Quoting Jeff, this law “finally provides VoIP providers with better tools for direct access to the 911 network and the liability relief necessary”. Further, “This is the first major piece of telecommunications legislation signed into law this year — and it happens to be a bill designed to help advance VoIP”.

“…VoIP providers have made extraordinary efforts and now provide E911 to a greater percentage of subscribers than any other kind of voice service. Its been the fastest and broadest onetime implementation of E-911 in the history of public safety. As a result of these unprecedented effort by VoIP providers, Americans who dial 911 using interconnected VoIP services can now rest assured they can reach help in an emergency. It is a particularly remarkable achievement considering that no underlying network connectivity provider can yet offer VoIP providers the ability to connect to all selective routers nationwide. This bill now gives VoIP providers a chance to expand their base, and VoIP consumers assurances that they can be safe and secure using a dependable VoIP service”…

… “The advent of VoIP, including interconnected VoIP services, is ushering in a new era of disaster-proof communications systems. VoIP and other IP-based communications services increasingly serve as the foundation of “survivable” networks that provide reliable and efficient connectivity in emergency situations even when key infrastructure has been disabled or destroyed. Because it operates over decentralized IP networks with redundant paths between any two points, interconnected VoIP service mitigates the dire consequences that can otherwise result from single points of failure.
The VoIP communications industry is justifiably proud of the technology’s achievements in the public safety arena, and it continues to make emergency services a key priority. Yet in light of interconnected VoIP’s impressive track record and largely untapped public safety potential, VoIP providers need this new law to help remove the barriers that can make these vital public safety technologies available in more regions and in more ways”.

So what does this low actually mean? The VoIP industry as a whole showed another major step of its maturity and its ability to provide quality service both as replacement to incumbent services and complementary! It means that the legislators have recognized VoIP to deserve equal protection as the incumbents.
Quoting from the VON Coalition press release: “(the new law) Gives public safety, interconnected VoIP providers and others involved in handling 911 calls the same liability protections when handling 911 calls from interconnected VoIP users as from mobile or wired telephone service users”.

Congratulations to all involved!

I was recently invited to join an interesting forum for Small - Medium Business IT professionals in NY called “NY SMB IT Professionals Meetup Group” the group is organized by an entrepreneur called Mor Sela, and is meeting once a month at the PC Magazine offices in NYC.

The July session was about new Cisco/Linksys products and their strategy towards the underserved SMB market.

The session left plenty of room for open discussion and networking. At this point I was approached by few IT professionals who brought up an interesting problem.

The problem was: “I know how to back up the company data offsite to ensure businesses continuation, but what about the phone system?” How can one provide a cost effective solution to back up a fancy PBX connected with T1 lines and fancy VoIP phones, without actually duplicating and hosting a redundant system offsite?

Well, our Phone.com Virtual office product provides the perfect disaster recovery solution for your PBX System and here is how:

While the usual competing hosted PBX solutions are billed heftily on a per seat per month basis, Phone.com actually charges practically for minutes and DIDs. If you think of the minutes consumed by a backup system that does not use any minutes while standing by, this is just a perfect situation where you save significantly. Effectively you end up with a very low cost per month that starts at less than $10 per month.

The Phone.com solution requires no hardware to install, no software to download and can be setup and managed remotely from any web site or even by calling our 24*7 customer service center.

The Phone.com solution is so flexible that it can probably be set up to provide practically all of the generic incoming call traffic and functionality your office phone system has. The Phone.com Virtual Office features support both basic and complex features like IVR using your existing recordings, queues, auto attendant, company directory, call transfers, faxes, voicemail to e-mail and much more without requiring any of your existing office equipment to be operational, and actually assume none-operational when you plan your disaster recovery process.

The phone.com solution will utilize employees’ company or private cell phones, home phones and any phone line available to the employees and management at any location including their homes.

The Phone.com Virtual office will handle all incoming calls and provides access to all customers as if they were using the original company’s PBX.

To complete the picture, when you design your backup system make sure to talk to your voice-T1 service provider to re-route calls to your backup phone number [assigned to Phone.com] whenever your voice-T1 line is down. This way you don’t need to introduce, yet another, T1 switching apparatus that may create a new single point of failure, but rather use whatever basic but stable functionality the incumbents can easily offer.

As an SMB IT professional there is probably additional recurring service revenue opportunity associated with keeping the backup system updated with the main PBX system’s changes and additions. A work that could be performed from any web site, at any time, and is backed up by Phone.com’s 24×7, US based support team.

