.au]

        A converged voice and data network may sound like a fabulous idea until you remember the last time a worm or denial of service attack brought your network to its knees. Do you really want the network and your phone system to go down together?
    • It's not that it's a "flash in the pan" as you put it. It's a step in the right direction. Voip providers (or at least the one I engineer for) aren't concerned with PSTN other than for now it's a nessesary evil and temporary source of very modest revenue. No what you say is true but what you miss is that a Voip provider brings a much bigger piece to the puzzle. How many other companies can make this work? VERY FEW, and the reason behind that is that they can't find the right mix of technology, and business.

  • Bleh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ziviyr ( 95582 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @09:42PM (#10794513) Homepage
    I just want a simple multiplatform opensource dial by IP voice chat program without the wacky servers and fees.
    • But try Skype [skype.com]. It works on Linux and Windows, its basically like an IM program, Skype to Skype calls are free, you can IM other Skype users (its got all the basic IM features you see on a IM program), sound quality is about that of a cell phone, and computer to POTS calls aren't just cheap, their extra geeky.
  • Thinking of getting VOIP, but I have DSL.

    I've heard conflicting reports that you have to have a valid phone # for DSL to work. Is that true? If so, I'm not sure if VOIP's cost effective because I'd have to keep my telco connection and the associated phone bill on top of the VOIP fees.
    • Personally, I ended up with a cable modem from Adelphia, who I can't stand, because verizon wanted to charge me 35 dollars a month for a phone that I wouldn't ever use. They insisted that I had to have a valid phone number and that there was no way to get that phone number without the base phone service. I don't know if it's different in other areas, but there was no way around it for me.
    • One word (err, URL) http://www.speakeasy.net/residential/onelink/ [speakeasy.net]. I have it, and I'll never go back. (DSL without the home phone line.)

      Once you try thier VOIP service, you'll love it, too. :)

      (No, I don't work for them, just a very satisfied customer).

      • Speakeasy is seriously overpriced. My TW cable bill (70 channel std pkg) + RR (they are offering 6.0 mbs up) runs me $65. Add in VOIP for $20 and my total is $85. Speakeasy wants $135 for 6/768 + VOIP. Granted, they provide static IPs (I use dyndns) and a shell account (who cares?) and a local RPM mirror (again, so what?). But that $135 is w/out video. No wonder dsl has been so slow to take off compared with cable.
    • A basic feature of VOIP is that while you need some type of bandwidth for it to be available it does not have to be over any particular media, as long as the bandwidth and latency characteristics of the medium are adequate to support VOIP. This can be DSL, Cable, Fiber, or Wireless. DSL is simply a regular phone line equipped with the DSL Hardware at your home or place of business, and at the Telco switching office. DSL will work with VOIP, but so will typically a cable modem, or a WiFi connection to a hig

    • Re:Question regarding DSL and VOIP (Score:4, Informative)

      by peter hoffman ( 2017 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:39PM (#10794836) Homepage

      It depends what state you live in. What you are wanting is called "naked" or "dry" DSL. It is available in GA and NC but not SC (yet). I don't know about other states.

  • Still not for biz. (Score:2, Informative)

    by skalcevich ( 701019 )
    so what. no business is going to use some voip line (www.vonage.com) for services. I can see asterisk or cisco call manager for businesses but i just dont see why a business would use a consumer grade service. The local lines / LD savings arent that big of a price break for the chance of loosing business...Now if they would centeralize and use asterisk i can see that being good.

    • Re:Still not for biz. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:24PM (#10794750) Homepage Journal
      There are commercial grade services and devices right now and have been available for a while. I am currently using such a service/device to patch in an AT&T multi-line Merlin system into a T1 service. Of course, I don't get ALL the cost benefits of VoIP, but the basic service is basically free for me and long distance is dirt cheap.
      • I know about multi line solutions and rollover lines. thats not the point its the same. WHen it goes down what do u tell customers? u have no control over these things. "ahh ya at&t is fixing it sorry" they will get a busy tone. if u had a nailed up P2p link with fallover to your HQ with asterisk or call manager u can route calls better and have more control. i used to work for a provider in canada that offered multi line voip and well it sucked. "ya we are down" opps. I know u have no dial tone. Its OK
    • But it's not a bad fit for small biz. I pay nearly $200 per month for my Verizon 'basic' business phone service with bottom-of-the-line DSL for my design studio. Since Verizon is the only game in town I have to play to matter what they decide to charge. And I don't even use the phone all that much.

