My answer to Jeff Pulver's "Call for More Innovation in Voice Services"

Jeff Pulver and Ken Camp are bored from what they've seen in VoIP lately. That's why Jeff startet a "challenge for innovative disruptors with regards to the voice applications industry":

Think about presence and voice and instant messaging, take a look at the APIs of twitter and Facebook and pitch me on the service that you want to create. Those who get my attention might end up with the early-early seed capital needed to turn their dream into a reality.

So what could that be? Jeff doesn’t want to hear about a service that's simply a variation on Call Forwarding and/or Voicemail. It has to be something really different. Something cool. Something that truly helps to redefine communications.

I am really courious to see the winner of this competition. I don't know why Jeff is so excited about Twitter and Facebook. To me these applications are mostly a waste of time. But what I would love to have is a "Hosted Fring with Grandcentral's filter rules and international mobile callforward over GSM".

What does that mean?

I like Fring because it connects me with just one program to my contacts at Skype, MSN messenger and Google Talk. Lately it also works as a VoIP client. But only on my Nokia mobile phone!

Why isn't there a website that does the same like Fring? Why isn't Fring a hosted service? I would love to leave my login data for all these services on their website and connect to it over SIP from my ATA. A kind of Voxalot, but extended with Skype, MSN messenger and Google Talk.

Whenever somebody contacts me, my phone should ring. Outgoing calls to Skype, MSN, Google or phone numbers should also be made with my normal phone. The server would decide automatically how to connect the call, because it has call rules for that - like Voxalot has.

Incoming calls would be filtered like at Grandcentral. Annoying people could only leave a voicemail and good friends could ring my phone day and night.

This service should of course not only work over an ATA but also over the mobile phone network. Internationally! There are more and more international MVNOs slashing roaming charges and giving local fixed line numbers to mobile phones. This means they already have an own SIP infrastructure and GSM gateways in every country. If they can give me a local fixed line number in a country, they can also deliver cheaply the described calls from Skype, MSN, Google and my home VoIP providers over GSM.

Outgoing calls should be done the Nimbuzz way:

Call your IM buddies on their mobile or on their PC. At the cost of a local call, worldwide. No credits needed.

A small application on my mobile phone would always know which cheap number to call in every country to connect to the described network.

I am sure, that the despicted layout is possible. The guys at Fring, Grandcentral, Gtalk2VoIP, Skip2PBX and Roam4Free have already pieces of it in their hands.

More coverage about the challenge:

Andy Abramson, Jon Arnold, Pat Phelan, Aswath Rao, Alec Saunders, Russell Shaw and TIA Communities.

Interesting interview with OpenMoko

PC World has a very interesting text and interview with the makers of OpenMoko, the open source "anti iPhone". Most interesting: After GPRS, built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth they will add 3G next year.

We plan on going 3G next year. This first device uses existing Gerber designs from our feature phones to lower the costs. Remember that this is an unlocked, nonsubsidized phone. So $300 is actually incredibly cheap. We thought this was super-important, to help with early adoption.

There is a nice list of yet available applications, but there is more to come since the entire open source world is invited to develop and to port their applications.

Google is the real telco disruptor

Now that Google goes "All In" and really takes up the fight for the 700 MHz wireless spectrum in the US we all wonder what are the plans of the search engine company. I found two pieces of well founded speculations that I like most. Both get to the point that Google is planning the total disruption of mobile and fixed line telephony by offering free calls, sponsored by advertising.

"GoogleTel" is arising out of the search engine's last moves and acquisitions. Thomas F. Anglero, one of my favourite VoIP bloggers but not the most frequent writer, puts it in the form of a equation:

GoogleTel = Ubiquisys (Femtocells)+ Bandwidth (Dark Fiber and 700MHz Spectrum) + Grand Central (One Number ID)
Sunday, July 22, 2007

It seems very obvious at this moment what Google is doing. They are building a US nationwide Telecom operator but without the Telecom legacy.

And Don Reisinger at CNet asks:

Could Google kill the cell phone industry?
July 20, 2007 11:08 AM PDT

Once the company announces the wireless broadband to the nation, it will immediately announce that Google Phone everyone has been talking about. The Google Phone will work specifically with the Google system (kind of like Skype) and will be free of charge. The only fee to the consumer is the cost of buying the phone [...] As soon as the phone is released, people will be tossing their iPhones, Razrs and every other cell phone into the nearest river. Why pay all that money for a phone when you can have the same kind of service for free?

Maybe Reisinger should have omitted the interrogation mark in his title? The two articles are highly convincing and should make traditional telcos shiver. Have fun reading and think twice before you sign your next long term contract!

Why Ooma is a security risk

Now finally it's out what Ooma is:

With one fell swoop, it hopes to let people share their phone lines with each other in order to disrupt the business of major telecommunications companies.

Here’s how it works: You install an Ooma “hub” device, costing a $399 one-time fee, in your home that routes phone calls through your computer or your land-line. Ooma’s device also sends and receives calls for other people in your geographic area (local land lines that Ooma takes advantage of).

