When moving between old office and new, as is my tradition in packing, I crammed everything into boxes with the knowledge that should I come to need an item, I would go searching through the boxes piled in the “supply closet” of my new “office”. In almost two years, I have not touched these boxes. Today was a day of reckoning when I was reminded of an important rule: Don’t use old Cat 5 and other copper cables.

There are people who will disagree with me, and I accept their disagreement with the knowledge they are wrong. Cat 5 (ie. network cable)  and copper coax cable (ie. cable tv cable) costs between $0.25 and $1 per foot. On a new VoIP phone, you need anywhere from 3 to 25 ft. of Cat 5 depending on the location of your phone / adapter in relation to your router and with the assumption that you are not using a wireless solution.

Many homes, like mine, have an accumulation of old cables, and when you get a new ATA (analog telephone adapter, aka. that veyeop thingy) that inexplicably comes without one, you go to the pile, untangle the least confined cable, and hook it up. Time and time again I have gone through ten and twenty minute troubleshooting sessions with people (and, in true ‘Dr. heal thyself’ fashion, spent hours myself) only to find that a strange or intermittent problem with connectivity, registration, or voice quality was remedied by putting on a fresh Cat 5 cable.

In fifteen years of working with networking setups, one in ten intermittent or quality issues end up being plain old bad cables (remember from previous posts, 50% are unplug or partially unplugged cables). Just in my five years of VoIP experience, I can’t count the number of times voice quality issues have been wiped out completely by getting fresh cables with good connectors. Considering the cost is < $15 for almost any project, save yourself the time and hassle. Throw away the old Cat 5 and coax cables, buy fresh ones for the new install, and you are eliminating a huge point of failure for years to come.

Fear not our friends. Education and blogging have come together. And with the assistance of You Tube, we present the Cable Wrapping master and his lessons of VoIP Telephone Adapter Cord love. Ok, well he’s using speaker wire… but still. Enjoy.

Cable Wrapping – Make VoIP easier

Apparently, while one hand created the the VoIP USB telephone adapter “jack,” the other hand created a CLEC. The acronym CLEC stands for Competitive Local Exchange Carrier and is the phone provider (or carrier) for local access numbers. These CLEC’s can charge for access to their numbers as well as lower costs paid to other parties for making or receiving calls. It’s quite the win/win.

MagicJack’s Don Burns explained that SunRocket was paying upwards of $7.00 per month for each phone number they had. By operating as a CLEC, MagicJack’s cost on the same service — zilch.

Talk about pulling a rabbit out of a hat!

By launching their @Home service nationwide, T-Mobile will be offering a home VoIP telephone line to their current wireless customers. With unlimited local and long-distance (domestic) for only $10.00 / month, T-Mobile will certainly attract many new customers.

The telephone line will use an existing high speed Internet connection to send phone service to their equivalent of a VoIP adapter. This adapter apparently will also be compatible with their Hotspot @Home service.

That $10.00 a month price tag (plus taxes and typical fees of course) is an amazing price. And we’re sure some Vonage customers are already doing a double-take.

The parent company, YMax Corp out of Palm Beach, Florida, released sales figures showing 8 – 9000 sales per day. The MagicJack device sells for just under 40 dollars and includes a year of free calls within the United States and Canada. An additional year of phone “service” costs an additional $19.95.

Why put service in quotes? Right now, you are unable to transfer your existing number to magicjack; and according to their website, there will be a nominal fee when LNP becomes available.

With a device that requires connection to your home computer to both make and receive phone calls, this service truly has differences with “traditional” VoIP telephone providers such as Vonage, Voip.com, and Packet8. But, at $40 for a year of service, will anyone care? If you care to read more, Michael Graves has a nice little post about Magic Jack on his blog.

Voip Trunking provides a method of connecting POTS equipment or conventional telephone equipment with a Voice over Internet (VoIP) network. Vonage, Voip.com, and Packet8 already ship out phones and adapters (or ATAs) for their residential services. These ATAs are essentially VoIP Trunks.

Many companies already offer Business VoIP service to “any” device. For example, both Voip.com and VoicePulse (along with many other providers) offer a BYOD (bring your own device) business service; allowing a user to connect their current equipment to the provider’s network (Voip.com also provides BYOD residential service). Packet 8 however seems to truly embrace the non-voip office. 

Most other providers require some knowledge or existing experience with integration. BYOD plans basically are geared towards a user who knows what they want and can either integrate the service themselves or hire a consultant for assistance. Here’s where Packet 8’s offering differs. VoIP-News reports that Packet 8 will be including installation of the Trunking service to the customer’s system. Of course, this is not free. With installation costs of $1,500.00 (including the internet voip trunk gateway), it may be cheaper to get a consultant to integrate a different provider.

However, for Packet 8 to sell the installation, device, and connectivity as one package — well, that’s a really good idea for a non-tech savvy office.

If you don’t like the current telephone technology, wait a few minutes.

Imagine the technology we use and take for granted today. And now think how kids today believe that the old phone you have plugged into the wall is as antiquated as an 8-track tape (if they know what that is).

When floppy drives came out in the late 1970′s, people were blown away. And of course, we mean the new and improved smaller and portable 5 1/4 inch floppies. The ones you can easily fit in your briefcase or backpack. And if you were really lucky, you could fit that great word processing document on about 3 or 4 of them! And then, just a few years later (1983), a new smaller 3.5 inch floppy came out that could hold 4 times as much and wouldn’t split in half if you accidentally sat on it.