Few of what seem to be smart consumers that I encountered asked me how any limited phone plan competes with other unlimited calling plans from so and so. I admit I thought I was smart when I got my first unlimited plan.

The truth is that at first glance it seems reasonable, unlimited means I don’t care how much I speak, but the real story is that when you check each case you see that the unlimited plan has marginal value if any at all to you the consumer. In fact you may end up paying more because of that.

I had my own unlimited cellular plan since AT&T wireless started their GSM service in the 200X, I was a heavy cell phone user, but soon realized why they offered that plan. AT&T at the time had very low coverage of GSM and had to come up with some enticing plan to get people to join.

The fact is I kept the plan until Cingular bought them and decided to cancel it. I then moved to what seemed to me a reasonable equal plan of about 1000 minutes a month. Few months later as prices went up I decided to re-visit my plan again.

It turns out I had about 5000 unused roll over minutes, which I will never be able to re-use. I over paid for quite some time. I instantly reduced my plan to my own realistic usage levels and started saving about $50 per month.

The first thing you should do when comparing phone plans is to actually check how much you really use the phone and to what major international destinations. Then check available plan pricings.

The way unlimited plans are structured is that they are overpriced and are based on the notion that most people will over pay significantly. Over 90% of the customers end up paying more per minute than they would otherwise.

With limited plans you pay an overage when you exceed the initial allocation of minutes, but this is not a major issue if you match your plan to your average usage. On top of that consumer friendly companies offer the overage minutes at low enough per minute rates which is not much more than you pay anyway.

The other myth about unlimited calling is that it is in fact unlimited; the truth is it is practically not! If you keep your line open for a day or even few hours you might notice that your service is going to be disconnected (don’t do that…).

For instance, if you read the terms of service of some providers you will see the following restrictions:

“You shall not use our service or your device for auto-dialing continuous or extensive call forwarding, telemarketing (including charitable or political solicitation or polling) fax or voicemail broadcasting, or fax or voicemail blasting.” Or another vendor that has “SERVICE LIMITATION” which is “the right to limit the plan service to reasonable quantities of minutes and messages used or consumed by the subscriber to prevent abuse from excessive usage and to maintain a high level of service for other subscribers. The service may only be used by individuals or small businesses who will use the service as deemed “reasonable” by the sole discretion of the company. Commercial enterprises that incur heavy usage of communication services including but not limited to Call Centers and Call Stations are prohibited from availing the Unlimited plan… Any breach of this condition will lead to immediate termination of the service..”

Obviously if you comply with all that - which I am sure most people do - there is no way an unlimited plan can benefit you in any way.

Even our own Home Phone unlimited plan ($16.88/Month annually or $18.88/Month to month) which is a lower cost than most other plans in the market if not the lowest, is limited for home use only, where we assume that a reasonable user is less than likely to abuse the plan.

Our recommendation is always check your usage first, then compare plans, compare both local and international. Do not buy into the unlimited marketing slogans unless it makes sense for you or you will end up paying more than you should.

I have yet to see a Phone.com customer, who actually compared plans and selected another vendor because the other guys saved him/her more money with an unlimited plan.

We got some interesting comments on our VoIP quality claims described in our post about “Why Consumers Like Our Home Phone Service?” where we claimed that VoIP quality is (ok… could be) even better than a land line!

People also commented about the fact that having a reliable network at the backend of the service provider has no relevance to VoIP call quality, stating that VoIP relies on the public internet anyway which has no real quality of service (QOS) guarantees.

First, we want to thank those who responded and pushed us to elaborate on those complex aspects just a bit more.

The QOS issue is not a simple one. The quality of VoIP is composed of many elements and the combination of which also changes from provider to provider. The usual culprits are network topology, end-point codecs, audio capabilities of end-points, end-point data latency and jitter handling; end-point network characteristics, central office redundancy, reliability and connection bandwidth and central office peek hour performance.
I will try to shed some light on few and how they affect the quality of VoIP and I apologize for using some technical terms.

VoIP Network Topology:

End-to end VoIP
• Two end-points communicate directly end-to-end. Here the quality of service depends primarily on the quality of the two Internet service providers at the end and the quality of router used at the subscriber home. Most routers today support QOS settings for VoIP or in simple words capable of providing higher priority for voice traffic. Even in this topology when a VoIP user calls a land line user the VoIP provider needs to send it’s subscriber’s data to the Land Line carrier so the call can terminate on a land line, this means that even here VoIP traffic is routed via the VoIP service provider network.

