The natural antagonism between VoIP users and companies

So Luca from Abbeynet has responded to my last comment, in which I stated that free phone calls in fact are a great thing, although he as representative of a VoIP company hates them.

Well, maybe I would have prefered from him a message like "dear competitors, please don't offer anymore free phone calls because we all can die from that". Instead of saying "please, don't give me more FREE calls. I don't want them" - which sounded as if an average end user was speaking, that he isn't.

Just a plain call for an oligopoly! A constellation that companies prefer when they cannot build up a monopoly. This would have seemed more honest to me.

I must admit that in his new blog post Luca has some strong arguments which make me think. But still it seems suspicious that most VoIP news sources are company driven and opt for higher prices. They tend to just tell what's good for their companies and not what's good for the customer. At least I would like to see a disclosure under such articles (as we see it often at GigaOM) which explains your company's interests.

People arrive at those websites via search engines and think it's an independent news source. But it's a marketing tool. That's why you see there news like "higher prices are good for you" while in user forums you find much more appealing messages like "how to make free phone calls from Pakistan to the UK".

That's the kind of information I like. :)

I dream about a worldwide SIP peering where everyone can call everyone for free. People would just have to pay their broadband connection and nothing for the calls, like they pay nothing for their emails.

That's technically possible and it basically was like this when the SIP movement started. But now I see every time more SIP blocking. Calls, which where free before, have to take paid routes. That annoys me.

Somebody has to say that too. There is a natural antagonism between companies and customers. Obviously the companies want the highest possible prices and the customers would love to get everything for free.

Every side has to make their points. Also the end users. That's why I responded like I did.

Also the VoIP flatrates, that Luca proposes as a solution, aren't always the best thing. In Germany they normally cost 10 Euros per month for national calls. When I pay 1 Cent per minute, which is a standard price of many providers, I usually spend 4 Euros monthly for my phone calls. So I would have overpaid using a flatrate.

Another example of the difficult relationships between VoIP users and providing companies.

The customer wants free phone calls

Luca-Filigheddu, from Italy's Abbeynet, makers of Sitofono, writes as guest blogger in the Skype Journal and makes a comment that looks strange at first sight.

Dear VoIP players out there,

I would like to ask you a big favor. Please, please, don't give me more FREE calls. I don't want them. I have always been used to pay for phone calls, it's not a problem. Fair rates of course, but not free. I don't want it. And you can save your VC's money. It's a bargain for me and for you. Please, don't keep offering me FREE calls. ...

Other well known opinion leaders of the VoIP industry, like Andy Abramson and Alec Saunders directly agree, which gives Luca's opinion even more weight and let's it seem very reasonable.

That's the catch of the weird situation in VoIP, where the majority of interesting news sources are blogs from people who have a personal business interest. Two of them (Luca and Alec) run companies in the area and the third does public relations for telecommunication companies. That's a pretty obvious reason why they are against free calls.

The customers point of view got again swept under the carpet. I am pretty sure that most people love free calls and cannot afford more that 200 dollars monthly for communication, like Luca does and thinks that it's normal.

That's why I wrote this reply:

Luca, I disagree.

You seem to be just rich with all the services you can afford. But not everyone has these possibilities.

I really like free calls. I pay 45 dollars monthly for a 16 Mbps DSL connection and try to only do free phone calls. That's a fair price.

But it could be even cheaper, regarding that people in poorer countries also want to talk. The real scandal is that I can call Peru for free or 1,5 Euro Cent. But Peruvians have to pay up to 10 times more for a local call on their fixed line.

Telefónica de España is squeezing them out while they behave in our markets as a price breaker.

I whish these people had the same possibilities as I have, since their wages are up to ten times lower, even if they belong to the middle class. So I always recommend them to use their internet connection also for phone calls. Unfortunately many still don't understand VoIP.

I am really looking forward to the time when all calls are SIP to SIP - and free like emails. People should pay only for the data pipe, everything else should be included. The communication should be free, regardless whether it's by email, instant messenger or phone.

Until we arrive at this point I try to reach exactly this scenario by playing around with the cheapest VoIP providers and looking for free Break-In numbers. So that my fellows from abroad can at least call me for local prices. What I liked most in the last time are Gizmocalls free local numbers.

The coolest thing I knew lately is a GSM gateway. It forwards calls to a VoIP number for free to a mobile phone. Also it lets you make free international calls from your cell phone by calltrough.

So you can use VoIP even without internet.

Best regards,
Markus Göbel

What do you, my dear readers, think? Are phone calls already cheap enough and companies should abolish their free offers?

Or should we smoothly move into an environment where every phone call is as free as an email?

Your comments are very welcome.

