"Bill Kearney" wrote in
t:
You say this based on what experience and measurement from an actual
marine environment? p2p traffic is not without it's waste of
bandwidth. For someone in a limited bandwidth situation it may well
be a BIG problem to go "sharing" it for p2p apps like skype.
The only time VoIP is going to function is over a satellite phone or on
wifi at the dock. I don't know anyone rich enough to use a satellite
phone for any kind of broadband, so we're talking about wifi from the
dock condo at the, as the little old lady in Beaufort, SC, put it,
"floating trailer park". There, it's no different than it is at home.
Cellphone is cheaper than any VoIP cruising down the ICW and rivers or
close, real close, offshore. "Out there", we're back in $1.50/min
satellite country.
In the "actual marine environment", as you say, no VoIP service is going
to save anyone any money.
I measure the traffic Skype uses to route calls to other users through my
system at around 200 bytes/second, on average. As Skype doesn't work on
dialup connections, but does, at least until Verizon Wireless catches
them, work well on a laptop aircard on 1X lowfi internet. This traffic
it consumes is imperceptable, even on the aircard. I've seen 8 Skype
connections through my laptop on wifi with no ill effects at all. It's a
tiny price to pay for great telephone service that has no monthly load
fees at all!
Which VoIP service in the "actual marine environment" is its price
competitor? Those who can afford satellite phones are not interested in
price. Small boaters living aboard at the dock of a wifi-enabled marina
would be crazy to use anything else, ask Skip.
Skype's new partner, Voxlib (
www.voxlib.com), in Canada, has REVERSED a
deficiency of Skype for anyone who wants it, for free at the moment.
Voxlib allows you to call your Skype contacts from a remote location,
from your cellphone or any telephone on the planet with your incredibly-
expensive $28/year SkypeIn phone number. Voxlib-to-Skype calls are all
free. Voxlib-to-landline/mobiles are dirt cheap at Skype Out rates, free
until January for US/Canadian users. How they make any profit is a
mystery to me, but you'll get no complaints from Skype customers...(c;
If you have a cellular service that doesn't charge for INCOMING calls,
such as Nextel for instance, Voxlib calls are even free to the cellphone
when you control Voxlib through its SMS message functions. Voxlib gets
the message, makes the interconnect to your party, then calls your
cellphone, a free incoming call, and connects the two of you in
conference. After January, that will be 2.1c/minute to most civilized
places where the local telephone bureaucrats don't make the caller pay
for the call. This is a pretty cheap boat phone if you have wifi. It's
even worth installing cable internet to your own wifi hotspot in a box on
the dock near your boat if the marina doesn't provide it at a reasonable
rate. A group of nearby boats can share the cost of this resource and
everyone on the dock can have Skype phone service aboard. WEP protect
the hotspot to encourage others to join and help fund it.
--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.