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The Internet Technology

NYT Reviews VoIP: Vonage, Packet8, VoicePulse 152

Posted by timothy from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.
securitas writes "The New York Times Technology section reviews VoIP services Vonage, VoicePulse and Packet8. A second article rounds up the competition including VoIP start-ups, cable companies and traditional telcos. The review primarily focuses on Vonage and it's an enlightening review particularly because the reporter isn't a techie. Most interesting is the comment from Vonage's CEO Jeffrey Citron: 'We're not that happy with the level of service today.' The outcome of the review and CEO's comments really do indicate that VoIP is still at the bleeding edge - and not for the average consumer - but the technology is maturing quickly. It will be interesting to see if the telcos do any better with their QoS (quality of service) - which has historically been a critical differentiating factor and competitive advantage - when they introduce their VoIP services in 2004."
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NYT Reviews VoIP: Vonage, Packet8, VoicePulse More

NYT Reviews VoIP: Vonage, Packet8, VoicePulse

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  • VoIP is available for UK users now (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lga ( 172042 ) * on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @06:54AM (#7793507) Journal
    People in the UK can now get VoIP from BT with BT Broadband Voice [btbroadbandvoice.com]. They are aiming it at people with cable connections. The odd thing is that they recommend still keeping a normal phone line.

    It's quite strange to see BT doing something before anyone else.

    Steve.
    • Broadband outage is still a problem. It's QOS is not as good as a phone service yet.
      • Thats exactly what I was thinking.

        Broadband is pretty new. I've had outages with my ISP but it didn't really bother me because I just watched tv until they got it fixed. What about when the next virus/trogien hits and starts saturating the network? What about

        When the phone is down, then things become a little more serious. I can't even think of the past 20 years the phone was down even during the recent big blackout.
      • If you plug a cablemodem and a DSLmodem into a dual-WAN router like the Xincom XC-DPG402 [reviewshq.com], you remove the single point of failure from your LAN. Sure each WAN has downtimes of around 0.1% or worse. But their combined downtime is about 0.001%, or 5 minutes per year. That redundancy give the reliability (failover) we expect of our landlines. Not to mention the pooled bandwidth while up, at up to 9.5Mbps (segregated per connection, unless you get a version that pulls off connection teaming). At about 2x$50:mont
    • This is presumably for when your granny visits, or some other technologically-challenged family members/friends :-)

      I especially like that USB 'traditional phone' piece of kit that just lets you pretend you're on a normal line while sending everything over VOIP (!)

      Simon.
      • No, it's if your broadband goes out (power outage, equipment failure, cable damage, etc.), you'll still have a backup. Vonage DOES let you pretend you're on a normal line - you plug the box into your router, you plug your regular landline phones into the box, you go. It sounds pretty interesting...

    • Re:VoIP is available for UK users now (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mafelixs ( 732591 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:03AM (#7793529)

      The odd thing is that they recommend still keeping a normal phone line.

      One reason I can think of is power outages. Normal phones and cell phones usually work during power outages, while you need an UPS to be able to use VoIP when the power is out. I would never rely on VoIP alone when it comes to emergency calls.

      • Power outages? I guess we'll have to setup solar cells on everyone's house, or backup generators.

        What happens is that you can have the number forwarded to another number if there is a power outage. Now that's likely to be your cell phone, so there may still be a problem. But maybe you can just forward it to the nearest payphone.
      • One reason I can think of is power outages. Normal phones and cell phones usually work during power outages, while you need an UPS to be able to use VoIP when the power is out. I would never rely on VoIP alone when it comes to emergency calls. Actually Vonage doesn't work well at all when there are power outages. The line gets a LOT of noise in it when running off a backup power source such as a UPS. Packet8 does not have this problem, unfortunately their network is not very reliable yet.

      • Re:VoIP is available for UK users now (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Base stations and exchanges have banks of UPS's and in some cases theyre own generator.

        If you check you will notice that all international calls are VoIP at the telco nowdays. It is here.

        Talk to a tech savvy worker there and they will tell u that, even ring the NMC and ask them. They will confirm it. Its how they drive down prices.

        This was confirmed to me by a telco a few years ago, and its how they manage to compete with the smaller startups that where undercutting them on price.

        VoIP is already in use
      • In the United States (or maybe this is just NJ), any phone line needs to be able to dial 911, whether you pay for the service or not. Also, as we saw with the large blackout in the summer, cell networks can fail during power outages. Of course the widespread area of that outage obviously contributed to the collapse.
        • With Vonage, you register your location with their website, associated with your phone number. If you take your phone adapter on a plane to Tokyo, plug into a broadband payphone, and register the intersection with Vonage, then call 911, they might send a cruise missile with a care package.
      • In the August blackout here in NYC, most of my neighbors couldn't use their cordless landline phones when the base station lost power. I wonder if a UPS would have kept a cablemodem or DSLmodem in contact with a powered WAN. Most of the datacenters in lower Manhattan have diesel generators worth days of load.
    • I guess one reason for the phone line is that the service doesn't allow you to call emergency services. I'm suprised they are doing that, I'd have thought any connected phone would HAVE to be able to call emergency services.

