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Standalone voip has nothing to worry about
Friday, February 23, 2007
At least not when it comes to behemoth competitors like the Cable companies. We've been griping for the last 6 months because our broadband quality took a nosedive, straight in the toilet as soon as our Cable Co provider started advertising the rollout of their nifty new "digital voip internet phone service for our little corner of the world."
Now, we're pretty handy over here. We can troubleshoot a network, no problem--isolate equipment and systematically nail down exactly where the malfunction is. We know how to keep tabs on how fast the broadband is and also find out what kind of voip quality we're looking at. We're not naive residential consumers, nor did we just fall off the apple cart. We know when we're being sold a steaming pile of...hot stuff.
So the last couple of weeks, our connection has been unbelievably flaky and sometime in that magic hour between Sunday night and Monday morning, everything went all to heck. We did all the standard troubleshooting, called customer service and after jumping through an endless series of hoops, were informed that our modem had become as useful as a doorstop and it was time to PACK IT UP.
The customer support girl sent us three towns south geocaching for the Cable Co office, where we'd be granted a brand, spankin' new modem--hopefully without all the doorstoppery of our current one. Three towns south...no address, just an intersection that was actually not even close to where the physical office turned out to be. We're talking a margin of error that's like half the town wide. Thank God for gas station attendants who know right where everything is.
We walked in the office, full of hope and eager to get back online before the DTs set in, but life is cruel sometimes. Perhaps we were more naive that we thought. See, the problem wasn't with our modem. Turns out we had a countywide outage. The profoundly unhelpful guy we were visiting with in the Cable Co office had no clue about what was going on, no idea if there was an eta for a fix and honestly, became painfully stumped about what he should do with our beige, LED-bespeckled doorstop.
Way to go, Cable Co...that's some awesome customer service you're throwing down. I went up the chain of command until I got someone who knew more...you'll get a kick out of this:
- All the cruddy service we've been struggling with for the last 6 months? Chalk it up to overselling the bandwidth. Yes, they totally copped to it.
- They say they had, "no way of knowing that the voip and 10 Mbps service would require so much bandwidth. It's a problem we've been having. We had no way to anticipate this, but we're trying to patch it right now." Unhunh...no way to know. Remedial math much? And what about the rollouts they've done in other areas? We're by no means an early adopter region.
- They can't guarantee any quality of service or bandwidth speed. In fact, the very concept seemed strange and frightening. That means you pay for 10 Mbps, get less than 1 Mbps and they are a-ok with it. Of course they are. Me? Less than thrilled.
- We're ripping along right now at less than half a Mbps and I'm doing the happy dance, instead of banging my head against the keyboard. Why? Because it's been 10 whole minutes since my connection dropped out and I might actually be able to post.
I am so back on the market...
The year of the voip
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
For the last couple of years, the dropping of that giant disco ball in Times Square has signaled not only the dawn of a brand new year, but also the start of prediction season. Specifically, predictions from wildly enthusiastic voip internet phone industry experts saying that this year, this year is THE ONE WHERE VOIP HITS IT BIG. [insert reverent pause] After a while, they start sounding suspiciously like the boy who cried wolf. Except last year? When they got all rabid about how voip was taking off...yeah, they were so. totally. right.
To the tune of 3.8 million new US voip subscribers in 2006. If you took all those new subscribers and laid them end to end...no, just kidding ;-) But seriously, that's a darn lot of people. Think of how much money they spent...and you know, if you start talking to people about why they made the switch, it seems like every single one of those voip minutes has a story behind it. Retired couples on fixed incomes who need to minimize those living expenses; divorced parents living far apart who don't want to worry about the phone bill while they're talking to the kids; college students away from home for the first time; families with members who are overseas.
People think of tech as something cold and inhuman, but I think you can't get much more human than voip. It touches people's lives, helping them achieve their goals, stay close to the people they love, live their lives the way they need to, and fosters our need for community.
Pretty amazing stuff. I predict that 2007 will be the year voip hits it bigger.
Cringeworthy
Monday, February 19, 2007
You've gotta wonder what Europe T-Mobile's PR people are thinking right now. I know when I was in the service, every time an officer got a hold of the PA system, we all cringed. They invariably had no clue as to what was actually going down in day-to-day ops and stuck their foot in it every single time. Good for a chuckle from the enlisted rank and file...not so great if you're PR folk.
Here's what happened...apparently there was a little slip up during an PC World interview of T-Mobile. A slip up by none other than the CEO of T-Mobile Europe's International AG & Co. KG, otherwise known as Hamid Akhavan. Poor guy. See, T-Mobile has already rolled out mobile voip solutions for European customers, in the form of their Web 'n' Walk program. They're allowing people to use voip on their cell phones.
Akhavan, on the other hand, seemed to have no idea what the other hand was doing. He pretty much implied that voip was simply too difficult to successfully deploy and that he didn't see people lining up to pay T-Mobile for the privilege of using their cell phones as voip internet phones. Never mind that the company was already delivering on that promise.
I totally understand how things can get so crazy that you could completely loose track of the finer points of what amounts to the newest exciting thingamajibby in T-Mobile's arsenal. All I can say is, I'm glad I'm not their PR guy and boy does it bite to be him.