Monday, January 10, 2005
Vonage - The Broadband Phone Company
Vonage - The Broadband Phone Company
Vonage have come to the UK, £9.99 per month (about $15.00) for the residential service which includes the Linksys ATA (analogue telephone adapter) which has two phone ports and a 3 port Ethernet switch.
You need an existing broadband connection, which could be cable or DSL. If it's DSL you're paying about £10 pm for the line rental and £20'ish pm for the ADSL. It all adds up. Vonage does give you the advantate of a 2nd line, but various CPS (carrier pre-select) services give you similar primary services for about the same price (i.e. about 10 quid per month all you can eat UK dialing).
Also most broadband in the UK is actually provided by BT Wholesale (about 4.1M BTW ADSL customers, maybe another 30,000 from local loop unbundlers). Most of this is consumer broadband, which is 512Kbits/s downstream and 256Kb/s upstream, but contended at 50:1. That means up to 50 people sharing your Internet bandwidth. Generally it's not that bad, and a lot of Internet protocols are bursty (BT's network statistically multiplexes the data streams) so most of the time people wont notice the contention too much. However voice traffic isn't bursty, it likes to have a clear network path where packets travel in sequence in nice equal time periods etc (i.e. consistent latency and jitter for the techies).
There's going to big consumer take-up of VoIP services, then a consumer backlash as no-one can currently guarantee any kind of QoS metrics and calls cut-out or pop and crackle.
When LLU eventually does take off, and DSL with QoS is offered, then VoB (voice over broadband) will stand a fighting chance.
Vonage have come to the UK, £9.99 per month (about $15.00) for the residential service which includes the Linksys ATA (analogue telephone adapter) which has two phone ports and a 3 port Ethernet switch.
You need an existing broadband connection, which could be cable or DSL. If it's DSL you're paying about £10 pm for the line rental and £20'ish pm for the ADSL. It all adds up. Vonage does give you the advantate of a 2nd line, but various CPS (carrier pre-select) services give you similar primary services for about the same price (i.e. about 10 quid per month all you can eat UK dialing).
Also most broadband in the UK is actually provided by BT Wholesale (about 4.1M BTW ADSL customers, maybe another 30,000 from local loop unbundlers). Most of this is consumer broadband, which is 512Kbits/s downstream and 256Kb/s upstream, but contended at 50:1. That means up to 50 people sharing your Internet bandwidth. Generally it's not that bad, and a lot of Internet protocols are bursty (BT's network statistically multiplexes the data streams) so most of the time people wont notice the contention too much. However voice traffic isn't bursty, it likes to have a clear network path where packets travel in sequence in nice equal time periods etc (i.e. consistent latency and jitter for the techies).
There's going to big consumer take-up of VoIP services, then a consumer backlash as no-one can currently guarantee any kind of QoS metrics and calls cut-out or pop and crackle.
When LLU eventually does take off, and DSL with QoS is offered, then VoB (voice over broadband) will stand a fighting chance.
