wonk v3.0

Yahoo, ninemsn tackle telcos (Australian IT / Michael Sainsbury and John Lehmann)

From the article: “LOCAL internet joint ventures Yahoo!7 and ninemsn are gearing up to inflict more pain on the ailing $33 billion telco sector, with the launch of cut-price internet-based voice services (VOIP) later this year.

The two groups join eBay’s ground-breaking Skype service as the latest threat to fixed-line revenues that last year earned Telstra $8 billion.”

Customer VoIP uptake is a major threat to the revenue base of the major telcos, especially when the consumer accesses the internet via Wireless or other alternative technologies. The startup costs for a VoIP provider are tiny relative to a traditional phone service provider so I think we’ll be seeing a lot of competition over the next couple of years.

ACMA proposes new number range for VoIP services (ACMA press release)

From the release: “ACMA is proposing to introduce a new service definition, ‘emerging communications service’, to accommodate VoIP and other emerging services. A new number range for emerging communications services (0550) is proposed. Emerging communications services may be fixed, somewhat nomadic or wholly nomadic but the numbers allocated to them will have no geographic significance.”

I see the creation of a dedicated number range for services which are not geographically fixed to be a good thing. Those of us who run our own VoIP switches or ATAs will be able to easily route this range to a particular destination without needing to guess what is VoIP and what is not. I’m not sure how the fixed line telcos will react to this from a pricing perspective. They may want to price PSTN to VoIP calls at a fairly high rate to try to discourage people from abandoning the legacy networks, but this could just as easily have the opposite effect as being the final straw in what people will put up with from the existing pricing models. Other people are speculating the cost of all fixed line calls will be coming down to a rate closer to what is being charged by VoIP providers. We will have to wait and see what eventuates.

The ACMA is accepting comments on their proposal until 14 February 2006.

VoIP rules on way, providers told (Australian IT / Andrew Colley)

From the article: “The federal Government said it would soon respond to industry calls to introduce measures to regulate low-cost voice-over-internet-protocol telephony services.

The announcement has been expected since last year when the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) co-operated with VoIP providers to develop a discussion paper on IP telephony for Senator Coonan.

“An announcement on the Government’s response to the ACMA report on VoIP is imminent,” a spokeswoman for Communications Minister Helen Coonan said.”

There are certainly a lot of regulatory issues that need to be examined with VoIP services. The main ones being emergency call handling and the portable nature of VoIP services. There is also some ambiguity currently as to whether a telecommunications licence is required to operate a VoIP service, or whether they are just considered to be part of an internet service which does not need to be provided by a licensed carrier.

The article also mentions a local VoIP industry group, the Australian Voice over IP Association. Their website says they have been operating since February 2005 however there is no information about what the organisation does or who the members are. Hopefully if they start getting a little publicity it will prompt them to publish some information on their site.

Why talk is cheap (The Age / Roulla Yiacoumi )

The Age has taken a look at some of the VoIP options for consumers which are available in Australia, and compares the costs to equivalent PSTN services. Its quite a comprehensive article while at the same time not being too technical for the average consumer to understand. I’d certainly recommend giving it a read if you’re considering getting a new VoIP service at home.

VoIP starts to talk the talk (The Age / Penelope Debelle)

This morning The Age has an article about the growing use of VoIP within Australia, and the world in general. As noted in the article VoIP is more widely deployed than most people would realise. There are a lot of large businesses and some telecommunications companies who use VoIP transport between locations instead of traditional ISDN or PSTN lines. Just because you are using a regular phone handset on your desk or kitchen bench doesn’t mean that your call isn’t using VoIP somewhere in the switching path.

Telcos debate new VoIP numbering systems (ZDNet Australia / Renai LeMay)

There is some discussion going on within the Telco industry at the moment to decide whether VoIP services in Australia should have a separate call prefix to the regular PSTN, as is done with mobile services. At this stage the ACA is accepting submissions on the topic with no time frame set for a final decision.

Unwired kills VoIP project (Australian IT / Andrew Colley)

From the article: “Announcing the company’s financial results, Unwired chief executive David Spence said that it made more sense to provide a prioritised packet service for users of soft VoIP services such as Skype and Engin than to continuing developing its own application.“

This is a smart move on their part. The VoIP uptake in Australia is still very low and they would have a hard time finding enough users to make the product profitable. Time invested in prioritised packet services also benefits realtime applications such as IPTV and video conferencing. Once they have suitable QoS in place they can always go back and look at VoIP again at a later date.

For the past month or so (excluding the holidays) I have been getting stuck into Asterisk again. I have found the perl AGI interface to be particularly interesting and have been experimenting with some of the options. One of the things I would like to implement to gain some experience is a system to phone me up just before I finish work for the day and tell me what the freeway congestion is like. While I could easily look this up myself it is far more efficient to have a system look it up for me and then based on the level of congestion recommend either using the freeway or taking an alternate route. Although if the Victorian government was able to take care of the traffic problems it wouldn’t be necessary at all!

On another note I am thinking of selling my Cisco IP Phone 7910s due to their poor support under Asterisk. While they are a great phone when used with a Cisco CallManager the support in Asterisk is terrible resulting in all sorts of weird issues. I’d love to get a 7960, but they’re a bit out of my price range at the moment.

Chariot to launch VoIP (The Age / AAP)

Australians will soon have another choice of VoIP provider if Chariot’s VoIP rollout is a success. It looks like an ADSL internet account with Chariot will be required to use the service, but they will also be supplying some hardware to enable you to use your existing phone with VoIP.

It looks like for now at least you would still have to maintain a voice account with Telstra in order to make 000 calls, but at least you wouldn’t have to pay their call rates. It would also leave you with a backup call route if the Chariot service was down for some reason.

Since the ACA dropped the price of a telco licence recently I think we’ll be seeing more ISPs positioning themselves to be able to offer phone services. This should be a bonus for the consumer as it will lead to greater competition in the home phone market, which should result in lower prices.

With a little luck some alternatives to Telstra’s speed-crippled ADSL will start appearing some and Pay TV over the internet will become available too.

Telstra to offer VoIP to residences next year (The Age).

Telstra have made an extremely vague media release about offering a residential VoIP product in 2005. The release is full of buzz words but contains no technical details on what format the service will be provided in, or who it will be available to. I suspect it will only be offered to people who already have a significant monthly spend with Telstra, such as people with Foxtel cable or a product bundle which includes BigPond ADSL.

If you are reading this because you are interested in using VoIP at home you don’t have to wait around for Telstra to get their act together. There are plenty of small VoIP providers around who will be happy to have your business. Some Melbourne based examples are ATP and Freshtel.