What folks are using VOIP for…FierceVOIP reports that last year over 614 billion national long distance minute were served, compared with 382 billion local and 82 billion international LD (iLocus report).
I posted earlier about a two week wait for response from Skype. I didn’t think that was too bad at the time. But another blogger has been waiting for 6 weeks for support and his Skype account is unusable in the meantime.
What’s the deal? Skype is happy to take your money but if it doesn’t work for you, too bad?
Don’t you get that feeling? Andy Abramson lists his six reasons why Cisco and Apple will play nicely together in the end. He’s probably right. Hey, maybe I hope he’s right…a Linksys box that plays iTunes? Hmmmm. I think those execs must get a kick out of everyone getting in a lather over this. Â
Initially, I thought that the online support systems for VOIP softphones Skype and Gizmo Project were pretty decent. Using them to answer burning questions is another matter.Â
Online Help belongs with the application. When I click Help > Online Help, please DON’T send me to the Knowledge Base or FAQs. Please DON’T open up another browser window and make me wait while the generic Help home page appears. Please DON’T make me use the Search feature. High level user guides or getting started tutorials are great, but make sure they’ve got some meat in them.
A Knowledge Base gives you little gulps of info with no breadcrumb trail to follow and no sense of context. To really aid and educate users, build Help right into the interface. Take the time to explain fields and buttons before I use them. To provide more information, use a fly-out Help pane (part of the interface that’s only visible when needed) and pull the content from an online server.
I want online Help that is specific to what I’m looking at on the screen. I want to browse Help by drilling down to the level of detail I need without losing my place in the story.
The End.
Is VOIP a generational thing? When I told my parents about my great scheme to use VOIP for my business line and long distance calling, Mom gave me that worried look that says “Are you sure that’s not illegal?” You should try it, I cry! Vonage, my service of choice at the time, was only $19.95 a month. A simple calculation on my phone bill told me I was spending more that that on long distance every month, so it seemed a no brainer.
Then Dad says, why don’t you just use 10-10-YAK? Only 5 cents a minute.
That’s what my parents use. YAK is a dial-around service you can use for long distance calling. The charges appear on your regular phone bill so there’s no subscriber contract to deal with.
But Dad (I’m deflated now), YAK isn’t VOIP, and VOIP is COOL. VOIP is the WAVE of the FUTURE…OK well whatever.
Now I don’t know if it’s just my parents, but the idea of only paying for what they use on a regular old telephone makes total sense to them. Hooking up a Vonage phone adaptor to their PC and broadband modem to make phone calls does not.
But my Dad did get me thinking about this question of unlimited calling vs. pay as you go. If you ask the folks at SIPphone Gizmo Project, they’ll say that unlimited plans won’t save you money. Only paying for minutes you actually use will.
“A calling plan that involves unlimited calling is almost never in the best interests of the consumer. When you just pay for what you consume, you end up paying far less.”
It grieves me, but lets do the math. At 5 cents a minute, I would have to spend about 400 minutes calling long distance calls (6 1/2 hours) to break even with my $20 plus tax Vonage charges for unlimited calling. I spend way less than 400 minutes a month talking long distance, so (a) I was paying way to much at my telco before for long distance, and (b) I can do way better than Vonage.
Most VOIP long distance rates are around 2 cents a minute or less, so for me paying as I go makes sense (400 minutes at 2 cents/minute is $8)!
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One appealing feature of PhoneGnome is that it can automatically detect when you are making a local call and when you are dialing long distance. However, local dialing in my area is 10-digits. In other words, I have to dial the area code then the number. In many other places, local calls are still the 7-digit number which poses no problem.
In my case, PhoneGnome thought that 10-digit local numbers were long distance and so placed the call using my Internet telephone service (I use Gizmo Project).
There’s an easy solution. Here’s what Televolution tech support had to say:
This did the trick. Tech support clarifies that sometimes PhoneGnome miss-detects a given number but usually this setup is adequate for the vast majority of users. If, after making this change, your PhoneGnome still doesn’t automatically detect local numbers, contact tech support for further instructions.Another way to force PhoneGnome to dial using the local telephone service is to dial ##, listen for a high-pitched dial tone, then dial the number.
From: www.quickstartvoip.com
Free Internet phone service lets you to make free long distance calls over the Internet in three different flavors. The first enables you to make calls from one phone to another as long as both are connected to broadband lines. The second allows you to make calls from one computer to another and the third makes calls possible from a computer to a traditional phone.
