Category: voip

Leave it to Andy Abramson to deconstruct the game of musical chairs currently going on within the executive ranks in Microsoft’s Skype division. What can Skype really do at this point anyway? Especially, as part of Microsoft?

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This is the companion piece to my previous blog post about not caring about VoIP so much anymore.

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It’s been a while since I’ve really examined the topic of VoIP on this blog. And quite honestly, there’s a good reason for it. It’s just not that interesting of a topic anymore.

I remember when I used to look at the different service providers, comparing features, pricing, and whether they allowed you to bring your own analog telephone adapter. I played with Asterisk and set up my own PBX. And got into the nuts and bolts of IP telephones and ATAs. I set up some cool things several years ago.

But now? It’s just part of the fabric of my daily life. I don’t think about the fact that I’m using VoIP. It’s not even that novel anymore. It just works.Voice and Video. It’s not always a crystal clear connection, but it works pretty damn good most of the time.

Something else happened, too: the world became a lot more mobile. Mobile phone service, for a lot of people, has replaced land lines for two reasons: they’re cheaper and they are mobile.

Unfortunately, mobile networks aren’t quite geared for VoIP–yet. That will come, in time. Meanwhile the traditional voice connections work well enough and they’re finally cheap enough.

That isn’t to say VoIP is dead. Far from it. Businesses are using it for their internal phone systems–especially when employees are not necessarily in the same physical location. Sure is a lot easier when all the phones in your enterprise across various offices and home-offices are connected via IP to the same PBX.

Of course, you can set up all this yourself, as many do. Or you can outsource this to one of many providers that will manage it all for you. Quite honestly, that seems like the right approach unless you really like to do it yourself and learn the technology.

It’s very possible that, even if you still stick to your landline, that when you call someone, that call at least partially occurs over a VoIP link, with quality is so good, you wouldn’t even know it.

VoIP has really become plumbing, as one of my older friends was fond of saying (and probably would if I asked him). That means it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, but it’s just not that exciting to write about most.

At the end of the day, it’s a topic I am thankful I invested the time into many years ago. It does come up in my work from time-to-time, since I help come up with solutions to various customer scenarios at Check Point. It may be plumbing, but it’s also an application transiting a computer network that needs to be kept secure

There are a couple of salient points brought up by columnist John C. Dvorak in his latest piece entitled My Mothers Day Comcast Nightmare, where he recounts his issues with his Internet connection on Sunday:

I had tweeted this problem earlier on Twitter and found out that Comcast seems to have given up on its effective social media program, as Comcast Bonnie was no longer working there. She relied to me that “they got rid of me.” She was great at what she did, but I’ve seen this sort of thing before. A company has person doing great and important work, and it fires her because some bonehead at the company couldn’t monetize it. Apparently, it values bad PR instead like this. Accountants will eventually ruin all American business.

This is the tricky thing about “social media.”We know it’s good, but it’s hard to quantify exactly how good. When times get rough, it gets paired back or, in the cast of Comcast Bonnie, “eliminated.”

Unfortunately, human beings remember these bad experiences and use them as a basis to make decisions about which services to use in the future. Unfortunately, cable is the only real choice for most people so Comcast can pretty much take on the whole “we don’t care, we don’t have to” mentality on these things.

So I scheduled the service guy to come on Tuesday and just figure I’d limp along at analog modem speeds. In the process, I checked by email and saw a note from one of the editors of my blog, Sergio Gasparrini, who apparently listened to the podcast—from Europe—and suggested that Mother’s Day Skype calls may have been the culprit. I thought this was laughable until mid afternoon when my speeds began to increase by the hour.

By 9 p.m. on Sunday, the speed had ratcheted back up from 1 Mbps around 5 p.m. to 3 Mbps and then increased to 4 Mbps to 9 Mbps to 11 Mbps. It was like clockwork. As I write this, the system has been restored to full speed by itself.

This seems plausible, but only barely. Skype and other Voice over IP tools do not require a lot of bandwidth. It does require low latency, though. The only possible explanation here would be if there were a significant number of video calls–which require both high bandwidth and low latency.

In any case, this is definitely something I remember growing up on the Bell System. Mothers Day was always a big calling day. “All circuits are busy” messages were pretty common. What scares me is how quickly we all forget…

From: Did MagicJack Lose It’s Magic? – VoIP Watch:

Over the weekend the Telecom Law Monitor, a blog from the telecom practice group of Washington D.C. based Kelly Drye caught my eye when I spied that MagicJack’s sister/parent company, YMAX and AT&T were embroiled in a battle over, you guessed it. MONEY. For a long time many observers were trying to figure out just how MagicJack made money. Well, this FCC decision really helps make things clearer.

Something always felt kinda scammy about the whole MagicJack thing, which offers a $40 product that lets you make unlimited calls for a year (costs $20/year to renew). I never really bothered to look into their product to find out why, but Andy breaks it down.

I’ve seen a number of these schemes come down over the years. Once the large telecom companies get wise to the arbitrage tricks these smaller companies are trying to play, the game is up. MagicJack had a good run as far as these schemes go.

Meanwhile, I feel sorry for all the people who bought the MagicJack devices hoping they’d save them money. I suspect the device is about to become nothing more than a cheap paperweight.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Google shuttered the Gizmo5 service they acquired the service in November 2009. The date of closure: 3 April 2011. You can add credit to your account for another week, but after that, you can only use the credits you have.

To be honest, I haven’t used it in quite some time as GTalk in Gmail and Skype fill my calling needs quite nicely. I only found out about the closure of Gizmo5 because someone asked me for a recommendation for an alternative that supported open SIP hardware (my recommendation: Voicepulse).

In any case, I still had somewhat of a balance in my Gizmo5 account. You are given the option to get a refund for the unused balance or transfer it to your Google Voice account. I opted for the latter, as I actually use GTalk to make calls occasionally. The balance transfer is “in progress.” We’ll see how smoothly it actually goes.

As someone who works with a team remotely–and makes heavy use of Skype--I certainly noticed Skype not working properly. The reason? From Skype’s Status Page:

Earlier today, we noticed that the number of people online on Skype was falling, which wasn’t typical or expected, so we began to investigate.

Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype. If you want to talk to someone, and your Skype app can’t find them immediately (for example, because they’re connecting from a different location or from a different device) your computer or phone will first try to find a supernode to figure out how to reach them.

Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.

What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations. Some features, like group video calling, may take longer to return to normal.

Guess what Skype supernodes are: individual computers running Skype who aren’t behind a firewall of some sort. This is what has allowed Skype to scale without too much extra cost on their part. They are using other people’s bandwidth–and computers–to provide service to their users for free. This reason alone is enough for some computer security administrators to want to ban Skype entirely.

One would assume these “mega-supernodes” that Skype are referring to are operated by Skype. This is going to substantially increase their cost basis: for the physical machines those mega-supernodes are hosted on, for the bandwidth they surely will consume, for the electricity to run them, and the administrators whom will maintain them.

As a user, these kinds of outages–yes this happened before–certainly shake my faith in Skype. I’m not a freeloader, either: I pay them for both an inbound telephone number and a calling plan. Google’s GTalk seems a bit more reliable, provides much of the same functionality, and (currently) costs me nothing.

Of course, any service can go down at any time–paid or not, whether operated by a multi-billion dollar company or by a half-a-dozen guys in a basement. My advice: always have multiple methods of communication available. Do not rely entirely on Skype, Gtalk, your mobile phone, or any other service operated by anyone else. No one is immune to acts of nature, government, or buggy software.