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Technology

Cisco's IP Phones - Seven Digits And Cat5 146

Posted by timothy from the what-took-you-guys-so-long?! dept.
kevin922 writes: "Check it out! IDEO, a small close-knit development firm (they are responsible for products such as the Visor, Transmeta Webslate, and a variety of other cool things) has developed Cisco's new IP Phone. This device (which looks like a normal phone) plugs directly into a 10-baseT connection and has a phone # associated with it. When you plug the phone in somewhere else it takes the # with it. I'm planning on getting some eval units to try out. Should the PBX guys start reading up on TCP/IP? :)" Doesn't look like these things are available just now, but the concept is long, long overdue. Bypass the phone company -- in fact, just ignore the phone company.
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Cisco's IP Phones - Seven Digits And Cat5 More

Cisco's IP Phones - Seven Digits And Cat5

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  • I was at a seminar where a number of long time telephone people were being introduced to IP protocols.

    Apparently in phone land every packet is sacred or something like that. They were having a real hard time understanding that IP protocol allows packets to be just dropped.

  • Correct, _you_ can.

    But you can't then use that to order pizza, call the cops, etc. You can only use it to talk to your limited set of tech-savy friends. As soon as it becomes widely used enough to be usefull, it becomes desireable to detect it, and the cost of doing so isn't prohibitive (compared to earnings).

    Jason Pollock

  • I should be able to dial 064 028 067 061 [slashdot.org] and get a prerecorded message with today's News for Nerds headlines. Or dial 192 215 176 126 [mp3.com] to listen to my playlist of unsigned bands on my hands-free phone. Or dial 216 033 238 007 [hotmail.com] and have rsynth [utwente.nl] read me my spam.

    Numbers look familiar? They're the IP addresses of the respective web sites. A "phone number" for voice over IP would be a static IP address.

  • J.J. , You seem to have a few facts incorrect.

    1. WorldCom bought UUNET over 3 years ago. You may have noticed that the official UUNET logo says UUNet a WorldCom company.

    2. WorldCom purchased MCI about a year and a half ago. The company changed it's name to MCIWorldCom.

    3. About 9 months ago the Sprint deal was announced and MCI WorldCom also announced that the name of the company would revert to WorldCom so as not to show favoritism to MCI over Sprint or any of the smaller companies that WorldCom now owns.

    4.The EU has already announced that it feels the WorldCom Sprint Merger would be bad, but they have not made a ruling.

    I agree that the phone companies own a majority of the Internet backbone systems and even though POTS is going away a billing model for packet traffic will replace it to balance the revenue streams of these large and powerful companies. The days of buy a pipe and send as much data as you want are going to slowly go away, or the pipes are going to get more expensive.

    Spacecase

  • I've not been involved in the Cisco IP phones, but we have a trial of about 100 of them at my place of emplotment. It seems that the server that interfaces the phones with the outside world i.e. VOIP PSTN only runs on NT, and we have had a few problems with reliability of that component.

  • But I picked seven, since those others would be even harder to explain. Some finite number of digits which would specify an IP-connected phone is all I meant.

    Wouldn't it be obvious that you meant twelve digits? If it's IP connected, you might as well be able to dial an IP address (news sites such as /. and NYTimes might have Dial-A-Headline, etc.)

  • I just read something from Cisco about this the other day. According to Cisco, 150ms RTT is the maximum for VOIP to have a toll-quality telephone experience.

    Whether or not it's gotten better is a function of the IP network(s) you have access to. From my house, through an encrypted tunnel (read: latency-increaser), NAT, across a common internet provider, to my employer, and across a Sprint frame relay circuit to California is ~80-90 ms from Minnesota.

    That's not bad considering there's a portion of the public internet (albeit a single, regional ISP my employer and I share), tunneling, NAT, DSL (which is its own, hidden ATM network) *and* a long-haul frame PVC.

    If you lease high-speed PtPs or have high-level service agreement (read: high CIR) frame relay circuits you could probably use this. For big orgs, add in smart network layout and routers/switches that support QoS/ToS, and lots of bandwidth to meet peak loads.

    Two nobs with 56k modems trying to talk during a fragfest? Probably about the same as those existing IP chat programs.

    I don't know what this fantasy about getting rid of the telcos is -- who the fsck are you going to call with an IP phone without the POTS people to terminate your call?
  • You must be a coder. :)

    You put phone.callZorn.desk, phone.callZone.home
    (OO syntax?)

    Shouldn't it be desk.callZorn.phone, home.callZorn.phone?
    From specificDevice.who.whatTypeOfDevice
    IE: specificHost.Domain.TLD

    Just to nitpick. :)

  • Since an ip phone has a fixed ip address, it can log in to the server from anywhere on the network, and have the same settings.

    Actually the real beauty is that it DOESN'T need a fixed IP address. It gets an IP address and registers with a server on the net. The server then makes a dynamic association between that IP address and and the phone number for that phone. Now you can take your phone with you from the NY office to the Dallas office, plug in, and you are receiving all of your calls again. Of course it can also do toll bypass, where you make a call from NY to Dallas and it appears on the PSTN in Dallas as a local call from the dallas office. Cool stuff.
  • Indeed a cool phone, but if every phone will have a unique IP, always, and that will be something implanted in the phone itself, and not something that will be retained from a server, that will cause heaps of troubles, like many crackers will decide they want that particular number, and a little of hardware change will let them do that, think about it...
  • All the magic is in there. If what the IETF wants to do is not compromised by greedy telecom companies, you will be able to reach everybody, with the quality YOU want, and actualy have the choice between "best effort", high quality or mid range, by choosing your provider for the media transport, at call time. The sip address might impose a choice on the last network used, but not on the entire path. And if a subscriber choosed to be with a very poor quality provider to save money, be it! I'm sure the telco will be willing to offer you a service "I want to call this poor guy on a bad network but with good quality" if you give them some bucks. :)

    If all goes well, a company not giving a "routable" sip address to it's subscribers will be forced to do so or will run out of businness. But of course, that is blue sky, and that's not for this year.

