Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), using the Internet to make cheap or free calls, was one reason I got extremely excited (well…pretty excited) when truck stops began becoming Wi-Fi hotspots. Unfortunately, I found that using services like Skype and Vonage were hit and miss. Not so much due to the services, although Skype seems better suited to our over-the-road lifestyle than Vonage, but, primarily, due to Quality of Service issues with the truck stop hotspots.

For the last few months, though, Flying J has been offering its own VoIP service, known as eValue Talk, that addresses some of those issues.

You can say what you want about Flying J. In seemingly equal measure I’ve been both impressed and infuriated by them. The fuel desks seem to suffer from infuriatingly inadequate staffing numbers but the few folks that do work them are impressively friendly and capable. Since I believe the attitude and abilities displayed by the employees of any organization are a direct reflection of the management and, since the employees I’ve encountered seem to be both interested in and capable of meeting my momentary needs, I’ve drawn the conclusion that Flying J has adopted the philosophy of Zig Ziglar: “You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

Flying J has grown from four gas stations into the largest retail distributor of diesel fuel in North America using a business model known as “Vertical Integration“. Vertically integrated companies tend to be very self-sufficient because they produce and control their own supply. Knowing this, I was not at all surprised when Flying J established yet another subsidiary, Flying J Communications, to provide and oversee, among many other things, it’s Wi-Fi service. When other truck stop chains were partnering with dubious Internet Service Providers like Truckstop.net; Flying J was setting about the business of becoming an ISP unto themselves. By doing so, they were able to control every aspect of their service and thereby avoided every single problem experienced by customers of the “other guys”. When the fortunes of Truckstop.net went south Flying J even offered to let those customers use their remaining subscription balance on the Flying J Wi-Fi network.

Another advantage that Flying J now has over the competition has to do with their ability to provide VoIP service. At first glance, eValue Talk doesn’t seem to be a big deal because, at least in its current form, you can only make PC to PC calls – and then to only two other people. (Its really easy, though, to reassign the two secondary extensions.) It’s doubtful that such a limited VoIP service will have Skype and Vonage quaking in their boots but Flying J hotspot users taking advantage of the free eValue Talk service will likely experience higher call quality than truckers making Internet calls through any other VoIP provider.

The reason for this lies within the 802.11e Wi-Fi standard that defines Quality of Service enhancements considered critical for delay-sensitive applications like VoIP. By implementing the 802.11e standard within their Wi-Fi hotspots it’s possible for Flying J to identify and give priority treatment to VoIP calls made using their eValue Talk service. They can do this because they’re vertically integrated – providing both the Internet and Voice over Internet services.

Not too long ago I talked with one of the guys at Flying J Communications and we exchanged a few emails. Some of what we discussed included information regarding future features that, if they can swing it, might one day be included with eValue Talk. There’s no guarantee that these features will show up anytime soon; there’s not even a guarantee that they’ll show up at all. That being said and understood; here’s what they’re still working on at the Flying J Communication VoIP labs:

• Video Calls: According to their spokesman, they have “some technical and strategic issues that we are trying to work through but we think it would be neat to teach professional drivers how to video call their families at home.”
• Allowing PC-to-PSTN Calls: Meaning that you could call a land-line from your laptop. Again, according to their spokesman, this is something that’s “(t)echnically very easy since we already have our switching equipment and we are already certified as a long distance carrier. Strategically it is something we really want to do. The hold up is that the FCC has required E911 to work from VoIP calls and it is physically impossible to do with a mobile hotspot VoIP caller. We have no way to switch the call to the correct local dispatch and provide address information.”

Even if you subscribe to another VoIP provider you should give eValue Talk a try and, if it’s not too much trouble, let me know what you think.