Phones

Among the conferences my partner and I had high on our list to attend, VON.x in San Jose was one of the most important. Due to scheduling, spring break, and cost, we sadly came to the conclusion we just couldn’t attend. When your work is focused on a particular area and you have to miss a key event, it’s a deflating feeling.

Second, the iPod Touch doesn’t have an audio input jack. That means you can’t use it for Skype, or other VOIP services. You can do IMing through web sites, though the Business Week article argues that it’s pretty awkward.

Voice over Internet Protocol is a fast-growing business in the United States, but it’s growing even faster in Europe, and its traction in the old world is only going to increase. With competitive broadband service providers (such as France’s Free and Talk Talk in the UK) offering flat-rate voice plans over their high-speed pipes and wireless carriers embracing triple-play offerings, Europe is poised to emerge as one of the regions where VoIP has a major impact.

Ok we all have heard of Vonage and the other VoIP providers that will give you unlimited Phone services over your broadband connection using your regular old phone. But there are other services that are similar but have a few extra fun options. Let's cover one of the services I have started playing with www.voipbuster.com.

Court backs FCC over states in VoIP case

As a Mac user, I long ago became addicted to Adium, an all in one IM client that allows me to combine AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Googletalk into one application. No integration with skype and VoIP yet, but hopefully one day.

Es gibt einen VoIP Dienst. Für alle die, die via Handy Flirten, oder andere Angebote im TK Bereich nutzen möchten und Ihre Nummer dabei nicht preisgeben wollen. Die Firma Shadownumber (Tochterfirma von TalkPlus) ist eine Art “Firewalldienst” für Ihr Mobiltelefon und führt ein “NATing” Ihrer Rufnummer aus. Somit ist Ihre Nummer nicht nach zu verfolgen und erscheint auch auf keiner Liste eines Dienstleister. Der Dienst schützt Sie also vor unangenehmen Stalkern und bewahrt Ihre Anonymität.

Cableco VoIP and IP application infrastructure supplier Arris today snapped up Tandberg TV1 for $1.2 billion. The deal, expected by analysts, adds Tandberg’s IPTV smarts to Arris’ arsenal, to better compete with Cisco and Motorola, who have both made similar moves2 recently to beef up as the world of service-provider triple-play grows and grows.

What could be the most favorable time to sell a product in the market than the Christmas? To lure the customers, the market players are coming up with attractive features and prices to sell their VOIP phones. However, I can bet on AU-100 VOIP USB when I came to know that the latest phone would be available for just $6 during the Christmas.

Sunrocket, Inc is a Residential VOIP (Voice over IP) company that provides local, long distance and international calling. They have many different price points for anyone to choose. They even have an India Calling plan that lets you get a rebate of what you paid at the end of the year. Not to bad, and not expensive at all.

French ISP Free opens all 300,000 WiFi hot spots of their users to be used by any subscriber to Free. If you have signed up with Free you can from now on roam anywhere you find a Free hotspot and make free VoIP phone calls (roaming is restricted to 64kbps). Frees set top boxes will have this feature turned on by default, all other users need to switch this on to be effective.

The Danger Phone is a USB VoIP telephone handset that works with Skype, or with any VoIP application that recognizes a standard USB handset and supports the SIP standard.

I wrote a piece for Download Squad comparing Sightspeed 5, Yahoo Messenger 3, and Skype 2.0 Beta. Check it out.

Swapped the modem from the Carter’s with ours and we all have internet again! So we’re going to have to buy a new modem for our house. Because we are going to get VOIP as well we’re going to get a modem, router, wireless access point and voip adapter all in one. Make cabling easier and much better value. Hopefully will have up and running within the week!

Have you looked at your bills and said “God I hate paying so much!?!” Well if you have a regular landline phone get either VoIP or just cancel your phone service and use your cell phone. VoIP is a lot like your regular phone service but is MUCH cheeper. Only catch is you need to have high speed cable internet. Consider this MCI current unlimited calling plans start at $49.99; while Vonage.com is offering the same plan with more features for $24.99! That’s twenty five bucks by just switching to VoIP and you can still keep your old phone number. Do the research and you will see the value. Save your money for something like a down payment on a new car or even better put it in your online savings account!