    Al least that's my partial understanding of how things are going on.
  • Why not just do it the same way as GSM - an "identity" card for each user that works in any phone?
  • who the hell cares?! damn linux-nazi's.
    ---
    remove SPORK.
  • This really isn't that new a technology.
    Cisco has been working on this for a number of years.
    As far as residential connections go, well You are gonna need a fairly fat pipe for this to work on. But for a business with the backbone already in place this is great.
  • .. You'll be able to catch biological and digital viruses at the same time!..

    -
  • Their vacuum cleaner [ideo.com] doesn't suck at all!!!

    --
    Here's my mirror [respublica.fr]

  • It's funny - their project list contains a number of projects that I like for their cool design.

    I wasn't aware that all these products were designed by the same company. Designers should be mentioned in a product's manual... Keep up your work, guys.

    ------------------

  • We've had these Cisco phones since Janurary. There have been a few teething problems (and having a pair of NT boxes in the server rack really pisses me off), we had to go without voicemail for a while, which was also annoying.

    I don't want to repeat what everyone else has said about standards and latency and connecting to leagcy phones etc. but there is one extremely large advantage of this system which no-one else has mentioned. Our office is a listed building. For those that are not in the UK a listed building is an old building which the owners (us) are not allowed to modify in any significant way, as it's historical architecture etc. has to be preserved. I think that this is stupid, but we have to live with it. It means that we can't take up the floor boards etc. and install structured cabling etc. All of the network cable has been installed with skirting board mounts etc. and cost us a hell of alot more than it would have done otherwise. If we'd had to install a seperate set of cables for phones, then it would have cost as more than twice as much again. Now the phones and the PC's are on the same cables, much easier simpler and cheaper. I'm just waiting for the new routers which deliver the phones' power via the cat-5 as well.

    The phones are not great, the NT factor is really stupid, but all in all they've been pretty good for us.

  • Nope. Because of deregulation, all the LD providers have access to the same phone lines.
    You dont have an MCI _and_ an AT&T phone line into your house. Thats an AT&T phone line. But the feds have said that MCI/Sprint and whoever else can use it.
  • Yeah, but people keep making noises about wanting to move to IPv6 RSN, so that'll break in a few years.
  • That sounds v. cool ... have you got a URL for the company selling these phones?
  • Here are links to two of the siemens products I reffered to in the last post. The first is the Siemens LP 5100 [siemens.com], a fully h.323 compliant, open hardware IP phone. The second is the TA 1100 [siemens.de], an adapter which allows a normal POTS phone to act as a VoIP device.
  • Even better, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), is an IETF standard (rfc 2543) which (in some respects) replaces some of the functionality of H.323. Here's a nice comparison: http://www.cs.columbia.edu /~hgs/sip/h323-comparison.html [columbia.edu]. Also check out the SIP faq [columbia.edu] and columbia.edu's SIP Main Site [columbia.edu]. It defines the protocols for locating and setting up any type of multimedia call, be it voice, video, virtual presence, whatever...
  • The issue with H.323 and VoIP is the underlying quality of transport between the two endpoints. Voice has a tolerance of about 200ms delay. Beyond that you start getting echo. The technology is pretty much there to ensure that you get good quality from anywhere on earth, but ISPs are still attempting to build services for it. Essentially it requires either diffserv or intserv, and intserv isn't happening on the Internet anytime soon. But it can happen on a corporate WAN. Also, many ISPs overprovision, such that if you own both end points to a provider you can turn on things like WRED or MDRR or FRF.12 and away you go. Remember that interleaving of large packets with voice requires special treatment, though. Later versions of Ciscos will do this.
  • I've had one of these on my desk for almost 3 months. This and the 3COM SIP VoIP phones are great. They work really well - especially with the 3640/3620 H.323 GK/GW pairs. Learn that Cisco IOS kids - its worth a fortune once these puppies hit the market. Also, read RFC 2543 SIP _ that is going to change the world for Linux. I'm under NDA for that,but keep your eyes open - there are a lot fo great VoIP coming out, and Linux is part of the mainstream from the ground up. Try looking at www.siphappens.com for a look at the tip of the iceberg... Sometimes it pays nice dividends to be working for a far leading edge company in R&D as a convergence architect :-)
  • My point was that you can't just arbitrarily toss the analogue phone network becuase that's where most people are and you WILL travel the analogue network or you won't talk to people.

    The telcos will kill it by keeping you out of the reverse path; ie, no or toll-only calls to SIP-based numbers, even those which may be geographically close.

  • Re:Bypass the phone company my tuckus. (Score:3)

    by EQ ( 28372 ) on Friday May 12, 2000 @07:44PM (#1076088) Homepage Journal
    Not true any more.

    Look at comapnies like Williams Communications, Qwest - and the newest 800 lb gorilla in the world: Level 3 communications.

    They are going to flood the market with cheap bandwidth and knock the old line guys like AT&T and Sprint off at the knees.

    Try reading the mini-essay on Silicon Economics at LEvel-3. They have my vote - any company whose CEO lists Snow Crash as one of his favorite novels is definitely out to do things differently.
  • And you have an Email address that you can be contacted with where-ever you go. Try reading up on the protocols. Especially SIP - and the Gateway-Gatekeeper interaction in H.323 for similar things.
  • They have a different stack (H.323) if you want to develop against Cisco Call Manager 3.0, but their gateway and gatekeeper pairs (3620 and 3640 cisco routers - using IOS 12.x) must confrom the the H.323 stack of protocols -therefore they will interoperate between H.323 terminal devices - I know, because we've had audio portion of a video conferening unit talk to the Selsius IP phones by way of Cisco equipment at both ends.

    SIP simplifies things even further - and will eliminate problems like Ciscos' stack onthe call manager. SIP is the future.

    So what you are saying isnt quite true if you know all the facts.
  • A beowulf cluster of these! Seriously, this is way better than all those pitiful voice-over-IP programs that never worked right. As long as you're paying for high-speed Internet access, you might as well use a little of it for your phone. I just hope the phone companies won't come up with some lame-ass reason why this is illegal. I wonder what the price and sound quality are, though...
  • I understand Nortel has a test VIOP in Spain running on SUN hardware.

