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Hardware

IP Telephony Hardware Stretching Toward Home Users 98

Posted by timothy from the eeehhhlliiiottt dept.
Banjonardo writes "On today's edition of The Contra Costa Times , there was an interesting article about an actual appliance that replaces the computer in net-to-phone calls. The phone can be connected to an ethernet port, though I imagine DSL users would have to have their PCs on to log in. The company has a nice website dedicated to it. Lately most PC-to-phone programs have been asking for more money for international calls. Netmeeting doesn't cut it for all video needs, but several alternatives are quite acceptable, even for international calls." The phone the article concentrates on requires broadband and a home gateway to set-up; luckily neither of those things is rare any more. A few of the competing devices are mentioned as well; you can almost smell companies like Cisco drooling to own voice transport.
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IP Telephony Hardware Stretching Toward Home USers More

IP Telephony Hardware Stretching Toward Home USers

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  • Yup, Cisco is (or at lest was while I was still with them) partnered with open telecommunications [ot.com.au] in Australia to implement VoIP. Cisco provided the hardware, ot provided the software.

    Disclaimer: I'm an ex-employee (moved countries, so we parted on friendly terms:) from the Wellington, NZ branch, but that was a year ago now hence the uncertainty (and a quick look at the site didn't help).

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • Phooey. Telephone-quality voice in 3k/sec? I don't think so.

    ITU rec G.723.1 is the common low-bandwidth codec in use, and it goes down to 5.6 kb/s, but the 6.4 kb/s varient is more common. G.729, at 8 kb/s, begins to approximate the quality you'd see on a voice call. G.711 is what's commonly used in telephony systems, and that's 64 kb/s. (kb=kilobits).
  • So, companies like Cisco (and Nortel, who I work for) have been working on this for a while. It's one of the reasons that Lucent isn't doing so well -- all the telcos decided that VoIP was the wave of the future, and stopped buying traditional telephony switches. Lucent didn't pick up on that fact and so they're playing catch-up.

    The primary problem with the net2phone box is that it uses the Internet as transport, and there is no end-to-end management of the internet. So, the packets that contain your voice have to compete on an equal footing with other peoples packets, despite the fact that yours are much more time-sensitive.

    The delay is likely due to the amount of buffering that needs to be done because of this. And, the fuzzy audio is because the audio still needs to be compressed, despite the high-bandwidth connection. Most home broadband connections can transport much more data coming down than going back up, so the outgoing voice stream needs a lot of compression.

    There are other problems: What services does this box do? Can it handle 3-way calls, call-waiting, call-forwarding, etc.... What happens when you plug a modem or fax into it?

    What I think you'll see is the broadband service provider putting in a home gateway (Analog phone-to-VoIP Gateway, not the ubquitous linksys box), then routing that VoIP over their private network, instead of feeding it straight to the internet. Cable-modem folks are especially eager to get into that market, because while VoIP doesn't use up that much bandwidth, phone-calls are a high-dollar business.
  • Try these links to get you started:
    http://www.openh323.org/
    http://www.linuxtelephony.org/
    http://www.linuxjack.com/
    http://www.openphone.org/http://www.voxilla.org/
    http://www.speakfreely.org/
    http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/unix/sfunix.ht ml
  • Surely you could do this better with a phone-sized Linux box - maybe with wireless networking - which has sound hardware. The CPU doesn't actually need to be that meaty for voice compression (GSM phones manage it).

    Isn't there already a Palm-type device with built-in microphone and speaker which runs Linux? Use that!

    Or better, sell some small 'base station' for your digital mobile phone which sends the GSM data across the net. You'd temporarily swap out the account details card from your mobile and replace it with one that contacts your home base station (which has a very weak transmitter covering a radius of about 200m).
  • Take a look at ITXC - they are doing great business in VoIP for real $$. They work mainly with international calling card vendors, but several large long-distance companies are also their clients...
  • Ahh.. something I can actually make worthwhile comment on.

    Large corporations aren't the only benefactors. VoIP services are also aimed squarely at small biz, over T1 circuits (See Cbeyond [cbeyond.net] or Broadriver [broadriver.com] for examples). Packages start at around $500 (huh? $500 for T1 and phone service? Yep.)

    Unlike what one poster mentioned, 911 and caller ID actually can be supported. You really can't be a CLEC offering services in a US market without 911. And, yep, they can trace it back, hold the circuit open and other neat tricks. BUT, your POTS line provides its own power, so you know it works if your lights are out and someone starts into a stroke.

    (Though, what's not currently there in most implementations is the FBI's CALEA [askcalea.com] requirements. Shhh.. :-)

    As someone mentioned before, the keys are latency (you've got a pretty small budget to work with before the human ear notices) and bandwidth controls for shared networks (can't let data overrun the voice, and that means tight QoS). A voice stream (at G.711 encoding, which would give the same voice quality as a standard PSTN call) sucks up around 80-100 kbps in either direction, and if you're sharing the trunk with data, you gotta make sure that the entire stream gets through. Otherwise it gets chopped up and sounds like Armstrong on the moon.




    --
    Never knock on Death's door.
    Ring the doorbell and run
    (He hates that).

  • but you'll still need a land line for ordering pizza

    Since when?

    http://www.papajohnsonline.com/html/pj/pj_i ndex.js p

  • Ahem, ANY ip phones over the internet or public networks suck. Hardware based wont give you any advantage (and I'm betting that it is software based anyways inside that little box) you lag is from the fact that there is too much traffic on too little bandwidth.

    all problems with IP telephony over internet is the fault of the internet/your ISP/the Govt/Universities/Spammers/Everyone with the letter A in their names, and finally to round out the blame, every .com company.