      Anyway, prices don't look that great to me, ymmv
    • Could you elaborate on your BT comment please. I work for BT here in the states & would like more info on how we are in the 'home market'
      • Could you elaborate on your BT comment please. I work for BT here in the states & would like more info on how we are in the 'home market'

        Slightly OT, but this is a prime example of why BT has the reputation it does in the UK (not generally good, for those of you not in the UK..). BT's just too big. Remember the dinosaur with a brain in it's head and another in it's back (ok, ok, a sacral ganglion [cmnh.org]) ?? Well BT is like that dinosaur - whenever you call, you never seem to get the same person, different
      • Could you elaborate on your BT comment please.


        BT has all the problems of an incumbent monopoly phone company. It doesn't react very quickly, is reluctant to provide new technology, and charges too much for services, especialy when they are to competitors.

        A good place to find out more would be the Register [theregister.co.uk] which is full of stories about BT.

        Steve.

    • Re:VoIP is available for UK users now (Score:5, Informative)

      by potcrackpot ( 245556 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:40AM (#7793629) Homepage
      The reason that BT recommend you keep a normal phone line is that they have to, by law (I think).

      This is because if you have no power, your VOIP phone won't work - so you can't call 999 (911).

      Apparently, BT Broadband Voice [btbroadbandvoice.com], is more of an effort to compete with cable companies (from here [newtelephony.com]), although being something of a toe in the water as regards VOIP.

      However, "the service, at this point, falls short of the feature-rich low- cost offerings by consumer services, such as Vonage" - so not quite before anyone else.

      Interestingly however, their solution uses Metaswitch [metaswitch.com] as their class 5 switch - as does Fujitsu's effort [ftel.co.uk].

    • Wow. Sunil from CUT, didn't think I'd see you again :-)

      BTW that BT Broadband voice is horribly misleading, claiming that you can make unlimited 1 hour UK calls for a fixed amount per month. Does that include calls to non-BT providers? BT Together's Options 1, 2 and 3 make the same boast, all 1 hour UK/national calls for a fixed amount, and on my latest phone bill I discovered that unfortunately that didn't include customers of Guernsey Telecom, despite this being a UK national number. Nice one, BT. Is

  • First hand expereince (Score:5, Informative)

    by harryk ( 17509 ) <{jofficer} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @06:59AM (#7793523) Homepage
    As a Vonage subscriber, I'd like to mention my experiences thus far.

    Excellent!

    Although, the service did take over a month to get turned on, now that it is, I haven't had any problems. The one or two occasions that the Vonage VM had to pick up, was while I was dinking with my router, and was blocking everything by mistake. I'm still working on getting QoS to work on my side, and thus improve performance, but so far the only drawk back is that I cannot be uploading at the same time, else it sounds muted when not speaking.

    I can download all day long and still recieve excellent quality voice.

    The other drawback I see, however, is the ATA. I would perfer a better way to incorporate it into the existing phone wiring, but no good. I've since purhcased a dual handset cordless phone, and no problems since, going forward, it'll be easy to take with me whereever I go. Just get the broadband access connection, and walla.

    Thinking ahead, I'm sure I can incorporate it into my home phone wiring, as soon as I get a home, currently living in an apartment, but again, minor.

    my 2 cents.

    harryk
    • The other drawback I see, however, is the ATA. I would perfer a better way to incorporate it into the existing phone wiring, but no good. I've since purhcased a dual handset cordless phone, and no problems since, going forward, it'll be easy to take with me whereever I go. Just get the broadband access connection, and walla.

      I also have Vonage, and I managed to find a way around this.

      I simply ran a telephone cable to the outside wiring of my house, where the telco's line would normally plug in. With a l

      • Re:First hand expereince (Score:5, Informative)

        by Heem ( 448667 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:46AM (#7793650) Homepage Journal
        I simply ran a telephone cable to the outside wiring of my house, where the telco's line would normally plug in. With a little cable stripping, I was able to remove the telcos line and splice the line from the ATA right on there.

        You don't even have to get that complex about it. All you need to do is :

        1 - make sure the phone company line is disconnected
        2 - run a cable from your device directly into any wall jack

        Now your entire house is energized with VOIP signal. Remember phone lines are just all one interconnected wire, unlike ethernet wiring which has one run for each jack, connected using a switch or a hub.


        • TCP over Bongos: During a lecture about the layers of the OSI model in our fourth year Computer Networks Course, Prof. Townsend was discussing the fact that the lower layers of the model could be replaced with any form of media. Despite this change, the upper layers would function as normal. In fact, others have implemented network protocols over "non-standard" media, including CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol) which was implemented using RFC1149, and reached speeds of 0.08bps. Prof. Townsend jokin
    • Although, the service did take over a month to get turned on They seem to have recognized this as a problem and fixed it now. I had my ATA delivered by UPS ground within 3 working days of signing up. However, even before the ATA arrived, my new number was up and running and forwarding my calls to my 'network availability' number.
    • I just found the walljack where the NYNEX line terminates, into which an RJ14 plug was jacked, which was the root of my home phone wiring. I unplugged from the dead NYNEX jack, inserted the M/M RJ14 wire from the Vonage ATA, and all my home phones went over the broadband to Vonage. I could have just unplugged from the dead NYNEX jack, and plugged the ATA into any of the extensions. Totally easy, just like the rest of the Vonage experience.

