Do-It-Yourself VOIP Telco 246
DamnYankee writes "Robert X. Cringley predicts the coming demise of the landline telco monopolies from the grassroots encroachment of VoIP and Linux on the latest generation of Wifi routers. According to Bob, 'The result is a system with economics with which a traditional local phone company simply can't compete'. With Linux capabilities and builtin VoIP any Mom and Pop can become the local equivalent of a cellular phone company for the price of $79 Wifi router. Now how is Verizon going to compete with that? Get the full scoop from the man himself."
Because we all deep down.. (Score:0, Interesting)
Or am I reading that wrong.
The gov't will screw 'em... (Score:3, Interesting)
big companies CAN change (Score:5, Interesting)
How many times have we heard that (insert some innovation here) will lead to the demise of (insert traditional provider here). Look, the only times when large established providers of a given good or service are eliminated by something new is when entrenched management gets hubris and thinks the new thing is not worth their bother. If/when the existing telcos realise they need to get on this bandwagon they will, and with a vengance. You can't count out the resources they can bring to bear until they don't and are truly out.
Mesh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think the Baby Bells will ever disappear, just like the RIAA won't ever disappear. Let's just vote for Congress critters that will be balanced in their voting and not swing wildly to one special interest or the other.
It's fun to play with though... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've setup a Linux box and Asterisk [asterisk.org] along with a couple Grandstream IP phones. The quality was as good as a landline phone, and we'll probably be rolling out a test next year sometime, putting phones in all the classrooms (we're a public school). One card in the server to get us an outside line and we're set....
As soon as wireless VOIP phones come down in price, I'll be running my own wireless service for myself. I plan on setting up an Asterix server at home plugged into my landline. I can then use my VOIP phone anywhere in the world to call!
Being able to cheaply setup VOIP using your existing landline at home will decimate cell service as soon as more WIFI hotspots get out. IDT is already looking at this as a replacement for cell services [idt.net].
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh, the one good thing about VoIP. Full control over what comes in. I get software that is custom. I get to decide who/what/where gets to call me.
Don't want China ads coming in? Block everything from China. Only want whitelisted people to call you? So be it. Want the phone to ask you if you want to accept a call or block the IP/range?
All doable.
quality of service (Score:4, Interesting)
if they've not got a highly resilient route onto the 'net then they are at the mercy of their uplink ISP(s).
Think 911 (or equiv) service going down for days on end as the DSL line driving the VoIP was down.......not good.
I use VoIP today. This doesn't seem likely. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going back. But I can't imagine my neighbors buying into what RXC suggests. First of all, there's a reliability issue. Folks need to have 911 service available. They need to be able to call the power company in the event of an outage. They need the phone to be a *LOT* more reliable than current VOIP is.
For me, when the power goes out in our neighborhood, it doesn't matter that I've got my VOIP device connected to a UPS. When the neighborhood loses power, my broadband internet loses connectivity. No internet, no phone. No phone, no way to call the power company to report an outage. It gets worse if you imagine someone needing emergency services (e.g. 911) during a power outage.
It's a nice theory, but it doesn't scale. And reliability is the limitation. Right now, I (personally) can put up with the lack of reliability because I know that my neighbors have nice reliable land line based phones, and in a pinch, I can pester one of them to make a phone call. (I've got good neighbors, all of whom are willing to help each other out in a pinch.) But if the entire neighborhood were on VOIP, we'd all suffer. VOIP today just doesn't have the reliability to scale. Some of us who are willing to put up with the occasional echoes, inconsistent quality, and lower reliability (in exchange for much lower cost). But we can't all do that. We rely on some of the neighborhood to have a real and reliable phone service. VOIP isn't there yet. So it won't scale as far as a neighborhood. Much less become a "disruptive technology".
$.02
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful (Score:5, Interesting)
But there's only one version of the softare, so unless you're running VerizonOS, you can't run it. Reversing the encryption (which is actually just an XOR against 0x00) will be illegal under the DMCA, and so there will not be any Linux/FOSS versions of the software, because to get there you have to have violated the DMCA.
This software will spring up out of Russia as FOSS, but its use within the U.S. will result in jail time.
Now the nation is protected, you see.
Following this, you'll see a group of FOSSers who decide that such things really should be free, and you'll find an underground network flying right through the radio waves in the air. Users who rebel against federal legislation and establish VoIP networks across the Internet using 802.11 or whatever the broad range wireless standard is at the time. They'll go on in relative anonymity for a while, but they'll all be struck with how very very cool this technology is, and they'll build steam and momentum, attracting other users to the technology until all of the sudden, someone pays attention, and legislation comes in that starts to restrict the use of such things.
Users will cry foul, people will claim this violates their first ammendment rights, and then Apple will release iPhone, with pretty colors, in hardware that looks edible, and whose color scheme wouldn't offend a conservative grandmother on a bad LSD trip. People will flock to this "new technology" and sell their souls to it before they realize that it's the same thing as what they had before, only it's got more restrictions.
