13 Oct 2003 | Steven Garrity said...

I've had a few trial phone calls with Skype on Windows and iChat AV on the Mac. Both worked surprisingly well.

However, I still have the feeling that there is this perfect device sitting right next to my computer: a telephone. It boots up instantly, it never crashes, and it's durable (I drop it all the time).

I would like to see a device (bluetooth? USB?) that relies on VOIP but presents the same simplicity (and a handset - which works well).

13 Oct 2003 | Andrerib said...

I use Free World Dialup. I take phone calls from across Europe and it's has got such a clear sound. It works fine in distance calls which is really nice.

The sign-up process was not that clear and the interface is a bit confusing but it works just fine.

You can even connect using a 'regular' telephone. You buy special phones (not virtual) that you use just like any other phone.

Will this change the way communications companies make money? At least it will change the amount we pay them!

13 Oct 2003 | jon said...

Long time listener...first time caller...

I think one of the biggest problems/stumbling blocks for VOIP is the inherent unreliability of IP. Right the now - IP services come in no way close to meeting the realibility of phone services.

I've never *ever* had my phone go off for any reason other than failure to pay the bill. I'm losing IP connectivity all the time. Either my own DSL is down. Or the sprint pipe to my webserver is down. Or some knob drives a backhoe over a fiber backbone in Ohio.

With POTS, when mr goober backhoes the cable in Ohio it simply doesn't affect me (unless I'm calling someone IN Ohio). Oddly though, it does affect my IP. And yours.

Until IP connectivity can be (and be perceived ) as reliable as POTS - VOIP is going to remain a niche market.

13 Oct 2003 | Chris said...

Rock Valley College, in Rockford, IL, has one of the largest VoIP networks that 3Com has installed. I know that it's saved the college thousands in long distance charges. As reliability goes, if their network is getting slammed it can be as annoying as a bad cell phone connection, although I've only noticed this problem a handful of times.

Here's the 3Com press release about the implementation.

13 Oct 2003 | Neil said...

The college I teach at recently opened a new downtown campus with is 100% VoIP. All of our desk phones are IP-based and made by Cisco. Quality is quite good, but I think this has to do mainly with the fact that we have fiber connections all over the place, and tons of bandwidth.

Still, when the network goes down, so do our phones. It hasn't happened a lot, but I have had the rather amusing experience of having to reboot my phone. :)

13 Oct 2003 | Jon Gales said...

I'm going to be signing up for Vonage in a week or two--not free, but a hell of a lot cheaper than POTS. My cable modem service is really reliable... Only been out a few times, usually late at night.

iChat AV works quite well too, but the beauty of Vonage is that it goes POTS-to-VoIP. No need for anyone else to do anything special.

13 Oct 2003 | pb said...

"I think one of the biggest problems/stumbling blocks for VOIP is the inherent unreliability of IP."

But that's also its biggest strength. For a most people and most situations, IP reliability is more than good enough. Just look at cell phones.

It's a huge mistake to discount a solution that in some respects may not live up to what it's replacing.

13 Oct 2003 | Matt Haughey said...

I've had a Vonage phone for the past few months and now that I'm moving to a new place soon, I'm thinking of canceling the service and getting a normal phone again. Keep in mind that I am not at all a heavy phone user, I usually make all long-distance calls with my cell phone, which uses about 300 minutes a month. I rarely use a home phone but these are my experiences with Vonage.

The reliability just isn't quite there. Aside from cable modems going out from time to time (it seems my system has a weekly 5-minute hiccup in service), the vonage service itself isn't 100% reliable at all. So you could have a bulletproof home network and great connectivity and still have outage problems.

The problems I've had are fairly random, but in the past month alone I've picked up a ringing phone three times to only hear a dial tone and the callers were routed to voicemail. One caller said they heard no voicemail message at all, even though I recorded one. Last night when I was sitting at home, someone called and went directly to voicemail, and the phone never rang. One nagging problem is that the service doesn't work with modems, so my TiVos will forever be unhappy on Vonage.

On the bright side, the service is dirt cheap and it's a cool feature to get an email when someone leaves a message. It's also crazy cheap to call people outside of this country. But, the phone feels like it has about 75% uptime to me and it's just not quite "good enough" that I can rely on it to work most of the time, even though I barely use the phone in the first place.

14 Oct 2003 | Neil said...

Matt Haughey wrote:

> it's a cool feature to get an email when someone leaves a
> message

Oh yes, I forgot to mention this benefit of the system at my office. When someone calls and leaves a message or email, I can choose to either hear the voice message via an embedded .wav file in my email, or hear a rather creepy computerized voice read back the email on the phone.