  • Why they need to unbundle DSL from POTS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by montge ( 253328 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:06AM (#7793534)
    A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line? I say that they get to wholesale it, and frankly that the Baby Bell's should be like power companies, you get a contract to maintain the lines for X years, you get paid Y dollars, and have to maintain Z services. On top of that you get to call them "your" lines, except you have to wholesale (wholesale purchases get to pay taxes just like you do, but they just get a circuit.) At that point states/localaties get to choose competition.

    If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.

    Of course I now live where DSL can't get to, so I have to live with cable until I can convince someone to startup a Wireless broadband company on one of the many high tranmission towers in the area. That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.
    • A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service.

      Do you have a link for this?

      Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line?

      CLEC's don't get the lines for free from the baby bells. They do pay a wholesale rate.
    • A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line?

      Ahem.

      The FCC never required that the phone company allow you to get a line for free. What they repealed was the set of laws that said that they had to offer just DSL without telephone service.

      Have a look at your phone bill. (If you have DSL, look at a friend's instead, but the author i'

  • Decent overview (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ehintz ( 10572 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:07AM (#7793540) Homepage
    I've been using Vonage as my family's primary line since April. It's not perfect, but it's better than a cell line. Back in the SFBA I was using it over a SBC DSL line; I found that it cost about the same to use Vonage and keep a $80/mo DSL line as it did to use a traditional PSTN line and keep a cheaper DSL line. I think we saved maybe $5 or $10/mo, chump change. But where it really came in useful is last month, when we moved to Wellington New Zealand. We've been using it since our DSL went live down here, and as far as the yankees can tell we're calling from the SFBA. Even with the outrageous prices of DSL (Telcom NZ is a monoploy and they really love to ream it to you) it's still cheaper than international long distance. There's a slight bit more latency than PSTN, but not enough to matter, given the significant savings. Another nice thing is being able to dial US 800 numbers. It's a real bitch from an international line, but on Vonage it's just like I'm callng from SF. And of course when folks call us they pay domestic long distance and ring a phone in Wellington. Good stuff for the ex-pat.

    • Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk [bigzoo.com], which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.

      Free VOIP: Another option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype [skype.com]. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get p
    • it really came in useful is last month, when we moved to Wellington New Zealand

      I've also moved from US to NZ (Auckland). We pay for bandwidth usage here. Getting DSL from Telecom NZ that is any faster than 128Kbps costs about 20 NZ cents per megabyte usage over a monthly quota. Vonage says they have a bandwidth limiting feature that keeps their usage down to 30kbps in each direction. That translates to 8.7 NZ cents per minute of bandwidth costs in addition to their monthly fees. Paying more monthly to get

      • I've hit the same problem. I went for the uncapped line for our first month and we're going to pay about $200 in overage charges. Starting the 26th we'll be on the 256k plan with 2 gigs, so we can probably keep all our traffic in that neighborhood. The thing I like about keeping Vonage is 1: calls to the SFBA are unlimited, 2: US callers can call us direct without using international, 3: the UI is excellent, the wife has no troubles with it at all, it just works. Given that I'm going to keep DSL regardless

  • Don't support Vonage (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Vonage has sold out and are owned partially by the Canopy Group. We all know the Canopy Group is also involved in the whole SCO mess. If you use Vonage, you're supporting Canopy (some money goes to them) and therefore are supporting SCO.
    • If you use Vonage, you're supporting Canopy (some money goes to them) and therefore are supporting SCO.

      While I agree that supporting Canopy is bad (I know Canopy well enough due to my previous employment), I reckon the second argument is specious. I mean, sure it's true, but if you reason like that, you'll stop paying your taxes because you give money to the government, and in turn some of that money goes to the war in Iraq, if you disagree with it.

      Everything is tied to everything else money-wise. If you

    • Re:Don't support Vonage (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:46AM (#7793651)
      Vonage has sold out and are owned partially by the Canopy Group. We all know the Canopy Group is also involved in the whole SCO mess. If you use Vonage, you're supporting Canopy (some money goes to them) and therefore are supporting SCO.

      thats not interesting or informative, its a troll. check your facts [canopy.com] before modding posts like this up.

  • Inspector Gadget (Score:4, Informative)

    by sethx9 ( 720973 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:19AM (#7793571) Journal
    Hilarious! I did the exact same thing as the journalist who wrote the NYT piece: called my mom. My nickname for her is Inspector Gadget because she still gets a kick out of picking up the phone and saying "Hello (insert caller's name)" after having peeked at her caller ID box. She refuses, however, to get an answering machine. ("What the heck do I want one of those things for?")

    Like cooking rattlesnake for someone and letting them think it's chicken 'til after they've eaten and enjoyed it, I dragged my mom onto the Internet. I don't know which one of us was more thrilled.

    Oh, and the Vonage service is fantastic. I actually called Qwest and told them I was switching to Vonage. Now there I definitely knew which one of us was more thrilled!

  • NO KIDDING!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig@hogger.gmail@com> on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:21AM (#7793577) Journal
    Most interesting is the comment from Vonage's CEO Jeffrey Citron: 'We're not that happy with the level of service today.'
    Change CEO.

    In French, Citron means "LEMON"...

    • Yeah, so?