Gizmo Call's free local numbers can last longer than 60 days without use

I wasn't happy with Gizmo call restricting its free local numbers to just some weeks if you don't use them. This seemed quite a bummer after I had managed, with lots of effort, to authorize the numbers of about 50 Peruvian friends to call me on the same incoming number from Lima. Since many still don't know or understand VoIP they would soon have lost this possibility, what annoyed me.

But fortunately I got this reply from Gizmo Call's CEO Michael Robertson:

Gizmo Call numbers last for 60 days

Markus,

Free local numbers last for 60 days. That's 2 months which seems a long time to not hear from a friend.

We don't have any plans to erase them at that point, so the number should last even longer. It's more about making sure we don't commit to say they will last forever and then someone gets upset because they don't last forever.

-- MR

This sounds OK to me. Given the small amount of calls between Peru and Germany I suppose that I will keep my number longer than just 60 days.

Thank you, Michael, for that!

If phone numbers are infinite, why is Gizmo Call's Michael Robertson limiting them?

Multi entrepreneur Michael Robertson is founder of MP3.com, Linspire and Sipphone (the mothership of Gizmo Call and the Gizmo Project) and other companies. I like his blog very much because he isn't only commenting other people's news, like the majority of bloggers does, but nearly always presenting new features of his products.

I am especially interested in his VoIP ventures, as you can see in my blog posts about the Gizmo Project and Gizmo Call. In the last days I played very much with Gizmo Call's free local numbers. And today I was quite happy to read Michael's interesting background article "Infinity Times Infinity - Telephone Numbers Should Be Free".

There he touts that in fact phone numbers should be free:

Phone companies have created an illusion of a limited amount of phone numbers to justify an unreasonably high charge for a simple telephone number. To buy a telephone number it costs $5-100 per month depending on the country. This is an artificial cost that is not in proportion to the actual costs of a number assignment which should be a one time cost of just pennies. The numbers should be allocated freely because the user will spend money in other ways that make it profitable.

He then explains how Gizmo Call nevertheless manages to give its users free local numbers for incoming calls, although the company itself has to buy them from the telcos.

First, we purchased business type telephone numbers that allow multiple channels. Just as a business can receive multiple simultaneous calls to the same number, each of the numbers in our system can as well. Secondly, we actually assign people the same telephone number and use Caller ID to determine where to route the call.

Gizmo Call purchased a limited amount of phone numbers, for a price that easily "can be covered as a marketing expense", and shares them between its users by taking into account the caller ID, so that there are unlimited call connection possibilities.

Specifically, we need to know the numbers you want to receive calls from in advance. It's very easy to type these into Gizmo Call. And we've created a convenient address book that keeps track of your local numbers for you so you can reference them at anytime.

As I told you in a former post I managed this way to authorize about 50 phone numbers of Peruvian friends. They can call my free local Gizmo Call number (+51-1-70XXXXX) and make my desk phone in Berlin ring. That's great because it feels like my own Peruvian phone number. And at the same time it doesn't take away anything from Gizmo Call's unlimited possibilities. This sole phone number can be used to connect an unlimited number of other people as well, because it takes the caller ID into account. Infinity minus 50 is still infinity!

Michael explains it much better with an example:

Let's say I have a friend in Finland named Markku who I call from Gizmo Call. On his phone he would see a local Finnish number. And you have a friend named Tommi in Finland who you call from Gizmo Call who sees the exact same number. If Markku dials the number our system remembers the Caller ID and knows he is trying to reach me. If Tommi dials the number then our system again uses Caller ID and knows he is trying to reach you. And if you're thinking through all the possibilities if two people call Markku the system is smart enough to always use different numbers.

As you see there are unlimited call connecting possibilities for just one phone number: Markku + Tommi, Markku + Johnny, Markku + Donnie, ... Limited only by the number of Caller IDs that exist in a country. So virtually unlimited.

To assign the same Peruvian phone number to my friends I had to make 50 phone calls to them. That was stressful but I thought this was a one time effort. But then I realized that I will loose this inbound number, that's assigned to a Peruvian friend, if he doesn't call me in six weeks!

Is this really necessary?

I think not. It's just annoying because it wouldn't bother Gizmo to give me this number for ever.

As Michael said: "Everyone except the cartel controlling telecoms knows there are unlimited numbers." And in the same way I don't take away the number from another person if it's assigned to me. Gizmo Call's servers can easily afford a database with millions of phone number combinations. So why is it necessary to loose my free local number, only because my friend did not call me for six weeks?

Could Gizmo Call please abolish this regulation?

That's what I directly asked in the readers' forum for Michael's article.

I don't like the idea to tell a friend my number, but after six weeks I have to tell him another, only because he did not call me. I mean: Most people don't understand what "VoIP" and "phone number multiplexing" means! They will just think that I am crazy because I change my phone number constantly and to every friend I give another.

Technically that's not necessary, I think. Infinity minus 50 is still infinity!