Soon Microsoft and Sony will realize that they've been behind the times on this stuff, and they'll release their own alternatives which offer extra features that no one wants or needs. The physical design of the hardware will look like a high school sophomore sketching doodles in the edges of his notebook paper, compared against Apple's Mona Lisa level design. Micorosoft and Sony will have invested several million dollars in to this before they realize that they're always playing catchup, and have never reached the black, financially speaking, on these products, when they discontinue the line, completely stranding those who *had* bought in to it.
Later, Apple will announce a deal where they buy Verizon and several other major telco's, who are now on the financial rocks, and every time you answer your phone, you'll hear a "Bong" and your phone will smile at you to let you know everything is ok.
Soon after this, you'll see Apple G7's booting up with a picture of Steve Wozniak with borg implants badly photoshopped over his face.
802.11b/g is powerful enough? (Score:3, Interesting)
I looked at antennas and amplifiers and wireless geek sites. I discovered two things:
At this point, I would frankly love to hear, "hey idiot, you're doing it all wrong! here's a url, here's what you're missing, etc etc." But I have a sinking feeling I wont.
This leaves me with the impression that Wifi is entirely not powerful or reliable enough to get anywhere near the neighborhood/citywide meshes that people (even Cringley, apparently) imagine. Like I said, based on my experiences so far, it's off by an order of magnitude. Even if you can fix that by upgrading your gear, it's not cheap, or easy.
One thing I will say is that I'm impressed with Linksys for going with Linux, and now I understand why I should have bought them, even though they're half as fast as what I bought, and don't support WPA. My DLink router, although it's overcome its notorious problems with 5-minute interval spontaneous reboots, still needs to be rebooted daily, otherwise traffic slows to a crawl. DLink, of course, like most vendors, finds only benign amusement with the fact that their product's firmware is totally boned. It's too late now, but if I could, I would bring everything back and switch to anything that ran linux in the router.
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful (Score:3, Interesting)
Who owns the copper? (Score:3, Interesting)
What a silly question. Verizon owns the copper. The ISP you're getting your DSL from is leasing the pair and a slot in the DSLAM from Verizon. It's not like they're totally cut out of the action by VOIP. If POTS dies out (which I doubt it will), they'll simply shift their business model to one of "last mile broadband provider".
Re:Your brother is in China on business (Score:5, Interesting)
If the number is not in my address book, the phone does not ring, and goes straight
to voicemail.
If it is someone I wanted to talk to, and they left a voicemail, I can return the call at my leisure and perhaps add their number to the whitelist.
Re:big companies CAN change (Score:5, Interesting)
The company I work for is a "traditional" regional IXC/CLEC. We've poured mucho dinero into R&D on packetizing and "converging" our network. After much blood, sweat, and tears, we've been able to provide a converged IP service that really doesn't suck. But, packets and Wi-Fi are not the magic bullets that some would believe.
Sure, anyone with a strong Wi-Fi antenna and a few IADs strewn about can make real-time interactive audio work. That's not the challenge. The challenge really lies in providing carrier-class services over IP. People expect phones to work, 100% of the time, between any two handsets worldwide. And they want audio quality and precision clarity.
In that regard solutions are still expensive to provide, and expensive to purchase. IP savvy switches are still buggy, feature-sparse, and prone to audio quality issues. Your average DMS and 5ESS may use Model T technology and take up a whole lot of bays, but for making plain old phone calls, it'll outperform the Ferrari's of the IP world.
Add up consumer broadband transport, untamed Internet ebbs and flows, Wi-Fi frequencies that compete moment-to-moment with cordless phones and microwaves, and you've got a lot of unsatisfied neighbors dropping your shiny new home telco for an old princess phone and an RBOC.
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful (Score:4, Interesting)
Each individual link doesn't have to be 99.999% reliable. Instead, rely on a mesh topology and have parallel (ie. redundant) paths between each node. Say we have 5 alternate routes between two nodes and each route is 90% reliable. The probability of an outage (all routes down) is (1-0.9)^5 = 0.00001. Hence, the network reliability is 99.999%. Each additional parallel route adds a '9'.
Re:Because we all deep down.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, deep down I want ot replace the phone company with something that cares enough to do an adequate job.
My own Pirate VoIP network! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful (Score:2, Interesting)
It's the first free VoIP product for your PC (yes it's a product not a service) that has overcome the treshold of 'cumbersome'.
It's got all I require:
It's anonymous, encrypted and P2P.
Instant Messaging included.
Good sound quality.
Disclaimer: I'm not related to Skype in any way, just a happy user
European telcos nuke IPV6 (Score:3, Interesting)
Router Hacking 101 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm insanely jealous that I don't have one of those WRT54G routers. I have a netgear mr814v2
My interest was piqued because I found services (locally) running on the router I was unaware of
So this prompted me to take a peek at the
So I head off to Sercomm's site... and lo and behold they make wireless routers! Namely, I think my MR814v2 [netgear.com] is just a rebadged Sercomm IP706SM [sercomm.com]. I know this comes as no surprise, many pieces of hardware are just rebadged and sold under a brand name. But look at the specs, they're identical! Right down to the dimensions, the Netgear router is only a few milimeters off.
So this is where my hacking hit a wall. Think I might go home and take apart the router and see for myself. Or just sell it and get a WRT54G. (Hey my birthday's next week, you never know.)
Re:The gov't will screw 'em... (Score:3, Interesting)