Is VoIP (Voice over IP) the killer app for broadband? What will it take to encourage people to routinely use their broadband connection for phone calls rather than the phone?

This was prompted by seeing a bunch of articles recently in this area. In the USA, Vonage partnering wth Earthlink and one of the baby bells. Work on SIP to provide you with a single "phone number" for your VoIP connection regardless of location. Rumours of stunning growth (67% per qtr!) in Japan for Yahoo Broadband when they started bundling a VoIP service with their DSL offering. Another unsubstantiated rumour that 10% of all international calls are now via the internet (really? That sounds really high).

I can see this tipping into mass adoption really fast once a small set of problems are overcome.
- It's got to be really transparent so you don't need to think too much about what's happening technically
- We have to solve all the problems of getting voice through NAT firewalls. this is all just too hard at the moment.
- We need something that looks, feels and works just like a phone but attaches either to the PC or directly to ethernet. And at the same sort of price as a dumb phone is now.

It's time for another of my time questions. How long will it be before 10% of all fixed line phone conversations involve VoIP at one or other of the end points? 1-2-5-10-20 years? [from: JB Ecademy]

blogging ecosystem lists the top 500 blogs in terms of who links to them. In parallel with this, the top 500 blogs in terms of number of people they link to. Then we have a new system on Technorati. A list of the top 100 interesting blogs in terms of new links to them in the last 24 hours.

I'm constantly in awe of just how much stuff there is out on the Net. [from: JB Ecademy]

In the Ecademy Clubs, after one week we've got:-
- 80 clubs
- 52 Club Moderators
- 219 members
- 427 Forum messages

This is great, but it doesn't happen by itself. It's time to take another look and put a little more in to it. For instance:-

- The Regional clubs are getting a lot more interest for their meetings than for their clubs. One example, Bristol had more than 30 registrations but only 15 in their club. Did you register or go to the meeting? Well join the club then!

- 52 people run a club but the "Club for club moderators" only has 10 members. If you run a club, go and join up.

- 209 people voted in the recent poll on running your own weblog. 26% said they run their own so go and join the Bloggers club

- At least a few of you ride motorcycles. Join the Ecademy MCC.

And so on. But this is not just a plea to get people to join my clubs. ;) It's also a reminder that there are like minded Ecademists with all sorts of interests. The Clubs provide another route to find and get to know them. [from: JB Ecademy]

Take a look at Wildgrape NewsDesk. If you need to keep informed and you read a lot of sites on the web every day, you really need a news reader. There's plenty to choose from here. [from: JB Ecademy]

BigChampagne - Online Media Measurement is producing charts for the music people are sharing on all the big P2P networks. Notice that despite the complete lack of payola, chart rigging and radio playlist manipulation there's a very strong correlation between the online and offline charts. So whatever it is that music companies do, it seems to be working in terms of guiding public tastes. [from: JB Ecademy]

Pretty detailed analysis of the The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm : The Sapphire Worm was the fastest computer worm in history. As it began spreading throughout the Internet, it doubled in size every 8.5 seconds. It infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes.

Wow! [from: JB Ecademy]

Wonderfully detailed description of the trials and tribulations involved in getting a Wireless link over Bristol Harbour for an Art project involving actors at one end speaking lines dictated to them by IRC at the other end, videoed and then streamed back to the "controllers". Done and performed by the Easton Community Wireless Network (CLAN) project.

"Always test all cables and connectors before going on site. Nine times out of ten, it is these that are at fault if something does not work properly.".

I'll repeat that. It's always the connectors. [from: JB Wifi]

Ross Mayfield has some updated results from his work on Networks and links in the blog community This ties together Ryze Friends, FOAF and Blogs. It's still a fairly small sample of 180 but shows definite small world characteristics where the average distance between people is only two hops. [from: JB Ecademy]

If you're looking for an Open Source content management system, look at opensourceCMS. What an awesome, awesome site. They've installed a huge bunch of systems so that you can look around them and give them a test drive. [from: JB Ecademy]

BT Pitches WLAN vs 3G

BT have a press release out promoting their BT Openzone rollout. This deserves some praise for getting more coverage. But again, they are attempting to justify their prices by comparing it with 3G. Like many other commentators I have some problems with this. I think if you're going to compare prices you have to look at the market and why someone would pay them as much as any apparent similarities in the technology. If I'm stuck in London for an afternoon and want to do some work on the net, I can go to an Internet cafe, go to my club, use a BT Openzone, or find some free WiFi, or maybe use an internet kiosk. Similarly if I'm stuck in an airport, I could use the dial up connection in a lounge, or use Openzone. So perhaps the real comparison should be with places like EasyInternetCafe or an airport dial up charge.

