February 09, 2004
Covad to Offer VoIP Service

Covad Announces Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Deployment Plans

Just after commenting that I haven't been motivated enough to try out a VoIP service provider as a wireline home phone option, I learn that my DSL provider, Covad, plans to roll out VoIP service for businesses and consumers later this year. Since this service probably won't be available to me until around the fourth quarter of this year, I've got plenty of time to look around.

Posted by Robert at 06:40 PM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
VoIP Home Phone Line

Internet phone service blossoms / But it still may not be ready for the masses

This article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides a nice overview of some of the trade-offs involved with using an IP telephony provider like Vonage or 8x8 instead of a traditional voice service provider, like SBC. Though I fit the category of early adopter technophile, I don't make enough phone calls from home to justify making the change based on practical purposes. While it would be a fun experiment, I have no shortage of items on my To Do list of time-consuming geekery. For now, getting a software-based SIP phone working on Linux is a higher priority.

Posted by Robert at 06:24 PM | link | comments (2) | trackback (0)
January 26, 2004
Zultys LIPZ4 IP Soft Phone for Linux Free Linux Soft Phone Released :: Voxilla.com :: A user's guide to the VoIP revolution

When I first read at work about the free Zultys IP Soft phone for Linux (in Internet Telephony?), I decided I needed to check it out. Then when I saw another mention of it in Voxilla's RSS feed while I was sitting at my Linux box tonight, I decided it was time to give it a try. If I can get a SIP-based soft phone running on Linux, I will be a lot less interested in trying to figure out how to get Skype running on Linux.

After filling out a very brief identification form, I downloaded the rpm file for their softphone. They currently claim to support RedHat 7.1, RedHat 8.0, and RedHat 9.0.

Files were installed to /usr/local/zultys, with a symbolic link in /usr/local/bin/softphone pointing to /usr/local/zultys/softphone. When I tried to start it from the command line with "softphone", though, all I got was a segmentation fault. Runing it as root gave the same results.

$ starting...
/usr/local/bin/softphone: line 44: 17685 Segmentation fault
    ./KylixPhone 2>/dev/null

Interesting to see that they used Borland's Kylix development tool to build it.

Although I'm pleased that they have a LIPZ4 discussion board there aren't many posts there, and no one else was reporting the same problem. I'll bang my head against it for a while longer before seeking help there, to make sure I haven't missed something obvious.

Posted by Robert at 12:18 AM | link | comments (0) | trackback (0)
January 02, 2004
Voxilla's Top Ten Predictions for VoIP VoIP in '04 :: Voxilla.com :: A user's guide to the VoIP revolution

The staff over at Voxilla have put together a compelling set of predictions for big VoIP-related happenings in 2004. Here are a couple I found most interesting.

2. Many new VoIP enabled routers hit the market.

I think this will be a huge boon to Skype's competitors. If more routers came with out-of-the-box configurations for VoIP, that would take away Skype's only serious advantage.

9. Broadband service providers up their uplink speeds.

I can only hope. I would gladly pay more to get a boost to my average 500 kbps download speed, but my broadband provider, Earthlink (via Covad), has a big gap in price between the plan I have and the cheapest SOHO plan. Even worse, when I check the Earthlink site to see if I can upgrade to that plan, it tells me that they offer only dial-up access to my address. Never mind the fact that they have provided me with DSL service for years. As much as I dislike SBC, their prices look pretty good and their wide variety of offers blow Earthlink away.

10. FCC steps in on regulation.

Maybe I will be proven to be a fool, but I'm not quite as worried about this as most people. Regulation isn't all bad. If one of my neighbors develops a new kind of death ray device that doesn't use the old fashioned death rays that the Regional Death Ray Operating Companies have been relying on for years, I'm going to want to see some regulation imposed. Just don't go crazy on me and ban all kinds of Death Ray research and development or make it where only the big guys can compete.

Update 1/13/04: These quotes from FCC Chairman Michael Powell match up well with my feelings on the level of VoIP regulation that is needed. My concern over regulation is lesser than others primarily because I think heavy regulation is very unlikely. I agree that heavy regulation would be an extremely bad thing.

In the comments section, someone added:

11. VoIP Spam

This is so sad, but so true. As other commenters also point out, super cheap international calling rates will open us up to unregulated telemarketing calls from locations where English-speaking labor is cheap. Like North Dakota. Wait, they're still regulated. Okay, then, India, Jamaica, and the Philippines. The Do-Not-Call list. Hmmm, maybe that regulation thing isn't so bad in every case. The most important feature you're going to need on your VoIP phone is an effective form of Caller ID.

Posted by Robert at 10:05 PM | link | comments (2) | trackback (0)
October 16, 2003
Voxilla

Voxilla is a great source for info on new developments related to VoIP, SIP, and other relatively new communication related technologies. Jeff Pulver from Free World Dialup and Ravi Sakaria, CEO of VoicePulse, even have their own forums where they answer questions.

