as part of the internet specialist 101, VOIP and related technology was discussed. Assignment 12 talked about a question of what VOIP was and why you would use it. Here’s what I wrote, and you are welcome to partake this discussion.
VOIP can be used to receive and make calls. It is usually cheaper than traditional telephone lines, especially for international calls. I’ve used Skype, Gizmo Project, Net2Phone, and other projects to make and receive calls. Now-a-day, I mainly use skype. Most Internet companies such as comcast, offer phone service. I personally would make sure I had a land line wired connection in case of emergency, because VOIP does not work with E911 services. Although that has changed as of late, one thing to keep in mind is the Internet connection. If the connection is having trouble, than your call may have issues. It reminds me of the old cell phone calls at times. International calling with VOIP can be as low as 2 cents a minute, where the landline can cost as much as $.18 a minute as a minimum.
One thing i always tell people that if they use VOIP, and the Internet goes out, you don’t have phone service. That may be important for people to know about, because you may have services that utalize the phone line to place a call if something goes wrong, such as smoke detectors, the alarm, and even medical devices. I have heard that devices have issues calling out using VOIP.
The comment boards await you. Enjoy!
This is why I put it out there for discussion. When i was not here every once in awhile, i did occasionally look at E-mail, but the majority of the time I did not. The bulk waited till I got home. I used the smart features to get me around town and to communicate if needed. I grew up with no PC until I was 9 or 10, but there were times i wasnt on it either. If you hear my recent audio boom you’ll hear whats been up with me lately. Not so pleasant, although i’ve released podcast 248 as promised. The weekend I just don’t stay on the PC much, and still have all that E-mail since that outage we had I haven’t really touched. I’ll get there, I’m sure, but keeping up on what i need to.
I agree with you.
My phone also died mainly because I had issues fitting the charge cable so broke the case some.
A friend who was working was upgrading her work phone so I was able to get a fully functional c 5 00 with the last version of symbian 3.
Freedom scientiffic for whatever reason still have talks and eloquence v5.0 premium for 250 nz bucks.
I brought this and have still got a good phone so I can stay in the dark ages for a bit longer.
To be honest as long as I can find reconditioned and older c 5 units I can for free transfer my talks licence for ever more though things may change we will just have to see.
I have not nore will I upgrade to win10, but I will eventually update to an app centric os.
I still will not conform to today’s standard though.
I do even though I shouldn’t do it, plan to customise my system such that it behaves like what I am using.
I don’t nor want to use office of any sort.
I have jarte for lite word processing and with my type of job an online contracter working my own hours word processing really is not part of my day to day job.
Most things are done via web forms if thatt or straight email.
Firefox and thunderbird are the tools of the trade.
winamp, vlc, media player classic, the klite mega codec etc are all I use.
The only expensive tools I own are abbyy fine reader for ocr which I don’t use much and applian video capture suite which is quite a visual beast but I do use it for things.
Flash fxp and goldwave, audacity and virtual recorder 7zip and winlame are the other tools I use along with defragler and ccleaner.
Thats about all the software I use.
I do have cd burn xp for writing cds and goldwave has a good cd extracter using freecddb which was what old nero 6 used when I used a cracked version of that in the early days.
Security wise msse and malwarebytes are all I use and I don’t keep mbam on all the time either.
Fact is it depends how you grew up.
I have known a world without the computer.
Not that I will ever give this one up but I did know once.
I have come back from vacation 3 weeks ago and spent the best part of a week or so catching up.
During holiday I scaresely thought about technology.
I had my trusty phone for the clock feature and a digital recorder for the obvious thing but at least for part of it I didn’t listen or watch news.
I didn’t take my computer in fact I had a break from the net and enjoyed it.
I do know I do want to catch up and see what is going.
I have just come back from a day trip to the cbd and enjoy it a lot.
I do know if I had a really smart unit sitting with me connected I’d end up tweating all day long.
Thing is, technology is so convenient we are finding it harder and harder to live without it.
And if you are born with it, you may never be able to leave even though you are not under the control of the machine just yet, you don’t want to leave.
I am unsure what the answer is but still.
Enter your comment here…You said it. I was born at the end of 1980. You’re not much younger than I. Had to learn everything from scratch. We were the first on the Internet. I check my mail a few times a day, on social media, but I don’t tweet as much, or facebook much, or anything. I do have linkedin, and I plan to post another tech podcast here soon. I’ve got other casts, I rarely have posted to lately. I do tweet, but its stuff I’m reading I think my audience should check out. I don’t post much of my whereabouts, maybe occasionally. Things are changing, I do agree with you. Its just like I said, I’m not interested in a smartphone, then my phone dies and basically fell apart, and what do I get? A smartphone. It has helped me when I’ve been lost, and I’m thankful now. The world is definitely changing.
Jared it was my reason to.
But the infrastructure was put in over a century ago, and its on the way out.
Fibre is the way now.
Power systems are getting better.
Ok small outages have your ups.
Bigger ones you would need to buy an 8 hour battery.
Bigger than that you would have to have a generator or something by your house and that may not be always the best.
People don’t seem to want to maintain the big networks as much as they would like, I know for a fact my dad before he left his job in transmition was sorting out the removing of underground tanks and the like to reduce the unused and rotting fuel in his generators, the removal of a lot of extra generation for what is not needed at all.
Generators are getting smaller to.
So what will happen when it all goes?
Who actually knows with portable solar tech and wind tech coming online that may not actually happen that often.
Its got more stable but batteries and generators are not as well maintained as used to be.
If it all goes to pot there is the traditional radio telephone unit though you would have to buy and maintain one of those.
Its about the only thing you can use when digital really fails excluding a nuke and even then.
