Why Video Conferencing Needs a Better Story

By now we know a lot of details about why HD voice calls are better than conventional phone calls. We've heard how the PSTN cuts off much of the audio range human conversation usually employs, making it hard to distinguish between fricatives such as s and f, and to understand people with different accents. We know that straining to fill in the words and phrases we can't understand produces listener fatigue and makes conference calls an ordeal.

All this information is evidence that the HD voice promoters have done a good job of getting the word out about their favored technology. But we don't have the same kind of information about why video calling is better than voice calling. The general assumption seems to be that everyone understands the benefit of video communication intuitively. In reality, understanding is limited, because detailed information is in short supply.

Heavy Reading Report Redefines VoIP Disruption

There has been a lot of confusion about the disruptive potential of VoIP innovation. Although announcements about supposedly disruptive new VoIP-based technologies or services occur regularly, somehow the dominant telecom carriers manage to remain dominant. In fact, their toughest competitors are other types of dominant carriers. At present, the three most powerful classes of competitors in telecommunications are landline, mobile and cable telephony providers, and all three employ conventional commercial and technical models. Although cable providers use VoIP, in every other way they are themselves traditional telcos.

Why 3G VoIP Is No Big Deal – For Now

When fring and iCall announced recently that they were introducing iPhone 3G VoIP calling apps, it seemed a turning point for mobile VoIP. The apps, which recent changes in the Apple SDK made possible, made it clear that there's no turning back: VoIP over cellular data connections will soon become commonplace. What was less obvious was that, at this point, 3G VoIP won't have major impact, at least in the U.S. That's because under existing major mobile pricing plans, it won't produce significant savings for most users.

XConnect's HD Voice Peering Trial: Focusing on Who Rather Than How

XConnect's recently announced plan for a trial HD voice peering federation marks a significant advance in the move to HD communication. The trial, to take place between April and June of this year, will directly connect providers offering HD voice services. That will let them pass HD calls, which provide audio quality superior to that of conventional PSTN phone calls, to one another rather than just among their own customers. The trial thus represents an effort to start building a critical mass of HD-capable voice subscribers. As such, it is as much a commercial effort as a technical one.

Vidtel Aims to Take the Complexity Out of Video Communication

Making a video call, particularly one with good video quality, is a lot more complicated than making a voice call. No one system or service ties together all types of video communication equipment and users in a single network like the PSTN. In order to communicate, callers must have compatible equipment, network setups and/or software. They must also use the same method for identifying and connecting to other users. It's a far cry from just picking up a phone and dialing.

Ifbyphone's Cloudvox Buy Highlights Questions About Platforms' Future

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox brought together two approaches to the hosted platform services business. One involves selling access to ready-to-use applications developed by the platform provider itself. That's what Ifbyphone has done from the start. The other involves providing the basic building blocks that allow developers to create their own apps. That's what Cloudvox was invented to do. The acquisition will allow Ifbyphone to do both. The question is which approach, if either, will predominate in the future.

Does AT&T Really Want to Get Rid of the PSTN?

When AT&T responded late last year to the FCC's request for comment on the transition from circuit-switched to all-IP public telephone infrastructure, it seemed to mark a turning point in the history of telecommunications. The 30-page letter the telco filed on December 21 urged the total phaseout of POTS (traditional "plain old telephone service") and the PSTN (public switched telephone network) on which it runs. It also recommended that the agency set a firm date for the transition in order to ensure that it happen as quickly as possible. Thus the company whose name is virtually synonymous with traditional telephony seemed to cast a clear vote in favor of the all-VoIP future. In reality, though, it was just as much a vote against AT&T's traditional service obligations. It was also a shrewd attempt to bind the phone company's interests to the high-profile issue of universal broadband access.

The Top 25 VoIP Advances of 2009

There were more advances than true innovations in the VoIP world in 2009. That's because some of the most important developments had more to do with commercial and political maneuvers than with technical creativity. Still, such maneuvers often helped spread the benefits of VoIP as much as did technical innovation. And collectively, the advances brought some already-evident trends into clearer focus. A key such trend is the increasing integration of voice with other applications and services. Another is the intensifying interest in HD voice. A third is the growing interconnection of VoIP services, in part in response to the possibilities that end-to-end HD voice offers. With such trends as background, here, in no particular order, are our top 25 VoIP advances of 2009.

Phone.com Offers iNums to Hosted VoIP Customers

Phone.com has become the latest VoIP provider to offer iNums to its customers. iNums are virtual numbers with their own country code, which is 883. Instead of going to subscribers in specific countries, however, the way calls beginning with 44 go to the U.K., calls to 883 numbers go to VoIP subscribers, regardless of where they are in the world. iNums let callers from around the world reach the subscribers for the cost of a local call. As such, iNums amount to global toll-free numbers.

Nimbuzz First Customer for GIPS Android HD Codec

The most widely recognized obstacle to mobile VoIP running over cellular data networks is carriers' opposition. Mobile operators don't want to allow services that compete with their lucrative voice minutes businesses to run over their networks, because it means all they'll get paid for is transporting the bits carrying the voice, a far less lucrative business. A less-known obstacle to the service is call quality concerns. Regular voice calls can sound bad enough, but delivering them over a data network not designed with real-time services like voice in mind. A Global IP Solutions (GIPS) answer to the latter problem is now available for Android users.

Google Voice-Gizmo5 Combination Means Free Inbound, Outbound Calling

TechCrunch reported this morning that Google has bought Gizmo5 for $30 million. Gizmo5 is a SIP-based Internet phone service that competes with Skype. Such an acquisition would make sense, given the already-close relationship between Google's Voice service and Gizmo5. One little-noticed effect of that relationship is that the combined services already allow free inbound and outbound calling to and from the PSTN via Internet-connected PCs with headsets. A formal acquisition would presumably make such calling even easier.

Ribbit Mobile No Google Voice Clone

The most common reaction to the newly introduced Ribbit Mobile service is that it's a Google Voice competitor. In some ways that's true, but there are significant differences between the two. The main one is that Ribbit Mobile makes one's existing mobile number the main number, while Google Voice hangs all its services on a new number it provides. For most users, one approach will be clearly better than the other.

Polycom Adds New Desk and Video Phones to Lineup

Polycom has added several new desk phones to its product portfolio. One brings SIP-based HD voice capability for under $200. A second works specifically with Microsoft OCS 2007. And a third provides compatibility with both video conferencing and unified communications platforms.

In a Biannual VoIP Market Worth $21 Billion, Where's the Innovation?

The numbers from Infonetics Research certainly sounded impressive. A new report by the market research firm revealed that the global market for VoIP services reached $21 billion in the first half of 2009. That sheer volume of revenue made it seem as if VoIP had become the massively disruptive technology everyone said it was going to be. A closer look, however, reveals just the opposite. In fact, VoIP itself is not inherently disruptive. Rather, it's merely a technology that makes the creation of disruptive services possible for those with the vision and insight to use it that way.

Phone.com Introduces Hosted HD VoIP Service

HD (high-definition) voice is getting increasing attention from both users and providers of business VoIP services. It offers a number of advantages over standard voice calling, especially in business situations. It makes calls less fatiguing, and different accents easier to understand. Until now, though, smaller businesses have had trouble taking advantage of the technology. To fill the gap, Phone.com has just added HD voice capability to its hosted phone service for SMBs.