    A number of the cable-modem manufacturers also have voice over IP systems ready for deployment if/when the FCC alows cable companies to be phone service providers.

    It's coming... fast...
  • It's about time. I knew it always felt wrong to pay for my ethernet link _and_ two phone lines. This technology is probably the BEST way to break up long distance monopolies.
  • Yes. And you can dial out from an IP phone. From what I understand, the phone does DSP to take the voice signal to packets directly. The numbers that are other IP phones get packets. The numbers that aren't get circuit-switched, so the call is dealt with correctly by a normal phone.

  • But it's still got a telephone number (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was worried to read that the phone "retains its number wherever it is."

    To me, this continues the existing paradigm that the telephone number specifies the telephone rather than the person you are contacting. So I'm gonna lug one of those beasts around to plug it in wherever I go? So when I move offices at work, we're gonna swap two physically identical objects?

    Far better to have a process by which I can tell the phone that it now has my telephone number!

    Login could be accomplished using a keypad PIN or for bonus points an IR link with some crypto keys in my palmpilot. (Double bonus points for being able to use my palmpilot telephone list as speeddials!)

  • Lazy question (Score:5)

    by kaphka ( 50736 ) <1nv7b001@sneakemail.com> on Friday May 12, 2000 @03:48PM (#1076096)
    I should just try this out myself, but I'll let you guys do the work instead...

    When I last tried voice over IP (about four years ago,) the biggest problem that I could see was the latency. The one or two second delay completely destroyed my precise comic timing, which is the only thing preventing people from seeing me as the evil, hearless bastard that I am.

    Is it any better today? The latency, I mean?
  • This is great for large companies. No need to have cube farms wired for both voice and data. Cut telecom right out of it or IS swallows telecom. More money for bandwidth as telecom and network budgets combine.

    I think these things plug inline between your computer and wall.

    Hmm..download voice mail to pc.
  • How are they supposed to tell which packets are from phone traffic and which are from computers? Scan the packet headers as they come through?

    Actually, I suppose they could just keep a list of which IP addresses are phones, and charge per packet out of those IP addresses. However, could this be done w/o slowing down the net too much? Would it hold up in court?

    Guess I just answered my own question ;)
  • Yeah. We said the same thing about CB radios in the 70's. Nice try but no cigar.

  • Voice over IP (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm working for Dynamicsoft [dynamicsoft.com] who is in this market. The basic design is to make gateways between PBX and IP networks so that you can designate a phone number to an IP address. Its pretty cool shit.
  • It may become desirable to detect it, but that's not always possible.

    Plenty of ways of securing this available using strong cryptography. I have a means in mind right now which would effectively go as far as defeating traffic analysis, though at a rather high (though not prohibitive) cost in bandwidth. Unless use of protocols not conforming to monitoring standards is outlawed, such monitoring can and will be evaded on a large scale.

    I personally believe this will end with bandwidth being charged for per-Mb, irregardless of type. I really don't see any other way out of it.
  • This part wouldn't make much difference in any of the places I've worked. When someone changes offices, I just switch a cable (cat5, even) from one port to another in the closet, and the phone number follows the individual without even having to carry the phone.

    True, this is how PBXs work. Its pretty simple, but the IP phone is absolutely idiot proof. No need to mess with cables at all. Since I left the place where I used to work no one even remotely technically capable works there, who knows how badly they can screw things up if they try going in the closet with 150+ cat5 cables and try to move the right one :-)

    Still this is a pretty minor point, the cost savings (not having duplicate wiring) are the most substantial in my opinion.

    Your Canon fax machine still requires an analog line to connect to the outside world. It just happens to be a step forward from older fax machines since you can directly send documents to it, and fax, instead of print (or both). This avoids printing a copy (wasting paper and toner), and then faxing it to someone where it prints again. What I don't understand, is if you have the document in electronic form, why not send it as an email attachment? For most cases, where content, not format is crucial, this is far more effective.

    Another thing I thought of though. IPV6 better come along pretty soon. Each of these phones will require its own IP address, presumably, to communicate, effectively doubling the amount of IPs needed per office, and we are already running out :-)

    Spyky

  • This looks to me as though somone has finally put H.323 into a simple and practical format. From my experience with all this, it should work great. From what I have seen, and used, it will. Unless they have implemnted something out of the ordinary in H.323
  • Isn't it far more traditional to use the PBX's software-based port mapping capability than to actually move wires in a closet? it would seem to me that moving wires in a closet would create a nasty nasty mess.
    ----------------------------
  • Ya, WCOM owns MCI... and they handle a lot of web traffic. So does Sprint. And Qwest (US West). So the VAST majority of Net traffic will flow through 'em anyhow.

    But at least now we are in an age where we aren't stuck with the local phone monopoly. Where I live we gots cable and DSL -- plus satellite. Now at least we got choices!

    -rt-
  • Just curious, a pet peeve of mine, why is it that so many people consider a binary protocol to be harder to debug than a text protocol? Really, is it that much easier to look for text than a binary string? I'm not familiar with the protocols in question, but I'd wager a guess that any differenece in ease of implementation is based mostly on sanity of protocol design, not whether there are text or binary fields.
    ----------------------------
  • i guess nobody here ever uses anything by america online. the latest beta of their instant messenger client supports voice over ip. it's amazingly simple to use and gives the best voice quality and response time i've found from any similar program. when somebody on your buddy list signs on, you can just elect to start a voice chat with them as easily as a text chat. if you have access to a high speed line with windows or mac, give it a try. kinda neat. still has a little lag, which i think will be difficult to solve with the way internet packets are sent. the delay is not to bad though, not enough to seriuosly hinder conversations, but enough to make for some very brief what-seem-like-awkward pauses if you're not expecting them.
  • DialPad consistently starts getting REAL bad (unintelligibly choppy) for me after about 3 or 4 minutes of conversation between me with ADSL and a friend with a cable modem (in another city in the same state in the US), so it's not a connection speed issue.

