AOL Enters the VoIP market

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."

VoIP is very popular...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all we can hear about these days.

I'm wondering if regular phone companies have "the fear" or not... they should!

These articles forget to mention, however, that latency (jitter) is very important for VoIP QoS.

Are AOL and others going to shape their traffic in order to put their own VoIP traffic before the others?

If not, how do they expect to meet the QoS requirements?

And 911 calls?

[Silver Sloth]

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!

Re:Emergency services

[stecoop]

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.

Actually they support full Enhanced 911

[company nuncio]

Their back-end provider is trunked into the emergency system, same as a landline.