One year of Vonage

I ordered Vonage service one year ago today on a lark. I guess you could also call it my year of living VoIPly. It has worked out beyond my expectations. Warts and all it was a lot more ready for prime time than I believed it to be. I work at home pretty often and wind up making phone calls all over the country, they can be quite lengthy and I've found that I no longer care where I call or how long the calls last. It's a flat rate, all you can eat, voice buffet.

Although it was meant primarily for my use, it's become a family resource, used by all. We started a year ago with monthly bills running around $35 (sometimes quite a bit higher) which made a transition to Vonage an easy concept (as long as it worked). Over the last year, our long distance usage has grown while the fee for unlimited service has shrunk by $10 per month.

There is an interesting glitch we've run into, although we don't deal with it much. Fairly often, there is a bit of a time lag associated with starting up an incoming call, which can make the typical "Hello. How are you?" dance a little weird. After a few seconds, things stabilize and conversation flows normally. I've seen this in other VoIP implementations too. We'll all either adapt, or the technology will get better or more likely, a combination of the two. Our family and friends call on our existing, bare bones local line, so it's not normally a problem.

The voice mail system is both a blessing and a curse. The good part is the delivery of voice mail .wav files to an email account of your choosing (intended for my wife? I can easily forward it to her!) Over the last year the quality of those files has improved quite a bit. They're also stored and can be accessed via a web interface for playback with additional information (incoming phone number, etc.). And there's the curse. The Vonage web interfaces (all of them) are often glacial. There's a lesser problem with resetting the voice message blinking light on our VTech phones (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't) but I'm inclined to believe it's a web side message issue because they're infrastructure is groaning.

And then...

Ten years from now we're all going to be using IP based voice, even if we're doing it the old fashioned way with a dedicated phone. What seems likely is that voice (via SIP or something else not yet created) will become a commodity protocol on the ever growing IP stack. The telco's will still have a piece and will likely still be fighting every advancement on both ends (technical and legislative) to keep their piece of the pie.

On the other hand, there seems to be a significant need to merge roaming of the cell vendor type and roaming of the type people do with the networks available.

Technically, there isn't any reason that my cell can't wander into an alternative network outside of vendor will and customer requests. I'd really like to have my cell calls ring on my Vonage line when at home. The big thing everyone gets upset about is delivery outside their network. I get that, but we should be able to use recent concepts like micropayments to compensate for the network traffic caused by lookups and slightly larger charges to deliver traffic. The end result should be like redirection (or aliasing). If delivery isn't local, systems should be able to perform the equivalent of a rewrite. I mentioned the micropayment idea because reasonable billing is going to need to embrace this idea soon. That blows up the new flat rate pricing, but may help drive it lower.

Realistic billing is going to a big part of future systems. Two thousand SIP rewrite's at 31 micro cents apiece is $0.62, probably a better estimate of cost than charging $10.00 for one rewrite.

Real time billing... we'll leave that for another time.