VoIP via the Central Office
• The end-points always communicate via the central office (never directly). This topology although considered more conservative allow for better call control and usually supports more in-call features.

In both topologies the quality, redundancy, and bandwidth of the connection between the VoIP service Provider’s central office and the internet backbone is critical. Given good connectivity the later topology usually guarantees better performance in terms of latency. In the first case traffic can be averted by the end point service providers via back channels or “side roads”, where in the second the traffic is directed to a very big pipe connecting the central office to the internet and then back from that pipe to the second user, which means that it is more likely that the data will to travel over major highways.

Most major Internet providers that are not involved in some vengeance against specific VoIP service provider will provide higher priority to real time VoIP traffic to keep their customers satisfied.

Better connectivity of your VoIP service provider networks to the Internet Backbone is hence crucial for providing good VoIP call quality specifically in both topologies where the data actually go through the central office. Good redundant connectivity of your VoIP Service provider is also critical to ensure overall reliability and availability of the service.

End Points
Today we can find three distinct types of VoIP endpoints on the market.

Direct VoIP Phones.
• Directly connected VoIP phones provide the highest quality calls you ever experienced, the reason is that they are not confined to the base low audio quality dictated by the analog phone system (300Hz-3400Hz). In fact they negotiate a Codec (Audio Compression Decompression Algorithm) that can even be a High Definition Audio Codec and use that to send your voice over the network in CD or (say FM radio) quality. The codec selection can be affected by the network quality, the service provider’s settings and preferences, the type of phone on the other side, and so on.

Analog Phones Connected to via an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter)
• The ATA or home VoIP gateway is similar to a VoIP Phone but it has no headset, instead it uses standard Analog Phone as its “headset” (or handset). For an ATA there is no real need to negotiate a very good Codec as it is, after all, fed with limited sound quality of the standard analog phone (even if it is in fact a digital wireless phone, it is still working within the confines of the standard for analog phones). The fact that we use a short line between our Analog phone and the ATA ensures that we don’t loose more quality or pick up interferences over a long land line distance usually connecting standard analog phone to the nearest land line neighborhood box.

Soft Phones End Points
• We have discussed Softphone Quality Aspects in the past, so I will leave this one out for now.

To summaries, when I call my colleague using my VoIP Polycom phone connected to my WiFi network and to the Internet via Cablevision, and my colleague using Comcast Cable Internet also uses VoIP Polycom phone, we feel as if we are sitting in the same room. There is no land line system that can emulate that. Needless to say we both use the Phone.com infrastructure along the way, in fact we insist on eating what we cook on a daily basis.

As for the ATA (which I also use) given a decent service provider, your VoIP traffic is a small drop in the sea and seldom we encounter the problems that VoIP had when we first started the VoIP industry back in 1995. It’s a new world now.

If you live in a rural area and try to use a satellite dish as your internet connection for VoIP, I suggest you re-consider and use a Land Line. If you live far from your nearest telephone company and your DSL connection is intermittent, I suggest you use a Land Line, but if you have decent high-speed internet connectivity and good VoIP service provider, VoIP is the way to go.

For those who are still not familiar with VoIP, when talking about home phone service lets clarify that we are not talking about the ability to talk from a PC but rather from a regular phone that behaves exactly like your “old” phone service but relies on your high-speed internet connection (and not a “telephone line”) to reach the outside world.

Phone companies have been doing that “jump” or bridging from the analog local lines to the digital highway lines for many years now, all VoIP does is simply move that intersection closer to your home. After all with your broadband cable or DSL internet connection this highway is already at your house.

This method has a few benefits, one is that the analog line is so short that it picks up less sound interferences that are usually collected along the analog lines, and hence provides better sound quality (contrary to what many think of VoIP).

There are also many new phone services and features that are offered by VoIP based service providers, some like the cable companies offer what seems to be attractive as triple (TV, Internet, Phone) play bundles (usually attractive price wise during your first year of service).

We recently wrote about why we believe standalone VoIP based home phone services have their place and what their benefits are, but what makes the Phone.com Home Phone service really stand out?

There are many VoIP Home Phone services out in the market. Most are similar in price and in feature selection. NOT all are similar in network quality or in customer service, and this is a key element.

At Phone.com we rely on a robust network infrastructure and reliable uninterrupted service. And we put special attention on customer service! Our belief is that when a company is under the impression that it is doing you, the client, a “favor” by providing the service, it has no place in the market.

Customer service is NOT just how fast we answer the phone but also how we ensure the customer is served and how we thank our clients for selecting us, and yes, even making it easy for the customer to leave if for whatever reason they are not 100% satisfied.

