VoIP - close but no cigar (yet) - PART 1

I've been dabbling on an off with computer based telephony since I got involved with my very own dot.com experience ViaFone. Yeah we were going to change the world with a telephone based app but unfortunately we were just way ahead of the times. Only one company from those days really made it in any way shape or form and that was TellMe that recently got scooped up by Microsoft for $800 million. I think they did pretty well, and of the technology at the time they stayed on target with pure voice technology, executed and weathered the storm.

Anyway my dot com ditched its voice centered plans when it realized that real telephone apps require expensive telecoms infrastructure, expensive hardware, expensive software, and expensive telecoms and telephony engineers. You have to understand that telephony is kind of like power technology - its a world unto itself full of regulations, restrictions and just pure arcana. Enter VoIP...

It stands to reason that if you have a 1,3,6, or more megabit data connection to your home that can stream DVD quality audio visual - or even HD now - then you could surely have a decent voice conversation over that data link. I mean just look at what the computer game biz can do with massively multiplayer realtime games - all that data going back and forth brining you split second messaging and data. A bit of voice should be easy.... Well you'd think that wouldn't you.

And yet it seems like it has taken forever for VoIP reality to arrive and really work - just like video phones that still don't exist after decades of promises except in a select few corporate conferencing facilities. The reality is that VoIP the most prevelant voice over internet systems in use by consumers today are actually completely separate from the telecoms based offerings. Just like with webcames for video its been a long, disparate (or desperate) and mostly proprietary road for voice chat.

There was an initial flurry of activity in the sector when DSL became easily accessible to consumers (and AOL's countdown clock started) and that featured a number of small companies with proprietary technology for voice chat all claiming they were superior in some way or the other. Unfortunately most systems just didn't have that many users, and certainly didn't talk to other voice chat systems. There was also the problem that few people actually had a microphone on their PC - it was always an add on for a desktop, and almost no laptops had it built in before Apple made that a standard item (it was an obvious and cheap addition but I'll thank them for showing the way).

Then the big text chat people like Yahoo figured they could add voice to their existing chat systems which had the advantage of large established user bases. The problem was that there were now even more people you might be able to talk to, but couldn't because you were on MSN and they were on Yahoo, or AOL or some other system.

Then a little while after the original Napster went tits up (pardon my English) the people from another P2P app KaZaA, went off and formed Skype which turned out to be yet another voice chat system that also did a bit of text chat. For whatever reason it gained a popular following and I heard about it early on, and even tried it pretty early on. As usual even with its own dedicated band of Skype-ers there was still the problem that I really didn't know more than one or two people who used it and by then it was almost always easier to just pick up the phone. Even when I did use it I seemed to have no end of problems with microphone noise and quality. I almost always had to end up picking up - the phone.

Then still later I started hearing about VoIP and a company called Vonage and another called Packet8, these guys could actually give you a real phone number and let you make a phone call over the Internet with it. The funny thing was you didn't even need a computer - just a box you plugged a regular phone into. In fact you couldn't even use a computer to make a call since there was no software solution. So where ever you went you had to drag you Vonage box, a power supply and plug a phone into it. But the funny thing was, it really seemed to work and pretty quickly I heard about several friends who'd bought Vonage.

Now the real problem was that if you wanted to use it at home you still needed a good internet connection which usually meant DSL back then and because naked DSL didn't exist then (it used to, then they got rid of it, then it came back recently...) you couldn't ditch your phone company connection even if you wanted. If you wanted to use Vonage on the road you'd still have to drag that box around and it just didn't work at internet cafes since you'd never have a ethernet jack to plug into (unless you also had a compatible bridge in your pocket). The finally issue for me was Vonage chose to behave just like a phone company, you could only buy their system if you chose a monthly plan with bundled minutes.

Now for a long time I've had a non-standard long distance carrier at home - they are pretty unique in that they have no monthly charges unless you use the service. That's what I want. The only charge I get from them is all those usury telecoms taxes that people seem to want to slap onto anything that might offer a semblance of free speech - you know "free, as in free-fiddy a minute" not "free, as in beer". I guess someone has to pay for all that phone tap technology. If we all decided to just ditch telephones and start passing post-it notes I'm sure they'd find a way to tax that too...

Anyway, I digress (again what else do you expect from the Long Dark Tech-Time?)

While I was first looking at Vonage and Packet8 I'd learned that there was away to use what was called a "soft phone" that used VoIP and understood this new SIP system that Vonage and others were using (but not Skype). A friend of mine said he'd been able to hack into his box and figure out the settings and subsequently make calls directly from his computer. Now that is what I'm talking about. Unfortunately it seemed like Vonage wasn't really happy with people doing that and it was at best flakey.

At the same time Vonage and others crawled out onto the consumer beach struggling to gain a foothold it seemed that pretty soon (and I wish I had time to research the time-line for all of this - I remember it well but not with exact dates attached) every IT magazine and his dog was talking about big corporations rolling out VoIP systems in their offices and saving bundles.

And yet still, here I was paying $12 a month of a phone line I didn't use other than to let me pay $70 a month of a 6mbps DSL line, and also chuck $100 a month at T-Mobile for two lines of cellphone goodness and a 1000 minute bucket of cellular chat time, plus unlimited EDGE cellular data access and WiFi roaming.

I briefly experimented again with Skype - I even purchased a years worth of subscription for a call in number (30 euros) so people could call me and I could call them without getting a weird 1234567 number showing up on their caller-id. I tried it for some transatlantic calls and it generally stank. Whatever headset I used I'd almost always have problems and my brothers would complain of "that helicopter noise". More to the point it seemed whenever anyone would call me on the computer with Skype (or MSN or Yahoo voice or video chat) I'd have no headset to hand.

The other problem I had was even if I had my headset almost everyone that called me seemed to have just a microphone and speakers so I'd be forced to listen-listen to-to my-my own-own echo-ehco... ouch. I'd be quickly reduced to a stammering fool and they didn't see to realize why because they could hear me just fine (except for the helicopter) with no echo.

One final thing about Skype was that their voice mail system sucked because there is no way to check it without a computer. You actually have to turn on your computer, fire up their software and then listen on that machine. What I really, really wanted was to have my voice mail just go to an email and be able to download and play it from my mail reader, or maybe just visit a website and hear it there. But Skype was and is having none of that for reasons that I just can't fathom.

TO BE CONTINUED...