Should You Switch to a Net Phone?
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If you&#39;re like me, you&#39;ve seen lots of ads for Internet phone services but met very few people who actually use one. Dan Cistone, an Army staff sergeant based in Killeen, Texas, is living proof that those ads aren&#39;t purely hype.
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These cell-phone boosters promise more stable calls, but how much improvement can consumers expect?
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(InfoWorld) - On Monday evening, my wife reached me on my mobile phone. She was spending a long weekend with her family in Maine. "I've called our home phone several times," she said. "And I keep getting a busy signal." That night, I didn't think twice about the phone problem. We have been VoIP customers for more than a year, and flaky service has been standard operating procedure. I reset my VoIP converter box and crossed my fingers. Then, on Tuesday, when the problems persisted, I called my VoIP provider, SunRocket, and got the message that the company was no longer taking tech support and sales calls. That's not good. Many free-market analysts and large telecom providers have hailed this as a new era of competition. It's a wonderful new world where your VoIP provider can cut off your home phone service without warning. This week, SunRocket went belly up without any communication to its 200,000 customers. SunRocket had been providing both my home and my home office phone service. I could charitably say that phone service since Monday evening has been intermittent. In reality, phone service has been mostly dead with occasional spurts of dial tone. Now, when business associates try to call my home office, they get either a busy signal, or they get one ring and a hang-up. I'm trying to switch my home and office numbers to Vonage, but they say it could take up to 10 days for the switch to happen. When I first heard about SunRocket more than a year ago, it seemed like a good solution to large monthly telephone bills. The local incumbent phone service was charging about $60 a month for unlimited local and long distance. SunRocket offered unlimited local andÂ long distance and even some international calling for $199 a year. The company also offered a second out-of-area-code phone number at no cost. That feature caught my eye because my home office is in suburban Maryland, but most of the people who call me are located in Washington, D.C. My wife and I looked at a savings of more than $500 a year and decided it was time to check out VoIP. The switch was not without problems. Voice quality was spotty at best, particularly when we were talking to someone on a mobile phone. For months, we had problems with frequently dropped calls. We soon became quite familiar with the "not-my-fault" phenomenon. SunRocket blamed the problems on Comcast, our broadband provider. Comcast, of course, blamed SunRocket. (Comcast: We can't guarantee quality of service for third-party applications. By the way, why don't you switch to our voice over IP service -- it only costs double what you're paying now.) After months of experimenting with equipment configuration, we finally got most of the problems ironed out. When it came time to renew our annual subscription, we had mixed feelings, but SunRocket was still significantly cheaper that most alternatives. We paid $199 for a year of service in March. In late June, in a sign of things to come, SunRocket laid off about a quarter of its workforce. The way I look at it, someone owes us about nine months of phone service, but we're not holding our breath. Now, in some ways, this is just a story about a couple hundred thousand VoIP customers who saw their phone service go dead without warning. But there's a larger context here. During the last couple of years, some telecom analysts, free-market think tanks, and telecom carriers have trumpeted a new era of competition. Their argument: Old, monopoly-style regulations aren't needed any more because there's all kinds of competition out there. They say that telecom carriers shouldn't have to share their networks with competitors and broadband providers shouldn't be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors because there's all kinds of competition out there. Meanwhile, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, has shut down. Vonage, the largest independent VoIP provider, has faced a patent infringement lawsuit from giant competitor Verizon, and its future is uncertain. Verizon contends it owns the patent to the technology that translates VoIP calls and allows them to connect to traditional telephone networks. Wireless phone carriers provide some competition, but the largest two wireless carriers are owned by the two giant telecom carriers. I'm not sure that counts as competition. In the broadband space, there are some indications that one or two new competitors are on the way, but it could take years. Right now, well over 90 percent of the U.S. has at most two broadband providers, the cable company or the telecom carrier. The telecom carriers are fighting against auction rules that would encourage a new broadband provider when a chunk of television spectrum is freed up in early 2009. Elsewhere, broadband customers in other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pay less for faster service. Japanese customers pay about one-seventh what U.S. customers do per megabit of bandwidth. But few people in D.C. want to talk about the real reasons for this. It's not free-market competition; instead, telecom services in many other countries are highly regulated and subsidized by the government. For some of us, the promise of telecom competition seems a long way off. And, by the way, if you want to find me during the next week, your best bet is probably e-mail.
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The number of US households that use Net phone technology is expected to reach 12 million by 2009, a new study has shown. About 17 percent of all broadband homes in the United States will use Web telephony
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Verizon plans to offer a service that would act as a virtual switchboard operator, letting customers stay in touch at all times. The program would send phone calls, voicemails and e-mails wherever customers designate. By Elisa Batista.
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Millions of pounds will be spent in the coming months trying to persuade people to upgrade to 3G phones. What do two users of the services which have been launched already think about what their fancy phone can do?
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AT&amp;T is attracted to Voice over IP because Internet telephony is cheaper to offer to businesses and consumers and requires less upfront investment than the old copper wire and traditional switching networks.
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(Source: Computerworld)  Voice over IP can decrease long-distance telephone charges, but only careful planning will turn that into real savings. Get started with this Computerworld Executive Brief covering everything from the standards to the security implications, you'll find the risks as well as the rewards.
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The next-generation Net won't just be more portable and personal. It'll also harness the power of people, making it even easier to zero in on precisely what you're looking for.
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By BRUCE MEYERSON  NEW YORK - Those who don't mind carrying a paperweight already have plenty of options for "smart" phones that do more than just make calls. The rest of us are stuck with a sad compromise between size and function.
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Phone service that's available wherever there's a Net connection is approaching 2 million users.
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Wouldn't it be great to have your own cellular tower at home? You'd always have a strong signal on your mobile phone, and you wouldn't be paying to use the carrier's network.
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Using the Web on most cell phones has tended to be a balky, awkward experience, reminiscent of what the Internet was like on computers in dial-up 1995. So a handful of startups are trying to make it much cooler.
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The firm&#39;s new Internet calling plan is cheaper than traditional phone service and has more features. AT&amp;T has followed its recent announcement that it&#39;s not marketing new residential telephone service by
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Internet phone service, a burgeoning technology that allows people to make cheap calls to almost anywhere over broadband connections, is getting a boost from retailers.
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A few months ago I made a list of all the phone numbers I have. It disturbed me a bit.  I started with the usual trio of home, office, and cell. Then I added a BlackBerry (RIMM) that I use primarily for e-mail, but also the occasional call when my Motorola (MOT) KRZR runs out of power.
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Here are answers to some of the most common questions people have when they're thinking about making the switch to voice-over-IP telephony.