With that in mind, instead of substance, I bring you a rant. Feel free to treat it as such.

Lately, Amazon’s shipping policies have begun to annoy me more and more. Part of this is because their marketing leads to expectations that are unrealistic. The foremost of these is shipping.

On the Amazon site, I’ll often find items I want that are in stock, and have these little adverts on their pages saying if I want the item by the following day, I could order next day shipping, or some such. This implies to me that the order it available and ready to ship. And, in fact, if I choose the item and order next day shipping, it will arrive the next day.

However, if I choose the same item and choose super-saver shipping, which they advertise takes 5-7 working days to ship, the problem is that it will usually not even ship out for 10-20 days. In several cases, they’ve run out of stock before they bothered putting the item in the queue, and my item doesn’t get shipped for months. What’s even worse is that, if the item does come back in stock, they still won’t ship the item for another 10-20 days starting from the date it comes back in stock, often leading to another sold out condition, and this sort of perpetual wait on things I’ve ordered.

I’ve written to complain about it, sometimes a month after I’ve ordered, and have been constantly fed the “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but your item isn’t in stock” or “We’re very sorry, but your item will take 5-7 days to arrive” line when it takes but a quick look at the order time and stock record to know that the line with which they’re responding is completely irrelevant in my situation.

If the item took 5-7 days to ship and actually shipped within 1-3 days of the purchase, I’d have no issues at all. But the fact that, if I spend more money on shipping, the item is processed immediately, but if I rely on their heavily-marketed “buy more stuff and get free shipping” concept, it rarely gets processed within a couple of weeks annoys me.

I thought, in fact, that it might have something to do with a ploy to push people toward the Amazon prime service. However, I signed up for the Amazon prime trial, and the items I ordered during that trial with the free Amazon Prime 2-day shipping took the same 10-20 days to process and ship. Needless to say (although I’m saying it anyway), I did not sign up for the rather expensive Amazon Prime service after the trial period. Who wants to pay $80 for the same indeterminate and excessive wait times?

It’s gotten so bad that, lately, I’ve begun ordering books and items from independent Amazon Marketplace sellers because they get the books to me faster, and I pay much less in shipping costs. As the only alternative to having my items in a timely fashion is paying for shipping anyway, and the shipping from independents seems to start at $2-4 cheaper, it baffles me just what sort of message Amazon is trying to convey.

I currently own a Garmin Nuvi 360. It’s been my companion on many a trip, locally and internationally, for a couple of years now. I have numerous personal items stored in it such as good photo locations for portrait shots, the locations of excellent local bbq places, fun things to see around the area, etc. I take it with me on just about every trip, even when I absolutely know I don’t need it. It’s like a constant companion.

It is not, however, without its issues. The Nuvi 360, while having a delightfully simple interface, lacks in a great many areas. First and foremost, there’s no way to change the route it decides is the best one, even when I know it’s a terrible route, fraught with traffic, blocked roads, or other random perils that the Nuvi has decided are irrelevant. Second, I can’t pre-determine a route I wish to take beforehand, and just load that in, allowing the Nuvi to guide me on my journey from point to point, as a true navigator might. There are other numerous issues, but those are just the main ones. They’re not show-stoppers, but they are imperfections that I’ve just learned to live with that shouldn’t be there for the price I paid.

Its maps are also two years out of date. I’ve looked at the new Nuvi maps and they don’t really add any new information in any area I’ve ever visited or frequented, so I’m not entirely certain what my money would be going toward other than the continued employment of a mapping professional or two.

It is with this in mind that I’ve been somewhat interested in the possibility of a newer GPS system, perhaps with fewer flaws and more updated information.

Since I bought my Nuvi 360, however, the world has exploded with GPS options right and left. It seems that somehow, the world has decided it was never able to survive without a GPS navigation system in its collective mode of transportation, and so it’s clamoured out for any and all to rectify this situation. And rectify they have. Everyone from the old standard GPS three (Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan) to computer makers and cellphone manufacturers have launched GPS devices for cars, bicycles, pedestrians, boating, motorcycles, and every other mode of transport imaginable.

The choices are now staggering. Even in Garmin alone, the options have gone from three (Nuvi 350, 360, and 660), to over 30. TomTom has kept its respectably small lineup, but even it’s grown from a sparse few to a healthy many. And don’t get me started on the random other contenders, which have all tried to be all things to all people — cell phones, mp3 players, GPS devices, web browsers, PIMs, etc. It’s hard enough to make a decision about what GPS is best, but do I need to know how many mp3s it can store? Or whether or not it can sync with MS Exchange?

