VoIP for the Masses!

SkywalkerOS8 writes: "Vonage has begun offering Voice-over-IP(VoIP) service to residential broadband users. I've had the service since Friday and the quality is indistinguishable from a regular phone line. It's only $20/month for 500 minutes or $40/month for unlimited service. They include Cisco equipment, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Caller ID and Voicemail (which you can check online) in the service price. You can read more about it in this article in Time. It works fine through my Linux NAT firewall/router and my monthly phone budget has now dropped from $60+ to $20."

Re:What's the bandwidth usage?

No, he'd rather download or play games than listen to his girlfriend. The difference is subtle but significant. :)

Re:What's the bandwidth usage?

Depending on the encoding used the bandwidth requirements could range from around 8K to 64K. They probably used G.729, which requires 11.2K.

Why????

At these prices, what is the point?

Unless it includes international, you can get almost the same deal on a cell phone which you can carry with you and 911 works.

And considering how flaky broadband providers are, do you really want to trust your phone service to them?

International Rates

Here's their rate chart for international calls [vonage.com]

Re:Why????

"Personally, I'd kill to have this, assuming it also covers international calling. My gf and I are spending nearly $80/month on calls back and forth from..."

1-900 numbers aren't included in this package, so you are out of luck.

Eh, why bother?

Cool idea and all, but why not just go all cellular/mobile? I have for the past year and a half. $40, 4000 minutes (which is WAY more than I'll use in a month), 3 way calling, caller id, voicemail, paging, text messaging, wireless web, email, custom ringers and a phone i can take anywhere if i feel like it. Yes, I know that not all areas have this level of mobile service but once you make the switch you'll never go back. People say that mobile service isn't reliable in the case of an emergency, but from my personal experience I'd trust my cell phone a LOT more than my cable modem =)

PPP over VOIP?

I haven't had much of a chance to look at this technology, but can you do PPP over VOIP?
I ask because my company has no VPN access in place, and forces us to use a dialup connection. ONly reason I still have a land line at all.

Technology to sidestep Regulation

This is providing no service whatsoever except a means of sidestepping the billing methods of the telcos.

Hardly new. Isn't that why DSL exists? It's not that different from ISDN. I don't mean the 128K ISDN that almost nobody can afford, but the high-speed version that's even more expensive. But DSL isn't covered by telecom tariffs....

I seem to recall services that allowed people outside the U.S. to place international calls anywhere at reduced rates by routing the call through the U.S. The to-U.S. leg was set up as a bogus "collect" call, so they caller payed deregulated U.S. rates for the whole thing, instead of paying local monopoly rates.

This goes back to Thomas Edison. Unable to patent his movie film, he copyrighted the sprocket holes. That gave him a monopoly -- until somebody invented a camera that punched the holes as the movie was being filmed. No DMCA back then of course!

Then there were "tax carts". In the UK, they used to asses road taxes on people who owned wagons and carts, based on the number of axles. Naturally somebody invented a cart that held up to six people, but only had one axle.

Social Libertarians like to think that Evil Unchecked Regulators are a sudden, massive crisis. It gives them an excuse to demand the other extreme -- privatize everything, even the army. No regulation of anything, except by contract and lawsuit. Nice classroom exercise --- let's hope that's where it stays.

The reality is that a modern society is full of people with conflicting agendas. The comprimises and workarounds they generate are often weird, kludgy, and inefficient. But that's preferrable to mandating that everybody adhere to some "logical" theory, be it Libertarianism, Marxism, or whatever.

Speaking from experience...

I work for a large US Naval organization and we've had a large VoIP solution in place for over a year (I believe it's the largest commercial VoIP rollout through Cisco so far...ever). The phones are great, they offer plenty of cool features that make them "really cool" and they are cheap to run (save the bandwidth costs). They are eseentially little routers - they use Cat6 twisted pair and can even run XML scripts. It's also nice to have your voice mail delivered to your e-mailbox instead of an answering machine.

My question is, with the low service reliability of broadband (mine needs a reboot once a week or two and it goes down every few months for a few hours), what will you do when your phone lines go out for 4 hours on a Sunday for a small "service problem?"

My take: it's too early for residential VoIP. Adam

oh poo...

Drawbacks? For arcane technical reasons, you can't call 911

Crap! At last I thought I'd have a way to call 911 for free...

I guess 911 would have trouble tracing a call to 66.96.178.192...

Speak Feely works too!