      There is a French carmaker called Citron. They actually make some pretty good cars, too. They even compete in the WRC.
      • Not "citron". Citroen [citroen.fr]. The 1950-60's DS was the best car ever made - an uncle made a dune-buggy out of one, and we'd go in a plowed field at 100 km/h and we could not feel a single bump. Heck, Rolls-Royce licenses Citroen brakes and suspension...
        • My bad.. I've actually never seen the name spelled out, but a few years ago I saw a couple of their cars (in the US!). When I asked my dad what kind of car it was, he told me it was a Citroen and it meant lemon in French. I couldn't help but ask "Why would anyone buy one if they know they're lemons?"

          I've since learned that they're actually good cars, and now I know better about the name.

  • Commercial VoIP is a law away from disappearing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:21AM (#7793578)
    Commercial VoIP is an artificial market. By that, I mean that it only has a reason to exist because of a circumstancial state of affairs, the one dictating that commercial phone companies (traditional land-line based phones) are taxed and must maintain their network with the proceed of their sales, while VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.

    I mean, apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls (I'm just talking about national calls to simplify). If VoIP companies suddenly were taxed or had to pay a fee to internet providers for the extra bandwidth, this "quickly maturing" market would vanish instantly.

    In any case, there's little difference between a VoIP company and a phone company : they both use digitally encoding to transport voice, it's just that the latter uses (and pays for) its own dedicated lines, while the other doesn't.

    3 things are likely to happen:

    - The feds step in and consider VoIP companies as normal phone companies (which they are), and tax them

    - VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it

    - Traditional phone companies start providing "free" internet with their phone services, in which case customers have phone and internet for the same price, nulling VoIP companies' value

    In all cases, VoIP companies die.

    I don't see how VoIP companies will survive in the long run. They're the product of the fact that the internet is much younger, therefore much less regulated and taxed, than traditional phone networks. This will soon change no doubt, and they're actually helping the government realize that the internet is a tax loophole. I think they'll all disappear soon and actually hurt the freedom (free as in beer) of the internet in the long run by their very existence.
    • Without any regulation, a VoIP system that functions like e-mail (peer-to-peer push) will invite VoIP spam that's nearly impossible to filter, much like our e-mail spam crisis today.

    • Re:Commercial VoIP is a law away from disappearing (Score:4, Informative)

      by lga ( 172042 ) * on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:36AM (#7793620) Journal
      - VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it


      Why? I already pay for my internet connection. If the money I pay for my connection doesn't cover the cost of the internet backbone, then my ISP has a bad business model. That's not my fault, is it?

      Steve.
      • Why? I already pay for my internet connection. If the money I pay for my connection doesn't cover the cost of the internet backbone, then my ISP has a bad business model.

        Well no, they don't have a bad business model. It's just that, if a majority of the population starts doing VoIP (as opposed to just some people, like today), the internet will become so congested that the entire infrastructure will become inadequate. Widespread VoIP is orders of magnitude more data than today's webpages, low-def TV clips

        • If the infrastructure needs to be upgraded, someone will have to pay for it, and I don't think VoIP companies should then be absolved from participating, being the cause of that upgrade.

          Wrong. If my ISP has to upgrade their capacity, then they will increase my internet bill. Likewise with the T-1 guys. And so on. Why should a data service that runs on top of my telecom and internet services pay the telecom god?

          As a consumer, I can't see at all your logic. And frankly a growth in demand for bandwidt

        • Re:Commercial VoIP is a law away from disappearing (Score:5, Informative)

          by doogles ( 103478 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @10:07AM (#7794357)


          Depends. How small do you propose this low-def TV clip is?

          G729 is defined as generating 8Kb/sec. At 50 pps (what Cisco uses), 2 samples per packet, this comes out to 160 bits (20 bytes) per packet. IP/UDP/RTP overhead is 40 bytes.

          So a typical G729 call is going to burn up 60 bytes per packet * 50 pps == 3000 bytes/sec == 24000 bits/sec

          That's AFTER IP overhead, as you can see in my math.

          Ignoring IP overhead for a moment, I'm unsure how you propose a low-def TV clip is going to be any smaller than 8Kb/sec. The audio alone would probably be encoded higher than this.

          Frankly, VoIP is a pretty small burden on IP networks, at least as far as bandwidth needs go. It's need -- and where you typically have issues over enterprise networks -- is consistancy. Jitter is the enemy of VoIP, and right now, most serivce providers offer no SLAs for this particular metric. This will change over time, and people will begin to demand differentiated services for their different types of traffic.

          Look in to Cisco's V3PN (Voice and Video-enabled VPN) program for information about how they propose to build and deliver end-to-end QoS to their SP customers:
          http://www.cisco.com/go/v3pn/ [cisco.com]

    • Re:Commercial VoIP is a law away from disappearing (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You are missing the point.

      Phone networks are pretty complicated things, requireing special hardware that is aware of things.

      Best effort networks however are relatively simple and an awful lot cheaper to run than phone networks.

      The complexity is shifted to the edge of the network.

      Of course there are still a lot of problems such as QOS vs best effort, but the fact of the matter is, VoIP will be cheaper, taxed or untaxed.
    • So every web-based business that relies on their customers' Internet access should pitch in and help pay for their customers' Internet access? Amazon and iTunes are to be held fiscally responsible for network traffic? That's ludicrous.

      Also, any business is taxed. A portion of those taxes may not be earmarked for support of the infrastructure but they are taxed nonetheless.

