Source: www.voip-news.com

Love this! VoIP and Gadgets Blog traces rudimentary computer technology that the writer used as a kid to the VoIP service that he now bases his career writing about.

The VoIP Weblog explores Sipgate  in its competition with Skype.

Truphone 3.0 has launched for the iPod Touch. Read about it on VoIP News of the UK.

Source: www.voip-news.com

A new phone service from sipgate claims to be a landline replacement that has all the functions of a phone service including telephone number but it carries no cost for the set-up, the number itself or any monthly charges or minimums. Sipgate one works with any phone (including standard analog ones, mobile phones and VoIP phones). It operates over the internet.

Calls cost 1.9 cents per minute, but calls to other sipgate users and received calls are free as well, giving it an advantage over Skype where you pay for incoming calls.

“There is simply no barrier to people disconnecting their old phone lines anymore. Phone and cable companies have long been pushing voice plans in the region of $25 to $40 per month–which end up being as much as $60 or more with extra charges–and that’s just ridiculous,” said Thilo Salmon, CEO of sipgate. “Even with calls to other landlines and mobile phones, most users will spend less than $5 a month using sipgate one. And for those people only receiving incoming calls on their VoIP phone, the service is completely free.”

I have to disagree with Salmon on there being no barrier to disconnecting old phone lines — if the internet goes down or the power goes out, you will lose your phone service, which is a problem for some people (like parents who want the security of having an analog backup phone with a traditional line so that you can phone anytime in an emergency). Nonetheless, as far as VoIP goes, this sounds like a good deal.

Here’s the benefits:

At no additional cost, sipgate offers a rich feature set designed to make users’ lives easier and more convenient:

– Need to write down a number while driving? Record any phone
conversation by pressing *6
– Want to customize your voicemail? Upload an mp3
– Want your calls to follow you? Have your home, office and mobile
phone ring in parallel
– Left your mobile phone at home? Simply go online and divert calls to
your office line
– Want to talk to friends in an ad-hoc conference? Bridge them with the
touch of a button
– Missed calls while on a flight? A list is waiting for you in your
email

Source: www.voip-news.com

Merry times. Sipgate has dropped the price of their VoIP packages in order to look more appealing to residents and also draw more people to buy.

Truth of the matter is that I am not sure that we should be purchasing anything at all. Just sayin’.

According to the company:

sipgate is making Internet telephony the number one Christmas present under the tree, all wrapped up in attractive VoIP hardware packages at rock bottom prices. Quantities are limited: First come, first served. This campaign officially ends on January 2nd, 2009. The Christmas specials are available at the sipgate online shop under http://www.sipgate.co.uk/shop and can be purchased not only by sipgate customers, but by anyone who is interested.

Source: goebel.net

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In the last weeks I received many messages from people who want to start a lawsuit against the VoIP company Betamax from Cologne, Germany. They feel betrayed by the mothership of Voipstunt, Voipcheap, Sparvoip, Lowratevoip, Nonoh and other offers. Something must have gone wrong with their billing or they believe that Betamax wrongfully charged too much. Aside from the problem that Betamax themselves are apparently victim of a scam, I can only say that for me everything works flawlessly. But I get the impression that many users don’t understand the company’s Terms of Service. This morning a Betamax user called Robert wrote:

The company I work for happens to be in Moscow so I call them regularly. Why do they suddenly want to charge me for these calls? It doesn’t make any difference whether I call the U.S.A., Italy or Russia. They are all free and perhaps I call Moscow three times a day but perhaps twice a week.

I told him to first look at the website http://backsla.sh/betamax. There you can always see the latest prices and you will realize that with most Betamax companies you can call Russia’s landline phones for free, within a Fair Use Policy (FUP) of 300 minutes per week. This FUP seems very fair to me. I never exceed it, so Betamax’ normally works like a flatrate for me.

In fact I am very surprised about their cheap prices for Russia, because I know that connections outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow are very expensive to buy in wholesale markets. Therefore e. g. Rebtel users have to pay $0.019 Cents to Moscow and St. Petersburg landlines – but $0.079 Cents to other Russian cities. So Betamax’ $0.00 Cent is a great bargain. For the German company it makes a big price difference whether they terminate calls in the U.S.A., Italy or in Russia. Although it might be difficult to explain to the average user like Robert.