Wendy Grossman's net.wars column this week is all about how security things that work just fine in the traditional PSTN don't exactly work in the new VOIP world. She links to truly fascinating paper by a selection of the Internet's great and good who explain how wire-taps are almost impossible in the VOIP world.

VOIP Phishing. This is going to suck. There is actually a blackhat talk or two about this. Combine misleading (let alone spoofed) caller id plus a slick Asterisck IVR plus unlimited free calling and you get a cheap system that will sucker a lot of people out of all kinds of thins, including credit and calling cards. Worst of all, people TRUST the phone way more than they do email.

Ahhh, taxes. This post on Techdirt got me thinking. Much like the USPS’s plans to charge Internet users for email, the FCC might really like to charge VoIP providers for the same thing: nothing.

Some hacker friends of mine released a new Asterisk-based phone system on May Day. I've just now had a chance to post about it, but it looks fantastic! Highlights include: $145.00 per month for up to 89 extensions and 3 conference bridges -- 2 cents/minute to call most international land lines, free calling anywhere within the global system. Telekommunisten.net is a peak into the future of telecommunications.

So then Van calls while I was producing Snarfcast number 5, says he’s downtown with his PSP. We took forever establishing a non-working Burnout challenge…but we chilled at the mall and shit. I bought 50 blank dvds for 14.99 and came home to create show notes for the podcast to end all podcasts. That’s right, I got a badass program called Gizmo that allows free VOiP calls to be recorded. Expect myself and a co-host to test the waters on the new Snarfcast.

One final gem: “It also discusses the possibility of the iPod getting VoIP functionality and what the implications would be.” Yeow. Really, though, if the the iPhone is such a certainty and is “imminent”, why bother putting VoIP in the iPod? Seems pretty counter-intuitive. Or even more so than having VoIP in an iPod at all.

The picture is of the Linksys Phone Adapter which is what we use to make our VOIP work. It is a mysterious little box that you just plug your DSL connection into along with your phone line and it all just works. In case you were wondering, the sound quality is very good. Neither Carol nor I can tell the difference from a regular phone. If you were thinking about going VOIP don’t hesitate. I think it really has arrived.

2 - Phone Service - Dropped MCI Neghborhood and switched over to Optimum Voice. Yes, I know we’re late to the party. Now I can kiss my $70 MCI bill goodbye and pay only $29.95 for Optimum Voice. Plus it’s one less bill to pay. The install was last week and for the few times I’ve used it, its sounded fine. If you’re still paying for a regular landline, I’d say it’s safe to go VoIP now.

It’s an astute observation, for certain, but to dismiss FMC simply because of this wouldn’t be wise. When talking about FMC or mobile VoIP, the impact of the technologies as a disruptive force may well overshadow their actual use. Mobile operators, as slow-moving as most of them are, don’t operate in a vacuum. They’ll respond to competitive threats, and won’t let new entrants simply waltz in and steal their markets (well, their close-minded approach might make that happen, but that’s another post). One example would be Germany, a pretty ruthless telecom market, where operators have found a great deal of interest in their home-zone calling plans, where users get discounted calls made from the cell that covers their home. These plans came as retaliation to cheap fixed calls and have served as a buffer against VoIP.

Según El Mundo la feria de este año va a estar muy enfocada a entre otras cosas la VoIP, la verdad es que ya nos hacía falta un nuevo empuje en las telecos.

Shaw wants its high-speed net customers to pay a $10 “quality of service enhancement” fee if they use a VoIP phone service. Shaw argues that its fee is necessary to maintain the quality of independent VoIP services.

One of the great features of the Grandstream GXP-2000 VoIP phone is that you can create and upload custom ring tones to your phone. The sad part is that the utility to do so on their web site only exists for Solaris and Linux.

Alessandro segnala in questo post un altro interessante servizio di telefonia VoIP: Jajah fornisce telefonate via internet senza la necessita’ di installare software sul client.