  • Re:Lazy question (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I currently develop a (better) IP phone [3com.com] for 3Com. We also have a several orders of magnitude larger market share with our NBX phones [3com.com] which can also talk IP.

    You are correct that latency is important. I wish more people would cite a latency (measured in units of time) when I ask about a DSL/cable-modem speed instead of a throughput (measured in bits per time). With TCP and congested conditions, bandwidth is allocated by latency anyway. Also, for the TCP ramp-up (where most web pages are loaded) latency is a big governor.

    In Internet Telephony (not counting that unusable crap over dialup modems) everyone basically uses G711 (PCMU) with 20ms packetization, so the inherent round-trip packetization delay is only 40ms. My typical ping times across the Internet backbone are less than 80ms making a total of 120ms + a little jitter buffer which is as good as a cell phone. For perspective, sound travels about a foot per millisecond anyway.

    A big problem is trying to make the phones autonomous. So many people implement a master slave protocol like MGCP/SGCP which allows for dumb phones. Strangely when you use this approach, you usually want the phones totally dumb, and the protocol specialized to the specific plastics, so everyone uses a proprietary one. The phones don't even know what their buttons mean. The have to tell the server. Yuck.

    My phone uses SIP [columbia.edu] an IETF standard. The phones can make direct phone calls without any server assistance. SIP has features for PGP, and the next phones will support strong encryption, like 3DES and blowfish. They currently already use MD5 digest authentication.

    Internet telephony will happen. The voice infrastructure grows at 7% per year, but the Internet at 300 to 1000% depending on how you measure it. As bandwidth becomes free (finally a commodity which really is too cheap to meter), people will naturally migrate to Internet telephony for the services.

    Now, if only 3Com could build DSL & cable modems fast enough to satisfy demand. :-) -- Rick Dean

  • It's the Public Utilities Commissions in 50 US states, sharpening their knives and getting ready to keep their power by finding new ways to apply new regulations to the net.
    --
  • Now that we have the hardware, we need to have a email like protocol to handle the registration and traking people.

    First the ip of the phone needs to be registered with the identifier of that phone. Friendly name would be like email. Something like somebody@phone.com or whatever the domain of the server. The mac of the phone would be it's identifier. The phone would have setup options that would allow it's owner to enter the server's it is to use to register itself, much like an email client would. Phone keypads would be replaced with small keyboards or touch screens.

    Their might be a problem with security. If someone can make their device have the same mac as you, then they could take over your phone. I imagine we would have to have a password to keep people from changing your ip on the server side.
    If everyone runs their own server and registers their own domain, than there would be no risk.

    Time for new last names. Come up with a domain name, and identify you family with it. When you get married come up with a new one. :)
  • No area code? So only 10,000,000 people can have one? Nuts. :(
  • this particular phone isn't available yet. The VIP 30 is their flagship phone, and its pretty much as basic looking phone. This is technology that Cisco aquired when they bought Selsius. I'm in the process of deploying Cisco's IP phone systems in two cities now. Eventually we will link them both together and have toll-bypass via our Internet connection. They are pretty cool, but it is not a total PBX killer just yet. There are a few more features needed, but they are probably not far away. As for latency, I haven't noticed any, and the sound quality is as good as regular phone systems. We have had some issues with drop-outs of very quiet calls, but I'm pretty sure its just something we need to tweak on our h323 gateway. For more info on the core server that runs all this, see http://www.selsius.com/univ ercd/cc/td/doc/pcat/7830.htm [selsius.com]

  • We have one... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Haven't paid much attention to it, I don't think it's a Cisco. They're installing them on campus as an alternative to paying the university phone service whose fees are a bit silly... As I understand it you can make direct calls over the ethernet, or can call normal lines by going through a switch at the service provider. We've played with it a bit, what can I say other than it's a phone which seems to work...
  • IP Phone systems are already available from 3COM. The small consulting company I work for just installed the 3COM NBX 100 IP Phone system in the office today. Basically, you can run your phones on the same CAT5 as your in house network. There is a small, central switch which connects to your POTS line(s) on one side, and your network on the other.

    I am still figuring this thing out, but its got enough cool features to keep an uber-geek happy.

    - you can configure your personal options (for your extension) via a web server built into the switch (as well as the usual voice prompted menu)

    - the system can email you voice mail messages as WAV files.

    - The phones remember their extension and setup when unplugged and moved. Going to work in the lab? Bring your phone.

    - With a fat pipe, and a VPN connection, the phone will work ANYWHERE. Ideal if you work at home a lot.

    - The phone has a mini-hub built in so you can plug your single network connection into the phone, and then run a cable from the phone to your computer for its network connection. (But see the minor gripe below.)

    - And I saved the best for last ... rumor has it that the switch runs Linux internally.

    Minor gripes ...
    - The phone only runs at 10Mbits. Which means that if you run your computer's network connection through the phone's mini-hub it will only get a 10Mbit connection as well. The guy who installed our system said that 100Mbit phones are coming later in the year.

    - Heavy network traffic *does* degrade phone performance. 3COM sells a managed ethernet switch which will boost the priority of phone network traffic. In our case, it was easier to just run two network connections to each office and run everything back to an inexpensive unmanaged switch.

  • 3Com NBX100 (Score:3)

    by COLUG ( 22898 ) on Friday May 12, 2000 @04:14PM (#1076117) Homepage
    The 3Com IP phone system [3com.com] has been out for some time.
  • I saw and used the cisco phone at interop. VoIP appliances like this do sound great, but they are far from being ready. Just to clarify, this isn't some phone you plug and through some vodoo, you can make phone calls. It requires alot of special and expensive networking to make it happen, and it's just not there yet.