    Until we get a voice compression system that can compress my voice into a 5Kbit stream cleanly ant at telephone line quality, it will not happen over the internet. AT&T on the otherhand has IP telephony working great in cablemodem land. But that's on a private network (the cablemodem network) and with some bandwidth room.
  • It's usually not a question of the bandwidth, it's a question of latency. Most people with DSL connectivity should be able to use VoIP, provided that the latency between them and their calling partner is less than 150ms.

    Until we get a voice compression system that can compress my voice into a 5Kbit stream cleanly ant at telephone line quality, it will not happen over the internet.

    I'd say its also going to take people learning to live with phone calls that suffer from a lot of digital artifacts (high latency, jitter, dropouts, etc). I think many people who own cell phones already are there in terms of noise acceptance. It's getting people who grew up in urban areas in the 60s and 70s on 56k toll-quality to accept it. It's too bad the older generation who grew up on circa 1920s handsets and even older switching and cabling aren't the decision makers on IP telephony purchasing, they'd tell you, "Hey, it sounds great compared to the 1910 Bell wall set I have at home, shut up about your 56k toll quality already..."
  • Actually, Dialpad [dialpad.com] is still completely free, at least for continental USA calls. They don't even make sure you're not using Junkbuster on their banner and pop-up ads. :)

    I have abandoned my POTS line, in favor of a combination of Dialpad for long-distance and a $30 a month AT&T cellphone for local. And so far it's worked rather well. I have more cell time than I could ever use, and when I need to call someone LD, Dialpad is there for me. And I'm not paying much more than I was for landline local plus long distance.

    --

  • Yup. ~3K/sec. If I remember correctly, we were doing sampling at a low rate, like between 5 Khz and 8 Khz nominal.

  • Its not the bandwidth.... (Score:3)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @10:07AM (#97287) Homepage


    Its the latency, stoopid. :)

    You can do telephone-quality vox over ip with as little as 3K/sec bandwidth. I remember toying around with some early, early stuff back around 1993 or so that had nothing more than two 33.6K modems on either end, and it worked fine quality wise--The issue was latency, not quality. Width of the pipe isn't the issue, gang. You can have the widest pipe in the world, but it will be totally useless if your latency is terrible. Who cares what the quality is if theres a 3 second delay between point A and point B?

    Broadband is nice, sure, but its not going to do anything to improve the way your packets are relayed, and subsequently the delay between sender and reciever.

  • You must work for the telco...

    • My cable modem has had nearly perfect uptime. I can't speak for everyone out there, but I've been with two companies, and have had about 99.99% uptime.
    • My local phone bill is over 50$ US. Which is more than my Cable bill. I don't know about Canada, but in the US, a fair portion of my phone bill is taxes.
    • A one time 19.99 fee isn't too bad, considering a lot of telcos around here charge installation fees.
    • Savings is savings, whether it's marginal or not, but for most people they probably would save about 20$ a month, or $240 a year. I could buy a lot of junk [thinkgeek.com] with that :).
    I've been looking for a way to dump my home phone for a while, the main hangup, is my wife likes having the number, and not having to charge her cellphone battery. If I could save a few bucks and still have a number based at my house I'd go for it.
  • Yup, about 3K will do it. I've been installing voip adapters that use integrated modems for NEC telephones as far back as 3 years ago that sound crystal clear over pots lines. Not only that, but they are full featured digital PBX sets with all the bells and whistles of a digital phone in your office. Now we sell voip sets that work via ethernet connections over your dsl/cable whatever and they tend to sound horrible because of the _latency_ inherent in the internet.
  • Well, from my experience the problems with the voice over IP come from lost packets and delays. Bandwidth is not an issue here. As a matter of fact Aplio Rave uses the G723 codec at 5.3 kbps. The overhead brings the stream to around 8 kbps. This is small enough even for a 14.4 modem. And if your network doesn't suffer from the above mentioned flaws, the quality is quite good (i.e. cell phone quality).

    As for the difference between software and hardware solutions, well there isn't any. In fact the only thing you could reasonably put in hardware is the codec.

    Disclaimer: I work for Net2Phone. This are my opinions, not my employer's.
  • Well, in case you didn't know, Net2Phone is an IDT spin-off... :)

  • Just of note:

    The Aplio/Pro is Linux based, and the Aplio/Phone is not (dedicated hardware). Aplio chose to head away from dedicated hardware simply because of the development costs.

    All it seems as though they have done is to point the unit at their Gateway/Gatekeeper, which is how the calls get to/from the IP network to phone lines. These devices should quite easily be capable of talking to any gateway/gatekeeper that meets the specs, like Cisco, Ericsson, OpenH323, etc.

    If you want to learn more about VOIP, and the H.323 protocol, check out http://www.openh323.org/ [openh323.org] which has a wealth of information and links.

  • FYI: The RAVE is linux based, its basically an Aplio/Pro with more software that funnels all calls through Net2Phone. The original Aplio/Pro and Aplio/Phone(not linux based, to my knowledge) were great products that let you talk between them for free. The quality is much much better than Netmeeting or any other VOIP product I've tried (incl. the Cisco ATA186 which is a rebadged Komodo). They did great dynamic jitter-buffering apparently. Net2Phone bought Aplio in 2000 and it looks like they've just changed the system software to force you to use Net2Phone so (of course) you can now dial PSTN destinations. If anyone has one of these I would be interested in their investigations. You used to be able to call between them for free using the aplio servers as location servers - if you still can then I will be happy.
  • There is one good reason to keep your land-line: 911 and caller ID. If you call 911 from your home phone, the emergency services people can immediately locate you and send someone over. They can't trace a mobile phone call or a VoIP call.

