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AOL Enters the VoIP market

Posted by Zonk on Thu Apr 07, 2005 09:15 AM
from the gutsy-business-moves dept.
Communications America Online Businesses Wireless Networking Hardware
freitasm writes "AOL is entering the VoIP market with its new service entitled 'AOL Internet Phone Service'. The service will be available in 40 cities around the US and offer integrated IM presence indicator, voice/e-mail and features like Call Waiting, CallerID. As a bonus current AOL members wil receive a wireless AP when signing-up for the service."
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  • lol i can phone!!1 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dougie Cool (848942) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:17AM (#12165039)
    If I get woken up at 6am by a phone AOLer wanting to know my ASL I'm going to sue.

  • Knowing AOL (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bazunok (868402) <bazunok@gmail.com> on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:17AM (#12165045) Journal
    It would be really easy to use, but you can only call other AOL users on AOL's proprietory phones.
    • Actually, no...the phone service works with any POTS phone connected to one of the router's rj11 ports. It's a very simple setup: connect the router to your existing broadband modem or router, plug in the phone, turn everything on. Simple as that. Phone calls can be placed to any other phone connected to the PSTN, of course.
      • Yes, the phones come with only 1 button.

        Don't you think that'd be a little comlicated for the average AOL user? Maybe just have them talk into the air...it'd still be better then AOL's commercials.

  • It's as easy as point-and-click (Score:5, Funny)

    by dangitman (862676) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:19AM (#12165068)
    So, when the phone rings, will it play "You've got telephone"?

    And why isn't this thing being released in September?

  • Emergency services (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WeirdKid (260577) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:20AM (#12165084)
    Notice that 911 isn't listed in the services offered. AOL's service likely suffers from the same deficiency as Vonage in this respect. Vonage's TOS says that if you cannot clearly state the nature of your emergency and your location, emergency services may not be dispatched. I'm sticking with my land line until the VoIP providers get the 911 thing figured out.

    • Re:Emergency services (Score:5, Informative)

      by thing12 (45050) <thing12@gmail.com> on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:24AM (#12165119) Homepage
      At least Vonage will direct your calls to a local 911 dispatcher (based on the location you provide). Most VOIP providers don't even go that far. They're testing e911 service in Rhode Island... apparently it's working quite well.

    • Re:Emergency services (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:24AM (#12165131)
      You can have your cake and eat it to. Keep your landline only for 911, they are required to provide it whether you have telephone service or not.
        • Forwarding to the PSAP on record isn't the same as knowing your specific location. This would be important if you couldn't speak.

          From the Vonage Terms of Service:

          2.10 Automated Location Identification
          At this time in the technical development of Vonage 911 Dialing, it is not possible to transmit identification of the address that you have listed to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) and local emergency personnel for your area when you dial 911. You acknowledge and understand that you will need to st
    • I dunno how AOL will handle this, but e911 works with Vonage... sort of.

      The deal is that you tell Vonage where the "phone" is and they will send that information with the 911 call. The trouble occurs if you move the adapter and forget to tell Vonage and then call 911.

      Then there is the uglier question about VoIP reliability vs. Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). Lots of things need to work in order to place a VoIP call (power for the adapter, power for your internet infrastructure, the cable/DSL, etc.).
      • Interesting -- was not aware of this. But can someone explain how 911 works (on a landline) if there is no dial tone?
        • Who said there was no dial tone?

          Most states require phone companies to maintain dial tone for 911 on any line connected to them.

          So, there is a dial tone, you just can't dial anything except 911. Dialing any other number will get you a nice recording telling you the line is not in service.

    • Shhhhhh! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:28AM (#12165153)
      AOL users use AOL VoIP.
      AOL users don't have 911.
      AOL users die.
      No more AOL users!

      It's genius.

    • Re:Emergency services (Score:4, Insightful)

      by stecoop (759508) * on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:39AM (#12165253) Journal
      I think the 911 situations are starting to look more like FUD. Larger municipals have had 911 starting back in 1968; however, a large segment of rural America didn't get 911 finalized until late 1990s (had to look that up on wikipedia [wikipedia.org]). I remember where I lived it did get come about really late too.

      Get this; America now has 911 since 1990 but there is a small problem with addresses. In rural America a lot of places don't (didn't?) have simple things like a street sign so for the last few years a names has had to be labeled to all streets just for 911. So the lets look at it this way; we have survived a large time without 911 as we know it and 911 dispatchers haven't been able to send emergency assistance to the right location; yeah were working on it but if there is an emergency you'll figure out something even if you don't have a phone.
      • Reminds me of one time when I lived in Minneapolis-- I heard a *lot* of sirens and went out to look. There were firemen going door to door all up and down the street. Apparently a little kid had called 911 and our area didn't have 911e, and the kid didn't know his address, so they sent a huge number of trucks-- I looked from the corner and there was a truck on every corner for ~4 blocks in every direction. I found this out from a fireman when he was asking if we knew which houses had little kids.