      Conversely if I could convince Adelphia to install cable in my business I could grab cable for $60-$70 per month plus Vonage for about $30 and I've cut my bill in half. Too bad I can't actually get Adelphia to co
    • Big business is already investing in VoIP. They are deploying it internally and having great success and savings.

      Small business will be delayed - for the reasons you mention. However, in another post [slashdot.org] I mention that I think you will see AT&T and some of the existing IXCs (inter exchange carriers, aka long distance carriers) enter into the VoIP market in a big way. Expect them to use that as a lever to displace the local carriers if they can. It will come, but it won't be the little guys who bring i

    • Our company uses VOIP for our internal phones, and also for customer locations. For our offices and for our customers it makes everyone an extension away, instead of a long distance call.

      Quality is excellent. Internal people and customers alike couldn't care that they're IP phones - they ring, they dial, they work.

      Latency and QOS are the two bugaboos, but if you've a healthy network, implementing VOIP shouldn't be a huge deal.

      We pronounce it "Voyp" - rhyme the first part with 'boy'.

  • Packet8 rocks (Score:4, Informative)

    by freelunch ( 258011 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:07PM (#10794659)
    I just dumped Voice Pulse. I have had their unlimited plan since April. The quality was good for a few months but has been awful since August. This would happen with or without p2p network activity going on in the background. I even tried their lower bandwidth codecs.

    VP also raised prices from $35 to $38 when Vonage dropped to $25! What price war?

    I have had packet8 for a month. The unlimited service is $20. So far, quality is much better. More impressive is the good quality even with 12 KB/sec of p2p upstream on my cable modem.
    • I've had packet8 for 6 mos or so. Its good except for the massive latency. Its like those commercials for Nextel where everyone has to wait a turn and make short little comments while holding the push-to-talk. All the latency in the traceroute is between Chicago and SJC (I'm in Minneapolis), about 200ms worth, on their upstreams network (Level 3). Apparently they backhaul everything to SJC and back out again, even when I'm calling to the East Coast.

      I still have and use the service and it is almost worth $2

      • Re:Packet8 rocks (Score:3, Interesting)

        by freelunch ( 258011 )
        I've had packet8 for 6 mos or so. Its good except for the massive latency

        That has not been my experience at all.

        My first p8 call was to a friend to do a latency test. One person counts "1..2..3" and the other repeats the number as soon as they hear it. That gives the lead surprisingly good feedback on latency.

        My sister uses Vonage and doesn't have this bandwidth problem, but she's in NY and I'm guessing there's a Vonage interface in NJ.

        I should have mentioned that I am in southern Michigan. A fri
  • Using it at 10$ for a line a month at $0.016 a min is cheep for cellphonish quality for a fone call or for a toll free... now if anyone here know of a muilti line sip iax (* compatible) that I can switch between lines easier I am game.. Also while your at it any decent DID canadian phone companies for voip would be nice.. Its good to see that the opensource community gives the big guys a run for there money.. I see alot of little voip peoiple out there and looks like they are enjoying alot of intrest

  • What I want to know about VOIP is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:16PM (#10794709) Homepage
    What I want to know about VOIP is, how do you pronounce it?

    Vojp? VeeOhhEyePee?

    (Oh, and a gold star to whoever can tell me where this quote is from "I P Freeley". Want a hint? It is phone related.)
    • .
      > What I want to know about VOIP is, how do you pronounce it?

      Sounds like John Voight's last name, except P instead of T. Or like void, except P instead of D.

      Although I read that some "purists" still pronounce the letters individually.

      A new hire at the company I work at says "t-dot" is the new "hip" designation for Toronto, being some kind of bastardization of "TO" (tee ohh). Everyone polled so far thinks "t-dot" it's stupid.

      Of course, t-dot is nicer than "big penis town" :)
      .