A P2P calling application? That's pretty dangerous and has failed before! I think it will not work, especially in the USA where people are so afraid of terrorists. Would you borrow your phone to Al Qaeda for their next announcement? No? But you might be doing it with Ooma, without even notice.

Out of the same reason Jeff Pulver's "fwdOUT™ Phone Sharing Network" (former Bellster) never made it big: People cannot control who is talking under their number. When someone uses Ooma or fwdOUT, his call will appear on someone else's phone bill or call record. This poor person would then have to prove that it was an unknown criminal who made the latest phone call. Quite difficult.

Jeff Pulvers fwdOUT idea sounds quite similar:

The fwdOUT™ Network is a system that matches callers with other users that can complete the call for them at no charge. The only catch is that to make some calls, you have to let others use your phone. fwdOUT™is free and not to be used for commercial purposes.

For Instance, Erik lives in New York City, and he gets free local phone service, his family is in Holland. Joe is an expatriate from New York living in Holland that calls New York on a regular basis. Using the Free World Dialup Phone Sharing Service, Erik shares his number. Joe also shares his number. When Joe calls New York, he uses Erik’s line and Erik uses Joe’s Line. The sharing is not done on a one-on-one basis, members share with the entire community and accumulate credits when their line is used. These credits can be used to place calls through other member’s phones. Free World Dialup maintains the tallies so that no line is used more than the owner has permitted.

Only that fwdOUT doesn't connect slick Ooma boxes over the internet but private Asterisk PBXes worldwide. It doesn't work too good because there are to few people providing their phone lines and the project has to face legal problems. Some Russians use it, but that's not enough. Boingboing wrote already two years ago about Bellster/fwdOUT:

The Bellster challenge for 2005 is to find out whether or not there are still people in the world who would let total strangers place non-commercial phone calls for free in exchange for the ability to do the same thing themselves. At the moment we have a handful of active nodes around the world, and as the word of Bellster spreads, my hope is that our network will be able to deliver calls to the PSTN all around the world.

Now Ooma wants to do the same. Good luck! As far as I know Jeff Pulver's project did not fail from technical difficulties, but from lack of acceptance. Jeff downsized his support when he realized what a difficult issue it is. Here you can read the fwdOUT risks, collected by voip-info.org. Many of them apply to Ooma as well:

Possible Risks:

• Potentially a criminal offence in some countries to provide this service, and you could face jail time, while there you would end up meeting a big guy named bubba who wants to be really good friends.


• Your phone line could be used for credit card fraud or to report bomb threats or death threats, and you will have a lot of explaining to do when the police come and confiscate your equipment and take you down to the station for a little chat. Unlike carriers who are explictly exempt from being responsible for facilitating these kinds of things occuring, home users aren't and you could end up being the one facing court over it. Even if you get off, there will be no doubt a great inconvience for some from having their machines confiscated for any arbitary length of time. Although if you decided to give smart answers to the police you could end up being the next rodney king.


• Contractually, the phone company could cut you off, or could introduce clauses in your contract to cut you off in future if they feel you are participating in this kind of service. Phone companies can and do monitor call patterns in different countries and people have reportedly been cut off when their call patterns changed legimately, they were still required to sign documents that it was their calls, the calls were valid and even had to pay a reconnection fee.


• Security, any route your call takes could easily be monitored, recorded or altered, all without your knowledge or consent, even if this is against bellsters terms and conditions you may not know it is happening until it's too late.


• You could end up with large phone bills, it's one thing to setup asterisk for home use for your own toll by pass but securing asterisk to prevent unwanted calls is a whole other thing and it's your phone bill on the line if someone works out a way round your filtering. Some 1800 numbers in the US offer to bill your phone line like a 1900 number, so this could also increase your phone bill. Some people apparently are listing themselves as +1 area code, what they don't realise is that there is 20+ countries other then just the US listed under +1 which could also give them a nasty surprise if the bellster route filtering is breached. These calls are not blocked by the fwdOUT network (but instructions for blocking them are available). There are other locations that aren't being listed that could cause similar damage to your phone bill/wallet.

Minor points:

• Only likely to benefit those in cheap call areas, in which case you can use VoIP providers which in general have MUCH better call quality and are bound by privacy regulations regarding your privacy.


• Call quality, you are relying on the fact that someone else won't suddenly flood their home line with a massive download causing your phone call to be lagged or jittered severely.


• You could end up receiving calls from people in foreign languages if you don't setup asterisk properly to block out bound caller ID (also you can't always block Caller ID apparently)


• Bellster has the potential to make it easier for telemarketers to push their sales pitches by leveraging the bellster network.
  
• Time to establish a phone call could dramatically increase if you hit a bunch of hosts that only allow calls out of hours, so while the network hunts and trys different routes you either hear local ring back or dead air depending on your local configuration of asterisk, which could potentially miss inform people about the true state of the call.


• non-geek house hold members, is it likely that most people will want to queue to use their own phone line? try explaining it to non-geeks and see how they react to it.


• high barrier to entry, as you not only need a linux box running asterisk but also hardware that's capable of interfacing with the PSTN network.