Office Depot hears call for VoIP
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The office equipment supplier jumps into the growing market of placing cheap calls over the Net.
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Subscribers of the company's Net phone service can get information on park locations, public transit, and so on.
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Low cost and flexibility are selling points for the open-source VoIP software, but is it right for your shop?
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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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Opinion: SIPphone&#39;s one good point is that Vonage-only router/terminal adapters must say Vonage on the boxâand Vonage seems to be hurrying to do that consistently.
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NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Office Depot Inc. will cut about 900 jobs when it closes and consolidates its call centers and account management operations, taking a charge of about $12.
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Internet phone service Vonage on Tuesday said it has struck a deal with Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO.O) to sell Vonage-ready equipment at hundreds of retail stores in a bid to boost new subscriptions.
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AOL LLC has said it would make available its AIM Phoneline VoIP service, which is part of its instant messaging client, to developers in a bid to spur new hardware and functionality for the service.
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Office Depot Inc. plans to cut 900 jobs as it consolidates operations at eight call centers and offices in six states. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Office Depot - the nation&#39;s second
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Office Depot Inc.  on Wednesday unveiled plans to muscle in on rival Staple Inc.'s turf to boost sales and stem a fall in market share in the increasingly cutthroat office supply business.
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VoIP is the belle of the telecom ball. Jotting her onto their dance cards are such well-dressed suitors as America Online and AT&#38;T
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The online giant is quietly calling on beta testers to try out its take on VoIP.
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DALLAS, Sept. 11  /PRNewswire/ -- Though there has been a large amount of chatter on the subject of storing VoIP information, no telecommunications company has actually done it.  Until now.
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Vonage and AT&#38;T, still locked in a price war, are separately planning new features in a battle for VoIP customers.
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WASHINGTON - Some New York businesses are using a voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) feature to avoid the crowds at the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.
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MINNEAPOLIS, Sept. 12  /PRNewswire/ -- There are a number of ways an organization can connect to a group of workers at a remote location using voice and fax over an IP network or the Internet.  Most of them are expensive involving IP phones or an IP PBX.
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By Nichole Monroe Bell, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Feb. 22--Ever wonder who the office techs call when a glitchy computer problem has even them stumped?   Quite often, they call right down the street.