Having browsed dozens of manufacturers’ products, I’ve decided I don’t like the user interfaces for most of them. I’m back to Garmin and TomTom as my choices, with the Garmin interface being easily more elegant, but lacking in the power that the TomTom’s software holds.

And so I’ve come down to my decision: They don’t make the GPS I want. They make all the features I want in a GPS, but it doesn’t seem to exist in any one GPS model, no matter what price I were to pay.

What I want (and who has it):

1) An elegant interface — Garmin wins out here. The interface is beautifully simple and straight-forward. Everything from being able to touch the map and have it switch to 2D mode automatically, allowing you to drag your finger along where you want the map to go, click a location, select Go To, and then just hit the button to get back to the 3D driving mode where you were, to having all the options you really need out in front and all the ones you don’t carefully hidden out of sight.

2) Categorised points of interest (POIs) — Garmin again. If I want to find a restaurant, I can select food locations, and then choose the type. Italian? Asian? Chinese (Chinese and Asian — somewhat amusing)? Deli? Fast Food? It’s easy to sort amongst the lists to find what I need. The same goes with shopping locations — grocery stores, drug stores, hardware, etc. It makes it incredibly easy to find what you need when you need it.

3) Clever routing options — TomTom. TomTom not only allows me to recalculate portions of a route I know are directions I don’t want to take or that go through areas I don’t want to go through, but its new maps keep track of where people drive and when, and makes routing decisions based on the real life experiences of people actually driving the roads, not just the basic speed limits of each road. While not perfect, it goes a long way toward being an intelligent GPS device.

4) Clear, easy to understand text to speech voices — TomTom again. The Garmin’s TTS voices are muddy, unclear, and there are numerous bugs with how they pronounce streets (any ST is ‘Saint’, any ‘DR’ is ‘Doctor’, etc, etc. Bugs that could have been fixed ages ago had Garmin actually cared to do so, but they only fixed them for one voice set — the American voices, which are arguably the least clear-spoken of all of their TTS voices. It goes to show that, while they claim a global fan base, Garmin is still first and foremost for Americans, and everyone else can just make do). TomTom’s TTS voices are crystal clear.

5) Sharp, clever-looking hardware — Garmin. Sorry, TomTom, but your GPS devices look pretty ugly. Not as ugly as some, I will grant you, but the design is hardly exquisite. And to top it off, TomTom skimps on the supplied accessories. No protective case is included like Garmin (you can buy it for extra money, of course). A very poor suction cup mount is your only real option from TomTom for mounting hardware. And, of course, the device doesn’t get its power via the mount the way it does in the Garmin. It gets its power from an external USB plugin, which makes things cumbersome, fragile, and makes mounting and dismounting the device awkward. Garmin wins hands down for elegance in the hardware category.

6) Easily-updated information — TomTom. TomTom allows you to update POIs — adding or removing them as you need, update road information to show closed roads, newly-opened roads, or roads that are incorrectly labeled in direction (for one way roads). While it doesn’t allow you to input actual road geometry, it comes close to rectifying many of the problems one has with map information that is already out of date by the time it’s released (and some of which that never seems to get updated).

There are a few minor other quibbling things I want here and there, but those are the most important. And it appears to be somewhat of an even split between the Garmin and the TomTom. It’s really a shame that neither one makes a GPS that I would consider perfect, and so I limp along with my old 360 for the time being, hoping that the upcoming year might bring advances from one or the other that would sway me toward an upgrade.

This, however, seems to be a rarity in the communications world. Constantly we, as a company, are having to deal with outsourced customer service for even the smallest of companies that we work with, with scripted call centers, or one guy sitting at a keyboard, answering trouble tickets or business enquiries in the most offhanded fashion.

This gives us an incredibly bad impression of the entire business we’re dealing with, even if everyone else is as professional and courteous as can be. And whereas, in many companies, an attitude like this would get you fired or at the very least severely reprimanded, this seems to be the absolute norm from telecom and IP communications companies. It’s staggering how little care for the customer there is in this field. And I don’t fully understand why.

