VOIP – Are we there yet?
Having relocated back to New Zealand from Asia recently and having to get used to more expensive telecommunications charges and much less bandwidth than in Hong Kong I’ve been looking into a few alternatives.
Firstly, ADSL just doesn’t cut the mustard – especially if you live in a rural area as I do and are a long way from the exchange. In New Zealand, about the best you can expect is in the region of 4mb, assuming you live right next to your local telephone exchange. Its also expensive, with monthly caps or charges for additional bandwith. With the likes of Apple TV (recently enabled for New Zealand) movie download the standard 1GB starter package offered by most local Telco’s here doesn’t go far.
Fortunately there are a few alternatives based on radio or other wireless technologies. In my case I have a line of sight spread spectrum (side-stepping licensing issues) based radio link to a transmitter located over 10 km away based on technology from Trango Wireless. This provides up to 10Mbit which is better than the typical ADSL link that is provided by most telco’s in New Zealand built up areas. ADSL2 is apparently on the way in the bigger cities though.
Couple this with a low cost SIP based IP Phone from webvoize (About $80 SGD at Sim Lim, Singapore and less and half the price of an equivalent linksys supura IP phone) and a SIP account with an internet based telephony provider and things start to get really interesting. Although its early days yet, and I am still evaluating the reliability of SIP based phone for home use – so far it has been working well and I’ve been able to set up phone numbers for both Masterton and Wellington, effectively bypassing any regional toll charges.
If this continues to prove reliable then I am considering cancelling my telephone account with the local telco altogether. This does beg the question what are the likes of Telstra or Telecom doing about this? So far it doesn’t seem like a lot – they are still fairly tied to the phone line and to a certain extent holding New Zealand customers hostage by pricing in such a way that there really isn’t much benefit to having only an ADSL connection without the traditional phone line connection that comes with it.
With SIP as a unifying protocol standard, the next 12-24 months should be interesting with the likes of smaller New Zealand companies 2talk (still a bit buggy in their UI, but getting there), FX Networks, and a few other ISP’s appearing to be gearing up for VOIP. Propriety protocols like skype or VOIP provided by Cisco will provide some interesting competition, but in the longer term I suspect the more open SIP based protocol, which is supported from open source PBX’s like Asterisk to trunking provided by the bigger commercial players will become more predominant.
Technology | seand | 
January 2, 2009 9:10 am
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