    At this point in time, the phone requires a wall-wart, dc power cord going to the phone as well as an ethernet cable. Everybody at the conference was very sure that they will soon send power with the signal in the ethernet cable (there were a couple vendors there selling that technology -- cisco just spent a fortune for the rights to it [I think it's breeze com that is one of them]). However, coupling power and signal is not standard on any switchs, and will never be used on any gigabit switch. Thus, you have to plug your phone into the right network switch, not just any ol' ethernet jack, therefore, you can't just plug in anywhere else and the phone number goes with it. You would have to plug in to the same special VoIP network that has the same gateway and call manager.

    These cisco phones are also considered thin phones b/c they don't have the full h.323 implimination in them, meaning, the real guts (and $$) are in another special cisco product in your network.

    When I asked the people there what did they think it would cost, they thought that just that executive phone (cool display and features) would cost about $600, and thousands for the rack unit.

    The final bit of discouragement for me was that at some point, you are going to have to get the signal back on to the pstn (public switched telephone network), and that's going to require the same old pri that you would order locally any way.

    So, if you're thinking of becoming a clec, with t-1's and ds-3's going all over the place, hoping to sell VoIP at the edge of your network to back haul the traffic and concentrate it at the core, it doesn't sound like it would work out, and definiatly is not profitable (yet). The telco's are just huge networks that we need, and we will need for quite some time. Check out multi-casting or IPv6 - much more cool factor.

  • Ericsson have been doing voice over IP for at least a year.

    Most of Spain's telephone system is now VoIP, BTW.

    My Webcam [michaelcreasy.com]
  • F'in great idea, but if the idea becomes widespread (which is definatly plausable because new homes here in Vegas have already been built and are being built w/ a 10BT jack right below the phone jack) it is not going to help the current problem of less and less IPs available, I think if everybody wants a IP phone next Xmas, we'll end up seeing IPv6 becoming the standard alot quicker.

    -SB-
    thcnet.net (Check it out, it's worth the time)
  • So, um -
    D'ya think I can hook a modem up to one of these or would I need an acoustic coupler?
    ;-)
    Jim in Tokyo

  • What happened to the modified version of Ethernet that allocated 10 mbps to data and 6 mbps to voice/video? I think it was being pushed by National Semiconductor. It looked like a clean way to run voice over Ethernet without the delay and loss problems of standard Ethernet.
  • Are you able to adjust the bit-rate on these? if so, it'd work over a modem at say something ilke 16kps.

  • Does anyone know where I can get more information of IP calling and the like?

    Thanx.
  • I didn't see anything in there about seven digits .. what happens when they use up the 10,000,000 "phone numbers"?
    --
  • Fine, how about utilities, cable, water, etc? (If you can, you are lucky)

    I know I know, go buy rabbit ears...

  • And that is easily overcome with "comfort noise"
  • Seems like enough people are interested that its worth my time writing a little helper on IP phones here. Standards: There are 3 standards in the play at the moment that are IP Phone candidates. H.323 which is the incumbent mature protocol in IP video conferencing and also the underlying protocol of MS netmeeting is the one that these phones and others will be addressing first. H.323 is somewhat ungainly based on a binary protocol thats a bitch to debug and firewall unfreindly. MGCP which is the basis for forthcoming IP telephony in the digital cable TV system, and a much easier protocol to understand being text based. And lastly SIP which is the new darling of the IP telephony world and already supported in beta versions of Cisco IOS. The actual cisco phones do NOT talk any of these standards, but insted talk something nicknamed the "skinny stack" which cisco inherited from Selisius. Other Cisco equipemnt in the network translates to the'standard protocols'. Expect to see many more IP phones from other companies in the next few months, cisco is not the only show in town. Interoperability: Until someone has a brainwave the user interface to make calls on all these phones is going to be a classic phone number which will be tarnslated into IP andthen ethernet by protocol engines transparant to the user. IP Phones interoperate with the legacy phone network through 'Gateways', just as present TollBypass cheap IP long distance works right now. You can expect that LDAP will be integrated in to buisness style deployments of these phones pretty quickly so throw that phone list away! Bandwidth: An IP phone will use anything from around 80kbit/S (G.711 audio) to maybe 24kbit/S (G.729/G.723), but in actual fact the killer problem is latency and jitter, so expect to need to use new protocols to make them work well. Cisco and others will use a standard called 802.3p which basicly adds a priority into the ethernet framing info so that switchs can expedite the delivery and routers can tranlsatethis into other protocols for delivery over the WAN (Diff-Serv is the ideal here). Enough I'm Boring myself! ION
  • "pretty cool, but not a total pbx killer just yet"
    That's exactly what we thought of the currently available Cisco IP phones. We opened a new site in March, and the decision was PBX, but each of us felt that had it been 4 or 5 months later, we might have settled on Cisco.

    When it's ready, it's going to be a nice system, and it's always good to have another option.

    Martin

  • Voice-over-IP isn't a "service" any more than the Web is. The phones connect directly to each other (or to a gateway); nothing goes through any central Cisco server, so there's no way they could charge you for usage. Besides, there are several companies making IP phones, so competition should drive the price down.
  • I imagine that these phones work fairly similarly to a standard PBX (digital or analog) phone system found in many offices. That is, it's going to require a device that manages multiple physical "trunk lines" that go out to the real world and the phone companies. This device also generally handles voice mail, receptionist routing, etc. The difference between this phone system and the PBX phones systems is that its traffic is routed over standard network Cat5, using the same hubs, switches, etc. as the rest of the network.

    What does this mean for the adopters of the system? Well PBX systems are generally supplied by phone companies and contractors and are, in a word, fantastically expensive for what they really are. I think that CISCO/IDEO can probably provide this system for the same cost or even less then traditional PBX systems! Any additional cost of the devices (if any) will be offset by the cheaper installation, because it shares the same network cables as the computer network. Running extra sets of cables in offices (or expanding current runs) is extremely expensive, as evidenced by several estimates my company recieved when it expanded its office space and took over a suite next door. Also as far as administration goes, these phones, designed by the talented people at IDEO are probably far more user friendly then the gastly telco-designed PBX systems. Being able to move the phone physically (to a bigger office when you get promoted) just makes management of the system easier.

