[OT] Re:VoIP home phone from Teksavvy (TekTalk)?

[Alejandro Imass]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 7:39 PM, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
> Has anyone tried VoIP home phone from teksavvy.com (called "TekTalk"),
>    <http://teksavvy.com/en/res-homephone.asp#tektalk>
> or from any other ISP?  I'm wondering, for $9.95/month, what's the
> catch?

There is really no catch, it's just that the POTS are ripping people
off. Canada still suffers from an oligopoly between Bell, Rogers and
Telus but the tide seems to be turning.

A DID (a fixed number) costs about $3 wholesale and the minute is on
average 1 to 2 cents US. The are actually making 100% profit because
most "unlimited" services are actually capped at 2-3K minutes, which
constitutes "reasonable use" on your "unlimited" contract (this holds
true for almost any voice provider whether POTS or VoIP). The company
I work for offers a $5.99/mo CAD plan with 60 free minutes included
and a flat rate of 0.02 CAD (incoming and outgoing) for US/CAN and
international rates cheaper than Skype. We are still not full scale
but have gotten great reviews from our existing customer base, and a
lot of word-of-mouth business. At 5.99 we are still making good profit
but we don't offer "unlimited"plans because they are a big bluff.

Anyway, the point was that it's a very straight-forward business, we
just buy and re-sell SIP services from wholesale providers and it's
exactly what Acanac and TekSavvy are doing. Since we use Asterisk
(most probably what Acanac and TekSavvy use) our operating costs are
minimal since we save on all the up-front license costs you would get
from Cisco, or similar.

Contrary to popular belief the TCP/IP protocol is actually ideal for
voice multiplexing and only requires about 60 kilobits (and less even)
per call to work correctly. There are some QoS considerations and SIP
is problematic for NAT and such, but as soon as IPv6 goes mainstream,
many SIP problems will probably go away. We use both IAX and SIP which
today gives us the ability to just plug and play, and also multiplex
several calls over the same channel, and the IAX hardware is going
down in price every day, but then again SIP is simpler and there is a
lot of cheaper hw that supports SIP.


> --
> William
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