      I think any new technology which supplants or significantly modifies an existing dominant technology goes through the same set of c

    • Re:Commercial VoIP is a law away from disappearing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rhakka ( 224319 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @08:58AM (#7793894)
      I think you're focusing too narrowly.

      I currently get phone, television, and internet through time-warner. If it involves the sending and/or receiving of data in my home, it goes through them, completely, with the exception of my cellphone. and you know what? IT ALL COMES THROUGH ONE CABLE.

      Phone lines were treated specially because they had to be a separate entity and a separate infrastructure utilizing public lands for a long time. That is no longer the case. Explain to me why there should be additional taxes and surcharges on my VoIP phone which utilizes cables that were ALREADY HUNG for use with cable TV and internet, with their own sets of taxes? Simply to allow phone companies to compete, when they use completely separate lines on the poles? Are you suggesting that time warner and other cable companies are allowed to use pole space without appropriate taxation for their existing cables?

      Infrastructure consolidation my friend, not an artificial market. My VoIP service may not be 100% of a regular land line yet, but it's reliable enough for me to run a business from home. Soon enough having a regular land line will be the "last mile" option or a premium service only ("Dedicated phone lines! Still work when the power goes out!")
    • - VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it

      In the grand scheme of things, a G729 call across an IP backbone (which with IP overhead clocks in at 24Kb/sec) is not even large enough to write home about. I would not call it a burden by any means. You can burn more bandwidth with moderate web browsing.

    • VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.

      Yes, but so what? These are legitimate savings. VoIP companies shouldn't have to pay taxes any more than any other service that moves data around since, ultimately, voice is just a form of data. If your justification is bandwith then there are dozens of media services (e.g. music and movie downloads) that suck up bandwidth. If it comes down to it, maybe the internet goes the metered route. Or just builds itself m

    • - VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it

      You mean, like paying for colocation of their equipment, their bandwidth, the USF fees they pay, and that sort of thing?

      I thought when you paid for these things, you were sharing the cost of the IP infrastructure. It's not like Vonage has just a cable modem at their end too. The fact that they can pay for the bandwidth they use, the bridging equipment, and the tie lines to the PSTN

    • First off, it's definitely not an artificial market. Based on your followup claims, you can call any business that operates over the internet "artificial". Let's triple tax UPS, they don't pay road taxes and drive their trucks all over the place, limey bastards!

      Secondly, there is much different about a voip company and the standard telco. Their business is completely different. A telco is many things, an incumbent, a legislated monopoly, and a regulated entity. They might provide an identical service as a

  • Where's the talk about the regulatory mess? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by davidstrauss ( 544062 ) <david&davidstrauss,net> on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:22AM (#7793583)
    While the technical side of VoIP seems rather solid, traditional telcos are making VoIP startups face stiff regulation. As the article says about the technical hurdles being a necessity to overcome for widespread adoption, I see the potential regulatory mess as just as significant of a hurdle, yet the article largely ignores this pitfall for many markets. I don't want to sign up for service today that may face steep service charge increases due to successful lobbying by traditional telcos. I'm keeping my exclusively mobile line.

  • Rah, Rah Vonage (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gnascher ( 645346 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:23AM (#7793587)

    Been trying out Vonage for over a week now. So far, I haven't a single complaint. Call quality has been excellent, my only complaint being that it is a bit louder than my land line. All the free included features are very nice.

    The coolest thing, however is being able to retreive my voicemail from the web ... or have them delivered to my Email inbox as a .wav file!

    I got fed up with the fact that I still have a charge on my Verizon phone bill for "Touch Tone Service", and that high-tech features such as "Call Waiting" still have to cost between 4 and 6 dollars!!! Not to mention the slew of taxes and fees that bloat out the monthly nut...

    Hopefully this threat of real competition will revolutionize the telecom industry. ...or even better, sink the baby-bells into a pit of despair!

  • I'd always seen the hope and potential for VoIP as similar to my hopes and potentials for WiFi: low-to-no-cost community networks that could be used to get everybody wired... unlike what's currently happening, just another area for corporate intervention.

    Maybe some of these attempts will contibute to the community network effort, but that's what we thought with widespread use of WiFi, and all that's done is added snarfing WiFi traffic to the list of amusing events at 2600 meetings.

    • Telekon writes:
      I'd always seen the hope and potential for VoIP as similar to my hopes and potentials for WiFi: low-to-no-cost community networks that could be used to get everybody wired... unlike what's currently happening, just another area for corporate intervention.


      Hmm. What about these guys [pulver.com]?

  • Only one phone connection (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheRealFixer ( 552803 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:35AM (#7793616)
    I'm with Vonage now, and only having one phone port in the back of the device is a bit of a drawback. However, I found that the point at which our standard phone connection enters the apartment is basically a second phone jack in one of the rooms. Plug this short RJ-11 cable into the bottom of this oversized wall plate, and you have standard phone service throughout the house. So I bought a line coupler, and hooked my Vonage box to that short cable, and now I have Vonage service at every jack in the house. My only worry was that the Motorola VoIP converter box didn't put out enough power for multiple phones at once, but so far, it's worked perfectly, and every phone in the house rings.