    However, it (unless my thoughts on how this system works are totally wrong) will still require telcos to contract blocks of phone numbers and trunk lines, which allow communication with the outside world. The telcos aren't going anywhere, until we start being able to route IP voice traffic *outside* of internal networks. Note: this is going to require a more reliable internet service. Users are going to scream a whole lot louder when then can't use their phones than when they can't access their email (and they scream pretty loud about email, trust me)

    As for those who mentioned that fax and modems are still going to require traditional telephone lines. This is true, except this doesn't really change anything. Most current PBX systems are digital internal to the site, and many use RJ-45 connectors instead of old RJ-11s. Fax machines and modems *already* require a seperate phone line under most current systems. However, modem support is mostly a legacy (but sometimes necessary) application, not every person's office is going to need a modem, every office requires a phone. Expect fax machines to move towards a similar IP-based internal system. Some current products allow the routing of incoming faxes to a "fax server" to be sorted and sent via email to the users email. The problem arises when handwritten cover pages are used (OCR can't figure out who the fax should be sent to). This technology is really interesting, but definitely has a ways to go. Personally I eschew the user of fax machines, but they are sometimes required when original documents with signatures need to be sent immediately.

    At any rate, this system is definitely a god-send for us techs who deal with both computer and phone networks, and its likely to save the company money in the long run.

    Spyky

  • It all depends on the network environment you're having to go through. If you have some of the various QoS methods implemented, then the delay is pretty much unnoticeable.

    I personally don't know how far the carrier IP network (esp. in the US) has progressed in this matter, but I do know that QoS is at least starting to be implemented industry-wide.

    One thing I noticed, though, is that people here seem to be expecting that you can just hook up these phones and have instant clean and delay-free VoIP from your home to the home of your friend on the other side of the country. While this may be the case (like I said, not familar with the US market), most "IP Phones" utilize the IP Type of Service field. This is one of the QoS methods: "best-effort" traffic is given an IP TOS of 0, while VoIP traffic is given a TOS of 5 or higher. The router then throws TOS 5 traffic into the low latency queue, while TOS 0 traffic is just treated as normal internet packets. Now, if you are paying for for the privilege of sending traffic marked as you see fit to your ISP, you would see no delays perhaps. But it doesn't take much effort to relabel all of a "best-effort subscriber level" user's packets as TOS 0 (well, the settings are simple).

    This doesn't necessarily mean non-business private individuals can't use an IP Phone, but you may experience the delay traditionally associated with VoIP.

    But as seen on the IDEO IP Phone information page, this is mainly aimed at businesses, who have full controll over their own internal networks and can pay for the nice extra services (Low Latency Traffic, VPNs, etc), to their upstream providers when connecting remote offices.

    Incidentally #1, with a full QoS setup, VoIP works surprisingly well....even with thrashing a router with best effort traffic, a voice call goes though and despite the heavy load most people would hardly tell the difference between VoIP and a normal TDM line.

    Incidentally #2, I believe this is just another step in an overall trend of making all networks packet-based, even the traditional phone network (so don't worry too much about the phone company getting jealous). There have been lots of recent developments in SS7 gateways to connect VoIP type networks with traditional PSTN.

    (sorry, too lazy to make multiple posts, so I just crammed everything I wanted to say into one reply, heh heh)
  • You physically can't. You can't even do it if you forget about the physical link. Even if you are using IP for long-distance, someone still has to pay exchange fees to get it to a regular phone. The FCC has already declared that IP voice traffic changes are to be treated/tariffed as inter-LATA (long-distance) calls. In other words, your ISP, or the other ISP will have to pay $$ to connect the call to a regular phone, and you had better bet that they will pass that charge back to you.

    Also, if an appreciable portion of the traffic starts to be carried over pure IP, the FCC will force ISPs and equivalent carriers to charge for the service, even going so far as to tariff all data calls as inter-LATA (billable).

    It may seem incredibly strange, but prices are regulated up as much as down in the telecoms market. This prevents the big companies, like ATT, MCI, AOL/TimeWarner from undercutting veryone else overnight and putting everyone out of work. This would also prevent anyone else from entering the market.

    Yes, yes, voice is data just like everything else. But, would you really trust your 911 calls to your cable modem and the Internet in general?

    And before anyone starts ranting about routing around the regulations and changing ports/etc. How would you find the person at the other end? You want to pick up the phone and dial. You can't do that without looking up the other person and initiating a connection. The connection initiation can be easily detected, simply because the software has to meet a standard in order to be usefull. Most high speed network providers already run hidden http proxies, do you think that they couldn't run H.323 gatekeepers if required by the FCC?

    Jason Pollock
  • >>Being able to move the phone physically (to a bigger office when you get promoted) just makes management of the system easier.

    This part wouldn't make much difference in any of the places I've worked. When someone changes offices, I just switch a cable (cat5, even) from one port to another in the closet, and the phone number follows the individual without even having to carry the phone.

    As far as fax machines and IP-based systems, we use a Canon printer/copier that also faxes. It's IP based like any other network printer.

    The phones do look good, though, and I look forward to them being ready for prime time.

    Martin

  • You can do what these phones do - using your linux box and an Internet PhoneJACK. The drivers for the PhoneJACK are already in your 2.2.14 or later kernel, in fact!

    Combine that with the software at www.openh323.org [openh323.org] you can do excellent quality VoIP calls TODAY with open source software all the way to the metal.

    Get more info at Quicknet's [quicknet.net] web site.

  • Time Warner is integrating cable, internet(roadrunner) and fone now(ip telefony) through your single coax around here...(Portland, ME)...
    I was actually visiting TW a few weeks ago and that was the thing most of the engineers were talking about...they've already set em up in the employees homes for testing. I didnt get a chance to see one in action though. AFIAK it's coming along well...and I think that the fact that TW is doing this...well, it may protect the existence of other VOIP things. Think: Two big Nasty companies dukin' it out...yes....TW wants to take on ma bell. And with that kind of clout...well, I think it'll be here to stay...and may eventually overrun the standard telco system.