One of the areas generating controversy on the website involves the Skype hype. I fall into the category of people who found Skype really interesting at first, but then was a little less amazed by it when I realized how similar it was to other IP phone software that had preceded it. Nonetheless, it may be those few differences that allow Skype to grab a big market share quickly.

I was astonished when I first read on the Skype site about how quickly they developed Skype. The sound quality was just too good to have come out so quickly from a company with no experience in developing high performing codecs for VoIP. Well, it turns out they didn't write the codecs. That work appears to have been done by Global IP Sound. However, Skype did do a great job in using peer-to-peer technologies to simplify the use of VoIP.

I'm still impressed by Skype, but it's far more evolutionary than revolutionary. Definitely, the best thing about it is that it has helped to really raise the visibility of VoIP in the media, which can only help all the companies developing VoIP software and hardware.

Posted by Robert at 10:11 PM | link | comments (1) | trackback (1)
September 18, 2003
Gone Skyping

I got to try out Skype tonight on a random call with someone in Vermont. I was definitely impressed with the sound quality of the call. She said that either she or a friend had used Skype to talk to someone in Israel, and the sound quality was pretty good for that call, too.

I was using my Plantronics headset, which worked pretty well. I forgot to ask whether she was using a headset or a speaker and microphones. Obviously, this will not qualify as a rigorous assessment of the Skype P2P Telephony and Chat services.

The Good

  • No echo
  • Minimal latency (i.e., only a small hint of the "talking to an astronaut" feeling)
  • It just worked - no router changes, no firewall changes
  • Simple, easy to use UI
  • Nice integration between the chat interface and the voice interface

The Bad

  • High frequencies were greatly diminished (but the low frequencies were okay, so it wasn't tinny)
  • Not really full duplex; kind of like a good, but not great, quality speakerphone
  • Very limited feature set

The limited feature set could arguably be called a good thing, at least for now. I haven't even bothered to look for online help within the app. Everything I wanted to do was completely obvious. Skype, a.k.a, Skyper Limited, plans to add a lot more features like conferencing and they plan to integrate with the PSTN, SIP servers, and other chat services, like ICQ and AIM. It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off without overcomplicating the interface and the options dialog, which so far is mostly a bunch of checkboxes. The current set of options are also really more like preferences than configuration.

The first call I was received was from Janus Friis. Either this was the Skype co-founder, Janus Friis, or someone else who took his name as a username. I missed him this morning by an hour. Assuming it was really the co-founder, my guess is that he's randomly calling people during the Skype beta period who have just signed up for Skype. That would be a smart thing, since there aren't a huge number of people using it just yet. There are about 16,000 users online right now. It would have been cool to get a quick call so I could verify everything was working.

Posted by Robert at 10:56 PM | link | comments (1) | trackback (0)
September 17, 2003
Skype

The people behind Kazaa and Joltid have taken their P2P expertise to the telephony world with Skype, a P2P telephony application.

One of the biggest problems with IP telephony for home users is that most endpoint protocols, e.g. H.323 and SIP, require that you open ports in your firewall, assuming the home user is smart enough to be using a firewall. NAT is yet another problem for the traditional approaches. I tried to set up the Pingtel instant expressa SIP based softphone about a year ago to use with TellMe Studio, but gave up after an hour or so of trying because of all the hassles involved in reconfiguring my router. Skype gets around the firewall in the same way P2P programs do; they tunnel over port 80.

Conversations are encrypted via 256-bit AES and the Skype FAQ claims that 3-16 kbytes per second of bandwidth are used during a call. For comparison, the bandwidth for a regular PSTN call is about 8 kbytes per second. A good IP telephony system, however, can compress the signal to about 1 kbyte per second. Encryption via IPSec would double the bandwidth needed, but there are better solutions. Anyway, the bandwidth needed for Skype calls is a little high, relatively speaking. We'll have to see how that affects their system, especially for people on shared or lower bandwidth connections.

Of course, bandwidth is not really a problem for individuals making an IP phone call over a non-shared broadband connection. The big problem tends to be latency induced by slow networks or bursty network traffic and errors that require digitized voice packets to be resent. Also, the echoes due to the latency have a tendency to make IP calls sometimes sound like you are listening to someone talking through a long, narrow pipe. You need to write some pretty good code to keep the jitter buffer small enough so that a caller doesn't feel like he is on a phone call with an astronaut somewhere near Mars. With a good quality IP phone switch on a well engineered network, though, an IP call can be indistinguishable from a PSTN call.

I've now installed Skype and am looking for someone else to try it out with. I have a pretty good quality headset (Plantronics DSP 500), so I'm hoping the sound quality will be reasonable. Either Skype me at username wombatnation, or send me an email to set up a session. I'm obviously not always sitting at my PC, and even when I am home and using la machina, I usually have it booted into Linux. Unfortunately, Skype is Windows only for now.

Posted by Robert at 12:50 AM | link | comments (3) | trackback (0)
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