·:[ Stream of Consciousness… ]:·
• • • • •

For the astute amoung, yes there is a ‘*’ in that statement. It allows any Gizmo Project member to call any other Gizmo Project member for free. There is nothing new about this, they have this (and I’m a user) forever. The new bit is that they allow you to call other members on any number be it PSTN, Cell, SIP or Gizmo. This is HUGE!

It’s a further sign of the asymptotic decline in per-minute pricing of phone service. Decreasing costs of bandwidth and switching fabric are placing downward pressure on the per-minute model. It’s clear that the market is moving to a flat-rate, all you can eat, model for telephone service.

If I were in a telcom manager I’d be actively investigating commercial VoIP based options. I do continue to harbor concerns about voice quality when calls are carried over a public network (internet) but for intranetwork calls, such as those between branch offices, there is no reason not to leverage existing infrastructure. The network impacts are well understood and manageable and the long term cost savings real.

As I begin planning for an office buildout and move for my day job I can promise you that VoIP will play a prominent role.

Everyone is familiar with the way telephone calls sound.  That particular ’sound’ is created by significantly limiting the range of frequencies that are carried through the phone network.  A full range of sound, like you might hear from a CD, is approx. 20hz to 20khz.  It’s very likely that the sound system that you are listening to that CD through is not capable of reproducing that entire range, but that’s Ok since only young children can hear it anyway.

Almost every phone call you’ve ever heard narrowed that 20khz range down to only 8khz, less than 1/2 what we normally hear.  The brainiacs over at the open source PBX project FreeSWITCH have created a new codec that doubles that range to 16khz.  The result is a much more natual sounding voice.

FreeSWITCH.org :: Open Source Telephony Project

Well the big Skype news this week is that a group of Chinese engineers have managed to reverse engineer the protocol used by Skype’s VoIP client. This item has been extensively covered in the last few days so I won’t bother to flog that horse further. But I will mention a few things that haven’t been overly flogged.

I doesn’t take a great leap of logic to infer that the Chinese government was behind this effort. Skype is well known for it’s ability to traverse firewalls and the Chinese are well known for their ‘Great Firewall‘ so it was inevitable that they would try to crack the code. Skype allowed those behind the Great Firewall to contact the outside World and get access to all that pesky Truth that the government there is so desperately trying to protect them from. Now that they know how it works they can shore up the Great Firewall to block it.

[sigh] (more…)

Now these are some cool handsets.  I prefer the Bluetooth PIP*PHONE myself; I haven’t decided if I prefer the black or the yellow.

Hulger

Ok, so it’s just on a few ISPs in the UK, but with the BBC behind it might, and it’s a might big ‘might’, get some traction.  Of course, one must bear in mind that this is the same network that brought us Benny Hill.  Let’s hope that this project doesn’t involve chasing a bald octogenarian around and patting him on the head.

The Jeff Pulver Blog: Multicast Finally is Happening! (At least in the UK):

This site has a ton of great hints/tips/projects utilziing the Asterisk open-source VoIP PBX project.

I found the series on using your bluetooth headset/handset as a ‘presence’ detector especially intersting.  It explains how to use this detector to route your calls automatically based on your presence or absence.  Trécool.

Nerd Vittles » 50 Great Halftime Projects Using Your Free Asterisk@Home PBX

Pamela is a ‘virtual assistant’ for Skype.  There is a basic freeware version that provides quite a few usefull features, including auto answer, voice mail (Hurray!) and auto-reply to chat requests.  I’m downloading it as I type this post; more later.

Pamela feature comparison | Free voice mail software and more for Skype by Pamela-Systems

So imagine if turnpikes charged when you got on the road, and then again when you got off. This is exactly what some of the telcos are trying to do with internet access. They see that internet access is a commodity and decreasing revenue from the cash-cow that is circuit based voice service and are looking for new sources of revenue. The increasing usage of VoIP is directly eroding their circuit based voice service income and it’s only going to get worse as Vonage/Skype/FWD/Gizmo/PhoneGnome reach into the main stream.

Jeff Pulver, who has been a thought and action leader in VoIP for years, writes at some length about it.

The Journal story warns of a looming battle between Internet companies, who create the valuable things we do with the Internet, and the phone companies who want to control access to it. The phone companies, who continually seek new ways to apply telephone access charges to Internet communications, apparently now want to take the next step by creating and applying access charges to all forms of Internet traffic (not just voice anymore).

This idea is BAD, BAD, BAD! There already exists ‘tiers’ of internet access; you can buy your bandwidth from a backbone provider, or from someone that connects to a backbone provider, or from someone who connects to someone that connects to a backbone provider or.. you get the idea. The closer you get to the backbone providers, and, in turn, better throughput to your customers, the higher the cost of bandwidth. In essence, the ‘fast lane’ for commercial traffic already exists.

There is no logic behind this idea, only greed.

The Jeff Pulver Blog: My reaction to WSJ’s “Phone Companies Set Off A Battle Over Internet Fees”

Now this I get big time. This project has created a platform upon which folks can build their own VoIP clients into all sorts of things; stand-alone apps, browser extensions, dedicated HW devices, etc and it’s cross-platform and CPU. Did I mention it was open source?

Sweet.

home - openzoep.org

Imagine what would happen if you took email (asyncronous delivery & universal access), IM buddy lists (presence indicators & ‘mobs’ of interest) and voice mail (”Watson! Come here, I need you!”) and mashed them together; this is YackPack.

I think it’s an intriguing idea but I’m struggling to grasp how folks will react to yet another new communication channel in their lives. No one is ready to dump email or their phone or their IM client (those that use one anyway) in favor of this approach for quite some time. And then, only if everyone else in their ‘mob’ does the same thing.

I’m really not sure how to categorize this so for now it’s going to be ‘uncategorized’.

YackPack Home