"Can't they make it up on volume?"
In the realm of "free," zero multiplied by a thousand - or by any number - is still nothing. Worse, operating overhead increases with increasing levels of traffic, with no corresponding increase in revenue. Such would apply to the commercial venture that was hoping to capitalize on advertising.
FWIW, the Open Internet application known as Internet Telephony is still "free" of measured usage charges (aside from the costs of Internet access, of course) for end users who are so equipped to use it. Albeit, without the directory and call handling services, and QoS, that one would expect from a carrier.
Turning to premises based VoIP, incidentally, it's proving to be anything be free, especially in large commercial building adaptations.
Some PBX substitution projects I've been privy to have revealed that port for port costs are about in line with traditional PBXs. And the VoIP ensembles still don't come close to providing half the features, yet. Also, distance limitations to LAN based IP phones are proving to be more problematic than one might have thought, previously.
Explan: IP Phones must be within ~300 feet (90 meters) of the closet LAN Switch. Whereas, analog and traditional digital PBX phones could be several thousand feet away.
From an architectural perspective this means that if you wish to connect a phone to the system that is greater than 90 meters away from the serving Equipment Room (LAN Closet), you must add an Ethernet $witch closer to the phone. Why not use fiber? Because IP Phones are powered from the LAN switch ports via metallic Category x LAN cables. Electric Power is a big sticking point with IP Voice to the desktop, as it is elsewhere, these days. A proposed fix, of sorts, for this is to present the voice application on the PC screen (a soft voice app) along with a headset.
I recall seeing this in a futures section of a trade rag about sixteen years ago. In which case you still need to provide local power for the PC, and you must still be within the 90 meter reach, anyway.
Only, in the latter case you can specify fiber if you wish to overcome the distance limitation, and connect it to an optical PC NIC. In this manner, the distance can be increased, substantially. Progress.
Another interesting factoid from those who are installing desktop VoIP provisions is that they do not send their traffic to the Internet or to a VoIP Carrier, for the most part. Instead, they still send most or all of their voice traffic to the circuit-switched PSTN, via normal T1 (PRI) lines for direct inward and outward dialing trunks. |
