That’s it, basically. Is it worth it?
Well, like any new technology, I don’t want to be first in the neighborhood to have it. VoIP is coming though, all the major players have big investments in it.
The major concern I have heard is quality of service (QOS). Voice traffic over a network is quite different than data traffic. Data traffic can be “bursty” and we don’t mind, we just get a flicker on our screen or have to wait a bit longer for our download. But by its nature, voice traffic has to be measured, bursty voice is unacceptable, and probably in most cases, unintelligible. They have come a long way in “smoothing out” voice transmission over the Internet, but it’s still not perfect. (For that matter, cell phone voice isn’t perfect yet either.)
Then there’s the E911 problem. It’s pretty much the same problem with cell phones, they are mobile so you don’t really know where the caller is, unless you use GPS.
There are other problems with VoIP too, I’m sure you can Google a few websites for all the gory details. One last thing is regulation. The FBI wants to be able to “tap” any conversation, so far this is a big sticky point. Also, of course people want to make money on this service, and the government wants their fair share too, they haven’t quite figured out how to price and regulate VoIP traffic, not yet anyway.
I’ve tried it from the UK to a colleague in Toronto; we both loaded the freebie skype voip application (google it, you’ll find it easy enough), and bingo, we were away. I used my laptop’s internal mic and speakers and I think Peter used a soundcard with external speakers and a cheapo mic. We talked for about 40 minutes, with one 3 second dropout. Pretty impressive considering that once you’ve invested in a semi-reasonable broadband connection, your long-distance and international calls are essentially free. You can set up lists of friends etc, click on call, and they get an instant notification that you’re ‘ringing’; they accept, you’re talking. It’s really not hard to try out.
Out of curiousity, a friend and I tried both MSN and Yahoo’s Messenger services to see how voice conversations worked. Pretty good IIRC. We got the video thing going as well, and that was good as well. On the up side it was free, but of course it is not as convenient, most of the time, as just making a phone call. I don’t know nada about telephone VOIP OTOH.
I assume you mean the variety discussed by the previous posters here. But if you’re looking into buying a VoIP phone system for a business-type setting, post back and say so… my company installed one almost two years ago.
The company I work for recently started installing the Vocera VoIP solution in healthcare environments. This is a “closed” system that integrates with an existing WLAN and PBX. VERY “Star Trek” and VERY cool…you wear a 2"x1.4" 3oz. badge with a “push-to-talk” button on it. You tap the button, and everything is voice-recognition from there. You can literally ask the Vocera system to page a particular person, or a department, or initiate a 3-way conference call. Pretty darned impressive. Of course, this is a closed system running on dedicated IP infrastructure, but it’s still cool.
This is one of the biggest VoIP providers in the US:
I was thinking about VoIP telephone systems (but thanks for the comments about the other options). Basically, I was doodling around, and realised that British Telecom are offering VoIP which works out cheaper than their standard telephone product. Now obvioulsy it’s not cheaper if you’re on ADSL over a BT line, but I guess they’re targeting people who now have everything with a cable supplier. And I know BT can always get away with being at the top end of the price range for any product, due to their huge public recognition factor. I was just wanting to know all the facts - is it as reliable and generally functional as a standard landline, etc…so when I can afford to move to somewhere worth living in, and where cable is available, I can look to go down that route.
IMHO, right now, there are probably too many quirks in the system to set up a VoIP phone for your everyday use. But, if you call a handful of people long distance frequently, it would probably be cost effective for you, and them, to use VoIP for those calls.
VoIP is becoming a fairly common thing in business. I would imagine Nortel has probably sold ten thousand full VoIP systems like Succession.
For home use, don’t bother yet.
Have had Vonage for the last year or so… Was happy enough with it that I finally got rid of my regular phone with Pacific Bell…
Most people can’t tell it’s not a regular line, and all my calls in North America are free, and it’s 2 or 3 cents a minute to London, Paris or other large cities in Europe…
Only time it’s a problem is when I’m doing too many things on the computer at the same time… People start sounding “choppy”…
Can’t recommend it enough…
I hear Vonage IS very good. Although I’m not sure other providers have all their ducks in a row.
Another Vonage user checking in. I’ve only had it a week, but it’s been great. Setup was a breeze - I had it up and running ten minutes after the box arrived. The sound quality is indistinguishible from a normal phone (I’ve got it hooked up to a 2.4 GHz cordless), and I called my sister in London tonight for 3 cents/minute.
I signed up for the el-cheapo $15/month plan. I got referred by a friend which got me a $40 credit - so effectively two months and change of the service will be free. After that, I’ll be saving over $270/year by using VoIP instead of a regular landline. I’m a believer so far!