    Absolutely love the service, haven't been able to notice much of a difference. There is sometimes a slight white-noise-type hiss when you're on the phone and no one is talking, but it stops as soon as there's some activity, and it isn't all the time. The latency is outstanding. Very, very impressive, considering how it's routing the call. I would put the overall sound quality at well above a cell phone, and only a fraction lower than a POTS.
    • The Vonage box puts out 5 RENS. Traditionally, 1 phone used to take 1 REN, so you would expect that should power 5 phones. These days, phones often run on 0.0 to 0.2 RENS, so you would expect that to power every phone you could possibly plug in. All phones have their REN value on a sticker on them somewhere, check the bottom.

      Just make sure you don't accidentally jack the Vonage box directly into the POTS network - disconnect your outside phone connection wherever it comes in, and you're set.

  • Power over ethernet for VoIP (Score:4, Informative)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:36AM (#7793617)
    The good news is that some new network devices (like VoIP handsets) may avoid the wall-wart syndrome of most modern telephones. IEEE P802.3af [ieee.org] is a backward-compatible standard that delivers device power over standard CAT5 ethernet lines. A quick search [google.com] shows that network gear makers are already selling switches that provide power to connected devices.

    It will be nice to return to the days when desktop telephones were powered by their network connections.

  • VOIP (Score:1)

    by powlow ( 197142 )
    VOIP has really taken its time to arrive in products such as this one. I remember a friend of mine working on such a project as his Master's Degree disertation, sponsored by Nortel. This was about 5 years ago, in the UK, and always struck me as odd that more was not seen about VOIP.

    I would most likely snap this up now if it were available in my area, as I got pissed because the phone company wants like 80 just for activating the phone line which, i might add, is already in place...its daylight robbery. So
  • I've got a slightly different VoIP service here. A friend runs his own ISP (small, single T1) and loves Linux. He setup an asterisk server and lent me a Grandstream phone for use. The only issue I've experienced is latency during his peak bandwidth load times.

    This I'm perfectly willing to deal with. I hate phone companies. I will never give Bell Canada another cent as long as I live. I have enough moral problems paying my cell phone bill to Rogers AT&T.

  • We'll see more VoIP in the future... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phoenix321 ( 734987 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:51AM (#7793665)
    All communication lines going to any endpoint (home, business, sensors, etc) are quickly moving to an IP based data network. Unfortunately, there are two problems that governments and current telephone companies face:
    1) Roughly 50% of their voice revenue stream comes from per minute connection charges, other carrier access charges, & regulation charges (govn't). These will evaporate when subscribers move to data driven VoIP (ie: you pay a flat fee for DSL or cable modem bandwidth now, and it can run all your voice calls to anywhere in the world). Eventually the PSTN connection part will no longer be necessary, so Vonage will disappear as we know it today, but it has finally woken up the telcos to what the future will bring.
    2) Pretty much the other half of their revenue stream comes from the 'premium' voice feature services (call waiting, text messaging, etc), all of which are quickly moving from the class 5 switch into the phones themselves (aka: free).

    What do you do when your primary revenue stream evaporates? Fight it in the courts or with govn't officials. Remember, govn'ts have been taking a nice chunk of that revenue for themselves as well.

    We will have to move to a bandwidth & quality of service (QoS) based payment style. A minimum bandwidth is given for a flat rate (which will include -all- voice), and extra bandwidth will be provided on demand at an agreed QoS. The higher the bandwidth & QoS, the higher the fee.

    Things to watch out for: VoIP everywhere, SIP phones/services, VoWLAN, current voice carriers moving their infrastructure to their IP networks, and govn't regulations dictating that comm lines (called data services & unregulated) become regulated for QoS.

    The companies that move to this model last will not survive. They aren't going to like this. :-)
    • Hey phoenix321 - I'm glad you liked my statement enough to cut and paste it from a prior article... ;-)

    • Bullshit. Phone companies themselves are moving to flat rate charging because of all of this. MCI and AT&T both offer flat rate phone service now, as one could argue they should have been twenty years ago.

      As a consumer I value predictability of my phone bill, and if it's a little higher some months than my actual usage would have warranted otherwise, that's ok. I expected to pay X amount for a service and I had that service.

      Also, it's a hell of a lot nicer than having to go over a phone bill with t

  • Packet8 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Heem ( 448667 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @08:01AM (#7793689) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunatley, the article only briefly (very briefly) covers Vonage's competition. I'm using Packet 8 [packet8.net] and have been for some time now. I've found their customer service to be EXCELLENT, unlink the article suggests - Perhaps the author of the article did not realize that they are based on the west coast, and while many people believe this to be true, the world does not revolve around Eastern Time - Before anyone starts screaming - Im also on the east coast.

    Anyway, we had the packet8 service installed about 6 months ago, unfortuntatley before number portablility was available, so we got a fresh new number. I had a minor problem in the begining, since my firewall (sonicwall) had a known incompatibility with H323 packets, This has since been fixed with a firmware update on sonicwall's side, but I solved the problem just by putting the phone directly on the WAN ( I pay for 5 IP's, might as well use them).

    Voice quality and overall satisfaction was poor to fair in the first month or two. The phone numbers would come into the caller ID boxes all garbled up, since they would add a "1" to the beginning of the number, making the CID info all skew by one digit.Also, the time CID info was Pacific Time, not local time.

    This has all been remedied since then. We've bought our first house and I brought the packet 8 device with me, plugged it into my network and installed a jack in the basement near where my network is setup. Simply plugged the device in, and we were up and running. The big bonus is we don't have to change our phone number, or pay bastard child SNET (SBC) any money.

