Ooma's Toll-Free Gambit: Too Good to Be True?
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The beta VoIP service is easy to set up and works well--but how long will the company be able to give away long-distance phone service?
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GATINEAU, Que. (CP) - Are Internet phone calls a new frontier or just a technological tweak for an old service? That was the question before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
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How much is too much to pay for the use of a pair of old-school rotary phones? In Furthermore.
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Science & environment: Network trebles number of free calls and texts on lower-rate tariffs
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By Vicki Lee Parker, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.  Sep. 10--An e-mail is making the rounds that warns people not to dial area codes 809, 284 and 876 because their accounts will be billed $2,425.
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It&#39;s easy to be wowed by Japan&#39;s mobile communications infrastructure. &quot;Next-generation&quot; 3G coverage is now so ubiquitous that carriers have already stopped launching 2G phones; an impressive array of attractive handsets offer free digital TV; phones can be used to pay for goods and train rides, thanks to embedded contactless smart cards; and on the mobile information superhighway data whizzes along at 3.6Mbps. But watch out for the off-ramps.While Japan has led the world with many of the services offered to consumers, in some ways the mobile ecosystem here is downright backward as I found out last weekend when I tried to buy a new phone. A broken handset necessitated a new model and this is where my story begins.In Japan, phones are sold by carriers and not the phone makers. Companies like Fujitsu, NEC, Sony Ericsson, and a few foreign vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and LG sell their phones in the thousands to carriers. This gives carriers the ability to pretty much dictate to the phone maker what software needs to be installed.This model is one of the reasons that mobile Internet services like I-mode took off here so quickly. There was no chicken-and-egg situation with phone makers and users waiting for each other to take the plunge. NTT DoCoMo decided I-mode would be in new phones and so it was.But this model has a downside. Phones are so tightly customized to each carrier that it&#39;s not practical to keep the same handset when switching carriers, and if you see a phone you like you can only buy it if it&#39;s offered by your carrier.Back to my story. The new phone was looking quite expensive so I decided to switch carriers and take advantage of a free phone on a competitor network. Japan launched number portability a year ago, so I could make the jump without losing my cell-phone number. I&#39;d still have the hassle of a new e-mail address, but it appeared a small price to pay.Before long I had a new phone in my hands, but my phone numbers remained locked in the old handset. The new carrier didn&#39;t have a cable to hook up to my old phone so they couldn&#39;t transfer the address book and it wasn&#39;t possible to beam it between the phones. While my old carrier was gung-ho on Bluetooth, my new carrier wasn&#39;t so enthusiastic, so the new phone had no support. Similarly, while the new phone offered infrared, the old phone didn&#39;t. Heavy customization strikes again.Back home I fired up my PC and managed to get my address book from the old phone into the computer. Getting it to the new phone via a memory card seemed like an easy task ... but no! The VCard file wasn&#39;t being properly read by the new phone. Carriers, it was explained to me when I called the help line, often used custom fields in their VCards so there were sometimes problems. So much for a common standard.I won&#39;t bore you with the technicalities of how I eventually got my address book into my new phone, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending. I&#39;m now back in cruise control, enjoying all the attractions the mobile superhighway has to offer.The number portability system that enabled me to keep my phone number is coincidentally one-year-old this week. About 3 percent of users in Japan -- roughly 3.7 million people -- have made use of the system during its first year -- far less than the industry predicted, or feared.One thing that&#39;s said to be stopping users from switching is the inability to keep their e-mail addresses. While carriers fussed over the details of keeping numbers, they forgot, or perhaps ignored, the need to carry e-mail addresses between carriers. In other countries this wouldn&#39;t be a big deal because most messaging is done via SMS, which relies on phone numbers, but in Japan the advanced stage of the market has again caused hassle for consumers.
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Think you're safe from Internet fraud? Think again.
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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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Password-stealing Trojan horse may--or may not--be targeting popular VoIP feature.
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Sound too good to be true? Don't worry -- reality is not so bad.
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One technology promises to harness the power of the Internet for voice communications. Its competitor has been around for a century, and has an industry shorthand that needs two adjectives -- "plain old telephone service" -- to describe just how boring it is.
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Are you being charged unnecessary fees? You can do better.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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Coming soon to a phone near you: spam, scams and viruses galore. Your text messages, address book and calls could be up for grabs. By Annalee Newitz from Wired magazine.
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With the loose purse strings at Vonage, others may come calling too.
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Some AOL subscribers are discovering that the company's new free service is only free if you ask for it.
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Is Microsoft's offer too low, too high, or just right?