Looks like the Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology is really taking off. Has anyone here used VoIP?
Apparently not 
Yep, have used it and set it up.
Works well for the most part*, the company I worked for used it in a few of their call centers. When I left I had deployed at least 750 phones and there were about 1,500+ cross-company, deployed for agents and most of corporate IT had them.
*Let’s just say there were a few bugs to work out… not to mention people resist change and it reflects in their learning curve.
If you don’t mind, can you answer a couple questions?
How was the QoS (Quality of Service)?
Any quirks or things different from “regular” phone use?
How about cost? Seems like VoIP would be VERY cheap, especially for overseas calls.
One of the callcenters we use as a partner has it and costs are considerably lower, quality of service is indistinguishable from the standard phone lines
Just one more note for any stock market speculators we may have:
I use a VoIP company called iconnecthere, and a USB handset I bought on Ebay for $10. It pretty much works, although the main problem is an annoying echo if the volume is set too high.
I pay 8.95 per month for a phone number and .03 per minute for long distance.
I work for an international wholesale telecom company. The bulk of our traffic is voip. We put a Cisco in the USA and a Cisco in, say Ghana. Both sides are connected to the internet. Point the originating traffic to the terminating ends IP address and it works great. Beats the cost of satellite by miles. Beats leasing T1’s or E1’s by even more. As long as you have enough bandwidth then the QoS is just as good as TDM.
I also use VIOP at home. I went with Vonage. For 25 a month I get my home number, caller ID, voicemail, call waiting, 911 service, call forwarding, 3 way calling and 500 minutes of long distance. Anything over my 500 minutes is .039 a minute. This all works over my cable modem. My old Bell South service was $50 a month for basic service, and my LD was another $20 a month. I am saving like mad now.
In this thread, koeeoaddi had mentioned a bad VoIP experience using the Packet 8 service:
FWIW, the company I work for has switched almost entirely to VoIP. It seems to work pretty well, but there’s a voice delay that seems to be about 1/4 second, and it’s really annoying. Every time I talk to someone else inside the company on the phone, we both end up talking over each other all the time as we each start a sentence before hearing the other person talking.
A new key technology to assist VoIP setups could be power over eithernet. A few companies are coming out with switches that do that now, it would make the phones a bit easier to distribute to wherever you need them, as they can be powered by their network cable.
-lv
There are a lot of different forms of VoIP. It’s actually been reasonably available for nearly 10 years, but no one “caught on” until recently. (I attend networking trade shows and they’ve been hyping it for a looong time.)
The Big Time Stuff, where a corporation moves it’s phone system to VoIP is here now and growing very fast. Only a PHB managed company is sticking with POTS. The FCC started hearings a week ago on how to regulate (i.e., tax) this. Next week they will hold hearings on putting the toothpaste back into the tube.
For ordinary folk, there are ways of doing it but it can be a bit quirky. One of the major problems is that the standards didn’t take into account that most people who would use it (broadbanders) would be behind routers/firewalls. Ugh.
I have used Yahoo Messenger for voice/video with knowledgable tech folk across country. Very interesting. Some lag, etc. But free.
People with relatives in far off lands are catching on a lot quicker. Free long distance calls across the globe!
The “dime a minute” rate is a factor of 100 too high. This will kill the long distance telecoms’ spreadsheets.
Note that it is just not voice, but the long anticipated videophone.
There is no reason this couldn’t have happened 5+ years ago. But it finally looks like it’s here.
Since the costs are low and there’s no big profit to be made, it will in fact not be a major moneymaker “killer app”. That’s going to be video (movies etc.).
Thanks for the tip. I got in at .30 first thing this morning. Almost 50% in a few hours. Only 5000 shares, though. Should have gone in large.
The best message board for VPER is on http://ragingbull.lycos.com
The hits just keep on coming for this company. Seems like every day they have a major news announcement.