In the days of purely physical telecom companies, customer service didn’t have to be quite as good because there were few alternatives. With at the most one ILEC and one or two CLECs in an area, you were stuck with sort of the concept that you had nowhere else to go, so you had to put up with the shoddy service that was available. But in the modern world of IP communication, there are quite literally thousands of players from all over the world. Granted, many of them are small and may not offer all the services you’re looking for or have quite the quality you need, but there are guaranteed to be at least a dozen who do.

Why, as a company, would you shoot yourself in the foot by employing customer service which was not at the very least responsive and cordial? Are the people moving into the IP communications field so deeply-ingrained in the old physical telecom mentality that they just think their performance is acceptable? Or do a majority of companies out there really just not care about your business?

We used to do business with a company that treated us like absolute garbage because we were a small company and therefore not very profitable to them. We used them for PSTN termination, and since we did almost no business in that area, they felt they could give us unacceptable service at all times. When we complained, we were told simply, “Too bad. If you don’t like it, leave.”

As soon as we started doing more business in the PSTN termination area, we did exactly that. We left and found someone else, never to look back. Why would you, as a company, treat a customer poorly simply because he’s not your biggest customer? He never will be your biggest customer with that sort of attitude.

Snom 820

But it does have one small issue. Like most IP desk phones, it runs off of wired ethernet. As I have mine at home in the family room, and the nearest switch is two rooms away, I used to run an incredibly annoying ethernet cable across the floors and ceilings. It was unsightly and I always managed to trip over any portion that happened to be on the floor. In an attempt to alleviate this, I started using these old Logitech Wireless Play Link devices, which are essentially RF ethernet, to connect the phone to the network. It has worked beautifully and flawlessly. Unlike wireless game bridges, there’s no configuration required (the Play Links are paired together with an RF code, so there’s no IP associated with them). Unfortunately, they’re big, blocky, and each requires its own separate power source. This makes the wire-free version of my Snom 320 need a total of 3 power plugs altogether — one for the phone, and one for each Play Link half.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a working solution, and I’m happy with it. But it’s by no means elegant.

The new Snom 820, however, has wi-fi built in. In an office environment, you could use power over ethernet (PoE), or wi-fi to cut down on cabling. I’ll just be thrilled to have a sharp design and the elegance of wi-fi cable-free life without extra gadgets. Not only that, but the colour screen on the Snom 820 looks pretty sharp in the pictures, and at a full 320×240 resolution, that’s to be expected.

Add in some impressive features like wide-band CODECs and built-in VPN client technology, and you have one incredibly impressive phone that I really do hope lives up to the standard for reliability I’ve come to expect from Snom. I’m eager to get my hands on one and see the rest of the 8xx series. If the 820 matches closest to the 320 did in the line, I wonder if we can expect a more basic 800, and a more advanced 860 and 870.

I am not, however, eager to see if this does to the 3xx series what the 3xx series did to the 1xx series. The Snom 190 has some serious flaws that I’m usually able to ignore. But the most annoying of which this week has been it has no way to update the Daylight Savings Time on it. And the moment they released the 3xx series, all firmware releases for the 1xx series stopped completely. This means many things simply never got fixed that should have been fixed (updated firmware, issues with the speakerphone buttons, etc). I’m hoping they don’t do this to the 3xx series when the 820 comes out.

At IdeaSIP, we’ve been fighting fraud from day one. We just didn’t realise it. It wasn’t until we had our premium (read: pay) services up and running that we discovered that some of our new users were simply waiting for the opportunity to hit us in our blind side. We took all the standard precautions — limiting credit card transactions to valid addresses and card verification numbers, relying on the credit processors to work their magic. We made it impossible to authorise a transaction based on an invalid billing address (you can actually allow invalid billing addresses, which I found amusing). We made it impossible to do this, that and the other — all within the limit our processing gateway would allow.

And our reward for our naiveté, was credit card fraud day in and day out. Almost all of it from Egypt or compromised machines in the Middle East in the beginning, but as we locked more and more of those machines out, it spread to compromised machines all over the world. You’ve no idea just how many poorly-secured computers there are in the world that can act as a proxy from which someone can attack or defraud you until you start getting hit by them. I could use a different hacked computer every hour for the rest of my life and never run out of them. Some of them are even left intentionally unsecured just to offer a haven for criminals.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against hackers. I grew up in amongst that sort of computer subculture element. I even attended a hacking party or two. But hackers are to these sorts of criminals as people who speed are to wanton mass-murderers. There’s certainly a potential for danger, but that’s not what it’s all about.