    For those of you not liking the the TW/AOL merger..and the fear of the big company...be afraid. Most of the people I talked to there are pretty much wanting control of the phone/inet/tv market...all through one coax. IMHO, not a very good thing to think about...all though, I think there is enough competition now a days to combat any monopolies forming in those areas...

  • You guys are stupid... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wake up... you can't just plug this thing in on any Ethernet network and start making phone calls. These are the telephones themselves. They require a gateway to the PSTN if you want to call anyone other than users you've got set up internally. You need software to configure the terminals and handle the calls. You cannot go out and get a pair of these for "evaluation" and expect them to work. Most everyone, including the author of the original "article", are confusing this system with the Aplio or other systems like it where you may use your existing internet connection to call another user with a like device. This is NOT anything like that. It is simply an IP-based PBX system, and just as proprietary and expensive as anything by Lucent, Nortel, etc. Unless you run telecom in a big office and need a new PBX, put your dick back in your pants. This is NOT a consumer device. Do your homework next time.
  • Telecoms and Banks are some of the greediest corporation on the planet.

    That's why long distance costs less than 10 cents/minute here in the US, right?

    I don't care how greedy the corporations are, so long as there are enough of them. Competition among greedy telecoms = DSL to my house for $40/month.

    -cwk.

  • If you want people with a regular phone to be able to call you you must have a number assigned according to the phone company's numbering plan. This means that even if everyone gets this kind of phone and we bypass the circuit switching phone network for virtually all calls we are still dependent on the phone company for assigning numbers. Sorta like our dependence on the InterNIC in the past, except that you can't assign your own hostnames under your domain - you must register each hostname seperately.

    ----
  • In my experience (NetMeeting, University-University connection, possibly over the Abiline network, with webcams) the delay is usually small. At times, it can build up to a second or two, but a reconnect usually fixes that.
  • You probably can too. But not everyone can.

    If I and my tech-savvy friends come up with some protocol using (for instance) SIP to find a connection, do a quick burst over it and then switch to a tunneling connection... well. I really can't see anyone charging phone rates for the length of that tunneled connection. Bandwidth rates, yes. Not extra phone rates, though. After all, who's to say that I didn't use that initial burst to set up a non-voice data exchange?

    Of course, some means of disabling this workaround may eventually come down the pipe -- particularly if this thing gets a particularly wide audience. As long as it's me and my friend Joe, though, nobody will notice or care.
  • The quality is only bad on the public internet. These are usually used on private networks. Check out http://nexbell.com
  • I've had an horrible experience with Cisco's Selsius phones. The first strike is the call manager. Runs on NT and that is VERY far from the 5 9 (99.999%) availability that other PBX offers.

    In a business environment, people can live without access to email for 5-10 minutes. But not to their phone system. Any system that bases their Call Manager and H.323 gateway around a NT solution is doomed. Cisco couldn't offer the reliability we were looking for

    I don't really know why this IP Phone post is news, we've switched our own PBX to Selsius and then quickly took it out because of the unreliable call manager and the initial Selsius phone models were pretty bad.

    We currently use 3Com's NBX100 product [3com.com]. It's worth checking out. It's been working great for us for the past year. Offers Layer2 and 3 telephony (why waste IP space when you're on a LAN).

    Its Layer3 telephony has an "IP on the Fly" characteristic that assigns IP addresses on the fly to the phone only when it requires Layer3 addressing. This way, you don't waste an IP per phone, set up a minimal pool of addresses and they get assigned on the fly when required.

    The actual "PBX" is a VxWorks powered box running an AMD Elan (x86 with integrated IO). It's got cards for analog lines, T1 lines, H.323 gateway and some more. It's offers CoS, ToS, Vlan tagging and all the things you'd expect from an IP telephony system.

    There are also analog adapters, so you can plug any analog phone (we use it with cordless phones) to an end unit, which then let's you use your analog phone as an IP phone.

    We've found the solution to be much more reliable than Cisco's, where you need to dedicate yet another NT box for your call manager and where the reliability just isn't there. The functionality of the Call Manager, though better now, has lacked trivial standard telephone options for a long time and just didn't cut it.

    Another nicety of the NBX100 is that you can program/configure your phone through the NBX's web interface, check your voicemail through its integrated IMAP server. It's also TAPI compliant, so the Windows users can tie in their address book software with the phone system.

    --
    Let's not all suck at the same time please

  • Explain to me how you plan to do that considering all of your digital circuits to the internet goes through the phone company

  • Re:3Com NBX100 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yup, our company has the 3com system installed throughout. Our New York and LA offices can be reached just by dialing an extension like any other in-office extension. The sound quality thus far has proven to be poooor. No static or dropped packets or anything but the audio quality is very lacking, apparently in lower frequencies. The voice quality sounds much thinner than the fuller more natural sound of standard phones.
  • I have heard good things about Cisco. I have used their products, so far so good.

    My fear is this, with 3com leaving the arena (5 years from now you will no longer have 3com support for your hubs and switches, and please correct me if I am wrong because I might be), Cisco could dominate. They could be the Microsoft of the "network industry".

    Please add comments as to why this may or may not be. (checked cisco's rise in revenue lately?)

  • Look, maybe trading whole copies of a song someone else wrote is too much. I'm willing to discuss the whole Napster thing. But PHONES? Come on, some people have dozens of conversations each week! Now they're saying that they have special rights to it? Under this "IP phone" scheme, what happens if I call a movie theatre to find out whether they have "Star Wars: TPM" or "The Professional" -- is it going to be against the law for me to tell a friend what I found out? Or is it just illegal for my friend, who wasn't involved in the original conversation, to talk about it? I think there are a lot of problems here.

    (if you're about to moderate this down, please try and get the joke first.)

    - Michael Cohn

  • VoIP for LANs (Score:3)

    by bladel ( 104002 ) on Friday May 12, 2000 @04:44PM (#1076148)

    My company has been involved in VoIP for nearly 5 years, and while it is extremely sensitive to latency, the response-time and bandwidth for a single full-duplex call has decreased about 10-fold in recent years.