    Not yet, that is, until they get GPS installed into every cell phone. Even now, they can tell which sector in which cell you're calling in from, and that will localize you to within a few city blocks.

  • Except that when the call was traced back to the VoIP provider, they check their logs, see your IP logged in, and dialing out to the target machine, and BAM, you're busted (assuming this 1337 cr@x0r1|\|g is taking place from home or work). And I seriously doubt you'd get a 56Kbps modem connection out of a codec optimized for voice :).
  • I realize it takes time, but that doesn't mean you're invincible. That's how dumbasses like you get caught.
  • Why is this moderated as 'informative' when the article states the same thing, but with a bit more info? People are not called informative if they repeat the same thing a previous speaker just said, unless they're signing! ;)
    RTFA (Read The Freakin' Article!)
    KM
  • Ok, I know there is going to be a little delay in the call. But I have used Netmeeting a good bit to talk to people all over the world just playing and fairly often it is very workable. I'd just like to see a box that would let me hook my Cordless Telephone to my computers sound card so that I could walk away, anyone seen a device like this. Will the net2phone thing allow you to do this? Even at 5 cents a miniute the costs add up when you talk for an hour or so twice a week. I'm already paying $45.00 a month for a cable modem, might as well use some of that bandwith.
  • If this caught on bigtime, you can bet the broadband providers would start blocking it and/or making it illegal by contract. The whole idea of giving you more downstream than upstream bandwidth is predicated on web browsing that uses more down than up. Voice by IP requires identical up/down usage and would therefore strain the current DSL/cable configurations.

    Just a word of warning: never mention the word "server" in earshot of your cable modem installation tech. :)
  • I don't know if its been mentioned before but there is a big problem with doing voip at the home: The telcos themself. Most people don't realize that the contract/AUP of the dsl line you get from one of your baby bells says that you cannot use this high-speed internet technology to circumvent the telephone network. If this stuff is to become pervasive the telephone networks might start enforcing this real hard.
  • The device connects directly to your gateway, and you use a web browser to configure it. After that you don't even need a PC connected to the LAN to use it.

    --
  • The home user would probably prefer the ATA 186-Analog Telephone Adapter [cisco.com]
    -k
  • there are plenty of phones with ethernet jacks, we are using some siemens ones in our company, they are standard h323 phones, with DHCP and configurable by a webbroswser ;) really cute

  • even over high bandwidth lines inet telephony
    blows in comparison to POTS. And you can get
    5c a minute long distance 24/7 from Qwest. For
    2c more a minute I'll save $125 and not keep
    saying 'huh?" every 30 seconds
  • Heck, I say give 'em points for just being on topic with the #1 post.
  • There's a really good article called "Where in the World is VOIP Banned" here [tmcnet.com] with a followup here [tmcnet.com].
  • I think Symbol technologies has some 802.11b phones now. They had a couple at Networkers in LA....
  • In fact, they do. It retails for $699 at the moment...

    Here's the data sheet! [symbol.com]

  • I've worked in VoIP for a carriers carrier company for the past 2+ years and its amazing how fast we've grown.. Anyone who uses pre-paid phone cards has about 20 percent chance of their call going over VoIP for domestic(US) calls and 60% chance for International during some leg of the call and they never know.

    The next logical off step after phone-voip-phone and PC-Phone is Phone-Phone mini gateways.

    In the next year you'll be seing usb boxes hanging off your computer or etnernet ones of your hubs that plug into your house phone network(unpluggin from outside telco legacy network) and you will be able to use your hose phones to Call anywhere and recieve calls..

    Its gonna be a great next few years and after 5-10 your gonna see the need for ILEC's completely disapear NPA assignments and thats it..

  • Actually international calls for many major carriers are already routed over IP. Check out ITXC.
  • Sounds like a great box, but it needs IPSec tunneling support (where the router tunnels your lan to a corporate IPSec box) and it needs to work with non-Net2Phone VoIP servers.

    Heck, I'd be happy just to find a cheap box that can act as a NAT and IPsec box. All the cheap NAT routers that I've seen support, at most, IPSec pass thru so you can use your PC to create an IPSec tunnel to your corporate LAN, but the router itself doesn't support being an IPSec client.
  • Cisco is already in this market. They have had products [cisco.com] out there for two years now.

    I don't think they aspire to own the transport, they just want to profit from increased bandwidth usage and more Cisco devices being sold. They are sticking to standards in this market like they do everywhere else (AFAIK).
  • AT&T has had things like this [attbroadband.com] for a while now. Plugs into your cable modem...

  • It is VERY clear in the article that your PC doesn't need to be on. The phone grabs an IP from DHCP and uses your account with them. This succeeds in being less awkward that computerized systems.

    At my office, we have the 3com NBX system. Once you leave the LAN, we use normal long distance, but internally it is over ethernet.

    The quality is fine.

    However, once you use the software based phones, the lag is horrible, and generally worthless. Dedicated hardware is much faster than software over generic hardware.

    Alex
  • You've been unhelpful, thank you. Neither BeOS or Linux are RT OSes. I wanted to let the Admin staff's Windows boxes double as phones instead of getting phones. It failled, miserably.