Now I see that calls, which were originally free, are now being charged under the ‘fair use policy’. This I don’t understand.

There can be two reasons for that:

1.) Robert calls for more then 300 minutes per week.

2.) He shares his IP number with other users, so that Betamax thinks that it’s only one user. That’s what happened at Voxalot, a virtual internet PBX: All Voxalot users had the same IP number to Betamax. Therefore they jointly exceeded the FUP very fast. Voxalot managed to strike an agreement with Betamax to pass the original IP number, so that every user now has his own FUP.

So, if Betamax charges for actual free calls, there might be a technical problem. Otherwise it seems a great bargain to me to get 1.200 minutes per month from Betamax for just 2.50. (Taking into account that that you have to pay 10 every four months to get the 0.00 to Russian landlines.) People should also consider what user satphoneguy wrote in Voxalot’s forum:

having lived in many parts of the world I think that a lot of what is happening is relate to cultural differences and expectation of customer service. from what i have read the vast majority of complaints are coming from the USA. here in the USA it is somewhat expected that if you are unhappy with a service or feel deceived by misleading marketing that you should be eligible for refund on what you spent. most American companies do indeed give 100% refunds to their customers no questions asked when they complain. i do know from having lived overseas that is not the business etiquette everyplace. there are a number of reasons why many people may feel deceived since the betamax ‘fair use policies’ are not very clear. in particular concerning additional charges for use of SIP devices on some services. it is all exasperated in that americans also feel that every company should have a customer service line where they can call with questions(or complaints) or at very least email support with a quick turnaround to response(same day)

i do have to say though that it seems many people who complain about numerous betamax companies continue to try the others. this is very similar to what i dealt with working for a very large retail company – some of the biggest complainers and returners of products for refunds were also some of the biggest shoppers; i would see them on nearly a daily basis.

i personally have never had a billing issue with betamax. although in recent months my only funded account is nonoh; since the rates are so much less for the mobile destinations that i call than with any of the SIP options and i have unlimited calls to NA and most landlines through another provider.

Many people in Europe accept a lousy service, as long as it’s cheap. But others expect a great service although they pay nearly nothing. That’s just not possible to deliver for a company. Good service always has its price, especially in a country with sky-high wages like Germany. People who want more than just plain phone minutes should subscribe to companies like PhoneGnome, Packet8 or Sipgate which have real hotlines by phone and email for their clients. That’s what I also told Robert, who finally admitted:

I suppose, like most people, I never fully read the ‘Terms of Use’, although in these terms there is no exact reason mentioned and more than that, there is no exact time limit per country or city mentioned where this might be relatively easy as an adder to the price information.

Please always have a look at the small print at the end of every Betamax web page!

* Max 300 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days and per unique IP address. Unused free minutes cannot be taken to the following week(s). If limit is exceeded the normal rates apply. With your FREE DAYS you can call for free to all the destinations listed as free! When you have no FREE DAYS left the normal rates apply. You can get extra Freedays by buying credit

They say it very clear that free calls are limited to 300 minutes per week and IP address. That’s not too difficult to understand, isn’t it? What still remains a mistery to me, is the sentence When you have no FREE DAYS left the normal rates apply.

What are these normal rates after 300 minutes? I couldn’t find them either.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

DÜSSELDORF, Germany, September 11 /PRNewswire/ — sipgate is the first VoIP provider to give customers direct access to its system via a designated, proprietary interface. At the same time, "sipgate API" provides a catalog of functions that – within the scope of the product stipulations – can be integrated into third party products and solutions at the discretion of the user. This allows customers and developers to use virtually any sipgate function for their own applications. Information on the interface and the source codes of several model programs are available at http://www.sipgate.co.uk/api.

In making API available, sipgate is taking a step no other telephony service has ever offered: developers are given the opportunity to customize the service portfolio of the company to their own needs. As a result, VoIP, SMS and fax systems can now be integrated into CRM systems and Office programs, for example. Their integration into commercial software, offering telephony and telephony administration to users directly, is also feasible. Website operators will find callback buttons and phone numbers featuring Click2Dial particularly helpful.

