KEY POINTS:
Yesterday's story about the launch of Dunedin company VentureVoIP has prompted some feedback:
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Cran
A few points about VOIP and Broadband in general in NZ.
Just read your article about VentureVoip. Although they offer a welcome step forward in the VOIP market in NZ,
I find claims of "world first" and "kiwi ingenuity" misleading at best.
I am a kiwi living since 1995 in Europe. I have been using VOIP for 3 or more years. Sure, it was a bit unreliable at first but in the last 18 months or so quality has improved greatly. I have had a local number with an Auckland-based Voip company since early 2005. Friends and family can call this number and the calls are routed thru to me. I have local number in other countries as well, some of them are free.
I can now call to landline numbers in many countries virtually free (see www.voipcheap.com).
All of these services use the SIP protocol which I guess VentureVOIP are using. Their website is a bit lacking technical info.
Then there is SKYPE which offers by far the most popular Voip. And it being used increasingly by businesses.
So claims about "kiwi Ingenuity" and "World Firsts" I find a bit rich. And I say this as a proud kiwi.
I fear this ingenuity has fallen by the wayside of late as has our reputation of being a nation of "early adopters". Some of this can probably be blamed on companys like Telecom, dragging their feet on broadband etc. I still have friends and family in NZ who have no broadband available to them.
Hopefully things will improve with Local-loop-unbundling etc and more competition from companies like Venture.
Big factors affecting all of these things is NZs geographical location,the local terrain and a small population. Not a lot can be done about the first two but the third,we could. (Said by a kiwi who hasn't lived in NZ for years!)
Matt Riddell, technical director of VentureVoIP, replies:
I thought I'd give a little more information on the system we're running.
We're not just offering a VoIP service as it was inferred.
We have created a full end to end solution including the ConduIT PBX which is an embedded platform running the ConduIT3 software, Asterisk and Linux.
While we may not be the first to introduce VoIP, we believe we are the first to create a full end to end solution from the PBX at one end to the VoIP service at the other end.
By installing a ConduIT3 PBX system in your offices, you are already set up to make calls. You do not need to add 30 VoIP providers to get least cost routing.
Internally we do least cost routing with quality based weighting so that you get the best possible call costs but with an emphasis on quality.
The great thing about this is that on the server side, we can add VoIP providers like your readers mentioned into our mix and if they provide both good quality and low prices then the calls will be routed via them.
The quality based routing happens on a per destination basis, as while some VoIP providers may be good at one destination, they may not be so good at another destination.
You can find more information on the ConduIT3 (which was launched with the company yesterday by the Prime Minister Helen Clark) on our website.
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David
I'm confused. I read your article "Kiwi ingenuity drives down phone costs" three times trying to find out what 'ingenuity' there was. I couldn't find anything.
Instead, it seems full of plain bad facts:
1. "the world's first VoIP end-to-end telecommunications solution". Come on, what about Skype for personal use or Gizmo and Asterisk for commercial use?
2. "VentureVoIP's own exchange handles all telecommunications traffic, both in New Zealand and internationally.". Why? What do you think the 'I' in VoIP stands for? Surely the internet handles "all telecommunications traffic"?
3. "there is no internationally accepted similar standard for VoIP networks at this stage.". Hello?! Ever heard of SIP, the core of almost all VoIP solutions in use today?
[The reader refers to Session Initiation Protocol, or SIP, a signalling and call setup protocol for IP-based communications. Just to clarify, however, this statement in the article refered to there being no common standard for integration of VoIP networks into the global telephone number system, in contrast to numbers associated with traditional phone and mobile networks. - ED]
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David
Steve, Interesting article on VentureVoIP.
You might like to take a look at www.skytelecom.net we have been running VoIP and SIP here in NZ for over 5 years and are part of a 22 country IP network.
Biggest barrier to entry and service is the quality and reliability of the broadband services in NZ. Such countries as India offer 2m broadband for as little as $11 per month.