But, there are limitations to free services. Let’s take a look.
Phone-to-phone service providers require that you purchase their telephone adaptor (or ATA). As long as you are calling other people who have purchased the same equipment, the call is free. PhoneGnome is one such service. The PhoneGnome adaptor costs about $119. You literally plug it in to your broadband connection and to your regular phone, it configures itself, and you are good to go. You can start calling other PhoneGnome users anywhere for free. You don’t have to switch phone numbers or change telephone companies. Vonage, Packet8, AT&T CallVantage, and others you may have heard of follow the same model.
PC-to-PC service providers allow users to make free calls from one PC to another. Both parties need a PC with an Internet connection and some software easily downloaded from the Net. However, for a call to ring through, both parties have to be online at the same time and have the same, or at least compatible, software. By adding voicemail to a PC-to-PC service though, callers can leave messages even when you’re not online. Unfortunately, voicemail may or may not be free.  Skype, Gizmo Project, and FWD are three typical PC-to-PC services.
PC-to-phone services let you to call a regular phone numbers for free. However, you may be restricted to the locations that you can call or the length of the call. VoipBuster, for example, provides free calls from your PC to landline phones in about 30 countries. The restrictions are a little bit complex, but free is free…Lucky for us, the bigger software-based phone companies are trying hard to entice users so there’s also a current wave of promotions trumpeting free calls to landline phones. Skype for example offers free calls to any phone within North America until the end of the year. Gizmo offers free calls to phones in 60 countries as long as both parties maintain an active Gizmo Project account.
In all of these cases, free Internet telephone services make money by selling credits for calling minutes to landline phones or mobiles, long distance destinations, or phone numbers not on the same VOIP service. Rates are low, however, and you can expect to save significantly over traditional long distance companies. For regular phone users to call you on your free Internet phone account, you must “buy” or subscribe to a conventional phone number. Most services allow you to buy a phone number in different locations, so if your family is in the UK and wants to phone you regularly, you can buy a local UK number that they can call for free or inexpensively.
Nextfone is another Canadian VOIP provider to add to my VOIP for Canadians list.
At first glance, their offering looks similar to many others: two basic plans, a suite of free features, and a favorable comparison to other Canadian VOIP providers Bell and Vonage.
What I like: Western Canada area codes and an actual phone number for customer service/tech support.
What I’d like to see before I sign: more information on who they are and how long they’ve been in operation, up front information (BEFORE I’m in the sign up process) about the hardware purchase or rental.
On the weekend, my husband had an important long distance call with a client. Downstairs, PhoneGnome had husband talking to the UK over VOIP using Gizmo credits. Upstairs, PhoneGnome had son talking local to his buddies. So easy. And we didn’t even realize that the whole thing panned out problem free until much later…no dropped calls or weird noises, and a whole dollar’s worth of Gizmo call out credits consumed. This is how VOIP should work…totally transparent.
I saw a post yesterday on the Motley Fool called “Avoid the VOIP Value Trap“. It’s reader is the investor looking for the “next home run stock”. The gist of writer Dave Mok is to avoid investing in VOIP like the plague. “Internet telephony is a novel application that leverages existing infrastructure to deliver comparable services at lower prices. Technological developments like this can help companies improve margins and offer better value to consumers, but they don’t necessarily create substantial new value worthy of investment.”
Hey, well he may be right. I’m not an investor so I don’t know if this is news or not (I suspect not). Consumer value just can’t get no respect…Well I think there’s more to VOIP than Vonage–that is to say there’s more to VOIP than just cheap phone calls.
With all the hubub around Vonage and other national VOIP phone companies like them, I sometimes slide into the trap of thinking VOIP is all and only about saving money, unlimited long distance plans, and the like. And of course it’s not. I was reminded of a conversation I had in December with Talkster CEO James Wanless who called the “race to zero” a lousy business model. The fact is there are many new ventures using VOIP as a platform to offer services that traditional phone companies can’t. Look at Jangl offering phone privacy for social networking sites. Look at TalkPlus with a second number for your cell phone. Look at iotum TalkNow for Blackberry users. MobileStick from Bridgeport Networks, SightSpeed video calling, GrandCentral, PhoneGnome, Fring, Jajah, Gizmo, Truphone…the list is getting longer by the day. To say that “VoIP offers no new killer applications or buzzworthy innovations” is a little harsh. Investor value? No idea. Consumer value? You bet.