    We were just going over Ethernet, the same ethernet as the physical phones, so there was no latency issue.

    It could be the OS, it could be the scheduling, but it sucked. I don't care that someone will whine about how other OSes that don't have the software. A non-Win32 version of this is kinda silly.

    There just isn't a market for software that needs to be on a tuned Linux box. A tuned Linux box is no more useful than a physical phone, because I need to tune it for a special purpose. Once I do that, I'll buy the phones.

    Alex
  • Cisco Has a VOIP system, The AVID system.. phones that plug right into the network, software based phones, call routing, voice mail, unified messaging, the works. We are finishing setting it up at my office, and it really rocks..

    ------------------------------------------
    If God Dropped Acid, Would he see People???

  • Linksys (Score:4)

    by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday July 09, 2001 @09:43AM (#97317) Journal
    Linksys has a sweet little cable/DSL router line, one of the variants having IP telephony capabilities and a phonejack; plug in a phone, somebody rings your IP, and the phone rings.
  • We tested MCK's [mck.com] PBX Gateway and Extender over an internet connection. One side was hooked to our wireless T1 to the internet and the other was hooked to the boss's cable modem. The first tests at 5:00pm were terrible but some tweaking of the jitter settings, compression, etc. made it tolerable for some circumstances. We ran some more tests the next morning around 8:00am and it worked great. The quality was better than a good cell call. Most people wouldn't notice the difference.

    The moral of the story is the bandwidth was the same but latency made all the difference in the world. You can do it if you have a dedicated connection or call in the middle of the night over the internet.

  • They moved pretty quick on the IP hard-phones but didn't check with what the standards were going to do. The standard are almost complete and Cisco's way isn't going to be the standard. This means that if you install Cisco you will be locked in with them. The rest will interoperate with each other. Some people think that Cisco rules the world and will be fine with this(I used to be one). The only problem is Cisco isn't real strong on voice and doesn't handle real-time voice as well as others [avaya.com] do. Their buffering is not dynamic so when it gets backed up you have to hangup and call again or put the call on hold and pick it back up. The phones are fairly basic on features too. It all depends on how much you want to take advantage of your PBX and all it could do for you.

    The biggest problem with IP Telephony isn't the hardware but a management issue. Most larger companies have seperate network and phone people (and they should) and you will get totally different responses depending on who is making the call on IP Telephony. Phone people will be concerned with latency and network people are concerned with bandwidth first.

    To do it well on the corporate network you must support priority packet tagging all the way to the IP phones. This means using a supported layer 3 switch/router all the way through to insure QOS(quality of service) aka latency. There are non-Cisco layer 2 switches that have this capability. Cisco's solution is to over-provision your network. Paying for a bunch of aggregate Gigabit fiber lines is not my idea of cost effectiveness.

  • Standard analog lines use 64k... All the time. The benefit of IP phones is that they're more efficient. Using LESS bandwidth.
  • Never stopped me from talking to my mates in Portugal. As far as they're concerned, that legislation doesn't exist. And if they are stopped by their ISP, they'll find another way.
    Bagpuss
    Your friendly cloth cat

  • Re:Don't abandon your POTS line yet... (Score:5)

    by Miniluv ( 165290 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @10:11AM (#97322) Homepage
    Reliability of DSL/Cable connections is something of an issue compared to standard telco lines, but that is becoming less and less the case. Once telco's move towards providing high bandwidth last mile we'll begin to enjoy "telco grade" reliability, as they'll be using high end equipment. If you look at reliability provided by large Colo or transit providers, i.e. Exodus/Level3/Genuity, they have extremely high (5 9s is the norm) reliability numbers.

    The subscription is usually around the same as monthly phone charges with potentially greatly increased functionality. Wouldn't you rather negotiate your speed dial numbers through a java-gui interface to your address book, instead of trying to remember who's programmed into where?

    The incoming phone number charge varies greatly with providers. The company I work for, for example, will be providing an incoming number (toll free) as part of the base subscription price.

    The real power of VoIP, mostly using SIP, is that it can easily go back and forth from data to PSTN networks. There are several transit providers offering soft-switching, as well as hardware vendors offering boxes for companies who already have large numbers of circuits from Telcos, perhaps with numbers attached to them already.

    VoIP is not really aimed directly at the home market, but instead at businesses, especially large multi-office corporations. Imagine being able to build a transparent PBX system with a soft-switch at the "edge of network" that people call into. Then you pay next to nothing to route calls across the internal LAN/WAN and can transfer calls easily from any phone in any office to any other phone in any other office.

    Obviously there'll be a slow phase in to different markets, based on who has the most use for the technology. Eventually it'll become refined, polished and cheap enough to make it to the home, much as every other technology has.

    Just remember, people used to sneer at the thought of anything other than dialup being affordable enough for home Internet acces. That was, of course, after they'd finished sneering at the thought of people connecting to the Internet from their homes at all.

  • Imagine the ability to write a perl script to filter out the phone spam....
    That would make it a dream appliance.

    --
  • Why is the "US" in "USers" capitalized? Are they saying US'ers, meaning people in the United States?

    Or did they just hold down the shift key too long?

  • If the computer needs to be on anyways to connect through DSL, what is the advantage of using a mock-up telephone headset instead of a traditional quality mic/headphones headset? Besides, since anybody with an ethernet connection probably owns a computers already (duh...), what would motivate them to purchase a separate stand-alone device at a premium instead of using what they already have?