Then there's the fact that 3G may have some announced pricing, but there's no actual service yet. And even if there was, there's a big conceptual difference between a wide area relatively slow service that is available almost everywhere and a local aea high speed service that is available in tightly defined hotspots. What we actually need is a subscription that covers both and uses the best that's available at any one time.

The best response goes to mmO2 in Ireland. Eu10 per month for unlimited usage of their proposed WiFi network. That's more like it. [from: JB Wifi]

FreeNetworks Conference (FN-CON) 2003 In Las Vegas June 6-8 and with all the usual suspects speaking and attending.

I would love to go to this, does anyone want to sponsor me for my flight and expenses? ;) [from: JB Wifi]

We're getting a burst of activity from people who want to meet up locally with other Ecademy members. I know I'm going to miss somebody out, but here's some of the things going on now.

Bristol
Dave Hodgkinson
Club
Next Event 30 Jan

Essex
Sunil Prabhu
Club
Next Event 18 Feb

Midlands
Donato Esposito
Club
Next Event 11 Mar

Sussex Downs
David Rosam and Ben Davidson
Club
Next Event 18 Feb

Glasgow
Andrew Poodle
Club

High Wycombe
Bruce Wallace
Club

East Midlands
Michael Handley

Some comments:

If you're in the area, please support these people. Join their clubs, attend the events and invite others to do the same.

If you're going to an event, invite some non-Ecademy people as well

If you'd like to see something happening near you, start a club, post a blog to advertise it and see what happens.
[from: JB Ecademy]

This just in.

Open Content public swarming download net launches Justin Chapaweske, who developed SwarmCast (a "swarming" parallel download tech) for OpenCola, has started a new company that's building on his work, called Onion Networks. Onion's tech turns the Slashdot effect into a cooperative effort, where everyone downloading a popular file becomes a host of part of the file, so that the more popular a file is, the easier it is to get. To show off Onion's stuff, he's started the Open Content network, which allows the whole world to put its popular, high-demand files into the mesh to make 'em easier to download. Link  [thanks, Boing Boing Blog]

My highlight. This is one of those technologies and approaches that Cory calls "Sheep shitting grass". And one aspect of this is that upstream bandwidth from your home PC ought to be just as important as downstream. [from: JB Ecademy]

Found on alt.internet.wireless, Michael Erskine has posted a brief Locustworld Review Here's the bottom line.

---

All in all I would suggest this unit as an alternative to a commercial
AP for anyone who has an old laptop or 486 PC sitting around. It
looks to me like the data on the link between the WET-11 and the
Locust network is probably not encrypted. Certain data on the Locust
network is encrypted but not all data. I have not dumped the wireless
traffic and probably won't for some time. This is a very nice self
annealing, mesh network that has some very interesting possible
applications. Range is no more an issue with this hardware than with
standard AP's given the right card, and external antenna this unit
will achive the same ranges as any AP can achieve. The unit has been
running all night. The links are still up. I have not run heavy
traffic thru it and have not tried to test performance. The locust
network is based upon Linux and once again Linux demonstrates complete
mastery of the state of the art in networking.

Bottom line, this is an AWESOME bit of software. Is it ready for
prime time? My test was not extensive enough, but my suspicion is
that it IS ready for prime time, at least his release hardware, and
that this technology will greatly facilitate the creation of AdHoc
community networks which will be able to share MULTIPLE gateways and
thus ***AGGREGATE AVAILABLE GATEWAY BANDWITDH*** in those networks.

