Here is a real VoIP supporter.

Almost two years ago, my wife and I purchased a home in beautiful, sunny northeast Ohio. Prior to the move, we’d been dealing with Alltel for our local phone service. It was costing us around fifty bucks a month for basic local features and a small clump of long distance. Of course, I’d used iChat and other VoIP software goodies over my Comcast broadband connection, so I knew there was enough bandwidth for us to make the switch. We decided on Packet8 and scheduled the turn-up date for April 7, our move-in date. I hooked the ATA up to the house wiring and the rest is history. I haven’t been an Alltel customer since. But it seems I’m not the only one:

My wife and I are buying a house. It’s 28 years old and needs an extreme wiring makeover. But that’s another story.

So I want to get some feedback from you guys about my game plan for moving day. I have vonage right now and plan on having the cable modem hooked up and running the first day were there.

I’m going to set up a structured wiring scheme in the house. Everything will go to the utility room were the wires come into the house. I will have the cable modem, router, and phone adapter mounted in there…along with phone, data, and cable distribution.

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Cablevision, the last MSO to report its fourth quarter earnings added 130,000 new VoIP customers, up just 7,000 from the previous quarter. The company also added, 94,000 new broadband customers, up from 81,000 adds in the previous quarter. For 2005, Cablevision added 341,793 broadband subscribers and 458,653 VoIP subscribers. Time Warner had also experienced similar growth for its broadband and VoIP services. Some of the smaller players are experiencing triple digit growth in their voice subscribers. According to UBS research estimates, there were 5.1 million cable voice users at year end, up 63% annually and 14% sequentially.

Read more

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2005 was a great year for Vonage Canada and we would not have been able to do it without support from you - our customers. In 2005 we made great strides in achieving our goal of offering local Vonage service to 90% of Canadians in Tier 1 and Tier 2 communities across the country. We look forward to a stellar 2006, filled with exciting new services and equipment choices for our customers, and further network expansion so even more Canadians can join the Vonage Internet Phone Service revolution!

Some of the highlights of 2005 included:

• Expanding local Vonage VoIP phone service to more than 60 Canadian communities
• Launching the Vonage customer care centre in Canada, which offers service for you in 14 languages
• Working closely with the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to draft a new emergency 911 policy on behalf of the Canadian telecommunications industry
• Expanding Vonage retail availability to more than 1300 retail outlets across Canada
• Launching a broad choice of equipment options for our online customers. Customers can now get a wireless router or a VoIP phone with the adapter built right in!

You can look forward to much more in 2006!

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If these phones from Switzerland come to fruition and get released they may be some of the cooler devices to let you roam between GSM and WiFi networks seamlessly and make VoIP calls when you’re in areas where WiFi is stronger than the cell signal.

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OTTAWA (Reuters)—Nortel Networks Corp., one of the world’s biggest telecommunications equipment suppliers, said on Thursday it will unveil a $1.9 billion spending plan for research and development next week.

“We have teams working on where and how we’re going to be investing the $1.9 billion. We’ll be announcing it next week,” chief executive Mike Zafirovski told a conference in Whistler, British Columbia.

“We have thrown a challenge, for us to have a 20 points of market share minimum in anything in which we participate today. And if not, obviously to be looking for some alternatives.”

Zafirovski, who marks 100 days in the CEO post on Friday, said the company will consider reinvesting its R&D budget in areas where it has a better chance to dominate.

“This is intended to be a growth story and will be a growth story. So though we may be exiting some activities … we will be reinvesting in places we’re going to win,” Zafirovski told the media and technology conference on a Webcast.

“It’s a combination of business transformation and realigning our investments to have this be an organization that has profitable growth as a key expectation.”

Calling 2006 a transformation year, Zafirovski said the company is at “ground zero.” Since 1999, Nortel has been stung by layoffs that cut about two-thirds of its staff, financial restatements, lawsuits, and regulatory and criminal probes.

“We have 10 layers in the organization, which is crazy. We’re going down to six,” he said.

Zafirovski has been shaking up operations since his appointment November 15. The former Motorola and General Electric boss has named several new senior executives and reshaped operations.

