Microsoft, Cisco face off over office comms

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Speaking at this week's Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit, executives from Cisco and Microsoft touted their own products to deliver "unified communications," which combines Voice over Internet Protocol phone calls, email, instant messages and conferencing technology.


Wow, one sentence ... so many errors.

Ok , lets start at the top. Bundling.
I want to sell you VOIP phone (phone that runs over the internet , not the regular phone system) , email , instant messages , and video conferencing. But what if you don't want it all ? What ifyou just want , say the phones and nothing else ? Too bad, All or nothing, no picking at what you want.

This is called bundling, and it's evil. Why am I paying for stuff I can't use ? Because everyone bundles the same stuff together and I have no choice. Or there's only one provider for what I want and I'm forced to buy all this other extra junk I don't want with it.

Second. VOIP , the unwanted three humped camel of the internet.
Lets say I'm an ISP (Internet Service provider). I sell my services , my customers can surf, check mail , the whole nine yards. But VOIP uses up my bandwidth terribly, far more than regular surfing or game playing or anything. And someone else is collecting on it, not me ! As an ISP I have two choices. One , get into the VOIP market with my own phones and sabatage the opposition somehow. Two , simply sabatage the competition to get them off my network and reduce my bandwidth costs. How do you sabatage the competition ? Well , our internet is great for surfing and game playing because no one cares about the occasional dropped package, but Voip is highly affected by these dropped packettes , and the customers complain bitterly that they keep hearing cackling in their ear piece. Sorry , it's not our Voip , call the distributer. We did they blame you for it. Sorry , we never claimed *THEIR* product would work on *OUR* network. They're making that statement , they have to back it up.

Third. VOIP on the open internet.
Every ISP only owns a certain small piece of the network. Even if VOIP works fine on their little piece, the open internet is another matter. The VOIP signils , which are LARGE amounts of data compared to a web page , still have to cross a bunch of other networks that often feel they are being unfairly put upon by having to put up with this extra bandwidth for a product or service they never agreed to run in the first place. Sabatage time again.

How do you sabatage VOIP ? Simple. You make your network easily handle small packettes so that things like chat programs , games and web pages go great. Larger packets get broken up and get there, eventually , but maybe out of order. And in any real time application packets that arrive out of order are simply dropped, as if they were never received, and your video or audio communications just gets a blank spot or static spike at that point instead. And when people protest you just shrug and say "I only certified it for web pages and email. You're on your own for anything else. "


Rogers Cable of Ottawa is thinking of making it's own specially dedicated network , just for VOIP no regular internet traffic allowed. A rogers to rogers phone call would probably be a very high quality experience.

Unfortunately , when the guy came knocking on my door to sell it to me it was actually more expensive than my regular land line phone. Plus it would use my existing modem , slowing down my online gaming. And my wife is notorious for being on the phone for hours at a time , so the slow down would be near constant. I passed on that offer.

I'm still debating on whether or not cell phones will kill all forms of land lines entirely, including VOIP. I give it 50 50 all phones go cell eventually.