Aswath Weblog

Price. No Features. No Price. NO Features? NO PRICE!

VoIP has this schizophrenic tendency that periodically sprouts itself. Though we were assured that features never before imagined will be available with VoIP, cheaper price due to efficient IP networking, compared to the aging and clunky PSTN, was pushed by the industry. But in the last few days there has been a ping-pong is worth noting.

Let me start with Mark Evans’ note a couple of days back. He tells us about a poll commissioned by SunRocket suggests that consumers do not have a full understanding of VoIP and he suggests that this is because the industry is not educating the consumers on the benefits of VoIP and cautions that if the industry is focused on price alone, the industry will stagnate.

Irwin Lazar disagrees. Based on his discussions, he feels that people think VoIP is a low cost replacement of PSTN and that they don’t want any fancy features. But worse yet, when they start to use VoIP, they will conclude that VoIP does not fully replace PSTN. He cautions that the resulting negative backlash is not good for the industry.

Martin Geddes uses three advertisements he found in a travel magazine to lament the fixation among service providers to offer arbitraged phone service and “[n]o new value, no new features, no unique convenience, no innovative distribution or pricing or sales method.”

As if in response to Martin’s colorful dig at the industry, VoicePulse took a press release out claiming that they will offer a $50 reward to current and former customers of competing VoIP services if they will switch over to them. I am assuming that PSTN customers are not eligible. Have they concluded, as Mark warned, that VOIP adoption has reached a plateau?

With that let me add my take on AOL’s Callways service and the recent upgrade to MSN IM. To be consistent with the spirit of this note, I will not comment on the cost of AOL’s service. As you probably know already, it is ATA based service offering augmented by additional user control through client applications. Just like many other VoIP offerings, the subscription comes with a telephone number; but unlike some of them, the allocated number will be conforming to the NANP allocation to the area where the service will be used – meaning no “virtual numbers”. I was surprised to hear this. After all Powell told us that this ability to have any number is a great breakthrough. Andy suggests that this restriction is related to E911 service they offer. Yes, they do offer E911 service, IF you do not access the service from another location. If this is the real reason, then it is a lame one; why not allow subscribers to get virtual numbers as secondary numbers?

Two additional features that AOL talks about are Dashboard and Call Alert. Subscribers can mange their account and call handling logic via the Dashboard. Conceptually it looks similar to what many other service providers offer. There might be some subtle differences in the UI; since I have not used it, I am not qualified to comment on it. Call Alert seems to be an extension of their earlier service with the same name that they offered to their dialup customers. For me this looks very similar to Verizon’s iobi service (offered to PSTN subscribers). Given that they offer an ATA, Ithey are tacitly assuming that users will not be close to the PC all the time. So won’t it be nice if the Call Alert information is presented to the phone as well. I hope they address this in their future releases.

In the recent upgrade, MSN is focusing on end-to-end voice and video communication. In anticipation of the increased traffic, they have streamlined the NAT/FW traversal technique and made it more efficient. This means they do not have to deploy too many relay points and consume lots of bandwidth. Other than that I am not sure what is new. I am a user of MSN IM; but still I can not tell.