The people hitting us, though, were systematic and thorough and absolutely determined to commit fraud. Always using the credit card numbers or stolen Paypal accounts of unsuspecting people, and trying desperately to buy services from us, either for the purpose of actually having services, or just to test the validity of the stolen information they’d just likely purchased from a shady dealer on some hidden Internet chat channel. Rumour has it you can buy credit card numbers for less than $1USD, and full identities including social security numbers for around $3USD.

I spent a majority of my time, as I felt personally responsible for each and every fraudulent transaction, tracking down the people whose cards had been used, calling them up, and letting them know their cards were stolen. It was getting in the way of everything.

My posts here, of course, became sporadic at best, as I spent time and energy working out ways to thwart those who would see us bankrupt. I worked with law authorities in several countries. We even had a professional translator translate some of the postings that at least ONE of the fraudsters posted onto an Arabic web site, explaining how he was hacking into our site for the good of getting back at the US (we’re a Bahamas company, but apparently that doesn’t matter. I guess we’re ‘close’ to the US in geographic proximity).

We weren’t the only ones being hit, of course. I know personally at least a dozen other communications companies that were all hit by the same people (and still are).

I’d be up all night, checking logs and examining new sign-ups to the service to see if they fit a classic profile of our fraudulent users. It cut deeply into what little personal time I had left after devoting eighteen hours a day to the company.

I’d hound the developers to fix things, both on the payment processing side, and on our payment acceptance side. We spent countless hours debating different solutions to fight the problem, including commercial solutions, home-grown solutions, and mixes of the two….

And eventually, we came to one solid conclusion: In a world of virtual services, there really is no absolute way to fight fraud. To understand why, you have to understand how our businesses differ from those traditional businesses that deal with credit cards on a regular basis.

The brick and mortar stores have it easy. Someone has to physically walk in with a credit card and swipe it there at the machines. They have to have picture ID that matches who they are, and when they walk out of the store, they walk out with merchandise. It’s all very clean. Sure, there’s identity theft that’s becoming rampant in the modern economy, but it takes a dedicated criminal to pull that off properly. You need to open up a credit account in someone’s name, which means you need information about the person, and IDs to prove you’re that person. This isn’t a job for the casual whim. It takes planning and time.

The Amazons of the world are a little easier to defraud, but it’s still not easy. You purchase an item from them, and they have to ship an item somewhere. At the end of the day, if you’re picking that item up, you run the risk of the police waiting for you at the destination once the fraud has been discovered. There’s still that physical exchange of merchandise being delivered to a fixed address that makes things more difficult overall.

Internet services, however, offer a service. We don’t send items in a box. There’s no tracking number. There’s no location to us other than an IP address — and those change all the time in this day and age. We never see you. You never see us. You give us virtual money using numbers and identification information, and we give you what amounts to credit for services. The services cost us money, so we have our own people to pay, but if the transaction turns out to be fraudulent, and we don’t catch it in time, that’s money to which we simply have to wave goodbye. Why? Because we’re not criminals. We actually have to pay our bills.

And so we rely on the validity of this exchange of digital information back and forth. Customers rely on us to provide them with services they can never touch. And we rely on customers we never see to pay us with money that is purely digital. It is an economy that is almost designed for fraud. And fraud is what happens — time and time again.

It was really only when we came to this acceptance — this almost Zen-like sense of understanding of the true nature of the business we run, that we were better-equipped to deal with the constant onslaught of fraud. We redesigned both our payment acceptance procedures and our methodology.

It makes it a bit more inconvenient to the potential user of IdeaSIP services. But in the end, I think users actually interested in IdeaSIP will see the value of jumping through the few extra hoops in order to be assured that we, as a company, will still be around for years to come. I only hope our users see it the same way.

I suppose only time will tell.

The basic problem for this comes down to a desire on the part of Skype to control every aspect of their service from the basics, down to how every end user is allowed to connect. The Skype communications protocol, the basic way that Skype’s network works, is kept a complete secret, allowing them to charge licensing fees to anyone who wants to make hardware or software that runs on the network.  As opposed to an open communications protocol like SIP, however, this means that you rely on the Skype developers when it comes to choices about security, stability, and user-experience.

With SIP, if there were a major bug in the backbone of the system, as there was in Skype, the fact that everyone can see the SIP protocol and how it works lets far more people find solutions to potential problems long before they become an issue for millions of helpless subscribers.