Sweet. Very nice work Jon. Very nice.
[from: JB Wifi]

More Links from the Pico Peering Site | The Wireless Commons Pico Peering is an approach to agreements between nodes in a free network to formalise the sharing of resources and the passing of packets between nodes. See also the Pico Peering WiKi.

See also some of Todd's pieces such as this one that argue for an economic basis for sharing between nodes in a free network. [from: JB Wifi]

I don't think I need to add anythig to this. Read it and weep!

Moore's Law + Good Ideas = Democracy FaxYourMP, an amazingly effective tool that lets Brits slashdot their Members of Parliament (and has been instrumental in killing the RIP Act and the national ID card campaign) is run off an aging server in someone's spare room in a London flat. Yesterday, the flat's ceiling caved in, and Yoz had to drive around London to get the government back up and running. Holy crap. Just imagine that. Some code, a good meme, DSL, and a few hundred bucks' worth of hardware adds up to a tool that moves governments. I am agog. Also, the flat they relocated the machine to is one that I crashed in last June, while Richard "GNU" Stallman was crashing in the flat below (a total, mind-croggling coincidence). I configured the WiFi router. There are some really hot politico-nerds in London, and no doubt about it. Link Discuss [thanks, Boing Boing Blog] [from: JB Ecademy]

JD Lasica has got a great article out about using RSS to read more news quicker. If you're not already reading your news via RSS, then take a look at this because firstly, you can never be too well informed, and secondly RSS is the most successful XML format and the richest source of web services out there.

But JDL went and broke all the normal journalism rules with this article. He's published complete transcripts of all the interviews he did while researching it. The two pieces together represent a very interesting experiment and approach to Journalism.

They point out a truth that the research, notes and tape recording, combine with the resulting raw article which is then further refined by sub-editors and finally given an abstract and headline. If there's a photo attached then that is likely to be just one of hundreds of photos that were considered.

Wouldn't be interesting if you could click through mainstream articles and see all this? Now given that modern journalism works almost entirely in the digital domain, exposing all this is a question of code and storage space. And of course it leads to difficult questions about privacy, copyright and confidentiality. [from: JB Ecademy]

Guy Kewney writes in The Register a much better article than I can about Locustworld.

Very interested in his comments about Oftel. "was the decision by Oftel, allowing people to share their broadband with up to 20 others." Is this saying what I think it's saying that Broadband providers (presumably BT) are required to allow their customers to share with 20 other people?

The second interesting option is where two or more ADSL lines are shared among a mesh of two or more mesh nodes. So now my neighbour and I can each get ADSL and share it between us and with the people across the street. So then we can all have occasional 1Mb access instead of each having 512Kb. [from: JB Wifi]

I've made some small changes to the display layout of the weblogs.

This is mainly to support "Trackbacks". If this means nothing to you then you can ignore it but if you run your own weblog you may recognise the concept. If you're posting a blog entry about a post you've seen on someone else's weblog (Either on Ecademy or elsewhere), look for a link called Trackback URL or something similar and drop it into the trackback field in the form. Ecademy will then ping the weblog to tell them we've commented on them and Ecademy will turn up in a list somewhere.

Conversely, if someone with a trackback enabled blog writes something about a post on Ecademy, they can use our trackback URL to ping us and their post will turn up in a new list on Ecademy.

If you've got any comments or suggestions about the function and layout, feel free to email me. [from: JB Ecademy]

Nice to see the Linksys NTL Promotion. Where NTL is pushing Linksys wired and wireless Wifi networking products to NTL cable Broadband subscribers. The actual deal is being provided via Global Direct.

What amuses me is that there is nothing on the site about security or the effect on NTL's AUP which says that you may not share with computers outside your house or that you do not own.

Couldn't help laughing at the photo here. Dad is wearing an office shirt and tie at home. 7 year old and 10 year old sons are messing with his laptop while teenage Big Sis looks thoroughly fed up and appears to be making a sandwich only inches away. But then as Big Sis has no tattoos or interesting piercings maybe Dad got lucky and it's actually Mum. Ah, bless. The joys of the well connected nuclear family as seen by marketing. [from: JB Wifi]