Have you seen this? Speak Freely [speakfreely.org]

You can even encrypt the voip using various encryption algorithms so all your other geeky friends around the planet can talk for free.

QoS & Reliability.

My AT&T broadband cable modem connection is spotty at best. I've had weeks of downtime, their level of customer service is horrible. They call me every now and again and try and sell me their voice over cable service. I wouldn't use it if they paid me. There's no way I'd use this. After all the problems I've had between the cable modem and the digital cable, I went with DirecTV, and even switched my long distance carrier. I just wish I had an affordable broadband alternative (too far down the loop for dsl). Like hell I would ever trust my phone service to AT&T broadband.

That issue aside, has anyone checked out how this works for data connections? Even if you have high speed net, DirecTV + Tivo still needs pots.

Upstream Cap

With the ever shrinking bandwidth limits being opposed on broadband customers, (can you believe that 2 years ago they used to advertise broadband service as being able to stream full screen movies?) it wont be long before we are capped at around 128K both directions -- I wonder how good this would work in that situation....

Great until...

From the Time article:

For arcane technical reasons, you can't call 911.

Yeah. That's just GREAT. In your last moments, as you're lying on the floor, convulsing in the midst of cardiac arrest, do yourself a favor and think: "At least I didn't pay too much for real phone service."

The problem with VoIP

I think VoIP is great techonology, but I have a hard time replacing a technology that has been working for 100 years.

For instance, usually your phone still works when your power goes out. Not with Voice Over IP, because your DSL router/bridge is dead. I guess you could get a UPS, but then we start adding additional costs to this technology that is supposed to save us money.

The Cisco VoIP solution is also very popular and has some nice features, but be advised that the core of it, CallManager, runs ONLY on Windows 2000. From what my VoIP consultant friend has told me, it's still quite buggy. And no surprise, patching it or making major changes involves rebooting... and your calls disconnected. I think there is redundancy but whether it works correctly is anyone's guess... since it is Win2K, my guess is no.

The fundamental problem is: no one minds too much if a computer network is down. These things happen and people are used to it. But if the PHONE is out everyone from Grandpa to Little Susie is going to be complaining!

Carl

FINALLY

Now I can call all those long-distance BBS's to download my warez without racking up my phone bill!

I've been waiting for this since 1992!!

Answers to some questions...

So, this is my field of expertise... To answer some questions/comments...

1. Why?
-- Cost and features. It costs the same amount for the phone company to run 4 or 8 lines to your house as it does 1. Features like 3WC, call waiting, etc... don't require special equipment.

-- You don't have to have seperate phone and data networks (more important in businesses, where they actually own/lease phone equipment.)

2. Latency
Latency on a phone call is generally noticable above 120ms or so (1/8th of a second). VoIP calls typically split audio into 10ms (or smaller) packets, which have maybe a 30ms buffer. Add some propagation delay and you're still well under 120ms.

3. Gateways
Yes! Equipment providers have gateways to translate between packet and traditional TDM networks. All different sizes, including home gateways that have a packet interface on one end and plug into your home phone network on the other.

4. PPP over VoIP
Ick. It *can* be done, but generally isn't a good idea. Wastes bandwidth. (You could then run VoIP over PPP over VoIP again...) For 99% of the cases, you're just going to data over the base IP network.

5. traditional Telcos response
Most major telcos have slowed their growth in TDM equipment in favor of VoIP/VoATM equipment. (Sprint just announced a > $1B deal for this equipment recently.) Fact is that telephone switches are expensive and naturally low bandwidth. Growth is in high bandwidth services, so moving to a data network makes a lot more sense.

6 Why no 911?
That's just a problem with this particular implementation, not of VoIP in general. For even more arcane reasons, 911 uses a specific type of digital trunk and requires a special gateway to talk to that trunk. There are ways around it.

7 What about spotty cable modem service?
That's a problem. Broadband needs to be something that you don't think about before you'd hook your phone line up to it. It's coming, but isn't there yet for a lot of people.

been there, done that, burned the t-shirt

I've been using VoIP for quite a few months now. I have a hardware IP phone plugged right into my hub, and the connection goes through my firewall (over an IPSEC VPN) back to the central office, which is 800 miles away. I can just pick it up and dial a three digit extension to speak with anyone in the office. It works very well -- under ideal circumstances. Those momentary little pockets of packet loss that cause you to die in CounterStrike make the conversation sou..nd li..ke.. so..th...ng..swe. oke...n.. It's not bad for talking to the folks in the office, but not a good thing if you have to deal directly with customers. The quality has gone to heck since cox.net took over. I want my @Home back. :(

If you're not doing QoS (which isn't very likely on residential broadband), then you'll need to terminate (or at least pause) all your high-bandwidth activity while you use the phone.