This reliance on obscurity for the sake of security and control is Skype’s biggest achilles heel, and is what makes use of their protocol a danger to anyone relying on them for business or essential communications. While one can hope that they might learn something from this lesson, or that users might realise that perhaps Skype is not all it’s hyped up to be, only time will tell for sure.

Note the use of ‘and’ in that statement to imply that in order to be considered interconnected, you must meet all the four criteria.

The USAC’s interpretation of this regulation, however, is vastly different from everyone else’s interpretation. According to the USAC, “The obligations established by the FCC apply to all VoIP communications made using an interconnected VoIP service, even those that do not involve the PSTN…” which reads as though they think that an interconnected VoIP provider is not necessarily one which connects to the PSTN.

This seems to be a somewhat radical interpretation of what an ‘interconnected’ VoIP provider is, expanding their interpretation to even directly VoIP to VoIP services that never touch the PSTN such as FWD or even MSN to MSN calls.

I note that their site was updated as of the 17th of July, 2007, and that the site archive doesn’t mention this interpretation prior to this date, so I’m wondering if this means they’re going to start to pressure VoIP providers that don’t actually provide connection with the PSTN to pay into the USF.

Always pushing the boundaries, I often wonder how long it will be before we see the USAC and the FCC attempting to charge users who send instant messages back and forth across states ‘interstate communications’ fees, or requiring companies such as AOL, MSN, and Google to pay into the USF for their AIM, MSN, and Gtalk IM services.

Tags: USF, FWD, FCC, voip, regulation, fees

This false sense of security has been the focal point of many a Hollywood film, often with the police, the government, or even the villains listening in and recording phone conversations through various methods. Traditional telephones are, after all, very easy to listen in on, as the technology behind them is exceedingly simple.

When cordless and early mobile phones became popular, this sort of listening in became even easier. Anyone with $30USD and a nearby Radio Shack could buy all the equipment he needed to hear the intimate conversations of his neighbors. A famous incident involving someone listening into phone conversations was one in which Prince Charles was overheard telling his mistress at the time, Camilla Parker Bowles, that he wished to be her tampon. The ease with which the conversation was overheard helped more people become aware of the inherent insecurity in phone conversations.

Since then, many mobile phones have gone digital and implemented several methods to help protect their users’ conversations from anyone trying to listen in. Conversations on mobile networks are interleaved and portions of the conversation are carried out on different, random channels to make it difficult to intercept any whole conversation as it flies through the air. They use this method of encryption to secure their calls.

There is an inherent flaw in these methods work, however: All data is disassembled and reassembled via a ‘trusted’ party (in this case, the mobile phone company). This is for the dual purpose of centralised management and ease of governmental wire-tapping. The phone company, then, is the ‘man in the middle’ who facilitates the security of the conversation. At any time, the phone company could choose to share the secure conversation with another third party, and in cases of police wire tapping, that’s exactly what’s done.

Enter into the equation VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). VoIP conversations, by their very nature, are more difficult for the layman to intercept, as they’re sent over the Internet as opposed to floating through the air or winding along wires as raw, unencrypted audio signals. It takes a little more expertise to tap into an Internet conversation and convert the data back into audio, but there is plenty of computer software available that takes the expertise out of the equation, allowing anyone to tap in and record if he can somehow find his way into the data stream. With Wi-Fi networks, this is quite easy, as all the data is just bouncing through the air.

It makes reasonable sense that VoIP, with its modern, technological origin, would have some sort of encryption built in that would make listening in on conversations more difficult, but in truth, encryption is still not always readily available in the VoIP world.

In VoIP, there are several issues to worry about. For one, if you’re using a VoIP phone to talk to a regular old landline or mobile phone, you run into the inherent limitations of both the traditional telephone network or the mobile phone network (as mentioned above). For another, while there are encryption methods available for VoIP calls, not many phones readily support them, and they each have their own flaws as well.

The major method of encrypting a VoIP conversation is called SRTP. The audio part of a VoIP phone call gets passed through the Internet using something called the RTP protocol (Real Time Transport). The S in SRTP stands for ’secure.’ SRTP works a lot like a secure web page works. A centralised authority hands the digital equivalent of a code word out to each phone, allowing the phones to encrypt their conversations back and forth. The centralised authority, often the VoIP provider itself, is considered to be a ‘trusted’ authority. However, there is still concern that such an authority could allow back-door access to a conversation to other people — governments or other authorities. It’s also possible that a particularly unscrupulous trusted authority could faciliate access to anyone it chooses.

