Voice Over IP

[BlueDragon1981]

Is anyone familiar with this technology. Verizon is working on VoIP. They hope it will be the next big thing. Vontage pretty much already does it.

If you are not familiar with it I will tell you a little about it. What it does is use the internet for your phone. Which makes it possible to make long distance calls for free. Hence voice over IP. You do need a couple things. One thing you need is a broadband connection. You cannot use it unless you have it. At least at this point in time. Another thing you need is a router or a switch. This is for plugging the next thing you need into. The next thing is a special box that handles the phone items. You can have all kinds of phone features with this service. Call waiting, call forwarding, caller id are just a few of them. The thing is your phone with unlimited long distance and your broadband (if you use dsl) is going to be one flat rate and you don't have to worry about phone charges. (in the US) Right now the price is like around 80 a month but I assume once it hits big and the snags in it are fixed it will drop in price.

There are some bad things at this point. One is all the equipment you have to buy, the next is that some people complain of sound quality and the last is that it doesn't always work with overseas calls, but hey it is a step in a direction that I like.

Let me know what you all think about this. :woo:

[bcullen]

I've worked with Inter-tel's IP phone sets in cases where we had a single staff member in another state. The only serious issues were that the DHCP option didn't work (the engineers told us this before we bought them so no surprise) which means all involved parties must have static IP addresses. The big one was after 15 hops packets can get dropped (so you miss words or even whole sentences). Everthing worked like a charm till the ISPs in the other states dropped business class service and revoked static IP's or buried the client 15 hops into their network alone.:mad:

The sound quality was good, only a slightly different from a normal call.

There were some new protocols to add to the firewall to get them working.

It was sweet well it lasted, I could administer them as if they were in the office. :love:

[Tika]

Our consulting company just picked up a contract to do voice over IP between here and el salvador I think... :D...neat stuff. Depending on what you want to use it for, it can be awesome. If you have a bunch of people that want to be able to call their families for a reduced rate ( and dont really care if the quality is a little low) it can be great.

[dfilson]

I've never used a system myself, but have done some work with companies that have. The technology is coming along quite nicely in my opinion. The biggest thing I've heard from several people is that equipment makes or breaks the system. Everyone is using about the same technology, but some use it differently. From what I have heard right now 3Com is making the best system. Hope this helps. You wouldn't happen to study with Glen Harrison would you?

[BlueDragon1981]

"You wouldn't happen to study with Glen Harrison would you?"

Is that referring to me? I do not but I do plan to go and look at his dojo sometime soon. I don't really have a steady instructor now....if you want to know more on that PM me. .. enough of that.

To update anyone on the VOIP. Verizon is now starting to implement it. They are using it. Which kind of confuses me. They are going very slow at expanding there DSL but yet they were quick to do the VOIP. Hmm...doesnt make sense since you need a broadband connection to use it....wouldn't you want to expand that service first. Just a thought.