For transport protocol, "sipgate API" uses "XML-RPC," whose specifications are described in detailed documentation. Working with "sipgate API" is free with any sipgate account, regardless of the pricing plan selected. The API solution can be used without a special release.

To facilitate the initial use of the solution, sipgate also discloses the source code of Firefox extension "sipgate FFX." Along with the creation of the connection with Click2Dial, it also demonstrates requests for account status, missed calls, faxes and voice messages received. Moreover, sipgate supports .NET developers with "sipgate API .NET SDK," a convenient library that makes the "sipgate API" services easy to use. Several Perl examples and a KDE panel application, which along with "sipgate FFX" are subject to a GPL 2 license, complete the no-cost service portfolio. A mailing list allows developers to share experiences and tips.

More information and press photos available at http://www.sipgate.co.uk/presse and http://www.sipgate.co.uk/api

Source: goebel.net

The VoIP company Sipgate, one of the biggest in Germany with also significant business in the UK, offers a special service for developers. "Sipgate API" is a new interface to integrate almost every Sipgate function – VoIP, SMS and large administration tools – in own applications. The Sipgate API enables to use central Sipgate functions within your own software or web projects, so that VoIP tinkerers can set up their own mashup services.

In his latest blog post Thomas Howe, the master of mashup, was so kind to explain again what mashup means:

A mashup is an application that uses
1) modern Web integration technologies
2) to take content or services from two independent sources
3) to solve a unique or niche problem.

The first element of mashups are the integration technologies they use. These integration technologies create a web as platform architecture, allowing the mashup developer to integrate his software on top of the world class infrastructures provided by Amazon or AOL, simply, easily and safely. The most common technologies used for mashups include Web services calls, which either come as a SOAP or REST flavors, AJAX, Javascript and Ruby.

The second element of mashups is that they take content or services from more than one independent source. This is where the mashup word comes from. Mashups take things that might not go together, and puts them together in a valuable way. The classic mashup is the Chicago Crime Map, that took data from the Chicago Police Department and plotted it on Google Maps, so that you could see where the burglaries happened.

The "Sipgate API" is provided free of charge and can be used for mashups with every Sipgate account. Up to date the fax function of Sipgate can be used only with the German service.

To make integration easy, Sipgate publishes also the source code of the Firefox extension "Sipgate FFX" as well as several Perl examples and a KDE panel application under a GPL 2 license. Further more .NET developers will find with "sipgate API .NET SDK" a comfortable library to use the "Sipgate API" services easily. Over a mailing list developers can also exchange experiences and tips.

You will find all information about the interface and the exemplar applications including detailed documentations under www.sipgate.co.uk/api.

Source: goebel.net

FierceVoIP has an interview with Andrew Frame, founder and CEO of Ooma. We can learn something, but it’s mostly PR blabla for Ooma. Much more interesting are, again, the comments to this article.

Maybe Andrew shouldn’t have answered the question "How is ooma different from PhoneGnome, aside from the physical aspect?". It causes an outrage of devoted PhoneGnome users, calling his answer "completely misleading" and presuming that he didn’t understand how PhoneGnome works.

In steps Dennis Peng, director product management at Ooma, making an even more comprehensive comparation of the two devices. He asserts that PhoneGnome doesn’t have two phone lines, like Ooma does, but just "one and a half". What does that mean? Maybe a half phone line is shorter than a full line? Peng gets it worse from the next commentator who says "Dennis, with all due respect to your position at Ooma, you need to do a little more homework", before he strips down his argumentation.

Too sad that most comments are anonymous, because they give pretty much insight and are funny to read. I hope that Mr. Blog himself, PhoneGnome’s CEO David Beckemeyer, will find this article soon and also leave a comment.

I was personally shocked to read that poor Americans pay $65-70 monthly just to get two phone lines from AT&T and PhoneGnome. With the necessary broadband connection it sums up to $100 every month.