Radio non fm units especially were designed for long distance transmition even when quality is utter shit reception is still possible.
In a major disaster it may mean that we will not have anything at all.
Technically though as long as all the satelites don’t crash we should have some communication at least probably.
And if a big rock hits the plannet or any really major happens it probably won’t matter that much.
With outages you probably are aiming for bad weather, blowouts or stuff that just dies but most is electronically controled now.
Saying that the era when simple power and coms just worked will be something I will miss.
No longer can I just plug in things and they work.
If I want to fix the network or update the router I better be damned sure the fucking thing will not become a scorched brick else no data, no vice, fuck all will happen.
While I do like scorched almonds I prefur to eat them rather than having to say my tech is baked and we have nothing till we get more.
Its a different way of thinking, but alarm bells have been sounding for ages.
In the early days people had to maintain their stuff.
Now I have people putting in a recovery disk and saying it gets it working or it just works with no reguard to what that means.
You and I know what the fuck it means what its like to gut your own stuff but people expect things to be idiot proof, and crash proof.
If it doesn’t work its replaced by something equally cheap.
And while I have no issue with the peace I get with my cheap and probably shitty security package, I share no joy in thinking about those that started with things that if they died, that they would well just have to do a simple doodle and they would be fixed by essentually wiping them and hiding things.
If they really die they just replace them, we have lost the ability to tinker.
Over the years I have been working on trying to get a job and I saw the transition from 10 years ago to now.
We seem to have lost creative aspects, a benifit is treated like some sort of crime with a push for work.
With tech we have been able to do a lot more, but have lost bits of ourselves as we have gone along.
This can not be solved easily.
Eventually we will probably kill the majority of ourself but all we will do then is reformat and reset and start from the state we were back in before.
Once again we will do the same things we have always done.
Its a continuous loop.
One day tech will be the death of us to be sure for now who knows.
The automatic system is good, but with it comes the fact we loose skills.
And it will get worse before it gets better, well or it will get worse, stop, spin round then restart from 0 again and get bad again.
Tech is fine for what it is but we are using it for just about everything and it may not be the best approach.
I do think for example that while tech is a big thing in our lives that children should still learn to write, read, etc in the traditional way rather than handling tech first.
Some of my friends go even further suggesting we have lost the ability to eat with the propper tools and that we should sit at the table to eat.
We have one day we do this but as well as that we shouldn’t have our tablets or phones or whatever at the table and we do that far to much.
3 years ago I made the concerted effort to not use social networks and now I use them all the time.
I don’t tweat everything and I don’t read all the time but I do use a large part of my life online, its hard to ballance it to be sure though.
I have played games where I have gotten into a world of my own, when family were away only to come out of it and realise I have spent all day in my pjs.
Now for a person born outside the matrix its one thing to remember what you are fighting for but for people like my cousins, born at the turn of the century, expeosed to tech, being able to brouse google before they could walk and others further down the road, there is no hope.
You can’t fight for what you are missing and in another century things that would even involve outside lives will be gone.
I enjoy walking the beach, going out to lunch, going on trips etc.
However we may be able to do that with tech soon enough, our desks are all we will need.
And when that happens that will become our beds and after that it will be the end.
It would be nice if it came fast but it won’t and all the new developments don’t always sit with me.
I have been used to manually doing work, I even enjoy it.
ANd while I enjoyed the automated system its getting to the point where I need to decide if I continue on as one of the last real humans or go down with the borg.
I don’t think I could just drop the past though.
I was born in 1982 about 30 or so years before the collective was created.
15 years before we even had the net.
I know what it is like to be free.
I can scarsly remember those days now though.
Hi Shaun,
I appreciate your comments a lot. Sadly, I know we’re going there. I also know that landlines will be dead soon, and VOIP will be all we have. I just don’t think its the right way to go, I mean, yes, you save money and thats a good thing, however, if there is an outage, you have nothing and that can’t be good. I’m nhoping there will be a way somehow that there could be a basic something for when the power goes out or the Internet goes out, so we can call and get the help we need. If we can get that, that would be good. Keep those thoughts coming! Thanks for writing.
Hi.
I am sorry to say that jared but landlines are dead.
We will be shutting them down in 5 years now.
That old tech is on the way out, fibre is the way to go.
I have vdsl which uses the same lines.
Its all voip now.
Even how its through the router.
Voice slows normal data traffic anyway.
And its not just skype a lot including previders are switching to the voip model.
Its the future.
If you don’t like it move to the country.
And even then you will eventually upgrade.
Here I know for the fact the government are no longer fixing copper lines.
They will keep them going but no more new lines will go in and eventually it all goes out.
For us our house is network wired with cat 5 and 6 cable.
All phones are on a master jack and this master is plugged into the router meaning we can use the phones as we usually would.
No power=no phone.
One of the plans is to switch from a ups system to a 8 hour battery system to sustain voice and data during an outage.
Voice being the important thing even if our computers do not work we want to use voice at least.
Cellphones rarely work for more than an hour after any major cut.
While the net works we would at least want voice access.
A landline is fast ending.
It is no longer assumed you will have a phone.
Chances are in the next 20-30 years a landline will be an old thing no one uses.
I have allready seen changes.
As well as the desktop and laptops used, its not uncommen for the family to sit round the dinner table on various tablets and tablet phones.
A landline is dead now or soon will be.
Loosing the landline means no wet lines, no static, no issues with anything.
No dsl filters nothing.
We are on the transitional mode still using the landline but only data.
Next will be full voip.
At work a lot of stuff is handled with the computer and servers.
It does mean we are relying on a lot of tech but thats the way of the world now days.
In fact now I have switched I am disliking old style phonelines a lot.