This brings us to a different kind of encryption, ZRTP. ZRTP, created by Phil Zimmermann, the man who almost went to jail in the US for writing and openly sharing the high-powered encryption software, PGP, is a method of handling VoIP encryption without relying on a trusted authority in the middle. The phones themselves negotiate a secret code pair and share them with each other in a secure way, creating an encrypted conversation between the two phones. ZRTP uses a method of encryption called Diffie-Hellmann, which uses a public and private key encryption scheme. Each phone has a private code key and a public code key, and the only key ever shared is the public key. One end uses the public key to encrypt the conversation, and the other end uses its private key (unknown to anyone but him) to decrypt the conversation.

Diffie-Hellmann is an incredibly secure method of communication, that suffers only one weakness — a ‘man in the middle’ attack. The idea of a man in the middle attack is that someone COULD be in the middle of a conversation, intercepting all the calls and all the keys. He passes out his own keys to both sides, pretending to be the other person. He is able to decrypt and re-encrypt the conversation in both directions, thereby listening in to the entire conversation.

A man in the middle attack is a difficult thing to accomplish, but it’s possible, so one usually takes precautions such as sharing code words decided in advance, to ensure that the person you’re talking to is REALLY the person you expect to talk to on the other end.

The ZRTP code is freely available for anyone to use in his own software, and Zimmermann has also created ZFone, a program which encrypts the conversations from most popular VoIP softphones.

Unfortunately, VoIP hardware phones and PBX switches have yet to implement any form of ZRTP, so in order to use this newer, more secure communication method, you’re limited to VoIP to VoIP calls (remember, the limitations of traditional and mobile phone networks don’t allow for the same type of encryption yet) between other ZFone users on compatible VoIP networks (IdeaSIP, FWD, Gizmo Project, etc.)

There is simple no such thing as an unbreakable method of securing a phone call. Given enough time and enough resources, any encryption scheme could be broken. Strong encryption, however, is often impractical to break, and it’s usually much easier to rely on people and their misunderstanding of the privacy of their calls as the weak link in any security scheme. While, in this modern age of VoIP, one can still have a reasonably private conversation, secure in the knowledge that his intimate discussions won’t make it to the media, the best way to keep a secret is, and always will be, never to tell it to anyone.

Tags: zfone, ideasip, voip, security, srtp, zrtp, mobile, telephony, encryption, privacy

It seems only natural that the next big thing will be Wi-Fi VoIP. Wi-Fi phones and Wi-Fi-capable mobile phones  are beginning to crop up on the market from leading manufacturers such as Apple, Nokia, and Linksys. Some, like the Linksys and UTStarCom Wi-Fi phones offer only Wi-Fi-based VoIP, while others such as the Nokia and Apple iPhone offer both traditional mobile phone service, but also have Wi-Fi connectivity to allow connections to most VoIP providers directly without incurring mobile connectivity charges.

With the increasing prevalence of Wi-Fi hotspots, and the soon to appear WiMax zones covering entire cities, connecting to a VoIP company and bypassing usual cell charges whenever possible makes perfect sense; however, this terrifies the mobile companies, who see their revenue streams dropping over the course of the coming years.

In fact, it’s terrified mobile phone companies so much, that the underhanded tricks are beginning to appear in abundance.  Verizon has made the news lately by claiming patent ownership over the mere idea of using Wi-Fi VoIP phones to make phone calls, a fact that is likely to cause any number of providers that currently allow customers to connect via Wi-Fi VoIP phones to worry about repercussions. It seems the next logical step in VoIP, and that such a patents even exists is ludicrous, but it is still cause for real concern, as Vonage was recently found guilty of infringing upon this patent and ordered to pay $58 million USD in damages.

In the UK, Orange and Vodafone have gone so far as to require Nokia to remove VoIP capability from their N95 telephones in an effort to keep users from avoiding cell charges. This has caused somewhat of an uproar from customers, as Nokia clearly advertises the VoIP capability of its N95 handsets, and neither Orange nor Vodafone bother to mention to customers that such capability has been forcibly removed from their own versions of the N95 phones.

In the US, it’s almost impossible to find a mobile phone provider that has VoIP-capable phones available at all. Nokia’s VoIP-capable E61 PDA/phone, exceptionally popular in Europe, has an almost identical counterpart in the US (marketed by Cingular/AT&T) called the E62. It has all the same features, but no Wi-Fi capability at all, leaving the only Internet connectivity to be that which the cell provider allows through its own charged network.