I just pay $40 monthly for broadband and VoIP, of course having two phones lines. Two people can call my Sipgate number at the same time. If the first phone is already in use the other rings. Also twofold dial out is possible. Betamax’ SparVoIP allows this without hassle, using my Sipgate number as caller ID and letting me call my favourite countries for free for just $3 per month. On top of that I can use 10 different VoIP providers on my Fritz!Box, having lots of inbound numbers from different countries and arbitrating for the best price on outgoing calls. At Voxalot I can install 30 more providers.

I can switch easily if one provider goes belly up or messes with their rates, without getting a new box or changing anything hardware-wise. Ooma guarantees only three years of free service and nobody knows what happens to the box if they go bankrupt.

UPDATE:

David Beckemeyer, designer and proprietor of PhoneGnome, aka "Mr. Blog," aka former chief technology officer and co-founder of EarthLink, has officially requested the opportunity to respond to Andrew Frame’s comparison of Ooma and PhoneGnome.

You can read more about that in today’s FierceVoIP article "ooma versus PhoneGnome". But his response will not be featured untile the Monday, Sept. 10 edition of FierceVoIP.

Too sad we have to wait so long.

Source: goebel.net

Sipgate is one of the best quality VoIP providers I know for Germany, Austria and the UK. They give free inbound numbers and, with rare exceptions, they always work. Last friday they were down for a half hour, but this was no big problem.

Until people started to realize that Sipgate behaves strangely since then. As I tested Sipgate is blocking all the free "always connected" web based PBXes I know:Voxalot, PBXes.com and simplyConnect. That’s really annoying since those websites do a great job. You can deposit there all your login data for the many SIP accounts you got from different companies. Then you need only one account, for example Voxalot’s, to receive phone calls to all your different VoIP numbers on one device. Also you can define dial plans for least cost routing. Then Voxalot uses for instance provider A for phone calls to country number 1 and provider B for country number 2, always taking advantage of the cheapest connection.

Thats nice for VoIP devices which can hold only one SIP account, such as certain mobile phones or the Fring software, which recently got very important for mobile VoIP users in Great Britain. With Fring you can avoid the problem that for Orange UK and Vodaphone UK are blocking VoIP on the brand new Nokia N95 mobile phone. As an external Symbian program Frings makes SIP calls possible on these crippled N95, but holds only one SIP account. Which should be Voxalot or something similar if you have different providers. I already use more than 20 VoIP providers.

It seems that Sipgate doesn’t like the described least cost routing, since their prices aren’t cheap compared with other providers. Poor Sipgate! Mean Germans use them only to receive calls on Sipgate’s free incoming numbers, but for outgoing calls they use free VoIP services from companies like Betamax. Nothing is cheaper than free, and even Sipgate’s flatrate for Europe cannot compete with it. Maybe Sipgate did not like it that the their Voice Mail answered all calls to my dozens of different VoIP accounts that I have installed at Voxalot. Even if you called my FWD or Gizmo account the Sipgate Voice Mail kicked in. This was a nice feature since I had to deal with only one Voice Mail box for all my VoIP and fixed line calls.

It seems that Sipgate wants to work like a normal PSTN telco and tries to be as much separated from the SIP world as possible. Only if people use Sipgate for their outgoing phone calls and do not free ride their services they can sponsor the free incoming numbers. I, for instance, use Sipgate’s number and Voice Mail yet for years but never paid them any money, since all my outgoing calls go for nearly free over the Betamax company Voipstunt. People from England do the same, as you can read in Voxalot’s forum.

I suppose that Sipgate prefers to be their clients only VoIP provider and therefore it blocks more and more interoperability options. This started already months ago when they began to block phone calls from other VoIP providers to their SIP adresses. SIP to SIP is normally free. But now the only option is to call the phone number of a Sipgate user, which is only free within the Sipgate network or for calls from their spare peering partners.

The hottest discussion about the PBX blocking I found in Voxalot’s forum. Sipgate clients are disgruntled that they cannot use the service with Voxalot anymore and give tips about alternative providers. One user even threatened the Sipgate support to cancel his account and got surprised that they did not try to hold him back, but explained in a polite way how to do it.