Among the tools that I haven’t used yet are “Crossover Office,” which allows Xandros users to run Microsoft Office stuff (it’s a time-limited trial, after which you have to buy); and Skype, the popular VOIP telephony tool. I won’t be bothering with Crossover — OpenOffice is just fine, thanks, and I’ll probably grab AbiWord for lighter stuff — but I’ll let you know how Skype works out after I upgrade to high-speed Internet.

Think about it. You can call anyone anywhere in the world via computer using Skype and other free voice over IP technologies. Then there is Vonage, Road Runner and others that have free or next to free VoIP technologies. What about cell phones? Most plans allow you to make long distance calls for free. Other plans charge maybe $5/mo to allow you to call anywhere you want.

I got approval to go ahead and work on connecting our existing PBX at work with an asterisk server. So…I ordered up another T1/E1 card for the PBX and a T1/E1 PCI card for my asterisk server. The two systems will be cross-connected by an E1 [1] crossover cable, essentially giving me the ability to have 29 simultaneous conversations routing between the two systems. It should be quite a fun project, and in the end should save the company a healthy chunk of money. Our hope is to use the additional VoIP extentions for our employees out in the Vancouver office, as well as travelling users.

Over on the GoogleTalk blog today, they announced that their extension of XMPP to include voice has become a public standard. They are encouraging the community to develop and connect to their systems so that they can handle voice between the GoogleTalk client and other Jabber/XMPP clients like Psi, gabber, Trillian and GAIM.

I ranted at BellSouth a while ago and now it’s time to do something about it. It took me 4 months to get things almost straight with BS and I have begun a solution. (These things take time.) VoIP, Voice Over IP, or “Internet Phone,” may be my solution. Nicky Smith, CEO of Carolinanet, brought a VoIP phone for me to try out for a few weeks. They’ve been selling VoIP for a couple of years, methinks. And I like personal delivery.

VoIP has become the hot topic for businesses and individuals alike. Many people are switching to this technology as an alternative to long distance communication. I know in our office we are looking to install this feature in order to cut down on cost of communicating with offices that are outside of our region.

My home Internet access is via Optus Cable. For a long time, Optus Cable has been a speed champion in Australian ISPs with downlink speeds that sometimes approach 6.5Mb/s. The only problem with the service is the anaemic 128kb/s uplink speed. This poor uplink speed is significant if you’re running certain types of forbidden “server,” multiple VoIP lines, or if you spend hours uploading your family photographs to Flickr.

Telecom Transformation: “How can RTC [Microsoft's VoIP technology] begin as an individual phenomenon, growing into a small business offering with a level of function that they’d never imagine possible, growing into the enterprise?”

In the interview, Mr. Wittenschlaeger says that Raptor's distributed network architecture, which provides very fast service at affordable prices, could have a huge impact on the video, voice and high speed access industries. "We offer performance and price that could cut bills by up to 50 percent while more effectively serving new technologies such as IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) and Voice Over IP (VoIP)," said Raptor Networks CEO. "We believe we can change the competitive landscape of this entire industry."

Overall, the Linksys CIT200 is a great wireless Skype solution that is a perfect alternative to your typical Skype headset solution. It has excellent range, very good battery life, and most importantly you can access your Skype contacts from the phone itself so you’re not chained to the PC for dialing or taking calls. It’s worth mentioning that most people are not using Skype as a landline replacement though many are using broadband VoIP providers such as Vonage to replace their landline. Part of the reason is that Skype requires your PC to be on all the time and you have to be at your PC to initiate dialing. However, if you take the Linksys CIT200 and add in a SkypeIn PSTN number along with pay-as-you-go SkypeOut minutes, and the ability to make outbound dialing away from the PC, then the CIT200 could be the perfect home landline replacement.

I got my first real Voip phone a week ago. I two ATA boxes to connect my old wireless phones, but I wanted to try out a real IP-phone. It’s a nice enough phone, feels a bit cheap (which it is), but I guess you can’t get everything for $100. Connecting it to my Asterisk server was a no-brainer. It has a web interface for setup, but you can do basic setup like ip-numbers from the phonepad. It’s great to have an message-waiting led on the phone. Then you just press the MSG button to listen to your voice-box messages. There’s support for up to 11 line indicators (with an additional key-module) but I think I’ll do fine with four. The only thing I haven’t got working is the Conference button, but it’s easy to just transfer the calls to a conference number. You also have 7 quick dial buttons. To configure them, just go to the web setup for the phone and enter the name and number.