So even if you just recently signed up and decided the service is not for you, we will let you keep the phone adaptor (sometimes called ATA) you have received from us and we will help you use it with another provider (we hope you don’t leave us though) by “unlocking” the device (this is really only for experienced users) or if you so choose, we will let you return the device to us (and therefore avoid paying termination fees).

This is just one more thing that makes Phone.com, stand out among other home phone service providers.

Though I have used VoIP for many years, we always had two “regular” home phone lines delivered by the “regular” phone company. One served as our main home phone line, the other as my fax line. But now I have gone cold turkey on both and am all digital.

I have found out that I really can not justify the expense on these phone lines, and by smartly moving my numbers to Phone.Com Virtual Office and Phone.com Home Phone and by simply managing my numbers on-line I can now not only save money but I can also gain functionality that I always struggled to have with the traditional carriers.

One can manage a home business using a toll free number using the same Virtual Office account. I for instance added extensions that dial internationally, so when I call my home number I can select an extension from my interactive voice response (IVR) menu (which took me 10 minutes to set up), and I call my family oversees at a very low cost (several countries are even included at no extra cost as they are part of the monthly minutes bucket anyway).

This is obviously at a lower cost than I ever paid all other traditional phone providers that I have used in the past and including some VoIP providers.

Now I don’t have to remember long international numbers, or pay extra when calling oversees from my cell. I can even call into the system from any other phone anywhere I am. I just dial my home number and press the desired extension and reach the person I want (and if I don’t want people calling me to know that extension 17 is say my cousin in Paris than I don’t have to list that extension in the menu).

When my wife traveled to Europe this summer, I simply forwarded her call to a European ‘pay as you go’ cell phone number so we can skip the roaming. It took me 2 minutes on the web. Usually if you want to forward your phone to another phone you have to remember to do that before you fly since you must be present to do that. With Phone.com I don’t care, I can do that from anywhere in the world.

So between my Facebook, linkedin and my Virtual Office I am all set with no old “phone company” land lines and a smile all the way to the bank when I know I am saving a bundle every month.

Today we want to point out a new section on our website where we will dive in and share information about some of our “cool” features.

Our first two “featured features” are:

1) Call Forwarding & Follow Me
2) Advantages of call “Queues”

Please visit our Features section to learn more. We will be updating this section and add customer stories to help demonstrate how so many are taking advantage of the power platform Phone.com Virtual Office offers.

On a different note, last week industry analyst and blogger Jon Arnold had an interesting story commenting about our blog posting: “The Future of Home Phone Lines” - worth reviewing.

Enjoy summer and stay tuned for more updates from Phone.com!

A recent article discusses the large number of home phone lines that the big incumbent phone companies are losing. Contrary to what many think, these lines are not all lost to mobile phones.

The article addresses a survey conducted by the Yankee Group showing that “Many consumers are not getting rid of their home phone but instead are switching to alternate or lower cost residential phone services.”
Patrick Monaghan, the Yankee Group senior analyst who conducted the report, concludes that “voice has become commoditized” since VoIP (and especially the triple play offered by the cable companies) is eating into the incumbents business.

Indeed cable companies will be doing the heavy lifting of replacing the main phone line dominated by the incumbent phone companies. So what is the faith of pure voip home phone services? So much has been written about how the battle has been lost to the cable companies and as a primary line replacement for most US homes it is indeed going to be the case.

However, there is still much room for pure VoIP home phone solutions. And NOT only as we see them today. As the article continues, solutions such as Skype are meant mainly for international calls and not for domestic calls.
Not the cable companies and not Skype like services can really replace the little box as a second, or third line, that can be moved from one location to another and allow one to keep their service at a much lower price then any cable phone service as well as offer many features that are not offered by the traditional phone companies (including cable solutions).

Also, for a very large, and growing, community of expatriates allowing their relatives to have a US phone line is a great benefit and the simplicity of the experience will have value for years to come.

The main issue this article debates is (as the title: “Cord cutters or Switchers” suggests) whether the Yankee Group conclusion is accurate? Is voice really a commodity?

Well, perhaps it is really just a matter of definition since voice (I guess VoIP) has a long- long way to go with innovation(s) and it is wrong to distinguish between wired and wireless voice with all the new ways to communicate (…as in TALK…).