Originally Posted by sipgate
You can delete your account under "Settings" -> "Contract".
Best regards,
Frederik van Koningshoven

Sipgate’s official explication is the following:

login details must not be given to 3rd parties. the provider mentioned above (note: voxalot is ment) attracted attention due to nonserious business practices. for our customers safety we try to remedy potential abuse through this corporation.

Other Voxalot clients got a clearer answer from the Sipgate support:

Originally Posted by sipgate
we block Voxalot and similar services, because our customer has to give them the login details.
This is a security problem.
Best regards,
Frederik van Koningshoven

Later it got more personally against Voxalot:

Originally Posted by sipgate
Unfortunately, we don’t consider them as trustworthy.
This decision will not be changed in near future.
Best regards,
Frederik van Koningshoven

Poor Voxalot! What did they do? How should the company behave in this situation?

Voxalot’s support worker Martin says that he "would be interested to know if this is an across the board "security rule" or if simply Voxalot was "singled out"…..". An interesting question, because Fring seems to work very well with Sipgate, although Fring also requires the user to give his Sipgate login details to a 3rd party.

Why isn’t Sipgate blocking Fring as well?

In fact this is a general problem: With every time more services moving into the web people have to provide every time more secret login data to 3rd parties. It reminds me of a former post that I wrote in april in Voxalot’s forum, "Theoretically Voxalot could steal all our VoIP minutes".

But it’s not only Voxalot. It’s also PBXes.com, simplyConnect, Fring, Barablu, Nimbuzz, Talkster, Mobivox, Iskoot, Skip2PBX,… Dozens of companies are in the same situation. There has to be a more intelligent solution than just blocking Voxalot. What’s missing is a secure way to share login data.

Maybe OpenID is the answer?

CORRECTION: Sipgate now at least seems to work OK with PBXes.

Source: goebel.net

Yesterday I told under the headline Why mobile and landline phone calls will soon be free my outlook on the future of telecommunications. I am sure that per minute charges for landline and mobile phone calls will soon be a thing of the past. Even a 29 dollar monthly flatrate for all calls will seem too expensive. But not because the companies change their business models. It’s the clients who find ways to circumvent the paid networks. They leverage their phone costs by using the SIP standard which can be seen as a Pandora’s box to the industry.

Today I want to show you some other examples how I would do it. I’ll also try to explain how the companies try to avoid these tricks. Skype and Truphone for instance try to stay out of the rat race by avoiding to implement the whole functionality of the SIP standard. Skype more than Truphone, obviously. Rebtel tries to tie up their clients to pay 1 Dollar a week for their incoming numbers. Jajah wants you to deposit at least 5 dollars on your account to charge you for their callback service. But they all can be beaten.

Connect Skype to a normal phone:

Skype relies on its own closed communication standard and until now there were no easy ways to use Skype on your normal phone. But maybe these days are over.

The VoSKY Exchange from abpTECH alleges to be the world’s first product to seamlessly bridge an existing PBX to the Skype network. It adds four Skype lines to your PBX, and extends the benefit of Skype to every extension in your office.

At CeBIT the Italian company PCService presented in march their Linux software Skip2PBX, which serves as an addition to a company’s existing PBX. Installed on a Linux machine, which can also be virtual, it controls up to 30 Skype accounts at one time, using different sessions of the Skype program. When a Skype call arrives it’s being redirected to a phone. The Users can call their Skype contacts for free by using short numbers on their phone.

But the easiest way is certainly to use Fring on a mobile phone. Why hassle with the PBX when there is a phone software that communicates with all kind of messengers and SIP phone networks? Fring works on Wifi and 3G.

Get a cheap incoming phone number for Truphone:

Truphone has another interesting way to assure their income. They give free calls to 40 countries worldwide until end of June, but maybe this special offer will last forever. It’s not only a marketing gag, they just have another source of income. The Truphone numbers in the UK are mobile phone numbers. To call them is quite pricey and Truphone takes its share from the incoming calls, as a Truphone network engineer affirms.

But there is an easy way to avoid these costs:

Install Sipgate as a second SIP provider in your mobile phone. So people can call you on your free Sipgate landline number. You can even set up a call forward from the Sipgate number. Just install Sipgate on Voxalot and make a call forward to your Truphone SIP address which has the form 447624XXXXXX@truphone.com. Your friends can call you always on your Sipgate number, but poor Truphone (which you will probably use for the free outbound calls) will not earn on the inbound leg from PSTN anymore.