In an unrelated topic, I ran nmap against my phone (what an odd concept!) and found a telnet daemon running on it. Has anybody hacked this puppy? It's a Polycom SoundPoint IP 400.

Multiple Phones?

My biggest problem with replacing the land line phone with a cell phone or VoIP is that each phone unit is expensive and, in the case of cellular, small. I like to have a permanent phone in many rooms with one cordless that I can roam with. And the cordless is never where it's supposed to be when the phone rings! So can I use all of my regular phones with this?

From the article: Hook your cable modem or DSL line up to one end of the box, plug any ordinary phone into the other end, and you're ready to go.

Can I then plug the "box" into my existing phone network and enable all the phones that I currently have in the house? I think that might sell me right there. I'd be really interested if someone has found a way around the expensive cell phone problem also.

Limited rollout to big cities

It appears that thie areacodes they support is fairly slim. Unless you really WANT to have NYC number. Hey mabye the scammers will love this, only takes CC and you can project a local phone number anywhere on their network.

New York - 212 - 516 - 631 - 646 - 718 - 914 - 917
New Jersey - 201 - 732 - 908 - 973
California - 408 - 415 - 510 - 650 - 707 - 831 - 925

So if you don't live in those areas it's useless.

Doggone it!

Now they're disguising ads as articles!

But you still need broadband

If you already have broadband, then $20 or $40 per month doesn't sound too bad for phone service. But I don't already have it. So let's see, what would this really cost me?

From here [adelphia.com]:

Power Link service plans* start as low as $34.50/month for customers who own a DOCSIS compliant, Adelphia approved cable modem. For customers who prefer to have Adelphia provide the modem, service plans start as low as $42.95/month. All service plans include up to 4 email accounts and 10 Mb of personal web space.

Hmm, that's not too bad. But then add the $25 setup fee and the $20/month minimum for the phone, and I'm up to $62.95/month. Amortize the installation over the first year and make it $65. Suddenly sounding not-so-good. Oh, and can I even use it? From here [adelphia.com]:

===
1)Generally Prohibited Conduct.

(a) You agree not to use the Service or any equipment or software provided by Adelphia:

...

(iv) so as to improperly interfere with, inhibit, degrade or restrict the use and enjoyment of the Service by others or Adelphias ability to deliver the Service to users and to monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes and/or other aspects of network servicing, including, without limitation, by:
(A) excessive use of bandwidth (e.g. exceeding 2.5GB of traffic in a given month);
(B) sending excessive data transfers;
...
(H) failing to comply with any bandwidth, data storage or other use limitations imposed on your use of the Service

(v) to run a server of any type in connection with the Service, nor may you provide network or host services to others via the Service. Prohibited uses include, without limitation, running servers for PPP, FTP, HTTP, DNS, POP, SMTP, NNTP, PROXY, DHCP, IRC, TELNET, TFTP, SNMP and multi-user interactive forums, or remapping of ports for the purpose of operating a server on the network.

...
5) "Camping on the system". When you are not actively using the Service for any duration of at least fifteen minutes or more, you agree to disconnect it so that other active users will not encounter difficulty logging on. Adelphia does utilize detection programs to ensure that our customers are not keeping the connection open for prolonged periods when not in active use. In the event that such detection programs discover an open connection with no activity for thirty minutes, the connection will be automatically shut down. Active use is user-directed utilization of the connection for activities such as web browsing, e-mail, chat and file transfer. You must be physically at your computer to engage in active use. Use of automated programs to keep your connection open without your active involvement is prohibited. In the event of active involvement for twelve continuous hours, your connection will be automatically shut off.
===

So when they say No getting booted off [adelphia.com] and You get flat-rate unlimited Internet access [adelphia.com] they don't really mean it. This service would be totally unusable for a phone.

Bad "human logic" loop in the Cisco adapter docs

In Cisco's document:
[cisco.com]
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/ vo ice/ata/ata186/ata186ug/186ugch3.htm

Unplugging the device while the function button is flashing could permanantly damage the device

If the device is configured to find a DHCP server when there isn't one, the function putton will blink forever

I can see my mom with an endlessly blinking IP phone guarding it with a bat in case any tries to unplug it...