Of course we will listen to the same people mutter the same old constraints as with VoIP. Bandwidth, saturation, the network is not ready. The cable companies won’t let it happen. Nobody wants the content to be distributed in that way.

Inspired by my new monkey powers, I also sprang for Skype voicemail. Now, if they’d just offer Canadian numbers with SkypeIn, I’d be a happy happy guy. Skype’s not the best VoIP service I’ve ever used, but the mobility and productivity it gives me is awesome. (Y’all can call if you want - I’m ThrustLabs. No guarantee I’ll answer, but hey! Voicemail!)

Well, in my stupid opinion, if anyone wants to “buy it”, we’ll have to look at this deal as “Let’s buy it before Microsoft does” or “Skype is better than Google Talk, so let’s buy it”. These are stupid, yes, but it has some logic. At this time, we have four variables in the IT Universe that might change the “balance”: Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. And now eBay wants to play big.

So, Google has screwed me. They got me all excited about this Google Talk deal, but now I’ve found out that only the GT program itself (which is Windows only) has voice chat. There are a bunch of non-Windows chat clients that can connect to the GT protocol, but none of them have voice chat. Come on Google, when do I get VOIP?

It’s a service that uses VoIP technology, but can connect to the telephone network. Not that different from Skype? The difference is, this is free. It’s skyware free, and you don’t need to give any personal information. The catch is, to prevent telelmarketers from using the service, calls are limited to one minute in the free service, and to get rid of that limit, you just have to pay a Euro. One time. A one-time, one Euro fee.

You may think I’m jumping to conclusions very quickly, and that it’s only $10, I can quickly get over it and carry on. But for god’s sake, it’s a whole 100 minutes of talk time! The reason I’m using VOIP to chat abroad is because it’s cheap. I could’ve used that same ten dollars and talk to my relatives for 30 minutes, perhaps less, but in this VOIP world, even a dollar is a lot to lose. Now, please, if you belong to the Gizmo project, do something about this. If you use the Gizmo project and have previously succeeded in your refund, tell me about it (comments below or sid@rev2.org). If you’ve read so far, I take it you like hearing people whine, whine, and whine. ;-)

Erik Lagerway pointed on his blog (www.sipthat.com)today to his interview by voxilla about his comments on P2P SIP. I read the article and found it quite interesting but it rose a couple hairs on my arms. It makes me nervous to see VoIP people talking about completely denuding telco's of their business model. One thing that P2P SIP really has an opportunity to do is destroy the commercial viability of telephony. It was ok when it was just Skype, a proprietary technology based mainly on hype and "enhanced" numbers. But the telco's have been getting bonked on the head repeatedly over the past few years; first they lost the internet to cable, and long distance, then they had to share their infrastructure with clecs, then this voip thing.

Yesterday's VoIP-a-thon at S Witham was interesting. A collection of many different ATAs, IP phones and Skype over bluetooth headsets. Basically it all "just worked" via Tom's wireless network, which runs on beer and tobacco.

and this is all coming together - virtual social networks like openbc, orkut or linkedin, the blogosphere, instant messenger, wikis, voip, foaf and geo-information systems like "plazes":

"Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life."

The Echo project is the contemporary implementation of an idea that a friend and I had a few years ago. We thought it would be neat to buy a toll free 800 number and hook it up to a computer that would act as an answering machine. We’d make the computer limit the calls to a minute or so and then create soundfiles for each of the calls that were made to the number. The soundfiles would be put on a website and made available for download to anyone who wanted to use them.

Project Gizmo is a new VoIP client that seems to target the same audience Skype does. I was amazed that Gizmo sports SIP peerings and it turned out the client was written by Sipphone.com people and thus I should already be able to make free calls to them via Freenet (I had to add a small advertisement here :)).