Truphone always tried to prevent this kind of tweaking by not showing to their costumers their own SIP password. Truphone’s software leaves it encrypted on the Nokia mobile phone to prevent that people use the service on other devices, circumventing the Truphone network. So do the Sipgate workaround! Calls between Sipgate and their partner networks are free, that’s understood.

Get lots of inbound numbers like at Rebtel:

One business of Rebtel is to give you local incoming phone numbers in many countries and charge a dollar a week for that. But why should you pay when there are free incoming numbers? I, for instance, have dozens of SIP accounts with their respective inbound numbers from different countries concentrated at Voxalot. No matter which number you call, they all ring on the same phone. The thing gets even more funny because my Voxalot account works with Sipbroker and Tpad. They have inbound number in nearly every country of the world. You can call them at a local rate, dial the account number and my phone will ring.

Free Jajah like web callback:

Voxalot even has a Jajah like web callback. But other than Jajah these calls can cost you nothing if you use free VoIP providers on both legs of the call. There is also a version for cell phones at mobile.voxalot.com which costs nearly nothing for the mobile data. Enjoy your free calls!

Of course the described services also work on mobile phones outside Wifi, using an IP PBX with GSM SIM cards as 4S newcom offers.

Source: goebel.net

Thomas Anglero is one of the big VoIP experts. He was a senior executive adviser with Telenor AS, CEO of Free World Dialup, VP of Vocaltec Communications and CEO of TrulyGlobal. So we might expect from him only a positive view on the the VoIP industry. Also because he is still attached to it as CEO of Nuclei Networks, a VoIP service provider in emerging Balkan markets.

But his latest blog entry sounds more than depressed to me. Under the emblematic title VoIP’s tragedy was foretold by Hamlet he writes:

VoIP is a 1/3 of penny numbers game with margins so low that micro-credits used in Malaysia by mobile operators have higher margins then VoIP. Think about this…

At Fall VON last year, the head of Yahoos! VoIP service told a story about how the head of accounting called him into a meeting to question his reasons for continuing its VoIP business. She informed him that the average margins for Yahoos! services are around 80% and his VoIP business was almost impossible to calculate…she asked, "why are we in ‘this’ business?"

Sad words. But only from a company’s standpoint. The clients might think differently.

I suppose this actual development is just the way it goes and we are on the verge of a big paradigm shift. Phone calls aren’t meant to cost anymore. They will be free. Like emails disappeared the written letter and the payment for the postage stamp. I would love to see it and already realize it on a smaller scale, by convincing my friends to use VoIP so that we can make free on net calls.

And there is more to come: If you use the SIP standard cleverly every phone call can be free, even mobile calls. One way to achieve this is the fwdOUT Phone Sharing Network.

The fwdOUT Network is a system that matches callers with other users that can complete the call for them at no charge. The only catch is that to make some calls, you have to let others use your phone. fwdOUTis free and not to be used for commercial purposes.

For Instance, Erik lives in New York City, and he gets free local phone service, his family is in Holland. Joe is an expatriate from New York living in Holland that calls New York on a regular basis. Using the Free World Dialup Phone Sharing Service, Erik shares his number. Joe also shares his number. When Joe calls New York, he uses Eriks line and Erik uses Joes Line. The sharing is not done on a one-on-one basis, members share with the entire community and accumulate credits when their line is used. These credits can be used to place calls through other members phones. Free World Dialup maintains the tallies so that no line is used more than the owner has permitted.

Critcs said that fwdOUT doesn’t work good. There are too many dead routes, because only few people know it. But the idea is brilliant and with a little grassroots marketing it can become bigger. I think that it’s no big problem that you need an Asterisk server to become a member of this free call fraternity. Asterisk is every time easier to install and there are pre-configurated packages. Also you don’t need a full fledged personal computer anymore to run it. Asterisk can run on small, fanless, quiet industrial PCs that spend few energy. There was even a competition to install it on an Apple TV. Another way is install Asterisk on your web server, which you can get fr 3 Dollars a month. But the most elegant way seems to me to use the web based Asterisk PBX that you can get for free at PBXes.com.

