Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Back in April when we were about to move into our new home, I started researching Voice Over IP (VOIP) services. There’s never a better time to do this when you are moving to a new location and will have to order a bunch of services like phone, internet, cable/satellite anew. At the time, after a lot of review reading at BroadbandReports.com, I came to the conclusion that a company called Broadvoice offered a service that offered what I wanted at the lowest cost.

For those who are unfamiliar with VOIP, it’s just a way to hook up a normal phone line and use it as you would a normal phone, but using a high-speed internet connection. Initially only smaller third-party companies were offering the service, but major telecom companies have gotten into the act since the service can save a serious amount of money for a lot of people, and I suppose they couldn’t bully the FCC into outlawing the technology.

Since then, I’ve been mostly perfectly happy with the service, although there have been glitches here and there. First off, until last month, our DSL service was a bit slow with a 128K upload speed, which doesn’t leave much after Broadvoice takes its 90Kbps. So it was hard to do much in the way of uploading during calls. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying. Sometimes the voice quality cracks out a bit, but it’s kind of rare. In general the quality is pretty close to what a regular landline phone sounds like.

When I first subscribed, part of the reason I went with Broadvoice over some more expensive services was their promises that various features were coming in a week or two or a month or two. That and they had a very good rating for customer support. I figured it had most of what I needed, and it would soon have things that were available elsewhere that might be useful. I kept checking back with their site but never saw any changes. It wasn’t a huge deal as I wasn’t used to those features, but of course it would be cool to have some added functionality.

Today for some reason I decided to go to their site after a good couple of months since the last time and found lots of surprises. First of all, I can now, for the same $20 per month, call 21 countries and stay on for an unlimited amount of time without getting charged. I don’t know of any other VOIP provider that offers something like this, although most are pricier than Broadvoice! For an additional $5 per month you can call unlimited to an additional 14 countries. Now if only I had lots of international friends! I feel so provincial!

The other nice thing is that they finally revamped the “Account Portal” which is basically an web administrative interface to control all the features of the phone, like call forwarding, voicemail, etc. Speaking of voicemail, one of the most useful features that we have enabled is the feature that notifies us by email when someone has called our number. It doesn’t matter if they’ve left a voicemail or not, but if they do, we get another email that has an actual wav file of the voicemail attached, and can then listen to it on our office computers without having to call our voicemail system. Of course when you for some reason these waves are not playable on my Treo 600 via PocketTunes, but I am going to contact them to see if we can figure out why they are incompatible. Anyway, the new portal actually has something that Vonage and AT&T had when I was first researching this stuff and wanted badly – a full online system to view the current voicemails on your account, listen to them, and/or delete them. This allows for much easier management of this stuff than having to go through a convoluted phone menu. My only problem is that I can listen to the voicemail “inline” with Firefox. Instead I have to download them manually to my desktop and then click on them. Whereas in IE I can just just hit the little play icon. Firefox tells me that I don’t have a QuickTime plug-in installed, but when I try to install it, it tells me it’s been installed, but going back to the page produces the same “Click here to download plug-in.” This is on my work computer, so I’ll have to try it out at home. I also thought I might be able to access it on my phone’s browser but I guess that was too much to ask, as when I try it tells me my browser isn’t compatible…

So it seems like Broadvoice has been pretty hard at work, it just took them a while to get some of the big improvements out. There are also a few items in the portal marked as “coming soon” and I’m sure there will be additional ones in the future. I think VOIP is definitely the way things are heading in Telecom. The “calling adapters,” as they are called, that allow you to use normal telephones seem to be a necessary at the present since most people still use these and they are readily available and relatively cheap. But already we are seeing “soft phones” that only work with VOIP services, but are optimized for that kind of functionality. While I can’t bring my calling adapter with me anywhere like a cell phone, I can at least bring it to a place that has a fast internet connection - like a hotel or a friend’s house - and get the same unlimited calling that I can at home. I haven’t actually DONE this, but if we end up taking any extended trips in the future where we’ll have access to a high-speed connection, it would be useful. I’ve also heard that you can’t use them in Starbucks/Borders Hotspots (Wireless public internet access). This may have to do with the fact that Hotspots is set up by T-Mobile which is a cell-phone company, and enabling the use of VOIP could potentially hurt their business.

The way it could hurt is that when cellular data rates get fast enough (and they already have for some of the 3G networks that are starting to be laid out), VOIP will be available on cell phones. But count on the mobile telecom industry to do everything it can to prevent this step, including blocking the ports necessary. After all, if you can bypass the phone company’s voice network and just buy an “all-you-can-eat” data plan for $40/month, you never have to worry about peak times or minute rates again, since you will just be using the data plan to your VOIP service. What mobile Telecom companies should really do in order to compete with this is to just set up their VOIP services and integrate them, offering a “data/VOIP” service for a $75 flat fee for unlimited VOIP calls and unlimited data. This would also enable you to be talking on your phone and simultaneously accessing the data network (say to view a web page), something that currently is not possible, at least with GSM/GPRS phones. It should be interesting to see how things fall in the next year or two when this should go down. For now, though, I am very happy with Broadvoice’s service.

Hey, if you found this useful and end up subscribing to Broadvoice and don’t mind giving me credit as your referal, email me before you sign up so I can give you my referral fee.

Engadget has a piece about inferior Christmas lights causing interference that may be effect DSL connections. While I haven’t been having problems with my DSL connection, my Treo 600 cell phone seems to be having issues when I’m at home this week. Everyone I talk to hears a loud buzz. So loud that they have to hang up after a pretty short period of time. Then again, maybe my family is just sick of talking to me and that’s a nice excuse. We don’t have any lights up outselves and neither do our neighbors on each side of us, but two doors down there’s a house with a decent number of lights. I just wonder if all these lights are causing problems for others. We don’t even live on a block that has that many big light displays, just the one that I can tell. Although other blocks not too far from us are pretty much dripping with lights and other garish stuff. It’s fun to look at all these monstrosities, but if they are going to make my cell phone reception suck, that’s another matter!