    Lenny
  • Have you read the article yet? They seem to be targetting these devises at (novice) home users who would be willing to pay a monthly fee for a limited number of local calls (as opposed to free Dialpad) just for the convenience of using a f***ing telephone headset and bypassing the computer. I don't know too many people with broadband connections and home gateways who are that averse to going to dialpad.com with their PC on. The only value added feature is the ability to receive calls--hardly worth $40-/month AND putting up with lower quality audio (when you can already receive all calls FREE from a standard telephone, without dropped packets...).

    Maybe you should read the article,
    Lenny
  • Cisco [cisco.com] already has their hands in with cool things like the Cisco ATA 186 [cisco.com] - an adapter that turns any old analog phone into an IP phone. You should be able to pick one up for around $200. I've thought about getting one of these and setting up a SIP server for my friends and me.

    wishus
    ---

  • Unfortunately, no one has developed a product that can be used by the average non-technical person.

    Cisco makes some really slick SIP/Skinny phones, but the cost about $1000 each. Though the average, non-technical person could use one quite well, I doubt they would be excited about purchasing one.

    Who wouldn't love to have a cordless phone that runs VOIP on encrypted 802.11b, with both POTS and Ethernet in the base?

    Your grasp of technology is laughable - if you're going allow the option of connecting to the PSTN at the base, why would you packetize data in the handset? And since it doesn't make sense to packetize data at the handset, even if you don't want to connect to the PSTN, why not use RF? It would be alot easier than trying to use H.323 or SIP between the handset and base.

    wishus
    ---

  • We (my company) have this router to use in our tests for VoIP in our wireless broadband product. I haven't actually set it up yet, but I thought that it wasn't free (the service) and required proprietary software. True?
  • Creative's VOIP Blaster [creative.com] is an interesting and ultra cheap USB device which, though relying on a PC, does a similar job, while using Innomedia for phone service. Specifically, one end plugs into a PC, and the other plugs into a standard POTS phone (or a headset). You can even dial with your phone's keypad - hook up a cordless, and, save for an extra couple of keys, it's quite natural. Free PC-to-PC calls and cheap PC-to-phone. It doesn't accept incoming calls originated from the phone network, but there's no reason why it couldn't. [innomedia.com]

    Anyway, if we could "figure out" more about it, adding linux support and breaking it's need for a phone provider would be sweet.

    Oh yeah -- calling Hong Kong is cheaper than calling in the US! (.04/min vs .05/min)

  • The primary problem with the net2phone box is that it uses the Internet as transport, and there is no end-to-end management of the internet. So, the packets that contain your voice have to compete on an equal footing with other peoples packets, despite the fact that yours are much more time-sensitive.

    Check out this article [wired.com] for information of smart routers that prioritize packets based on their contents. The claim is that packets containing temporal information (e.g., audio, video) will be passed more synchronously that packets containing less temporally-dependent information.

  • It's not just the reliability of your DSL/Cable provider, and "last mile" fibre isn't the problem. My DSL's connection to the DSLAM has been, to my knowledge, uninterrupted (except, of course, at my end). But then you have the DNS servers and every hop between you and your call's recipient, and the reliability starts to drop. Not to levels that make home internet too difficult, but to levels that would make phone service unbearable.

    Of course, that doesn't even count the biggest reliability problem of all (which the initial reply misses). How stable is your electricity? I'm in Minneapolis, and even though we're supposedly not having any problems this year, it was out twice last week for an hour at a time. Unless you've got your own generator or some serious UPS time, if your electricity goes down, your IP telephony goes down (for that matter, if the only phones you have require electricity on your end to function, your SOL too). I've nowhere near enough trust in our power grids to abandon the 47 milliampres or so that the phone company is sending to me to power my POTS.
  • It seems to be as expensive as regular Long Distance calling once you factor in all the costs...

    Unless you already have DSL/Cable.

  • In the next year you'll be seing usb boxes hanging off your computer or etnernet ones of your hubs that plug into your house phone network(unpluggin from outside telco legacy network) and you will be able to use your hose phones to Call anywhere and recieve calls.

    I've recently purchased a Creative VoIP Blaster, which is essentially that. It has a USB interface on one end, and an RJ11 for any telephone on the other. Run the software, plug in the phone and you're ready to go. The neat thing is (with their software,) you can actually use the phone to dial another computer up.

    I'm not too familiar with the way telephone lines are hooked up in the house, but i would imagine that you could plug this VoIP blaster into your telephone junction box (where your home lines are connected to the telco's) and be able to use any phone in the house for VoIP.

  • I'd be surprised if they don't already have a piece of this. It wasn't long ago that the cottage industry in SV was spotting gaps in Cisco's line, building a start up and waiting for them to buy you out for several mill. Some people have done this repeatedly. Mayby Cisco is leaner and smarter and will just partner with one or two of these firms.

    --
    All your .sig are belong to us!

  • A bill is on Capitol Hill which would make it illegal to provide VoIP services without FCC registration. The bill is HR1542. It basically wraps IP-based telephony into the Communication Act of 1934. Join the Fight [pulver.com] to keep VoIP unregulated.
  • A few of the competing devices are mentioned as well; you can almost smell companies like Cisco drooling to own voice transport.

    since odds are we're not going to pay for it. [slashdot.org]
  • I know that most people think wearable computing is overrated. However, I felt like I should mention this. I always thought that it would be cool to go out and get a ricochet modem and there highspeed wireless service (this would probably be a bad idea now that they are Chapter 11) and build a little wearable computer and do voice over ip that way. It would kind of be neat. A cellphone that was also a computer, and free long distance. This is also a moot point because many cellphones now have free long distance.