Nortel is buying router maker Tasman Networks for $99.5 million, has struck a joint venture with Chinese rival Huawei Technologies for high-speed access products, and has sold its blade-server switch unit.

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Voice-computing mash up continues. Today, France-based OpenWengo released a Firefox extension that allows users to make free phone calls to each other. Open Wengo’s parent company, Neuf Telecom offers the optional Wengo call-out service so that you can dial out to PSTN/Mobile numbers. Till recently, they have been pushing a classic softphone, but I am betting that the Firefox extension is going to be quite popular. If you are signing up for this, let me know … we can chat!

Open Wengo, in many ways is like OpenZoep, an open source effort by Dutch start-up, Zoep. They also have a Firefox extension that allows users to make phone calls from within their browser. Like Open Wengo, it is SIP based and allows you to call old-school PSTN (and Mobile) numbers. Zoep acts like a back end engine for this service.

OpenWengo and OpenZoep are two examples of “mashed-up” apps that have a potential of mimicking the viral growth of Skype.

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Last week at 3GSM, Steve Ballmer introduced a service for Windows Mobile devices which allows them to become endpoints for free voice over IP calls. The immediate significance of this development is unclear–but one thing is sure: it puts Microsoft at competitive odds with Verizon, Cingular, and the rest. Whether or not Microsoft tries to heavily monetize (and therefore market) this service remains to be seen. So far, Microsoft has had very limited success with the service subscription model.

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Network World has a great lab test article comparing the call quality performance of several commercial VPN packages with VoIP running over them. They’ve used the tried-and-true Mean Opinion Score rating system (see, system performance does have an impact on user opinion!) to show how VoIP call quality varies from one vendor to the next. NW hasn’t gone as far as employing various QoS standards in their research, but the results are spelled out very clearly, and it bears repeating: latency is the enemy of voice over IP.

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British Telecom is getting serious about VoIP. Under competitive pressure from upstarts, they are taking battle into the enemy camp. The proof of this comes in their decision to bring price parity in their BT Communicator (PC-client) and BT Broadband Talk (that uses an ATA) services. The British incumbent will also offer its BT Broadband Talk service to customers who don’t buy broadband access from BT.

This is a good move for the UK incumbent which is facing increasing competitive pressure from upstarts. The biggest threat to BT’s voice business comes from Tesco, the supermarket chain that has started to market its bargain-basement VoIP services to its customers. Wanadoo, another BT rival has signed-up 100,000 customers in less than 12-months it has offered a VoIP package. Dixons, VoIP Cheap, and scores of others have jumped into the VoIP arena, in a situation reminiscent of the early days of DSL. Nevertheless, BT’s efforts will dampen (and perhaps further increase marketing costs) of voice service providers such as Vonage.

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That’s the formula for sarin, a deadly gas said to be a favorite of terrorists.

So let us say you have a terrorist in Amman, Jordan talking to a compatriot in Hamburg who has a line on some guy who trades in deadly chemicals, toxins, or naughty biowarfare agents.

And let us say they then dial up another compatriot in New Jersey.

If these calls are being made over Skype the conversations are being encrypted by 256-bit long Skype encryption keys are a length that at least in theory, would take a literal eternity to crack.

The National Security Agency may not be able to intercept them. Or even know that they are going on.

That’s according to Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at Counterpane Internet Security.

Schneier tells the AP’s Peter Svensson that even if Skype’s encryption is weaker then believed, it would still stymie the type of broad eversdroppoing that the National Security Agency is said to be performing. That eavesdropping is believed to involve scanning up to millions of calls at a time for certain phrases.

Even a weakly encrypted call would force an eavesdroopper to spend hours of computer time cracking it, adds Svensson via Schneier.

Skype’s chief security officer Kurt Sauer tells Svensson that there are no “back doors” that could let a governmentpass the encryption on a call. He does add, however, that the company complies with all government requests in this area.

But my question is, what if the government- the NSA or whatever, doesn’t know that these terrorists are talking over Skype because they cannot intercept the call?

Scary.

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