    I'm sure this is where VOIP has a big market - People like me who have been burned hard by the local phone company- you know, the guys that never care about you or me.

    So, Give packet 8 a try - I'm happy, and I believe they offer a risk free trial.

    • Re:Packet8 (Score:2, Informative)

      by 241comp ( 535228 )
      Actually, it hasn't all been remedied. Packet8 still does not support number portability so you have to get a new number to use Packet8. See here [packet8.net].

    • Re:Packet8 (Score:3, Informative)

      by salesgeek ( 263995 )
      I picked up Packet 8 two weeks ago at home. I just fired the phone company. Packet 8 is easy - works fine and appears to be pretty damn reliable. The only real issues I've seen are:

      * Doesn't work with the power out.
      * Dependent on the cable company.
      * If I take my terminal adapter with me, 911 will dial the response center close to my phone number.

      I also like the way the bill breaks out:

      $15 - basic cable service - from the cable company
      $35 - high speed internet - from the cable company
      $20.90 - Packet 8
      • $15 - basic cable
        $35 - hs internet
        $27 - local phone line
        $30 - long distance
        $15 - taxes on local phone line and long distance

        In order to even make a fair comparison, you'll likely have to beef up that $27 local phone line - remember with packet8 you are getting:

        Caller ID
        Voicemail
        Call Waiting
        Call forwarding

        To have my former phone line equipped equally from SNET/SBC (spits on the ground) It cost me over $65 a month just in basic charges.
    • Perhaps the author of the article did not realize that they are based on the west coast, and while many people believe this to be true, the world does not revolve around Eastern Time

      More than likely it never crossed the author's mind. Remember, we're used to the phone company being local.

    • Re:Packet8 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Minupla ( 62455 )
      The other reasons I like packet 8 over vonage are:

      1) they accept non-US customers (my main reason is because my travels take me to places like the far north or the caribean where multi dollar a minute phone rates are not unheard of)

      2) The bandwidth req's are such that in a pinch I can configure the laptop as a dialupLAN router and use it from the far end of nowhere to make acceptable quality toll free calls to anywhere in North Americia. This is a huge win when you're in a coms shack trying to configure

  • Stay away from Vonage (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I had Vonage service for about a year, and during that time I had varying call quality. At times it was as good as a land line, and at times it was worse than a cell phone. Towards the end of my time with Vonage, I had increasing problems with one-way dropouts. I'm still not sure whether it was Vonage, my cable modem or something else in my network, but dealing with Vonage support was not a good experience. The worst experience of all came when I finally decided to disconnect my Vonage service. Their number

  • I don't think I would call that a review.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by MadAnthony02 ( 626886 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @08:52AM (#7793852)

    He used one service, and asked 2 other people to use two other services. That hardly constitutes a review. From the complaints about the other people, I would guess the writer is more tech savy and more willing to deal with minor inconviniences than the family members he had look at it.

    I use Packet8, and I'm happy with it so far. Sounds way better than a cell phone, easier to use, and $20 a month for unlimited calling. It's perfect because I get lousy cell reception in my apartment and regularly call my parents several states away. I did contact their customer support once via email and was happy with the response times and level of service.

    If you are planning on trying packet8, search for "packet8 coupon code" on Google - there are a number of $20 off or 1 month free coupons out there.

  • I'm curious if anyone has used Cablevisions new VoIP.

    In my eyes, while my cable modem has been on just about 24/7 with no problems. I find it hard to give up a regular old phone line/cell phone combo. The cell gives me plenty of free long distance and the landline is much more reliable then cable.

    Thoughts? Nonthoughts? ::)

    Happy Holidays!
  • From personal experience of having loved ones abroad -- more specifically on islands in the caribbean that charge in excess of $0.50/min for long distance to the island(up to $1/min for VoIP providers) and $1-$3/min from the island -- I have discovered that using the Asterisk PBX [asteriskpbx.org] with an IP Phone cuts down on my long distance bill dramatically. Many of these islands offer 256/128kbps dsl service for under $100/month. Add a DSL line on your side with asterisk and you're in business. The

  • Vonage not quite ready (Score:5, Informative)

    by philipsblows ( 180703 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @09:04AM (#7793928) Homepage

    An actual Vonage user for about 3 months now.

    I signed up with Vonage back in October, or maybe the end of September, of 2003. The intial experience was not bad at all, and in fact the Cisco ATA-186 worked flawlessly with my netfilter configuration once I setup dhcp. The intial customer support was great, with fast, meaningful responses.

    I opted to transfer my old POTS phone number from Qwest, so I had a temporary Vonage phone number for incoming calls on that line. My Qwest phone number appeared as my outgoing caller-id number on the Vonage line, which was nice, since several of the people I call use caller-id and/or distinctive ring features.

    Then the trouble began.

    To transfer the number, you have to submit a Letter of Authorization along with a current phone bill. I asked them if I could scan and email the docs, and I got an immediate response with instructions to email attachments of the documents to a particular email address and they would print them out. I thought this was great!

    First attempt, scanned them in at a resonable resolution, sent them in, got a response that they were not legible. No more informative than that.

    Scanned them in again, this time at 300 dpi greyscale and sent them as TIFF documents. They looked excellent, if I may say, but the response once again was that they were not legible. I suggested that there would be no way I could fax documents at a higher resolution using any fax machine I had access to, so they cancelled my transfer.

