[clue-tech] internet phone

[Nate Duehr]

Louis Miller wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
>     Does anyone use Ekiga or Skype? 

Disclaimer:  I work for Polycom -- and all do is make things that do 
"conferencing".

 From user end-points to the stuff that goes in the central offices and 
the back room closets at corporations, to support all of it, from audio 
through HD video... we probably make something that does it.

Back to the question:  I have definitely used a lot of Skype and 
Skype-like things personally and at work.  I keep in touch with some 
far-flung friends via Skype, Free World Dial-Up, Gizmo, and who knows 
what else.

I swear to God, they're all ADD poster-children, and don't stick to any 
one particular technology for more than a few months.  It all started 
with early text-only AIM, and continually gets more complex and silly 
from there!  I was fine with "just Skype" but some of them just HAD to 
try other things.

One wants me to set up Asterisk so we can just put routes in between our 
houses, and is threatening me that he'll just "forward his front door 
delivery phone to your cell phone for my afternoon deliveries here in 
Australia" -- which would be some un-holy hour here... "if you don't get 
that Asterisk server built, mate!"

Well -- whatever.  He likes my company's IP phones.  (Lots of people do, 
actually.  Or so I hear.  I don't really find myself using the darn 
things too often, but they're in an emergency communications trailer a 
friend built and seem to work well via satellite IP back to his Asterisk 
box in a data center, when we use them all over the State.)

As far as Skype and other freebies go, nothing's perfect on the 
Internet, but it's all cheaper than traditional telco.  Whether or not 
you can use it for your only phone via their gateways to the Public 
Switched Telephone Network, still depends a LOT on what IP networks 
you'll be on throughout the majority of your day.  But generally -- it 
works.

(Personally I find that well over 80% of my phone calls are now on a 
"traditional" cell phone network, and the rest are on a really cheap 
metered Vonage line.  I'm far happier with the cell phone.  I have a 
friend who has a CDMA-based router in his car, and joking plugged an IP 
phone into it one day after establishing an VPN link for it back to his 
Asterisk box.  I kept joking with him that he needed to go "hands-free" 
and buy one of the giant Polycom "starfish" speakerphones and see how it 
performed with tons of ROAD noise in the background with the window open.)

For conferencing:  Someone mentioned that setting up conferences on 
Skype is easy, which is true... but audio quality suffers a bit.  (Most 
folks don't care.)

Easier yet than Skype, but for Mac only... is iChat.  Setting up an 
audio or video conference with a camera equipped group of Mac users, is 
child's play.  Especially if your home router has Universal 
Plug-and-Play support and you don't mind the "security implications" 
that having UPnP on your internal network might cause you.  iChat will 
poke the appropriate NAT router holes for itself on-the-fly.  Skype on 
the other hand, just gets around every NAT device I've ever seen, and 
talks to their public Internet servers.  (It's actually pretty hard to 
stop Skype at a firewall.  It plays a LOT of tricks to get out.)

Additionally modern "pay to play" conferencing products produce better 
quality at a cost.  Picking up a remote control like a TV, pointing it 
at the screen, and navigating through a menu of speed dials to dial up 
an HD quality video conference is "modern state of the art", but isn't 
cheap yet.  Someday, it'll be something built into your TV... but not 
yet.  QoS and packet-loss/latency issues will eat it alive on the public 
Internet.  Especially at the speeds needed for HD quality.

Actually what the REALLY modern state of the art is -- is whole rooms 
with multiple HD screens set up to conference to like-designed rooms 
where it just looks like you're sitting across the conference table from 
the other people who might be in the next room, or thousands of miles away:

<http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/telepresence/telepresence.html>

Again, NOT cheap.  Started originally by HP for Pixar so the cartoonists 
could draw things and hold them up for each other to see across town. 
Now executive conference rooms everywhere are installing systems from 
us, Cisco, HP, and who knows who else... some compatible and playing by 
the standards/rules, others proprietary.  All "somewhat" proprietary in 
one fashion or another.  It's just where the industry "curve" is on the 
uptake of this new thing right now.  (I expect many years of protracted 
debate in the ITU about the standards for this stuff.)

Back to Skype... If you want a "real phone" there are some cheap USB 
based "handsets" and even some "cordless handsets" that'll plug in and 
act like a phone on a PC running Skype, but they're not that great.

Another gratuitous plug... for something affordable:

<http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/voice/desktop/communicator_c100s.html>

They really do sound excellent for Skype and other things.  And it's not 
a headset, so you can wander around the room a bit.

And I really like the Logitech USB headsets for audio quality if a 
headset is used.  Way better than an analog headset and a sound card...

Nate