re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?Since VoIP is the way 100% of voice communication will be done in 3-5 years, it seems to make more sense to treat it as a transition rather than some exotic new product. It makes more sense to just to a graph of all voice lines and mobile users in a geography, then chart how fast they transition.
The numbers also seem low, since Skype already has 109M users according to their web site.
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?Good article. Thanks for publishing it.
A security company offering VoIP could be convenient for a small business owner. Unfortunately, an ADT web site suggests there is a problem. Can anybody comment?
>Voice Over Internet Protocol GÇô How It May Affect Your Security System.
Voice Over Internet ProtocolVoice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a popular telecom service in Canada and is now being offered in most main urban centres across the country. Briefly, VoIP allows consumers to obtain phone service over the Internet while still using conventional telephone sets.
When this service is installed to obtain an additional line at your home or business and is not being connected to the inside wiring of your existing telephone outlets, the communication of alarm signals from your premises to the monitoring station should not be affected.
However, if you intend to subscribe to VoIP as a replacement for your standard telephone service, please be aware that your security system's communication with the Central Monitoring Centre will be compromised. It is for this reason that, ADT does not recommend or support VoIP for use with your security systems at this time.
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?it seems to make more sense to treat VoIP as a transition rather than some exotic new product.
I think we treat VoIP as just another application.
The exotic new product may be a financial one. People will need to take an ownership position into the new and modern optical facilities. Something like golf club memberships where participants pay into the system in which they belong might do the trick. (Maybe ask the people who created 529s and see what they can come up with?) http://www.independent529plan....
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?The question does not concern VoIP technology in general -- it's usually hard enough to make work worth a hoot'n'holler -- but the business model. The question is not office PBXs, interoffice trunks, or voice mail. The question is the "VoIP Business", specifically the parasitic service providers of whom Vonage is the market leader. This is not a hard business to enter. Thus there are a lot of competitors, with lots of price pressure on all of them.
The parasitic business model is inherently limited for the time being. It depends upon the subscriber having either DSL, which is usually bundled with a phone line to begin with, or a cable modem. In the latter case, the cable companies are rolling out PacketCable, which technically is a form of VoIP but which works better than a parasitic service, and is usually supported like a POTS line by the cable company. Little things like E911 usually work, and the voice doesn't drop out when you or your daughter press the "send" button on an email.
So the parasitics are left basically selling a cheap LD service to techno-geeks and k1Dz who think it's "k3wl" and who imagine that somehow they're stiffing "the phone company". This gets them a few million collective subscribers, but runs out of steam.
The interesting thing to watch will be whether the FCC reforms the way the real phone industry works, so that it doesn't have all of the cross-subsidies and opportunities for arbitrage that it now has. Powell used the existence of Vonage as an excuse for ignoring the law that allows CLECs to compete with ILECs. But the old idea of LD usage subsidizing everything else, including overpriced ILEC data lines to schools, is obsolete. Vonage refused to play; it's time for that rule to be changed.
Yes, they would be low if Skype is included, but they aren't really in the same league as the rest. I assume the IDC and Infonetics numbers exclude Skype, but include Vonage, Comcast, AT&T, etc.
Nice article, although the calculation of total 12 months of revenue (moving picture) divided by end of year subscirbers (snapshot) is misleading. There is no perfect way unless you havd monthly figures. Another calculation is to take the average of the start of year subs and end of year subs and divide that figure by 12-month revenue or create a weighting scheme based on which half of the year brough in more revenue.
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?I think the alarm box connect to a telephone line that is also connect to some equipment outside your home, so that they can detect when your line is cut, alarm is sent to the central. If you use VOIP, that line is not there anymore.
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?I think the alarm box connect to a telephone line that is also connect to some equipment outside your home, so that they can detect when your line is cut, alarm is sent to the central. If you use VOIP, that line is not there anymore.
I dout that very much. Thy didnt do that for my ADT, and it doesn't even make sense unless yo mean the my phone provider is actualy involved hardware-wise, which they aren't as far as i know. I assumed the reason was the alarm box essentaly uses a modem to talk to the security company (when an alarm goes off), and so any codec compression would break it. so if fax works through it alarm would. but someone else told me the alarm box actually sends tones (like dtmf, but maybe not actualy dtmf) after call connect, and so compression could break that or the ATA's DSPs could possibly interfere with the tones even for 711.
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up? There are absolutely alarm systems that look for physical connectivity to the home over the phone network. Having worked on OSP issues and having them go off when you have connection problems, it is a big deal. As are the other non-POTS voice line services.
re: Does VOIP Business Add Up?There is the modem/tone issue. The central monitoring systems needs to learn, for example, which type of alarm and zone within the area has been tripped.
There's also the DID issue - the central station may use your public direct dial telephone number to identify the calling location. (Yes, Jason, I know CLID can be spoofed if you word hard enough.) When your Internet telephony number is in Phoenix and you're in Cleveland, it can become a bit confusing ...
The numbers also seem low, since Skype already has 109M users according to their web site.