Cool Tech Reviews

The number of VoIP services continues to increase rapidly and the prices are spiralling down to free. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has the latest:

The VOIP wars are already crowded with more competitors than can possibly build a business. Well capitalized players like Vonage and Skype battle with nimble startups like Gizmo and Jajah in a race for relevance. All have their own twists on the idea of cheap or free calls using the internet. The most recent entrant, Hullo, is a worthy addition to the crowd. Hullo is most like Jajah, with a few notable differences.

Jajah allows easy phone-to-phone calls from their website. It has a somewhat complicated pricing structure, but the important thing to know is that it is free or damn close to free for most calls in the US and Europe. To make a call, you type in your phone number and the phone number you are calling. A moment later your phone rings. Pick it up and the person you are calling is ringing on the other end. From that point on it’s a normal phone call. Jajah generally requires you to initiate calls from their website, although they do have an Outlook plugin, firefox extension and Mac address book plugin as well to ease the process of calling. Simple, straightforward, cheap.

Hullo is a little different. The actual process of having a call is the same as Jajah - first your phone rings, then the person calling you. But as Alec Saunders notes in his review, it does a lot more, too.

First of all, it’s impossible to spend money on the service, at least for now. Everything is free.

That part sounds good as do the features described in the rest of the article and in the Alec Sunders review linked above. I especially like the conference calling capability, but here’s a quote from Saunders about the real bottom line:

Best of all, all North American calls are free, whether you make them on the softclient, or on a handset, and whether you make them to another hullo member, or to a non-member. When compared to Skype, this means you can make a free call from any handset as well as a PC. And when compared to Gizmo, you can make a free call to anybody, not just another Gizmo member. This up’s the ante significantly in the price spat Skype and Gizmo started.

The company is focusing their launch on the college and high school crowd. The features have been designed recognizing that young people are increasingly the most sophisticated users of mobile phones. hullo’s feature set makes it easy to use those phones to socialize, arrange events, or stay in touch with friends and family who might live in different cities. It’s not hard to imagine how appealing this will be for students away from home for the first time.

And appealing to everyone else too. I wonder how long it can stay free?

Tom Spring has a cautionary tale of Web Phone Woes at PCWorld:

Pamela Stodghill of Alabama thought Internet-based telephone service would help lower her household’s $65 monthly phone bill. An “unlimited” calling plan from the company 8×8 looked like a great way to stay in touch with distant family and friends.

But despite spending 12 hours on a (landline) phone with 8×8’s tech support staff over the course of a month and despite paying $104 in fees, Stodghill never received working phone service, and she lost the family’s phone number of three years while trying to transfer it from BellSouth, her landline carrier, to 8×8.

Millions of consumers are tempted by inexpensive Net phone services–some priced as low as $10 a month–and Stodghill isn’t the only one to incur huge headaches when things go wrong. She says she gave up on VoIP after spending far too much time dealing with technical problems and installing replacement equipment. “At a certain point you just have to throw in the towel and say, ‘Is this really worth it?’” Stodghill says.

She also reported 8×8 to the Better Business Bureau where VoIP firms are apparently well known.

I tend to think of the possible downsides of VoIP as technical issues such as spotty call quality, limited 911 service, and inability to work when the power is off. This article pointed out some problems that I had never heard of before:

Many VoIP providers impose very restrictive terms of service, including low-usage fees–surcharges that apply if you don’t incur enough regular charges in a month–huge early termination fees, and mandatory shipping costs for returning faulty equipment. ViaTalk requires that the ratio of calls received to those placed be roughly equal; if you receive 75 percent or more of the calls on your account, or make 75 percent or more of them, you risk being designated as a business account and incurring a steep rate hike.
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Jean-Claude DeMars of Texas says that Primus tried to charge him $5 extra one month as a low-usage fee. He angrily canceled his service–but then discovered that he would have to pay the shipping fees to return his Primus equipment or face a $40 disconnect fee.

Amazing stuff, but curable by reading the fine print before signing up. More by following the link.

Bruno Giussani has an interesting post at his blog, that also appeared in Wall Street Journal Europe, which reveals a little known downside to using Skype for VoIP telephone service. It turns out that Skype is actually a peer-to-peer application and under certain circumstances, your PC may get turned into a “supernode” spewing a ton of Internet traffic on behalf of Skype.

Consider this text from CERN’s Web site: “Skype [peer-to-peer] telephony software is not permitted on CERN’s computing or network facilities. It violates CERN’s Computing Rules by bypassing firewall protections and offering services to others.”
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The issues are a bit complex. Let’s try to break them down.

First, the “supernode” question. “Skype can turn user computers into ‘supernodes’ which route traffic through CERN,” François Grey of CERN’s IT communications team explained in an email exchange: “We have encountered some operational problems as a result.” That’s because Skype’s design is based on peer-to-peer, distributed networking principles. This means that the core functions of the system are decentralized, as is the database of Skype users (the tool that lets you look up other Sykpers and tells the system where to forward a call). The calls are set up and passed on among users, flowing through a chain of computers around the world without traversing any central infrastructure.

That’s good for robustness and scalability — and for Skype, which can avoid massive investments and add new users at near-zero marginal cost. For the system to work, however, some users have to take over its vital functions: routing traffic and holding portions of the database. In Skypeville, these tasks are farmed out to those users with the most powerful computers and the biggest bandwidth, such as CERN. Skype turns them into supernodes.

Only a fraction of users are elevated to this function–currently some 20,000, according to research presented at a recent conference in the Netherlands by Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux of EADS. And only a small portion of their bandwidth is supposed to be shared. Skype CEO Niklas Zennström explained it to me in an interview last year: “When you become a supernode you share some of your resources and a little bit of bandwidth, but very little; you won’t notice.”

That’s the idea at least, but it doesn’t always work out that way:

But some do notice. San Diego-based venture capitalist and TV host Paul Kedrosky, for example, complained on his blog in January that while he was traveling his computer “was sending out enormous amounts of traffic.” The IT people at his firm discovered that the machine was routing Skype traffic as a supernode. Computerworld magazine found that “in supernode mode, Skype is reputedly able to saturate 100 Mbit/second connections.” In layman’s terms, those are fast connections. The average Skype user’s PC is much less taxed than this, obviously. The possibility of becoming a supernode is written into Skype’s end-user license agreement, but not explicitly: The word “supernode” is never used. The license speaks of “permission to utilize the processor and bandwidth of your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.”

The criteria for a subscriber PC to be chosen for use as a “supernode” aren’t really clear although the Computerworld article linked above suggests that if your machine has a high speed Internet connection and a routeable IP address (e. g. not behind the average home router with Network Address Translation (NAT)), you are a good candidate.

There’s much more by following the link including worries about security and legal regulations that might require Skype users to store any traffic routed through their machines. Nicholas Carr notes how using customer machines to provide infrastructure seems to be critical to Skype’s business model and that there it is no such thing as a free ride. I’m wondering about the multitudes of other VoIP services and how many of them are really P2P applications too?