Quality vs Cost

Nothing is free, it's an old saying and I fully believe in it. In the VoIP world, it is more true than ever. VoIP is a revolutionary technology; it has taken the high cost of entry of the POTS world and made it dirt cheap. Unfortunately, the dirt cheap idea seems to be taking over and the quality and availability we used to expect is falling by the wayside.

I have very high expectations of computers and technology. I switched to Debian GNU/Linux in 1995 and since then I've learned how stable things can (and should) be. A reboot should happen to upgrade the very core of the operating system, a hardware upgrade or a power failure. Anytime other than that and something or someone has failed to do their job properly. When I am on the phone, I expect high quality audio and a connection that stays connected. Why the world is starting to accept crap from telco's is beyond me. What happened to the 5 9's? (For those of you keeping track, that is about 5 minutes a year that your phone can be unavailable, whether you are on it or not).

Granted, anyone who has really worked with SIP will acknowledge it has some fatal shortcomings, so perhaps that is contributing to the degrading service quality we're seeing in the telephoney world. I don't think that is the sole cause. Honestly, I put a lot of the blame on the consumer. We don't vote with our dollars enough. For some providers, the cost of monitoring their trunks appears to outweigh the loss of revenue from when links go down. I find it incomprehensible, but with the focus so much on cost, quality gets the shaft.

I hope the pendulum starts to swing the other way, and customers actually get up and leave a telco that is failing to provide a quality connection. The nice thing about capitalism is that, at least in theory, the consumer market can punish those companies that fail to meet expectations. Hopefully the market will weed out the providers that charge $0.001 less per minute for about half the quality and availability. If that happens, those of us trying to provide the service we'd like to use ourselves can continue to do so.

Fun with Web 2.0

I've added an RSS feed I just created to my blog here; Top SIP Devices for AIM Call. This is the 5 most viewed device pages in the last 4 weeks on voice.aol.com. Go "Web 2.0" I suppose.

I clearly remember using Mosaic to browse HTML pages and thinking "Wow, this is so much easier than Gopher". Today, in about 10 minutes, I was able to create a live RSS feed of the the most popular articles in a subset of a web site and import that as a handy list on my blog. Seems like a great improvement over the early days of the World Wide Web doesn't it.

But when you think about it, the technology to do it really doesn't seem all that advanced. It's just a database query, a sort, a truncate and then an import. UNIX has been doing piped commands like that for, what, almost 40 years now? Congratulations Web 2.0, on being able to do things the Unix command line could do 30 years ago. I guess you're much more colourful than Unix was. That's something.

AIM® Phoneline Help Updated

I added some new questions to the AIM® Phoneline FAQ today. We get a surprising amount of requests about AIM Phoneline, which I guess is good. I've also added a "Customer Support" page for the APL product, which I hope will make contacting us about APL easier.

Hopefully these new questions help speed up the support for some folks. Don't forget to call yourself once a month to keep your account active if you don't have anyone else calling you. That seems to be the biggest complaint we get.

Getting Started

Recently, we posted an article on my voice portal that mentions the other bloggers in the office here. It's motivated me into starting a blog of my own, which is something I've been thinking about doing for a few years now...

So I guess this makes for the inaugural post on my inaugural blog. This reminds me a lot of the BBS days, how nostalgic.