VOIP to replace BT?
I just saw this post on O’Reilly Radar, which refers to an article in the Guardian. Basically Tesco is going to start selling VOIP phones, and some people wonder if this is the start of the end of BT. Being in an office with VOIP phones, and using the Asterisk server that O’Reilly is pimping a book for, I can safely safe BT is safe for now. Mobiles on the other hand, they have a good chance at ending BT, especially if you could get a phone that routes calls seemlessly over Skype if it finds a WLAN connection. But everyone gets their ADSL connection off BT one way or another, so I guess they aren’t going anywhere.
January 20th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Half the problem with the phones in the office are that they’re cheap… it’s interesting that you haven’t bothered bringing up your issues with the phones that… it’s even more interesting that the longest downtime we’ve had is because someone didn’t pay the BT bill. Given that the only part of VoIP that you’re actually using in the london office is from the phone, to the asterisk server, and that anything after that is heading over bog standard, BT ISDN lines, I’m not entirely sure that you’ve done any research…
Also, sometime look at BT’s website, they also sell VoIP phones, as a cheap second line.
Skype is not true VoIP, it’s a nasty proprietary protocol and serious vendor lockin, but never mind.
January 20th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
I didn’t say they didn’t work I’ve just seen the effort it takes to get it running. I can’t imagine someone who buys their phone from Tesco going to be able to cope with the switch. What’s nice about BT landlines is you stick the phone into the socket and you’re done. I would have thought the convenience of that would offset most cost differences, but then the size of the market of calling cards suggest I’m wrong.
Office phones are a different beast all together, with the need for extensions, voice mail, line sharing and what not. Our last phone system, which was supposed to be out of the box, was difficult to use. But office phone systems are a different topic that I’m not going to go into.
You’re right though, I’ve done absolutely no research into VOIP, the entire basis of my argument is the simplicity of the one phone/one line setup that most people have in their homes. To displace that, the new system has to be just as good.