  • meanwhile, in Canada (Score:5, Informative)

    by WormholeFiend (674934) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:22AM (#12165098)
    The CRTC Issues 911 Ruling for VoIP Providers [digitalhomecanada.com]

  • Impossible to implement! (Score:5, Funny)

    by yotto (590067) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:23AM (#12165108) Homepage
    This will never work, because you can't talk on the phone in ALL CAPS.

  • Already in Canada... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    AOL Canada (oxymoron?) already has something like this:

    http://www.totaltalk.ca/ [totaltalk.ca]

  • And 911 calls? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Silver Sloth (770927) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:24AM (#12165121)

    Doesn't VoIP have issues with 911 calls. I know they can be resolved but I don't see anything in the article about this. Will the average AOL user be aware of the problem? I somehow doubt it as the AOL user base is not known for it technical awareness.

    All the bells and whistles will be great until the first time the house catches fire, dad has a heart attack, or there's bad guys in the cellar!

    • Assuming that you don't travel with your phone (just as you can't travel with your landline) there are no issues. The VOIP phone can announce your location to 911. If you do travel, you have to update the service to tell it where you are. Why do people have so much trouble with this versus cell phones? Am I giving people too much credit in their logic skills?
    • The ability to dial 911 is the only boogy-man the phone company can raise against VoIP.

      How about this -- look up the phone number to your fire department and police department. Post the numbers next to the phone. In case of emergency, dial the appropriate number. It's what we did before we had 911 service.

      If you just can't live without 911, get an old cell phone and use it to dial 911. No contract required.

    • What's the problem with 911 calls? is it that the VOIP phone requires power, whereas standard house phones will operate even if power is out in a house? or is it something to do with what numbers can be dialled?

  • What about keywords? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jav1231 (539129) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:27AM (#12165150)
    "If you're too drunk to drive, just say AOL Keyword "Cab" and a taxi will pick you up!

  • Free Forever? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zoomba (227393) <mfc131@NOspAM.gmail.com> on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:28AM (#12165154) Homepage
    I wonder if AOL will treat its VoIP subscribers like they do normal AOL users when they want to cancel their account.

    About 3 years ago I loaded up an AOL free trial CD just for shits and giggles, and to see how much it had changed since I last used it (1.0). Well, I found the experience disappointing (as I expected though) and at the end of the trial went to cancel.

    What happened at that point was a 30min conversation where the sales rep practically begged me to keep the service. He offered me 6 months free and told me that if I make this same call every 5-6 months I could end up not paying for the service ever again. I think I said "No, just cancel the damn account, I DO NOT LIKE THE SERVICE" about two dozen times. Finally, defeated, the rep canceled the account. That was the most painful phone convo I've ever had.

    I'm wondering if I can pull the free-forever scheme with their VoIP service. Think they'll be desperate enough for subscribers to it?

  • Hot damn! (Score:4, Funny)

    by alispguru (72689) <bane.gst@com> on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:28AM (#12165160) Journal

    As a bonus current AOL members wil receive a wireless AP when signing-up for the service.

    Does this mean we'll see a bunch of new unsecured wireless APs soon?
    • No, it means you'll see a bunch of AOL-type users flooding tech support forums with help stopping their AP crashing when they try and run kazaa through it without forwarding all the ports

      You can be pretty sure it won't be a decent US Robotics or Linksys, but will be a rebranded far-eastern Safecom or similar.
  • http://sipphone.com/phonegaim/ [sipphone.com] has been around for awhile. =)

  • Test your connection... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fiji (4544) * on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:30AM (#12165181)
    If you are at all interested in this service (or one of the alternate offerings from the other VoIP providers) then make sure your line can support a VoIP call by using this free service: ahref=http://testyourvoip.com/ [slashdot.org]http://testyourvoip. com/>.

    Also you can roll your own with the Asterix software, and some cheap hardware... (URL:http://asterix.org/ [asterix.org]). There are companies who you can pay to bridge to the phone network calls from an Asterix server.

    -ben

  • Only 40 cities? Why not everywhere? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dnaboy (569188) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:38AM (#12165241)
    I can't understand why they would only launch in 40 cities instead of nationwide (or worldwide). I've got vonage, and when I signed up, I got to pick phone numbers from essentially anywhere in N. America, so really, where the customer is located doesn't matter.

