The Open Road

Voice-over-IP (VOIP) has long promised to significantly disrupt the telecommunications market. And so it has. Never before have so many people paid so little for technology that doesn't work.

Yes, I know. You probably have a VOIP provider that works. All the time.

Guess what? I don't believe you. I've used Skype, Comcast Digital Voice, Vonage, a commercial service my company uses, and it's all rubbish. The problems vary, but one thing is clear:

Plain old telephone service (POTS) may be pricey, but at least it works. All the time.

It's amazing how much pain we'll endure to save a few pennies. I'm switching back to POTS.

Vonage narrowed its loss this past quarter, but its customers are cutting their own losses with the struggling VOIP provider. I should know. I dumped Vonage two months ago and will never go back. Its service was terrible, both the customer support and the technology.

I'm with Comcast now for its Digital Voice offering and it's better (which is perhaps not surprising since Comcast intentionally hurts rival services on its network to preserve its own services). My problem now is that the Comcast VOIP boxes causes my wireless router to reset several times per day. Very, very aggravating.

The most surprising thing in all of this is how much better Skype is than either Vonage or Comcast Digital Voice.

Dell has entered a partnership to take to Fonality's affordable VoIP phone systems to small and midsize businesses.

This is big news for the VoIP world--and for the open-source Asterisk project underlying Fonality.

Dell will be selling the Fonality VoIP Phone System through its global SMB sales organization, as well as its channel.

Needless to say, the opportunity is huge. According to a Dell'Oro Group group analyst quoted in The Wall Street Journal (PDF), 35 million small businesses worldwide are expected to adopt VoIP calling over the next three years.

Fonality brings to the table a product designed to be easy to use and directly installable. Dell brings its market reach and brand. It's a good deal for Dell. It could be the making of Fonality.

Look at the math.

Most people will never have heard of Asterisk, yet it's a sure bet that an increasing number of these same people make calls with it each day. This week, Asterisk registered its 1,000,000th download, while the company behind Asterisk, Digium, continued its dominance with its 24th straight quarter of growth.

Is there an end in sight for Digium's/Asterisk's success? Not anytime soon, it would appear. Tim O'Reilly has called Asterisk the industry's most under-appreciated open-source success story, and he's probably right, though it depends on whom you ask. Industry pundits may not give it the credit it's due, but customers certainly are.

Congratulations to Mark and team!

I'm several weeks into my switch from Vonage to Comcast's Digital Voice. Verdict? Comcast Digital Voice works great. It has yet to go down and the sound quality is consistently excellent.

Unfortunately, I can't fully recommend it for two reasons:

1. It has an annoying habit of knocking down my wireless connection in my house. I haven't noticed it for the past two weeks, but in the first month it was disrupting my wireless access point on a daily basis. It was easy enough to fix: unplug the access point and plug it back in. But kind of obnoxious, all the same.
2. Within hours of signing up (with a new number, mind you), telemarketers started calling. I found out after the fact that Comcast sells its customers' data to telemarketing firms. What a nice surprise.

It's amazing that Comcast would treat its customers with such profound disrespect. I've already signed up on the US Do Not Call registry, but why does Comcast need to show such derision for its customers?

Fonality , a leading open-source Asterisk-based VoIP phone system vendor, announced today that it is acquiring Insightful Solutions, a distributor of SugarCRM-based customer relationship management (CRM) software, to merge telephony and CRM for the small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) market.

While the deal is being struck with Insightful, the company that should primarily benefit (beyond Fonality) is SugarCRM, since the FonalityCRM bundle of Fonality plus Insightful means that more copies of Sugar Professional will be shipped with Fonality's PBXtra and trixbox Pro IP-PBX applications. Insightful has been a SugarCRM Gold partner for some time, and has been active in modifying and improving SugarCRM's code. It hosts more than 1,000 seats throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

I noted a few weeks ago that I was considering dropping Vonage for Skype. Today, I pulled the trigger. After several weeks with no Vonage, I've been much happier. Skype actually works most of the time. Vonage? Almost never (at least during this past year - it used to be much better).

So, today I canceled my Vonage account. So that I have a "real" phone service I also signed up for Comcast's Digital Voice service. I'll give that a spin for a few weeks to see if it's solid. If not, I'll dump it for Qwest (POTS line). I'll continue to use Skype for international calls (once or twice each day) and when convenient, which turns out to be quite often as I like keeping my phone/laptop tightly integrated.

Bye! Bye! Vonage!! I had a year or two of pleasant service from you, but far too many headaches this past year to continue shelling out $60-70/month. It might be Comcast's fault for throttling down my bandwidth used for Vonage, but guess what? I don't have the same problem with my Skype service.

Surely, 3Com could have written its own VoIP software. In fact, it has, releasing two new products recently based on its own technology. But the more interesting release is its OEM'ing of Digium's Asterisk-based VOIP appliance.

"Digium is the leader in open source telephony, so we are partnering with the most significant company in that space," [3Com marketing director Kevin] Flanagan said. "By taking the [Digium] Asterisk Appliance and placing a 3Com UI on it and supporting it with our Global Service organization, which we believe no other open source telephony provider can do, we are making this technology available to even the smallest businesses and organizations."

I view this as a toe dip for 3Com. If successful, undoubtedly it will end up going even farther with Digium/Asterisk. Why reinvent a wheel that the open-source community is already building?

(Credit: Skype)

Yes, you read the headline right. I have long been a critic of Skype, suggesting that eBay was foolish to buy the VoIP toy and generally ridiculing it as a serious business tool.

Today I'm eating crow, and it tastes great. Why? Because Vonage has been complete rubbish for me, whereas Skype is increasingly approaching perfection. I dropped my traditional phone service for Vonage. I'm now about to drop my traditionally awful Vonage for Skype.