Other companies, like 4S newcom, are working on the mobile edge. For costumers they can equip their IP PBX with SIM cards of all German mobile phone providers. Of course with flat rate tariffs, so you can ring the PBX and it calls you back for free. Once connected you can, theoretically, use the fwdOUT service or every other VoIP provider which connects you to the world for free. For instance Voipstunt, which offers free calls to 40 countries and the rest of its destinations very cheap. Voipstunt is one of the many brands of the German company Betamax. Their prices are so cheap that people from all over the world use them. I recently read comments in a forum by a Brazilian who does all his local calls with Lowratevoip, another Betamax company. Having compared lots of VoIP providers in the last time I suppose that they are a real menace to the industry, undercutting nearly every other offer.

So what will this all lead to?

I would no be surprised to see some kind of war start very soon. It’s the big incumbents and the mobile operators against the thousands of small VoIP companies. First signs are how Vonage gets pushed out of business with a lawsuit by Verizon and the crippled Nokia N95 which Vodafone and Orange sell to their costumers in the UK. People where quite surprised to see that they cannot use VoIP on their branded N95, which normally can.

But to me this mutilation seems quite reasoned. From april 2007 the City of London will become the biggest wireless Internet hotspot in Europe. This means that in Europe’s most important finance and economy center the people can call for free or very cheap by using VoIP on their cell phones, circumventing the traditional mobile networks.

The big winners will be SIP phone companies like Truphone or Sipgate. Where there is bandwith there you can make calls. It seems that the standardization of VoIP in SIP has opened a Pandora’s box for all telecommunication companies: With SIP you can tie every phone system together, as you see in fwdOUT and 4S newcom’s IP PBX. More and more bridges are being built to make free phone calls. The people like it and companies can soon only charge modest prices for the bandwith. Voice will become "just another application", as techies use to say. Or, as a comment on Gigaom states:

Its becoming a tired catchphrase, but its no less true for its repetition: All voice is converging towards free. Its just another service on your dumb pipe: It makes no more sense to pay a per-voice call charge than it does a per-website visit or a per-email fee. I dont regard myself as a bleeding edge adopter, but these days about 85% of my calling is on-net (Either Skype or one of the zillion SIP networks that operate here in Oz). Its a bit cumbersome (Prefix dialling for the SIP network, then the users own 86 digit SIP phone number), but Im viewing that as a temporary aberration.

Id say the days of PSTN arbitrage (which is really what the VOIP providers are) are coming to an end. Im cheering FON and others on too, so that soon enough the days of GSM arbitrage will be over too.

LG

Paying a phone bill is so 80ies style!

(Read my next blog posts More tricks for free phone callsand Tpad to involuntarily offer free phone calls worldwide? to learn more.)

Source: goebel.net

At GigaOM there is an interesting survey going on under the title "Does your house VoIP?". Om Malik asks:

Regardless, time to ask the community what kind of a VoIP users are you? Cable kind, or someone who uses soft clients or do have still doing the Vonage styled ATA-based VoIP calling?

This cuestions finally made me get a general idea about all the services I use. And, god, it’s a lot of them!

Actually I am using 20 VoIP accounts, out of couriosity and because of the different services they offer. But maybe I am subscribed to even more, but just forgot it. My goal is to make free calls and use arbitrage possibilities between the different VoIP services. I use the different VoIP providers on my desk phone that’s connected to the Fritz!Box fon ATA and on my mobile phone, Nokia E61, that can hold several SIP accounts. Also I use Fring on the E61, because it can hold my accounts on Skype, MSN messenger, Google Talk and also one SIP account.

Here is why I use so many different services:

Voipstunt: For free or super cheap calls worldwide. This services I use most. It’s installed on my desk phone and on my mobile phone, Nokia E61. So I can make free calls from Wifi hotspots.

Sipgate: Is use Sipgate as an answering machine. Incoming calls to my ATA are forwarded for free to the Sipgate mailbox if not answered in 30 seconds. For that purpose we have two Sipgate accounts at home.