I just started up with Vonage yesterday (11/29) and so far the service has been a bit choppy.
My very first call died. It did take a while to reach a tech support guy, but I was calling late at night. By then the problem seemed to have healed itself.
But my adaptor seems to be acting up so I have to run a diagnostic on it tonight when I get home.
I do worry about the 911 function however. I’ve told friends of mine not to use the VoIP phone to call 911 if the situation warrants. (Such as me falling unconscious, I figure in other emergencies, I can figure it out.)
We use both Vonage and Skype at work.
Vonage is rubbish - dropped calls, dropped packets, inaudible conversation, long delays.
Skype, however, is superb. About a 90% success rate, very clear sound, only a slight delay, and an IM client into the bargain. And it’s free!
I have Vonage since 4 months. The first 2 months were hard, the phone dropped out once a day, I always had to reboot the box. I complained to Vonage, and they must have done something - online ever since.
My setup is two PCs and the phone behind a router on a cable modem. When I am videoconferencing on one of the PCs, the phone connection suffers. Other than that, I love the bill (low, low). Also love the fact that I can listen to voicemails from my office via their website.
As for the 911, I signed up for their 911 location plan thingy (free), since I do not plan to move the phone around, that should be good enough.
Not sure about UK providers. You might be able to sign up with Vonage from there but that will give you a U.S. phone number
Dorfl
We’ve got Vonage, but we’re not too crazy about it. We asked them in June to transfer our number, and it still hasn’t been done. The few times I’ve used it (with the temporary number), it doesn’t sound that great.
Glad I saw this thread, I’ve been meaning to cancel our service.
Yep, IP phone lines shipped for business systems in the industry will meet and supass the number of traditional digital phone lines sometime next year, in fact.
The major advantages are for businesses who have to administer both voice & data network infrastrucutre: IP allows you to do both on the same network, so investments are much easier to justifiy. Plus, IP telephony allows you to do things in multi-site, multi-building companies that are truly impressive in traditional business telephony terms. In general, the bigger the company, the more they can benefit from IP telephony.
In addition to the savings in equiment, cost of ownership, and maintenance simplification, IP telephony can allow for some really “cool” applications: drag & drop dialing from your PC, having your own “office phone” ring on your PC in a hotel room on a trip, web push to your phone screen, streaming video to your phone screen, incoming calls automatically following you from your desk to your cell, hotel, home phones, etc.etc.
Most of the proverbial bugs have been worked out in the “corporate” environment right now. QOS is well understood, and most Enterprise VoIP systems now sound just as good as tradditional sets. In fact, you can expect to see “Hi-Fi stereo” like audio quality available on high end phones within a year or so. 911 is understood and in the process of being addressed.
Where this breaks down is for the individual home owner in North America *. The cost of fiber-borne bandwidth having plummetted in the recent boom, where everybody was putting in fiber almost faster than they could unwind it off the drum, means that plain phone long distance costs are now negligible. This has completly taken the wind out of demand for VoIP at home. When you add the fact that to have decent QOS, you need a network that is QOS aware end-to-end, and with sufficient capacity engineered into it, which is virtually imposible on the public Internet, where you don’t own the network infrastructure from end to end, you get the fact that you will only see VoIP appear as “alternate” local phone service from cable providers, who will be carefull not to mention that their offering is IP based, because of all the outdated but still prevalent notions of poor audio, and in techy early adopters, who think it’ s cool to talk over the 'net.
*In the rest of the world, where phone rates are kept high by goverment owned phone companies, PTTs and monopolies, VoIP is making a big, but not very publicised, dent. So are cheap wireless phones. This is especially true in countries with a big expat population, but with relatively poor traditional infrastructures, like India and the Philipines.
Thanks for the replies, everyone…
Looks like I’m stuck with my regular phoneline contract for another five months, anyway, so there’s no huge change on the way after all. And vonage.co.uk is still ‘coming soon’. I’m going to try out Skype, though - even if it proves crap, I’ll only be wasting the €10 minimum purchase which is only about 10 minutes to Bermuda through British Telecom.
We have had VoIP for about six months and while I’m very happy with the price I’m very dissapointed by the performance. Our phone convos get choppy and broken fairly often. The sound quality is noticeably worse than a land line, but then again, the cost is very low. We pay $50/mo for unlimited phone service and DSL.
For Ms Doubt and I, it is definitely worth it. Many of our friends are paying $150/mo+ between phone, cell phone, long distance and broadband internet. I can deal with the awful sound quality and find better uses for that extra $100/mo. My feeling is, since half the time we talk from home the other party is talking on a cellphone anyway, the conversation is gonna sound crappy either way we might as well save the dough.