    Voice over IP also tends to have problems relating to bandwidth. When I have something important to talk about with something I will avoid using a VOIP application because often you may cut out or freeze up or sound like your using a 1980's cellphone. Don't get me wrong. The technology is improving, and as more people get broadband access at home it becomes a more viable option, however, it still needs some improvement. And when a company begins to sell you a device that you just plug into an ethernet jack you know it's going to cost per month or per call because you are most likely no longer seeing ads.

    It's a neat technology. And I can just see call centers calling people about the new credit card deal that they are offering utilizing these!

    [Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]

  • BigZoo.com has been a problem for me recently. They have charged me for calls that have not been connected. They have refused to review my bills with them for return of the money.

    Are there any alternatives for inexpensive calling internationally?

    What about in the U.S.? What is the cheapest phone-to-phone method of calling? What is the cheapest PC-to-phone method of calling?
  • Well, I have a $20 CDN Off Peak LD cap each month with Ma Bell, and only $0.10/minute fee during peak hours! So THERE! Pbbtthhhttt! VOIP is a little too expensive to be considered just yet, although basic non-call charges are getting freaking pricey lately!
  • That's correct - the Linksys VOIP-enabled router must be used with a for-pay service.
  • We use IP phones in the office, and they are great for our application, since we can move the phone anywhere in our buildings, and still have the same extension.

    The ubiquitous Nortel Norstar system does this, and it's been around for 10 years or so. When I need to work somewhere else, I just bring my phone with me and my calls automatically follow.

  • Sure. Saudi Arabia is a notable example, since they have a high proportion of overseas residents who would like to be able to make phone calls for less than $.70/minute. For a while they blocked all calls to +1.206 because a lot of callback companies were based in and around Seattle. The main effective result of their ambitious internet filtering system is to make it difficult to use VOIP services. So you're in fine company.

    I thought that Euro governments were supposed to have opened up telecoms markets by this year.

  • American would mean someone in America. I guess you're one of these arrogant US'ers that think "America" only includes the US.

    Ecuadorian would mean someone who lives along the equator. I guess you're one of those arrogant Andeans who think "Ecuador" only includes a certain country sandwiched between Peru and Colombia.

    Malaysian would mean someone who lives on the Malay peninsula. I guess you're one of those arrogant Malays who thinks "Malaysia" only includes a certain country north of Singapore.

    South African would mean someone who lives in the south of Africa. I guess you're one of those arrogant Afrikaners who thinks that "South Africa" only includes the RSA.

    Turkish would mean someone who lives in a certain near-flightless bird in the vulture family. I guess you're one of those arrogant Ottomans who thinks "Turkey" only includes the country straddling the Bosporus.

    Lemme guess, you're either Canadian or a South American grad student. Either way, you're an idiot.

  • It seems to be as expensive as regular Long Distance calling once you factor in all the costs... Unless you already have DSL/Cable.

    Even then it's more expensive than regular LD (normal dial-1 charges these days being around 4-5c domestic, no fees or minimums, as long as you don't go with MCI/ATT/Sprint) unless you make hundreds of hours of calls. I cannot see how this could possibly be worth it. I've been looking around for a device like this to hang on one of the ports of our PBX just to see how it works out, but I am sure as hell not going to pay effectively 25% more for long distance in exchange for trying out a new gadget that will surely provide far worse-quality calls.

  • Ah, but what you're missing is that it is exactly those broadband providers that want to muscle in on voice traffic. Compressed VoIP only takes 8-13kbit/s depending on what codec is used, so this is a relatively small amount of bandwidth even when compared to a (say) 60Kbyte/s upstream cap.

    There is a product already out there for cable companies that takes one cable in and gives 4 phone lines, an ethernet connection, and 2-way digital TV. You can just bet that your local cable company would love you sign you up on this...
  • That's why independant bandwidth providers like Level3, GlobalCrossing... are trying to push this kind of market. The main problems of theses companies right now is that their pipes are actually quite empty.

    Plus their is also the problem that the Bells invested billions and billions of dollars into proprietary switches, and that they can basically scraped them all because they cannot be adapted to IP. Softwitching, on the other hand, run on fairly common hardware, is completly flexible and run IP.

  • Not over the Internet (Score:4)

    by AdamInParadise ( 257888 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @09:47AM (#97348) Homepage
    IP Telephony rules, but not over the Internet. Using private networks, it is possible to achieve a very good quality and reliability.

    Big bandwidth providers like Level3 are beginning to provide softswitching technologies (you call your local gateway and your call is routed through the private network transparently).

    As usual, the problem is the last mile, as the Baby Bells really don't want you to do that.
  • What makes this so different from the box you plug into your phone, and it searches for the lowest rate for your call.

    I know that's not voice over IP or anything, but dammit, it'll save you cash. Is that the interest? The money or cool toys?

    Stupid question.... forget this post
  • You just have to do a lot of legwork with the LEC and other people to make it work. This is feasible for a medium to large company, but I seriously doubt net2phone does this for each home user.
  • heard about this thing in my weekend paper (Toronto Star) as well - I guess their PR people are earning their pay this month.

    My bad. I read it in SiliconValley.com via AvantGo. Which is the same parent paper as the Contra Costa Times, thus my extreme deja vu while reading the article.

  • Don't abandon your POTS line yet... (Score:5)

    by GuyZero ( 303599 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @09:56AM (#97352)
    I heard about this thing in my weekend paper (Toronto Star) as well - I guess their PR people are earning their pay this month.