    For what it's worth, my vonage line is my home office line, so I've even been known to travel with it when I want to work from my college friend's house. Just plug it in to their cable modem, then plug it in to a phone. Ultimate portability.

    • I've got vonage, and when I signed up, I got to pick phone numbers from essentially anywhere in N. America, so really, where the customer is located doesn't matter.

      I have been a Vonage customer over a year and hoping that they will add Knoxville,Tn.

      Let me know when they have service for the 865 area code.
  • So are Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks actually going to be able to talk on the phone this time??? Brilliant!

  • Hhhmmm.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Slashcrap (869349) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:43AM (#12165295)
    As a bonus current AOL members wil receive a wireless AP when signing-up for the service.

    Excellent! Everyone in their neighbourhood will be getting free VoIP as well then!

  • Call Me Paranoid but (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TooCynical (323240) on Thursday April 07 2005, @09:47AM (#12165323)
    AOL/TM knows my buddies, surfing habits, shopping preferrences, magazines subscriptions, TV and cable viewing tendencies - do they really need to know who I talk with on the phone???

    I am probably giving them more credit than they are due but knowing that much about 40+ million people cannot be good...

  • I wonder if they'll try connect to AOL using their VoIP phones.
  • I use broadband, so dont flame me. I have AOL For Broadband for free, and I participated in the beta test of the "Internet Phone Service". Its very reliable, and you get a free Linksys box to hook your telephone into. To make things easier, and less linksys boxes (I have 4 as it is now), I hooked up the TA into the Telephone Network Interface and put a label on it that says "Anti-Qwest Device". All phones work in the house on it. I performed one 911 test call, and took slightly longer to reach than a cell
  • That's pretty much what I pay for regular service. One of the big pushes of voip is the national calling, but for me 99.9% of my calls are local.

    Is there any voip service in canada that can really save you money over traditional local service?

    When I see less than 5 bucks savings I think it's not worth the hassle. Plus the headaches of qos, e911 etc, it's gotta be worthwhile to switch.

  • Speakeasy Too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Greyfox (87712) on Thursday April 07 2005, @11:41AM (#12166481) Homepage Journal
    I got some snail-mail spam from Speakeasy and they're getting into the market too. They also address 911 service, although I'd be willing to bet that it won't work if the power goes out. Standard telephone service works during power outages as long as you don't have a phone that needs to be plugged into a wall socket. Still, I might have to take 'em up on it since Qwest has been ass-raping me on phone service since I moved into the area.

    If memory serves me correctly, and I do believe it does, a phone jack that doesn't have service has to, by law, provide 911 service. So if you were concerned about the 911 service from... whoever... you could get a red bat-phone style phone and plug it into a wall jack in case you ever need to make that emergency call.

    • AOL Internet Phone Service...AIPS... rhymes with "Apes".

      How fitting, considering most AOL users are only slightly more advanced than trained monkeys. And on the bright side, if you get this service you can look forward to koreans calling you at 4 AM asking you if you want a larger penis or herbal cialis.

      The Nigerian VoIP Spam ought to be really interesting, especially if it comes with sounds effects like machine gun fire in the background.

      I doubt anyone gets porn VoIP spam, though - people wouldn't ha

    • Latency is not jitter. Latency is when packets get delayed. Jitter is when packets arrive out of order.

      Latency is not generally a problem. Cell phone services tend to have rather heavy latency. Typically you don't even notice latency up to about 500 to 600 ms.

      Jitter can be a problem if out of order packets aren't dealt with properly, that is, in most cases, they should be discarded, or more precisely, the longer they have been overdue the more likely they should be discarded for VoIP.

      However, there are c

    • VOIP != computer phone (Score:4, Informative)

      by mamladm (867366) on Thursday April 07 2005, @10:20AM (#12165617) Homepage
      You are mistaken.

      VOIP doesn't mean that your computer becomes a phone. All it means is that voice is encapsulated into IP packets. Period.

      In fact, a software that allows you to use your computer as a phone, a so called softphone is a very bad compromise.

      You will always get far superior quality if you use a real VOIP phone, that is, a device that looks just like an old fashioned telephone, but instead of a phone jack (RJ-11) it has got an ethernet jack (RJ-45) at its back and circuitry to convert between analog voice and IP packet encapsulated digitised voice.

      http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-VOIP+Phones [voip-info.org]
      • But that might only refer to the backbone, not the "last mile" between AOL's POPs and AOL customer premises.

        If they use SIP for the last mile, that would mean you could use your own SIP phone to connect to the network. I am kind of skeptical about AOL using a standard protocol, though.

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