Meanwhile, strictly Wi-Fi phones such as the Linksys WIP330 or the UTStarCom F3000, offer only limited performance, and have connectivity trouble when moving from Wi-Fi hotspot to Wi-Fi hotpot. Their inability to utilise a mobile cell network as a backup makes them of limited overall use for the moment except in offices or homes, where traditional VoIP-connected cordless phones might work just as well.

The technology is ready for Wi-Fi VoIP, and its popularity is guaranteed with price-conscious consumers, but there is still a considerably amount of pressure from mobile providers to keep the technology from reaching the populous.

While the news of Wi-Fi VoIP is bombarding the media, it still has significant hurdles to overcome before it is truly the next big thing.

Tags: wi-fi, voip, ideasip, skype, verizon, orange, vodafone

The problem, of course, with that business plan is that you have to ensure that the people who use your service are on the phone long enough to recoup your substantial losses for the free DIDs. That’s a huge gamble, and with their dial-out pricing, it was more of a pipe dream than anything else. On average, with Internet businesses, you can assume that, if you offer a free service, then 1-2% of your users will ever actually pay for any additional services you may offer. That’s a good average.

Let’s assume they were able to get DIDs for some outrageously inexpensive price of $3.00 per DID (with unlimited incoming minutes, which is pretty unusual for a DID of that price). That means if you offer a free DID, you have to make at least $3.00 in profit every month from other pay services to cover your basic costs. That’s per user. Now, Stanaphone was charging $0.016US per minute for US-Canada calls. We’ll assume they were making a pretty heft profit of about $0.007US per minute — $0.009/minute is a very good price, so that’s a high estimate. That would mean that, just to make up the costs for the free DID, each user would have to be spending more than 430 minutes per month dialing out.

That’s totally unrealistic.

As I say, I’m honestly surprised Stanaphone lasted as long as it did in that arena.

The VoIP market is, today, flooded with providers all offering their own take on what customers want. Open VoIP networks are becoming increasingly rare, as more companies try and close their services to keep users from being able to easily switch to other networks. The free DIDs are getting harder and harder to find from providers, as more and more providers either go out of business or simply realise that the usage they expected from customers is far more limited than they’d anticipated. More and more companies, like Stanaphone, are deciding that business VoIP is where all the money is, and are closing up shop in the consumer market. And many companies are simply discovering that the VoIP market is not the gold mine everyone thought it would be a couple of years ago, and have closed down after losing all their capital.

Some companies are doing well for publicity — Vonage and Skype being the top two known brand names in VoIP. Others, such as Gizmo Project are poised on the brink of being the next big name by offering flashy and full-featured software phones and becoming less a VoIP company and more an IM/VoIP offering. Some, such as IdeaSIP, are relying on a careful and close customer service focus that is unusual if not unheard of in the VoIP world. But the gold mine simply isn’t there. Vonage has been fraught with money problems even before the latest Verizon suit brought them to the edge of bankruptcy. Skype, backed by eBay, has been able to leverage its massive funding to attempt to gain customers by offering calls for free or close to it, but it’s simply losing money hand over fist to increase its customer base. Gizmo Project gained an influx of capital funding about a year ago that allowed them to create a new client and gain a large user surge, but their offerings of free calling to anyone else using Gizmo Project has the ring of a Skype-like attempt to burn capital in exchange for a larger user base.

Every day, there are more obstacles to avoid and more hurdles to jump. Legislation pushed by the telecom lobby creates an anti-competitive market. The sheer number of VoIP companies springing up out of the woodwork creates tough competition. The number of VoIP companies that go out of business every month frightens consumers away from adopting the technology, worried that their provider may suddenly vanish. The technology itself has yet to become transparent enough for many users to understand it enough to be able to use it. And marketing VoIP services is still an obstacle that no one has quite figured out how to overcome.

In the end, the products that survive will either have the capital required to survive the lean times, such as the ones already run by the large telecom companies or cable companies, or will somehow find a way to gain the appropriate grass roots momentum to carry them into the future.

It is with great trepidation and no small amount of morbid curiosity that I wander through sites like the VoIP Graveyard, wherein lie the brands that have already fallen. May they rest in peace.

Tags: ideasip, stanaphone, voip, rip