Not enough of a telephone services maven to know what’s hype and what’s not in this press release. Seems pretty revolutionary. Is this really the leading edge of a sea change in how voice services will be delivered in the US?
AT&T Ushers in New Era in Communication With Launch of AT&T CallVantage Service
I think Vonage (among others) have been doing this for a couple years now. It is big news though, that one of the “biggies” is finally coming onboard. I believe Verizon is rolling out a similar service later this year.
Our fairly massive corporate network has been VOIP for a while now. It is good to see that a major telco is getting in on the act, though I would be curious if they are pushing IPV.6 as well, or are going to try to migrate all those users using the ever-shrinking pool of IPV.4 addresses.
That is assuming, of course, that the ATT system will be using a similiar setup to ours, where the phones are all IP’d. Shrug
This is definitely “bleeding edge” stuff. It kind of reminds me when X.25 was first being introduced as THE networking architecture of the future. The problem was, not all of the standards were cast in stone yet, so Bell Labs defines BX.25, which became the de facto standard. I believe VoIP is going to be huge, no doubt. They still have many issues to address though.
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~jain/cis788-99/ftp/voip_products/
I read the article in the Wall Street Journal. My question is, who is this really targeted to? I don’t make enough phone calls to justify $40 a month. Heck, I barely make enough phone calls using my cell phone to justify $40 a month and when I leave college there’s a good chance I won’t even bother getting a land-line. Now, if they were offering this with broadband for $40 a month, I’d be all over it or even if it was an add-on for $10 or so. But there is no way I’d get it for $40 a month plus a seperate broadband cost.
Apparently it’s targeting people who pay $50/month for unlimited local and long distance, which is another plan ATT has. The VOIP undercuts that by $10.
Since I wasn’t even aware this existed, and I’m sure most people don’t have it, I’m not certain this is that newsworthy.
My knowledge of this stuff is 4 years old, which in this industry, is light years away. Anyway, I found VoIP to be kinda suspect. There were definite lags, and it wasn’t all that great a service. The company I had worked for was a start-up and given their spend-free attitude, they didn’t put too much thought into this service (they had a more “solid” business plan of networking, web services, app services, etc. – then they got bought out). Anyway, it makes a lot of sense for ATT to get into this b/c they pretty much own all the lines (at least in the US) anyway. I’m curious to see what it can do now. Is this where IT makes it’s comeback? Mind you, my knowledge is second hand at best, as I was mostly concerned with the legal side as opposed to the business side (some exposure) or technical side (almost no exposure). However, given the state of technology currently (as I see it) it seems to me to be pretty cutting edge. As to the leading change of the way voice services are offered, I still think it’s pretty far off. The arcitle says that 1 out of 5 suscribe to a broadband connection. That’s not by choice. People in my area have been clamoring for access to a cable modem and either there’s one provider in the area providing crappy service (I’m talking about you, Comcast), or there is no service at all because nobody bothered to dig lines, or it’s just too costly too dig.
The telco i work for as a broadband engineer has been trialing this stuff for about a year now. Its ok but still has a lot of issues to come to terms with. We do actually move voice around on a gigabit ethernet backbone, as apposed to atm, which has worked ok. The backbone stuff has been reasonable, but the quality has been hard to keep consistant to the customers door. Suffers from lag quite badly at times. Much of this is leading toward integration of multimedia services through softswitches, replacing telephone exchanges. I cant see it working until IPv6 has been implemented, well on a large scale anyway. It works ok on private networks ive worked on using ip’d handsets. Thats mainly becuase its easier to control bandwidth, and standardisation across the network.
Yes and no.
It definitely represents a trend of the future. But who benefits is yet to be determined.
The timing of this is pretty interesting. The FCC just issued a ruling related to Pulver.com which clarified for the industry that end-to-end VoIP “calls” are not subject to government regulation. What hasn’t been decided clearly is whether hybrid calls will be regulated (as in this case, where it originates on VoIP, but then later interconnects to “plain old telephone service” (POTS).
When AT&T offers the service in this manner, they don’t own the “access line”, meaning that they can provide this service without having to pay the typical regulatory fees associated with local phone service. As this technology moves to other providers, and users begin to migrate en masse, the federal revenues (such as the Universal Service Fund) will begin to shrink. Among other places, those funds go to help schools and libraries afford Internet access. And this whole infrastructure is likely to feel the strain.
As for the price tag, don’t forget that the user must also pay for broadband access. Many local phone companies are already bundling DSL with unlimited local and long distance at price points which would be comparable to the AT&T offer plus standalone broadband access.
As for the feature list, while AT&T makes it sound earth shattering, most of those features have been available in one form or another for some time. Just not all pulled together in one service, and usually more expensive.
But VoIP has drawbacks. Some have pointed out the call quality. While the quality may be a bit less than POTS, it is significantly better than the old analog cell phones, so I don’t think that will be a big limiter for consumers.
In addition to quality, you have to consider availability. How often has your local phone service failed? How often is your broadband connection down? Get the point? And what about making calls during a power outage. POTS still works, but your home network doesn’t.
This is true. In the communications industry, this is like snaking out of a narrow trail and finding a wide open pasture. Imagination and creativity will drive innovation, and the barriers to entry are dropping significantly. It will be revolutionary. But it won’t happen overnight.
One “cool” thing is that your phone number is no longer tied to geography. You can make a call to VoIP user in the 212 area code and they could be anywhere. When you travel, you could take your phone (or adapter, if it isn’t a SIP phone), plug into a high speed network, and your calls will ring there. You can make calls back to your local calling area at no charge (even international, in this example). Simply put, it is very different.
IPv6 is not an issue. These devices work just fine behind NATs, and the IPv4 space will continue to work admirably.
There’s also the ALI (Automatic Location Identifier) problem with E911 calls. For normal E911 calls, you can call 911 and not say a word and they still know where you called from, your address is displayed on the dispatcher’s screen in real-time. I don’t believe they have figured out how to do this with VoIP yet, and like a previous poster says, you can call from multiple locations anyway. Hmm … come to think of it, how does this differ from cell phones (in an E911 sense)?
Actually, VoIP has been able to address E911, but they are not required (necessarily) to provide it. I would bet that AT&T’s service includes E911, and that is part of the reason the service availability is currently so limited. However, your service contract will have some fine print that basically says “if you take your phone out of your home, and use it to dial 911 from somewhere else, don’t expect it to work the way you think it should, and don’t even THINK of suing us”.
Another issue the VoIP providers have to deal with is CALEA (FCC mandated wiretapping capabilities).