Tpad: Because of their BreakIn numbers worldwide. My friends from Peru can call me so in Berlin for the cost of a local call without having a computer.

Truphone: To check it out on my mobile phone and because of their new offer that gives me landlines nearly worldwide for free in the next two months.

Several services for testing purposes and out of couriosity: GMX, Voipbuster, FWD, dus.net, Sip2sip.info, Ekiga.net, Openwengo, iptel.org, Rebtel, 4S newcom …

Voxalot: Every time my Fritz!Box fon ATA gets too full, because it can only hold 10 VoIP accounts, I move the one I don’t use to call out anymore to Voxalot. This service works like an ATA in the net: It’s logged in to the VoIP services I don’t use so much anymore. So I can keep them and receive calls on their SIP addresses or phone numbers. For instance if somebody calls my unused Gizmo account (I have several of them) my Voxalot account in my Fritz!Box fon ATA rings.

Gizmocall: I have set up a special web link to my address at Gizmo Project. So people can call me unlimitedly from a web page.

Ageet: That’s probably the world’s smallest PBX. It works as a Activex plugin in Internet Explorer and has a link from my website. If people open this page the PBX loads and they can call me from their browser. This was really cool until I discovered Gizmocall one week later.

The large quantity of the services I use is not so much a sign that I might be tech crazy. It’s just an indication of how much the VoIP sector is still evolving. The industry consist of thousands of different companies that offer basically the same: Cheap phone calls over the internet. But if you look closer you see that they differ in the added services: cheap break in numbers, calls from a website, use the old PSTN number as VoIP number, administrate your other VoIP accounts,…

So probably I will have soon 30 VoIP providers. For instance I am interested in a Peruvian VoIP number that my friends in Lima can call for price of a local call. Tpad is already doing a good job with their callin number and the extension. But sometimes this does not work and a real Peruvian phone number would be much more elegant. But still the Peruvian VoIP market is underdeveloped and these numbers are too expensive to me.

Source: goebel.net

Some days ago I had a litte blog comment conversation with Luca Filigheddu, a recognized expert in the VoIP space and CTO of the Italian VoIP provider Abbeynet. He had a written a blog post called Jon Arnold on why VoIP has succeeded. The two of them were looking for the reasons why the VoIP business is a success, but they seemed to see it too much from a company’s point of view. So I want to add my humble opinion as a costumer and hardcore VoIP user to the discussion.

To me "free" calls as in "free beer" are still the killer application of VoIP. I am a normal user and freelancing journalist who is happy to bring down his costs per call near to zero. The telcos charge me anyway high basic fees for my DSL connection which is bundled with a fixed phone line I hardly ever use. Still there are no cheap DSL only offers in Germany. At least I make free or super cheap calls on this infrastructure, using several VoIP providers and an ATA, so I can talk on my old phone while my computer is switched off. I suppose that many users are thinking like me.

It seems that Luca doesn’t like this point of view, although he says that he agrees. His answer:

Markus, I totally agree. But we are still far from the picture you are painting.

Are we really far from it? I am living it! I pay about 3 dollars a month to Voipstunt for unlimited calls to Germany, where I live, the US and most important countries. The rest is just plain internet access costs I would have paid anyway for surfing the net. Still Luca replies:

Ok, but you don’t get more. Moreover, is Voipstunt related to your DSL provider ? Have you other services like presence, voicemail and so on ?

Naked "voice" is not enough. IMHO, of course.

Well I am quite happy with naked voice and I don’t need more. Voipstunt is not related to my DSL provider. I have to pay extra for DSL. What I need from VoIP is just a phone and an answering machine. Any special presence functions I don’t need.

When I don’t want to be contacted I tell my Fritz!Box FON ATA from the German company AVM to forward all calls to voice mail. Voipstunt doesn’t even give me voicemail, but I use Sipgate’s free voicemail: When I don’t answer a call to one of my 10 VoIP numbers then Sipgate’s voicemail answers and sends the left message as an email. When I don’t want my phone to ring I send any call directly to Sipgate’s voicemail.

I only use free VoIP services. Maybe I am the type of client that makes the old and new telcos (like Abbeynet) cry.