  • It's a power thing. (Score:2, Informative)

    by e9th ( 652576 )
    Older corded phones worked fine regardless of local power outages. POTS is there as long as the copper is intact. When the VoIP folks figure out how to line-power everything from the CO, I'll sign up in a heartbeat.

  • Unmetered phone ... unmetered electric (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Thursday November 11, 2004 @10:22PM (#10794743) Homepage Journal
    How ironic. In the 1960's, there was a big push for all-electric homes (electric heat, electric hot water heaters, electric stoves) because nuclear power promised to make electricity so inexpensive, it wouldn't be worth metering -- we'd all someday just pay a flat monthly rate to keep the grid and the plants maintained.

    Well, we all know how that particular story ended up. But who would have imagined, back in the days of 40 cent per minute interstate calling, that someday telephone service would become so cheap that it wouldn't be worth metering? Unmetered telephone service? Now you're just crazy talking!

    I suppose it's somewhat ironic (in an Alanis Morrisette fashion, not true irony) that it's really just people problems, not technology problems, that we have to solve in order to make these things come true.
  • What about bandwidth? From what im seeing, the required upload stream is at least 90KbitsPS+ http://www.voicepulse.com/learn/TechnicalRequireme nts.aspx [voicepulse.com] and in some cases more(although they say 40K can be used with degraded quality). I cant speak for all the broadband users but in my own experience with comcast, they only offer 256K and i know of others that only offer as little as 128K up. Now, for the person who *uploads* alot ;), how is this going to work out? Is there a switching technology built in th
    • QOS at the router level (for a home/small biz) will do most of what you need. Cheap routers have quality of service settings now... or at least a Linksys WRT54G - with the stock firmware too.

      Prioritize the voice traffic, and it should get whatever upstream bandwidth it needs. This won't do much with the downstream traffic, but for most folks it isn't a problem.
  • When I can talk to my friends in the US (who only have cell phones) from my Mac in the EU with having to become telekom engineer (or pay the zillion euro per minute charge I get from my cell) because none of us have land lines...
  • How is voice over IP any different than having a microphone in yahoo messanger? Except the fact that you get a phone number, and are able to access non voice over IP locations. A FCC ruling could clamp down on already free services like yahoo messanger who have been free for years! Think about it, FCC ignorance could control things like all voice communication on the internet (video game, messanger, etc).
    • "How is voice over IP any different than having a microphone in yahoo messanger? Except the fact that you get a phone number, and are able to access non voice over IP locations."

      Replace Voip with car and yahoo messanger with city transit and you have your answer.
  • This would of course be totally badass!

    However at some point you have replaced the whole palm pilot or phone but oh well.

  • Can you hear me now? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Charcharodon ( 611187 ) on Friday November 12, 2004 @01:53AM (#10795737)
    They need to hurry up and come out with a WiFi phone, as in like a cell phone not a cordless home phone, that can operate over one of the many IM services or through the free VOIP services like skype. In wireless laced cities like Seattle, my current home city, or in my own little wireless hotspot at home I can dump my Vonage and my Nextel phone for good. Nothing more than a broadband bill.

    I say good riddence.

    • I've been doing a lot of research for the past 2 day and the Wisip phones are what your talking about. I've been drooling ever since I saw it [broadvoice.com].

      Since SIP phones seem to be pretty damn cool (open standards, I guess companies like Lingo [lingo.com] and Packet8 [packet8.com] use proprietary hardware which can spell limited choices and hardware lock-in) Wisip phones seem to be the way to go (it helps that they've got that tech-fetishist look going on too!).

      Pulver Innovatoins [pulverinnovations.com]
      Xiologix [xiologix.com]

      An added bonus of using a SIP based service is
    • How about a micro-power cell phone "tower" for the home network that a GSM phone could connect to for calls from home? You would need to configure your cell phone to use your home cell service by preference, when available. It would probably also be necessary to disallow connections from neighbors' phones.

      I imagine that with low enough power levels, it would be legal in today's legislative environement. Phones themselves may not be able to reduce power enough to comply, however.

      Of course, adding WiFi t

  • What are the telcos choosing? for this?

    This seems like such a natural fit for IPv6, don't you think?

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