Then we went to CD’s where we could write over 700mb to one small disk. This was the equivalent of more than 500 floppies. Of course, you couldn’t reuse the CD as easily as the floppy, but it was a lot easier to carry 1 CD than a box of multi-colored 80′s data disks.

Today, kids think that CD’s are antiquated. They use small USB flash drives capable of storing tremendous information in the size of a lipstick tube.

So, on 1 little flash drive you can store an entire high quality episode of The West Wing, several episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or hours of podcasts from Voip Tech Chat. All on one little drive you can fit on your key chain, for about the price of a key chain!

You can pick up a good USB drive for under 25 dollars. Now, at Voip Tech Chat (.com), we are not economists. In fact, Fred’s grade in Economics — well that’s for another day — but as these products have gotten better and better, the price of storage has dropped astronomically (interestingly, Fred aced astronomy). Let’s use our favorite shows (The West Wing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as an example.

Let’s pretend that Fred’s still living in the 80′s and Patrick is living in the present (this would mean that Fred would still have hair, though not as much as Patrick). Now the storage size of a 44 minute episode at “decent” computer quality is about 200 MB. So, Fred will be storing his favorite episode of Buffy on floppies while Patrick stores Bartlett’s administration using today’s technology. Fred’s will need more than $140.00 worth of Floppy Disks to store his episode (and not to mention how he’ll carry 100+ disks) while Patrick needs less than $1.00 to put his episode on a CD or DVD. Additionally, some guy who isn’t involved in the show, can put the both Fred’s Buffy’s and Patrick’s West Wing on his thumb drive, and still have room for enough music to drive across the country and back.

The beauty of technology, is we continually gain more for less cost.

Recent reports show that the “traditional” phone companies lost more than 10 million subscribers last year to VoIP alone (even more people decided to unplug their home phones and just use cell phones). As VoIP technology continues to grow, and VoIP adapters (ATA) continue to provide more features (at a lower cost), how far are we from seeing a generation that won’t understand what a phone cord is?

What will we answer when they ask why we would tether ourselves to a wall when they are calling from a 0-carbon footprint car while eating a renewable, soy-based, vegan, no-meat burger out of a water-soluble starch-based bag?

But, more importantly, will they still recognize that Ben Affleck rocked in Daredevil?

Did you know that Paula Abdul had a hit with Rush, Rush? Not Fred, he lost a hammer thinking it was Hush, Hush.

Check out the newest voip tech chat on your computer, mp3 player, or ipod. Download it today from:

• iTunes
• Voip Tech Chat (mp3)
• Voip.com (streaming audio)

VoIP is natural – VoIP is good
Not everybody does it
But everybody should

Why would we paraphrase George Michael? Why not is the better question. You see, at VoipTechChat, we strive to be different. We don’t want to just talk about a 1979 Chevy Malibu… we want to talk about cooking with a 1979 Chevy Malibu. We’re not going to talk about a Buick LeSabre… we’re going to talk about jumping a Buick LeSabre that you could call it the General Lee. 

What was the question again? Oh yeah…. so what’s VoIP?

First of all, ask your self this question… Do you know what is Http?

Now, this is going to be like one of those Choose Your Adventure books, where you get a different answer based on your selection. But at VoipTechChat, we’re kind of lazy, so we’re just going to go ahead and post both answers here in the same post… but you’re on the honor system to only read your choice.

So… the question was, do you know what is http?

NO, I do not know what is http:

Ok… don’t worry. Most people don’t. It’s ok. We don’t think any less of you — we promise. For the record, if you’re reading this, you’re using a web browser… and http is the computer technology that allows this page to display. No biggie… the bottom line is even though you don’t know what http is, you still used it. Wow… pretty deep isn’t it? Alas, VoIP is the technology that allows your phone to use the Internet. But, since you don’t know what http is and you still visit websites, you can relax… “Forget about it.” Voip is internet phone. It works like a regular phone, but uses the Internet instead of the house wires. And that’s all you need to know.

YES, I know http. I am a Dungeon Master and I own 3 pocket protectors:

Sweet! Well, my 20 sided friend, VoIP is an acronym standing for…. wait for it… Voice Over Internet Protocol. Wow… pretty amazing, huh?

Voip works by digitzing your voice, sending it over the Internet to the destination, and then having it return to audio on the other side. You know star trek? (of course you do) Well, VoIP is like a transporter — for voice. The transporter on your end is a special phone (or adapter) that takes your voice, turns it into digital “packets” and then sends it on it’s way… and it also turns other digital packets into voice… allowing you to have an actual conversation. It’s pretty cool.

So, Voip is digital, internet phone service. To use Voip, you need 4 basic things:

1. Electricity
2. Internet (Generally high speed internet)
3. A VoIP phone or adapter
4. A VoIP service provider

That’s it? Yes, that’s it. Pretty sad really.

We will now open the forum for discussion…

First question comes from Mike in the hills of Oregon: Fred and Patrick. Love the show… long time listener… first time caller. Anyway, I don’t have electricity, can I still use VoIP?
  

No. You need electricity. Sorry. Please don’t mail us any more special packages by the way.

Mary from Utah asks: Patrick… I love your stories… huge fan… if I don’t have Internet, can I still use the Internet Phone?  

Hi Mary… um… well… Internet is pretty important for VoIP. Without the Internet, it would just be VoP. And nobody wants to use VoP. So, no, you cannot use an Internet Phone without the Internet.

Have a question for Fred and  Patrick? Ask it now… watch… we’ll really respond.