    There are still a few reasons not to give up your good ol' POTS line just yet though:

    • Checked the network availability stats on your cable/DSL modem versus your local telco lately? Ever picked up your phone and received a "server timeout" error? Obviously these net-to-phone gizmos are primarily for saving money on long distance calls, but you'll still need a land line for ordering pizza or calling 911 after your double-cheese-and-bacon-pizza induced heart attack.
    • These things still require a subscription to the order of about $10 to $20 a month. That's on top of your $40 (minimum) DSL subscription. And the article I read said it needed a home gateway box ($100 or so). Plus the cost of the net-to-phone device itself ($100-$200). You're going to have to make a lot of long distance phone calls to offset all that capital & ongoing expense.
    • You pay extra to get an incoming phone number.
    • The amortized average cost per minute for a LD call with one of these things is still a few cents . I pay .10 CDN for long distance, most US residents can get LD for 7 or 5 cents a minute, of peak. Again, unless you make a lot of calls or mostly on-peak calls you're getting a fairly marginal savings.
    Overall, I'm not convinced that it's really economical. Neat, maybe, but not all that economical.
  • I thought i read in a magazine somewhere that the latest Linux kernel has some sort of Voip API built in.

    Or maybe I'm wrong.

  • Wow, this thing is only US$19.99 plus about US$10 shipping I went ahead and ordered one.
    I didnt sign up with Innomedia yet though I think I want to play around with this thing for a while.
    Does any on know if you need Innomedia software or just an account?

    If anyone else has one of these send me an Email.

  • Re:Don't abandon your POTS line yet... (Score:3)

    by tb3 ( 313150 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @11:46AM (#97355) Homepage
    There is one good reason to keep your land-line: 911 and caller ID. If you call 911 from your home phone, the emergency services people can immediately locate you and send someone over. They can't trace a movile phone call or a VoIP call.

    So if that kind of thing worries you, it's reason enough to keep the land-line.

  • Ever picked up your phone and received a "server timeout" error?

    As a matter of fact, I have - several times. There have been several times when (during peak usage), a long distance call will result in a message like "all the circuits are busy; please try again later", or a very fast "busy-signal" type tone (which the operators have told me means the same thing).

  • Has anyone heard of any Linux projects regarding GPL IP telephony? The big boys are doing it and it rocks for big offices but what about for us geeks at home? Death to RJ-11!!!!! RJ-45 till I die!!!

  • The reason why we're not seeing many successful IP Telephony systems is because these companies have to lease bandwidth from Telcos ... the same Telcos against which they are competing in the long distance market.

    The technology already exists, but until a major Telco comes out in support of a provider (i.e., one of their subsidiaries), it's unlikely that these ventures will be successful.

  • I don't understand the real value. Net2phone already offers long-distance service at, I believe, 3.9 cents per minute. It's a prepaid deal, and you don't have to worry about being billed 1.5 times the amount if you run over. You can just set it up to automatically charge your credit card for a specified amount. The per minute rate remains the same.

    Check out the facts:

    • For 99 cents a month, you get national long distance for as little as 3.9 cents per minute.
    • International long distance is as little as 7.9 cents per minute. (I've made tons of calls from Germany to US for 10 cents/min)
    • You don't need any special equipment. Just pick up your phone and dial the local access number. If no local access number is available in your area, dial the toll-free access number (for a slightly higher charge).

    Now, if you want Rave, you pay for the device, the monthly fee. Extra money if you run over your monthly alotment. You also pay for a router or whatever and broadband access.

    GreyPoopon
    --

  • Local Cable Company to provide phone service (Score:3)

    by Fernd ( 445460 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @10:22AM (#97360)
    The local cable company here is set to provide phone service over their cable lines using ip telephony. They are installing a cable modem like device on the outside of one's home and then routing it through your existing telephone wire. In essence the technology behind this is going to be transparent, and it will seem to work exactly the same as a regular telephone hook up. From what I hear, the few test units in the field work flawlessly.
  • I kinda like the idea of VOIP but this prioritizing of packets worries me. First of all I don't really like someone monitoring what I am sending or recieving (yes I have some idea on just how large the packet/manhour inspection ratio is but it still worries me). Second I don't like the idea of telcos bumping up the priority of (what is essentially their) VIOP data transmissions. I need that ping for counterstrike!! :) Perhaps I am way off base so please reply if you have some info that pertains to the above.

  • I saw the Linksys router with the phone jack a few months ago and was intrigued enough to do some research. It turns out it really wasn't that cool, they pretty much just route you to some company who wants to be your long distance provider. But the existance of the box, the fact that these devices can already do all the hard work of IP telephony makes me wonder if anyone has looked into hacking them.

    More specifically what I'm wondering about is whether it would be possible to set up a telephony server and have a group of these telephony boxes point to it rather than the company that sells them. It would provide a cheap, secondary form of communication that would be very easy to use. Picking up the receiver and pressing 5 on a spare phone on your desk could quickly connect you to a friend without tying up the main line. More interestingly, your server room could have a "red phone" that would ring up another server farm in another country.

    So my question is, is anyone doing this stuff? Not a replacement for the phone companies, but an easy way to link these boxes together and form a small phone network?

  • I thought that Euro governments were supposed to have opened up telecoms markets by this year.

    Around here open the market means that other companies other than the monopolist telecom have access to licenses that allow them to deploy cabling and selling bandwidth to others. In any case the local loop here is government owned and only the the (ex-)monopolist telecom has access to it.