Quoting Kim: “the ability to use one’s services, anywhere, any time, any place, on any device will require an enormous amount of “non-commodity” effort, probably will be highly personalized and customized, and will be priced like other products that are highly customized”

Whether prices will be high or low will depend on the market and not only on the level of customization (in many cases much of that customization will be shifted to the end user) and whether the service will “arrive” over wired lines or new broadband wireless solutions will also matter less.

We are finding that with so many solutions out there we still don’t have a “one size fit all” solution. We don’t remember phone numbers any more but we also use many phones and many phone numbers. New solutions are consolidating that.
We are nearing the time when we all have one number to hand out and be reached anywhere and anytime we want.

Kim presents AT&Ts position that same services will be offered regardless of mode of access. Question is what are these offerings? Who will offer the and when will they come?

Well, some are here already. One can already enjoy a service where one number is used to call a land line or a cell phone (see phone.com-Virtual Office as an example) and much more will come in the next year or two. Mobile providers are offering more broadband voice services and some are also trying to offer landline services (see T-Mobile’s $10 a month home phone pilot as an example).

To summarize: though this may have turned out somewhat of a synopsis of the IP Business News story. Two points that we need to remember:

1. Voice (VoIP technology) has a long way to go for innovative services.
2. One will be able to use his/hers own personal VoIP services over wired, wireless or broadband connections.

Yet as budgets are shrinking the two requirements seems to collide. While at the same time the operational requirements mount.
If you are a PBX distributer you are probably feeling the price and budget pressure from every direction, including in what seems to be, more promising VoIP systems.

The important element in the current economy is to keep the client happy with a solution that fits their budget, and up-sell as the future becomes greener. Well, most hardware systems can not provide the goods, not only because of features, but due to surmounting initial hardware costs or expensive financing models that simply do not make the final cut.

If you are a traditional PBX Distributor / installer supporting small business, there is good news for you.
Check the Phone.com Virtual Office solution as an example. It requires no hardware and no upfront cost to provide an office with all the modern telephony features they need at a cost that becomes a no brainer to the customer.
Not only that you can up-sell the solution and augment that with professional services and maintenance, but there is no inventory, no lead time and no up-front cost for you. Phone.com already has many distributors augmenting their on going pbx business with the Phone.com-virtual office solutions.

Phone.com has your back with 24×7 customer support available and can help with any handholding that may be required.
The solution starts at under $10/month and offers an all inclusive service with toll free numbers, extensions, IVR, Voice mail, queues, rule base routing, after hours and vacation handling, caller ID based routing for important calls and more.
The system is constantly updated with new features.

You can keep clients, prospects and all relationships going, you don’t need to pass on the deal due to budget constraints or features, you become their de-facto outsourced telephony manager and you can do all of that while on vacation in some all inclusive resort in the Bahamas.

The internet needs a free, universal registry of telephone numbers. That’s sort of tangentially related to ENUM (Telephone Number Mapping), but I would guess that legacy telecom is too snooty to cooperate with any sort of movement like that.

It would be wonderful if, after receiving a nuisance call, or identifying a fraudster/phisher, I could look up the company that provides service for that phone number, perhaps with an abuse contact that I might actually have a conversation with.

I see a lot of parallels between abuse of phone numbers and abuse of IP address space. IP Address space is done this way today - if you identify a spammer or hacker, you can always contact the company who “owns” the IP by checking with ARIN [American Registry for Internet Numbers].

The availability of this information allowed free DNS-based blacklists to spring up, which are now one of the pillars on which SpamAssassin and the like are built on today. Of course, nothing’s perfect, but it’s something.

Sure, resources like www.telcodata.us exist, and while they are great for some uses, they aren’t really usable in this situation, once you consider resellers, LNP, and the like. If I did take the time to locate the correct company I would probably end up wasting 30 minutes in a menu, and wasting some more time talking to a call center agent who won’t help me. With the right equipment and money, I can gain access to legacy telecom’s SS7 network, but even that won’t get me down to the reseller level.

I’m not suggesting that a registry provide information to associate a phone number all the way down to the end-user. Sure, we need to maintain some semblance of privacy. But why shouldn’t a list that associates phone numbers down to the company responsible for the service (and the company capable of terminating service) be public domain?

Take Craigslist, who (allegedly) recently started refusing to provide service to certain VOIP users who happen to be using telephone numbers from the Level(3) Communications network. If a free, universal ENUM registry existed on the internet today, Craigslist could be less heavy handed — in the spirit of the spam whitelists and blacklists out there today, Craigslist could simply record abusers and stop providing service to phone numbers on those networks.

With a nice use case, DNS-based blacklists would then pop up, maintained by people who hated telephone number abuse as much as they hated spam.