Unication was showing off a Linux OS PDA at Computex Taipei that had some very interesting features. Built-in VoIP phone capabilities (via 802.11b), an FM radio transmitter (for broadcasting your favorite MP3s to the nearest radio), rotating screen with Tablet style input and of course all the typical PIM applications you’d expect in a PDA.

I happened upon a link to this article on municipally-owned broadband, with Provo, Utah as an example of a successful fiber rollout. Wow, 3 Mbps symmetrical up-and-download speeds! I’d love to have that. Right now, I’ve got 3 Mbps down/256kbps up (Charter Cable), and wish I had a more-symmetrical connection. With VoIP and other home server applications becoming more popular, cable and DSL providers are getting pressure from consumers (well, some of us) to provide more upload speeds. Comcast just announced upgrades to 384 kbps upstream...

I'm actually intrigued by the offerings from this VoIP startup. The reason? They are about to beat Vonage out of the gate with a Starcomm WiFi phone and have pricing that seems to be very low.

"Linux is a logical choice for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet as Linux and the Open Source development platform provide us with fast and efficient solutions to build products for this new, Nokia product category. This is the first step in creating an Open Source product for broadband and Internet services. We will be launching regularly updates of the software. The next software release planned for the first half of next year will support more presence based functionalities such as VoIP and Instant Messaging", continues Janne Jormalainen.

Slashdot reports the availability of the first video plugin to be released to work with Skype for providing video calls over the popular VoIP service. Dialcom's video4skype ( clever, huh?) is available for free to be downloaded from their web site. Dialcom states they are working on versions compatible with other VoIP programs for future release.

Digital Media Europe is reporting that Dialcom (Spain) has released a video plugin for Skype VoIP users which enables users to make video calls on the Skype service. The call is encrypted, and Dialcom claims the capability is firewall and proxy friendly.

But much of the regulatory power in Europe remains on the national level, and the situation differs dramatically among the 25 EU countries. Some national regulators have welcomed VOIP - Britain and the Nordic countries are most often mentioned. Others seem to see their role as protectors - of both consumers and incumbent phone companies - as more important.

This is what I call doing things the smart and right way. Cablevision is upgrading their customers and making them VoIP ready.

Then there is the issue of third world country broadband connections. If VoIP has an Achilles heel it is that it relies on broadband providers. Eventually service providers will provide better broadband service but in the mean time companies need to protect themselves by having redundant systems in place so when there is an internet problem with one connection, switching over to another is seamless.

Forbes believes that the E911 VoIP mandate is a clear entry barrier and instance of raising rivals' costs.

I purchase the 7960G from VoIPSupply.com about a week ago, and just got time to mess around with it yesterday. Ironically the system comes with zero documentation, either hardcopy or a pdf on a CD. Zip, nil, notta, nothing… not even a CD period.

The one thing I was a little worried about was all the recent hoopla about VoIP 911 capabilities. Well, I set mine up just fine. 10 minutes after I registered the service (which only took 5 minutes), the line was working. I logged in and setup 911 (1 page form, took all of 30 seconds), and a few hours later I got notification that it was working. I'll probably call tonight and do a line test to make sure it's functioning properly, but I honestly don't see what all the fuss is about.

This case study demonstrates how a school system saved by making the transition to VoIP and migrating 50 servers to Red Hat Linux. The effort represented a significant overhaul of existing intrastructure. I believe we'll be seeing more and more of this type of story.

Radicati says adoption of Internet telephony was slow until recently, but the research firm believes that the technology is about to hit the mainstream thanks to its incorporation into instant messaging applications by AOL, MSN and Yahoo!, and the efforts of independent service providers like Skype and Teleo. Radicati's 12-page report reviews and compares these five services.

After assiduously avoiding damage that would have been done to emerging Voice over Internet Protocol by labeling it as a telecom service, the FCC requires VoIP to clean up its 911 act. As Jeff Pulver pointed out in his blog a couple of days ago there were always 3 non-technical hurdles VoIP would have to leap to pass muster with DC plutocrats - numbering, surveillance by the good guys and location awareness for use with public safety networks.