  • Legislation problems (Score:3)

    by jneves ( 448063 ) on Monday July 09, 2001 @10:20AM (#97364) Homepage
    In Portugal (a small european country that's part of the euro zone) it is illegal for any person or company to carry voice traffic without a license from ICP (portuguese version of FCC). This includes voice-over-ip (and yes, they explicitly state that).

    That means that the use of this kind of equipment, netmeeting, yahoo messenger or any other program that allows voice communication is forbidden if you don't use one of the 11 (minus 2 that become our version of dot.com bombs) licensees networks.

    Are any other countries like this ?

  • We use IP phones in the office, and they are great for our application, since we can move the phone anywhere in our buildings, and still have the same extension. We've even made them work via VPN so the CEO and some others (ahem) can have an office extension, and long distance calling on the compnay bill at home. Bandwidth? according to Cisco the phones we use only require ~100k/s to operate, so that falls within the means of most people's capped 128k cable lines.. but of course they are connected to a server here in the office, that is then connected to the phone company. What is going to make a difference here as to who is going to be using these devices at home is WHO is running the server to patch into telco lines and how much are they going to charge? are they going to allow free calling within the network? (that would be cool, seeing as just about everyone I know has made the exodus to southern california)
  • There's an rfc for VOIP E911. Cell phone providers are required to provide full E911 functionality this year sometime. I think it's October 1., but not sure about that. Try a google search, and be informed.
  • You can buy SIP based phones (3Com has one, probably others). Ethernet connected phones with an IP address using the IETF SIP protocol. I believe their is open-source server out there t (basically DNS like to link a "phone number" to an IP address). I also know of a masquerading module for SIP too if you are behind a Linux based masquerading box.

    Basically do a google search for SIP. One URL I know of off the top of my head is http://www.siphappens.com/ .

    I think this stuff is mostly commercial now, but I imagine quite a bit of work is being done on SIP in the open source world to get it affordable. Most of the real expense is doing a linkup to the PSTN, but if you remain strictly IP costs should be reasonable as soon as the phone hardware is commoditized.

  • So true, BUT, the "always on" nature of Cable/DSL is a feature that makes it so much more usable. It is kind of hard to call someone at the other end if they are not online.

    Also, you would be surprised (I was shocked) how many of the current VoIP products use non-compressed codecs. I tried one that my company was developing over a 2B ISDN connection (bandwidth choked by a 115.2 serial port) and it was practically unusable (64K codec plus IP overhead was too much). I guess the hardware to do the compression made the phones too expensive. Hopefully that shit goes away.

  • Quicknet has some products [linuxjack.com], whereby an ordinary analog phone plugs into a PCI or ISA card and connects over IP through your computer's internet connection. Uses open standards for VoIP. Best part is, their Linux drivers are GPL'ed.
  • i heard that iomojo [iomojo.com] is adding telephony support [ostel.com], quicknet [quicknet.com] cards and others. this should be an nice opensource option [freshmeat.net] for people wanting to get free voip with video capabilities. [vidcard.com]
  • VOIP technology has come a long way very quickly. Level 3 and others have done quite a bit with their internal phones in this regard, and the technology works well on high speed networks.

    With broadband acess becoming more widespread, the networks in the home market are just maturing to the point that would make the technology feasible for the average user. Unfortunately, no one has developed a product that can be used by the average non-technical person.

    Who wouldn't love to have a cordless phone that runs VOIP on encrypted 802.11b, with both POTS and Ethernet in the base?

    chown -R us all_your_base
    chgrp -R us all_your_base

  • The problem with all currently-available devices of this type is that they require you to use a service such as Net2Phone for most or all of your calls, at a per-minute charge. In certain situations, this is ridiculous. For example, if you are traveling and you need to place a call back to your home town, you may have a perfectly good computer and your personal phone line sitting at your home or office that could be used to facilitate the call. What you probably don't have is the hardware necessary to complete the call using your own phone line.

    An article entitled Can the Internet take the place of a pair of copper wires? [timmins.net] (which was put online in response to a previous /. article [slashdot.org]!) makes the case that with the proper hardware, the Internet could be used to extend personal telephone lines. In this way, people could access their own personal or business telephone line from anywhere in the world. As the title implies, the idea is to use a pair of (as-yet-unbuilt) hardware devices, that would use the Internet as an underlying transport mechanism but would simulate (as closely as possible) a bare pair of copper wires to external telephone equipment.

    Note that we are not talking about allowing "the public" to use your line - this would simply give you the ability to access a telephone line that you are already paying for, from locations other than the place where that line is terminated. For example, you could access your home phone line from the office, or vise versa. Or, you create a point-to-point "ringdown" circuit between two distant points, without having to get a private circuit from Ma Bell. How you use your "virtual copper pair" is up to you.

    For those that understand telephone system terminology, the article makes the case that under certain circumstances, such a device could be used to provide the functional equivalent of at least four different types of service now only available (to most of us) from the phone company. These are Off-Premises Extensions (OPX) (also known as Exchange Service Extension (ESE)), Off-Premises Station (OPS), Foreign Exchange (FX), and Ringdown. The article even points out that it's completely legal to extend your own phone service in this way, thanks to a federal appeals court decision in 1990 (discussed in an archived TELECOM Digest article [mit.edu]).

    What's needed is for someone to design and build these devices. I think whoever does it first will find that it's not at all difficult to sell these, provided that they are easy enough to install and configure that the average computer owner (or, at the very least, anyone with enough intelligence to install and configure a Network Interface Card) can do it.

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