    At that point, I was a little ticked, and a couple of days later I learned that someone finally printed out the documents and they looked just fine (as expected), but then nobody got back to me and told me this (I have this email thread stored away in the Stupid folder...). But, once the process is cancelled, it has to be handled manually, which means as slowly and painfully as possible. Oh, and there was absolutely no way to get them to put that to-be-transfered number back as my outgoing caller-id number, so everyone would answer with "what number is this?" or "where are you calling from?" or just not answer (I get that enough when they know it's me...).

    On November 19, 2003, my number was transfered. Okay, actually on November 20. Well, actually on November 21. Wait, it was done on November 22. But remember, I had that Temporary number, which meant that even thought my Qwest number was now transfered, it didn't work. My outgoing caller-id was wrong, and my incoming calls would go to voicemail okay, but then my voicemail box was assigned to the temporary number. The email notifications of this process were not useful, and in fact they never sent a final email when the transfer was "complete."

    It took a good week of emails, and finally I got on the phone for 75 minutes (timer running, that's the acual elapsed time) with a tech support person there who actually asked me for my login password (which I did not give him-- so they simply reset it on their end and logged in anyway). By the time I was on the phone, just about nothing was working according to plan.

    In the end, I lost access to my voicemail box twice, had this number transfer go completely sour, had a very negative experience with the number transfer person (I have her name but won't bash her here), and presently my main issue is the intermittent and extremely annoying echo on my end of the calls. The Vonage FAQ suggests this happens with some handsets, but as it happens, one of my best buds from college is a VoIP developer at Cisco and gave me the 411... basically, Vonage has to fix that little feature, but I don't fell like spending an hour hearing about how the FAQ spells it out for me (incorrectly).

    To be fair, Vonage service is lower in price than Qwest service was for residential use (in Arizona) and the feature set is fine. I pulled the outside wires from the phone junction box (they're rj-11 plugs) and plugged the Cisco ATA box into my house wiring, works without a hitch (before

  • US Military overseas (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kruczkowski ( 160872 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @10:48AM (#7794685) Homepage
    Hey VoIP companies!

    If you guys want a lot of subscibers, why don't you ship your units to APO and FPO address? There are a LOT of families overseas that have broadband and would LOVE to sign up for service like this. I personaly have tried to call Vonage but they will not ship to APO.

    BTW: Vonage has it's call center in India.
    • I'm not sure about APO/FPO addys, but Packet8 will ship to the spec of an island I'm relocating to. You might wanna check into them, seing as how they'll ship overseas, it seems that they should be able to work something out for APO/FPO addys.

      Min
  • I never realized that you could plug the VoIP adapter (Analog Telephone Adapter or ATA) into a phone jack to make the whole house live. However, Vonage's Web site says that the Cisco ATA only has enough power for (I think one or two phones). Also, at least here in Canada, people have a Network Interface Device on the side of the house. If you disconnect the RJ-11 plug from the Bell side and plug it into the ATA, the whole house will be live
  • A question: I know that I can transfer my landline number to Vonage. But if I'm not happy with the service, or if something happens to the company, can I transfer a number *from* Vonage *to* a POTS company? Anyone know? (Their Web site is silent on the issue...)
  • I think cellphones demonstrate that people will put up with with crappy, unreliable service. Hell, they'll even pay MORE for it.

    Personally, I'd take a hit on availability if it meant I could tunnel my voice calls over ssh -2.

  • Been using Vonage for 4 months. I have a 678 Atlanta #, and a 321 Orlando virtual #.

    Problems:
    1) Voicemail quality is often horrid. Suspect their voicemail system is overloaded.

    2) 321 # broke twice ("this number has been disconnected", not my cable box going down). Fixed within a day each time.

    3) 678 # broke once ("this number has been disconnected", not my cable box going down). Fixed overnight.

    4) They 'upgraded' the voicemail system with only a couple days of e-mailed warning once, resetting my gre
  • For ridiculously reasonable fees, many telcos already offer unlimited monthly long-distance anywhere in the U.S.

    For example, I have DSL and unlimited long distance service coming over the same phone wires in my home (SBC). Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not. Why bother with VoIP when long distance is all-you-can-eat?

    Granted, if I made a lot of long-distance calls overseas to people who didn't mind talking over crappy 1970's quality conn

    • Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not.

      The article discusses how Vonage works, and Packet8 works pretty much the same way. You don't have to fire up your PC to use it. You get a "terminal adapter" - you plug an ethernet cable from your router to the terminal adapter, and a POTS phone into the rj11 plug on the terminal adapter. You then use the phone as any normal phone.

      As far as sound quality, Packet8 is way better than the quality I go

  • I wonder how many people or businesses have bought service from Vonage and then shipped the equipment abroad? It's got to be one of the cheapest ways to get a US phone number if you are outside the US.
  • I just set up my parents with an IP phone and login via FWD [pulver.com]. I tried Sipphone [sipphone.com] first, but could not get it to work behind the NAT router at my parents' end.

    I can now make unlimited, free calls to them, saving $100/month. What's more, there are no monthly charges for either of these services, all you have to do is buy the equipment -- which can be either a hardware IP phone, or a software phone.


  • I'd just like to know if anyone has tried running Smoothwall with the Vonage service, and with how much success?

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