It's pretty cool, and makes working from home a snap - I don't have to worry about calling in for voice messages, as I can retrieve them via email.

14 Oct 2003 | Aaron said...

I have Vonage for my home office and I love it. No matter how you slice it, you're going to be paying at least $35 a month for a phone line from the Telco (Qwest here in PHX) and that was without even the most basic features like Caller ID and Call Waiting. With Vonage I pay $25 a month and kept my same number, plus lots of cool features. I can point the call forwarding to my cell phone, so if I'm waiting on an important call I won't miss it when I grab some lunch. When I'd rather leave the phone off the hook for the day to focus on some code, I like getting an email with a small .wav the instant I get a message. Plus I get 500 mins long distance which I would normally have to use my cell phone for, and I'm thinking about getting the $10 fax line to save those random trips to Kinkos. I use it with Cox Cable and it seems pretty reliable to me. I'm actually less worried about missing calls or sending clients to voicemail because I check my email all day long.

14 Oct 2003 | jake said...

I also use Vonage, and considering cost and how infrequently I use the phone in general it's great. I use Cox and randomly lose my IP and then all hell breaks loose for about 10 minutes while I reset things and try to get it back. Although it might have something to do with my d-link wireless router, or my Toshiba cable modem, as opposed to Cox, I'm not sure.

Overall, I love the service and haven't had any problems outside of the IP loss. Which isn't really Vonage's fault. Though it points out a problem with these types of services; no power, or no net connection = no phone. Of course it costing me half the price of SBC/SNET with more features is a good trade off imo.

14 Oct 2003 | Darrel said...

Almost anything is better than Qwest. That said, the one advantage I see is that when the power goes out, you can still dig out the old POTS phone and plug it in and it works.

Of course, that wouldn't be an issue if the powergrid was reliable.

14 Oct 2003 | UltraBob said...

Here in Japan BB Phone is pretty big. I would guess that it is one of the largest providers of VOIP telephony in the world. Anyway, calling domestically I notice no difference in quality from a normal call, and calling the U.S. (for the same price as calling domestically) I actually think the quality is an improvement over what I used to get. I think VOIP is here to stay.

On a side note, I am working with a company here that provides on demand translation and guide services for foreigners via mobile phone. They are looking into the possibility of using VOIP to allow them to provide quality translation 24 hours a day around the world, by using translators around the globe connected by a VOIP network. A couple of barriers to this yet, but the idea is exciting.

I've also heard rumors in the last year of VOIP cellular phones, but I don't really understand exactly how that would work at this stage.

14 Oct 2003 | Richard Rutter said...

It's not quite the same thing as a VoIP phone, but I've had great results using the audio chat built into Microsoft's latest instant messenger.

Over 600 Kbs broadband connections, the audio was flawless; better than telephone. It was certainly an improvement over any voice-over-IP that Ive used before (to be fair Ive only used VoIP long distance). And all you need is that 8 microphone you stuck in a drawer last time you bought a multi-media PC. The really clever bit is the audio feedback filtering. Both parties can talk and be heard at the same time (unlike telephone squawk boxes for example) and yet you never hear yourself. My fellow converser also tried playing music loudly through his computer speakers and I could hear him talking but not the music; he assures me it was not down to the sensitivity of his mic.

14 Oct 2003 | brian said...

Since I failed telecom 101 in highschool, could someone tell me what is POTS?

14 Oct 2003 | Elaine said...

if i remember correctly, brian, it stands for (freakishly!):

Plain Old Telephone Service

funny, huh?

22 Oct 2003 | drew said...

We employed a voip solution for our business up in Madison WI. we reviewed all the big boys including Cisco and 3com and ended up implementing a system from Shoreline http://www.goshoreline.com

We have it spanning 10 offices across 4 counties. It's been a reliable solution for us: major reduction on costs, the voice quality is good, unified message is powerful, and it's easy to scale. Redundancy is there also, in that if we lose our main location each of our branch offices have their own servers which can act route calls.

01 Nov 2003 | JohnZ said...

Well Guys whether it's reliable or not VOIP is the future. A little while ago when we starting looking for a new Phone switch we looked at all the major vendors Nortel, Alcatel etc and one thing we found in common was that majority of their research money was going into VOIP. Most were late comers but were trying hard to win the VOIP market even at the expense of their traditional PBX/Switch market. So we we went with Cisco. I will tell you that the reliability of a traditional TDM based phone can be built if you realize how redundant these systems are internally. Outside you see one big box but inside there is atleast two of everything (processors, linecards etc). We followed the same philosophy with VOIP and we have had it running for 2 years flawlessy.