In this issue

Who’s who and what's what in Internet Telephony

Skype and others

I was talking to a colleague about a year ago and he asked me if I had heard about Skype.  ‘It's great’ he gushed.  'You can telephone anyone in the world for free!  And they are unique because you have this program that runs on your PC.  It tells you when the person you want to talk to is on line, and you can send text messages to set up the time of the call.  Isn’t that great?'

'And this differs from Microsoft Messenger in what way?'  I asked.  In fact MSN Messenger supports video calling as well as audio, has several times as many users and comes installed as standard on all new PCs. 

Skype differs from MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and (shortly) Google Messenger in only two ways as far as I can see:

1. They connected up to the telephone system so you can make cheap rate calls using the same program.
2. They have convinced the public they had a USP (free calling) that is offered by three very large competitors.  The spirit of that great ad man Claude Hopkins still walks the earth (if you havn't heard the Schlitz advertising story take the link).

Their clever wheeze of connecting to the public system is now being copied by the other networks.  Microsoft for one is serious – they just bought VOIP startup Teleo. This company has interesting technology that allows you to click on a phone number on a web page and immediately get connected.  Neat – and a big potential money-spinner for a company that also happens to own the browser.

Vonage and others

The problem with Skype is that you have to use a microphone and speakers (or headset) connected to your PC in order to make the call.  I have tried it and you really have to want to make the call to be bothered.  And receiving a call when you are not plugged in to your PC is a real pain.  The average punter frankly just wants to pick up a phone. 

Vonage and others offer a special telephone or a telephone adaptor that plugs straight into your Internet connection.  The phone/adaptor is quite expensive - £60+ but Vonage gives you an adaptor as part of the package.

The phone itself is just a regular phone; a design honed over the last century for its one purpose - to make and receive phone calls.

Why VOIP at all?

The advantage of all this is mainly cost.  The connection from your phone to the exchange in the region of the person you are calling is handled by the Internet, so calls can be very cheap.  Vonage offers a month’s landline calls for £9.99. Others are even cheaper but you may have to pick up the tab for the phone. 

This cost advantage is not overwhelming - you can get many good deals without changing your telephone or line.

There are some other advantages:

• Vonage offers a full voicemail service, call redirection and so on.
• You can have a local number anywhere on their network.  We have a US phone number, for example, so US customers can take advantage of domestic phone rates.
• Calls from Vonage phone to Vonage phone are free.

What are the problems

There has to be a disadvantage.  This is quality. 

If you have ADSL, the ‘A’ stands for asymmetric.  This is because the line works much faster downloading information from the Internet than uploading to the Internet.  The difference between the upload speed and download speed can be dramatic.  You might have a 4 megabit (4,000k) line but the upload is still at a lowly 256k. 

This is what you want for web browsing, you type in a few characters and a page full of stuff comes back to you.  However for telephone calls both directions are important – assuming you let your caller get a word in, of course.  So what I find with Vonage and ADSL is that I hear the other party fine because their speech is being downloaded to my phone.  However they often complain about quality because they are hearing me courtesy of the slower upload speed. 

The other factor that has an impact on quality is contention for the network. In London you may be sharing your bandwidth with 50 other people.  If they all decide to blast away at the same time your quality could be badly affected.

So to make ADSL work at a quality comparable to your landline or mobile, you really need a high upload speed and a low contention ratio.  For that sort of performance you are going to pay dearly.  The cost benefit rapidly disapears.

Technical tips – use a good HTML editor – if you can find one.

When the Internet was brand new there was just one HTML editor in the game – Hotmetal.  Somehow and for reasons that defy comprehension the product slowly died.  So a few years ago we figured it was time to switch.  I have been looking for a program that is half as good since.

Dreamweaver MX is the obvious candidate.    But it lacks features that I would expect in any mature product.

• No split screen which makes it hard to edit the page and css file at the same time. 
• No facility to collapse tags 
• No facility (truly amazing) to flip from one end of a container tag to another
• It does a pathetic job of auto-indenting (Guys – in CSS the ‘}’ means you go up one level – Duh)
• No tags view that shows the tags symbolically in the WYSIWYG display. That was a nice feature of Hotmetal. 

Dreamweaver is adaptable for new tags (we have a few extra ones of our own in templates) but not nearly as nicely as Hotmetal.  A new product – Dreamweaver 8 is promised Real Soon Now.  Hopefully it will add some of these features.

Topstyle lacks one big feature – a WYSIWYG editor.  Other than that it does a good job for not much money.  I tend to use Dreamweaver for HTML editing and a copy of Topstyle on another screen for CSS editing.

There is an open source product called Nvu which is very functional.  But somehow there is something about the crude design of the screen that does not inspire confidence. 

Other than that there is GoLive from Adobe which I haven’t tried.  But I am going to download the trial and set it up. 

The search continues.  I will do a more detailed evaluation in a future newsletter.  If anyone has any candidates which you think I should try please send me a mail.

News from the web

Skype is for sale.  News Corp apparently put a price tag of $3bn

Now ebay bought them.

Glamorgan University researchers have been measuring the user satisfaction of men and women to different types of web site.  There is a news story here.  I have searched the Glamorgan web site www.glam.ac.uk but can’t find the paper. 

A study by Zoomerang for ChoiceStream suggests that consumers are becoming worried about the security of their personal information given to web sites. 

A good time to cash in their chips I would say with Google entering the market. 

Donald Trump has a blog.  I must abandon mine – wait, I did. 

Read the master’s blog here. http://donaldtrump.trumpuniversity.com/

Firefox market share dropped last month. Help them out – download it now.

Hybrid mobile / wi-fi telephones will have 73% of the VOIP market in 2009 according to a new survey.  At least this type of technology might do something about the jaw-dropping international roaming rates from mobile phone operators. 

San Francisco is launching a free or at least affordable wireless Internet service.

Google is selling $4 billion of stock – to fund what I wonder?

Google is updating its desktop search program.

Vonage is planning its IPO.  A modest $600meg apparently.