    Maybe it's not ready to replace the PSTN yet, but would be ideal for a LAN PBX.

    AFAIK, however, there are still some interoperability issues to be ironed out, pertaining to call transfering, multi-party conferencing and other call management features. Still, this is way cool, and brings us one step closer to packet-switched network.

  • Oops, sorry. I'm on Napster.
    Kevin Fox
  • I have been looking at phone systems for several months, our phone var wants to sell us a big huge
    Fujitsu 9600 to replace our not so great Fujitsu Series 3. We also taked about VoIP phones, but all of the phones talk to an NT based PBX router to talk to our POTS and Channelized T1's incoming phone lines. this is totaly _not_ acceptable at a company that is working on 100% unix/linux installation.. our workstations are linux, our MRP server is a big old Unix (soon to be replaced by linux :) and even our embeded factory automation is linux. I have been trying to find _some_ kind of non-NT based VoIP PBX package, I thought I was close with vovida, but they ended up not doing PBX software anymore. so my search continues.
  • What I should have said (but shouldn't have said, 'cause it would have been far too awkward;) ) was "don't pay for two types of phone-company cables / service."

    Bypass the phone company *as a long distance analog phone carrier*, that is. Redundant, overlapping IP networks are already spreading, since there are several strains -- ground-based wireless, cable modems, DSL, satellite options which keep peeking over the horizon -- competing with each other. Even with phone co deregulation, it's still the local de facto monopoly which typically wires and oversees service ...

    Yes, the phone company owns lots of cable / infrastructure. But as things are digitized and commoditized, they'll (I hope) become Just Another Bandwidth Broker.

    timothy
  • That's exactly what I was going to point out. You can't avoid being billed, one way or another. Figuring out new ways around the system, like ip phones, will undoubtably cause the phone companies and isps to figure out new ways to bill you for the service. You may, however, save money while they react.

    This kind of reminds me of the 80's when the phone companies were trying to lobby to charge modem users higher fees.

    In the meantime, people are using a technology (voice over ip) less suited for it's purpose than it's predecessor. This traffic will be driving up isp costs since more traffic will be driving up the bandwidth requirements.

    I don't know much about the IP phones, but chances are they are bound to a specific port or there is some characteristic about the IP packet which will allow such traffic to be monitored, calculated, and billed for.

  • I know slashdot is a usually a forum for slaging things of, making some kind of insightful or informative comment but I simply thought this was a really good idea.

    The only issue here is will they try and patent the very principle and if not will systems from different vendors be interoperable. What we need here is a nice clean open standard so we can finally put the old phone system to rest along side the dodo, the dinosaurs and our freedom of speech.

  • Selsius? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What was wrong with the Selsius [ucsd.edu] Cisco IP Phones?

    These ones are snazzier, sure, but the Selsius worked find and sounded great...

    -D.

  • MCI Worldcom (which is now beginning to drop the MCI part of their name and refer to themselves increasingly as just Worldcom) bought UUNet recently. They're currently in the process of completing the details of the merger within the companies. (employee pay, pension plans, chain of command, etc) For the most part, each is acting independently as of now.

    While the bulk of MCI's revenue still comes from long distance, someone at the top there has some vision, and is positioning the company to do well as the Internet shifts the way they do business. They've been on a business purchasing spree over the last two years. A merger with Sprint PCS is currently getting gov't approval. The Worldcom acquisition, the UUNet acquisition, as well as many smaller companies.

    One of the most interesting (read: risky and different) things I've seen them do is purchase many small MMDS companies in hopes of offering wireless Internet access at 310kbps for US$40/month. They're the first large company to attempt it on a broad scale. I believe their timeline is to begin to roll out the access on a large scale sometime early next year. They're currently in test trials in three cities in the South. (Memphis was the largest)

    So yes - the phone companies do own a large percentage of the backbones in one form or another. But I don't think the phone companies can get by by simply raising access prices. AT&T will probably try, because they're a behemoth of a company that doesn't do anything well, but companies like MCI that can see the trends will, hopefully, mow them over.

    J.J.
  • Doesn't MCI own a fairly large chunk of the internet backbone here in the states? Kind of stuck with the phone companies either way.
  • Very funny comment about the comic timing :)

    Now, about the phones...
    We just took a looong look at these at work, as we were opening a new headquarters and had to decide between buying a lot of regular (nortel) phones and doing the whole PBX thing or going the cool Cisco route.

    We all really wanted to go the Cisco route, but it just wasn't quite ready for business use. The handsets were actually the big shortcoming, but overall the tech just wasn't there yet.

    The decision, made by the guy who started my company, whose telecom knowledge is remarkable, was that the Ciscos would be ready by late summer. So one generation past what you see now, if you're a business intending to buy a lot of them and rely on them heavily. Or if you're just a normal guy who doesn't want to buy a new phone again for a while ;)

    Martin

  • Already done (Score:3)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Friday May 12, 2000 @05:03PM (#1076178) Homepage
    The standard is called H.323; you can get an Open Source, patent-free implementation from the OpenH323 project [openh323.org].
  • keep a consistent phone number (maybe)

    yep, "is the phone number yours to keep" is the right question. In light of netJerk solutions [slashdot.org] claiming it owns our domains, you know what Cisco should introduce? A little box with with an RJ45: plug it in, and your domain is online... and yours to keep till you sell the box :)

    BTW, toches is spelled toches.

  • I love this device. I do. But lest we forget, the people who own the T1 lines, and most of the backbone of the Internet, are the phone companies. It's cool in that you can avoid long distance rates and keep a consistent phone number (maybe). But we can count on LD companies raising their rates for backbone access as voice over IP becomes more popular.


    The Second Amendment Sisters [sas-aim.org]

  • What about reliability? Where I work, we have a big Rolm PBX. It wasn't cheap but it has been very reliable. It has a hot backup CPU in case the primary CPU faults. The techs can do maintenance without taking it down. The LAN is much less reliable, probably due to the large number of components that are single points of failure. It was designed to be fast and cheap, not redundant and reliable.

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