re: Brits Brace for VOIP BattleComrades, I tend to agree with Mr.Doran. I recently returned to the UK after living in France and have been pleasantly surprised at the level of competition here now.
I can get low cost voice services for local, national and international calls over my conventional telephone line. What's the point in moving to a lower quality VoIP service that offers no additional features or facilities?
In the past couple of weeks I've had a couple of telephone conversations with the other person being on enterprise VoIP. These were national, not international calls, and yet the delay was so bad we ended up saying "over" when we finished speaking. And this was using a G.711 codec. Goodness knows what the delay would have been like with compression. On the other hand I've had calls to a business contact who uses a VoIP service from home, and the quality has been fine. But part of the quality equation is consistency, and VoIP consistency clearly isn't there yet. I assume the biggest part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of the end to end connection, which may have to pass through several conversion stages in transit, each of which adds delay.
So what about adding new features to a VoIP service vs POTS?
A very useful feature on a residential phone system would be to have multiple phone lines into my house. I work from home, so this would be a real benefit. This can be done with POTS today, but the pricing isn't very attractive.
But current "broadband" technologies don't offer enough bandwidth for multiple voice connections, never mind leaving any additional bandwidth for Internet access.
What kinds of useful new features or services can a VoIP connection offer, compared to good old POTS?
re: Brits Brace for VOIP BattleAs an ISP (SAQ) we think VoIP is boring and I would agree with the previous commentary - it does nothing that POTs cannot already do. Where I part company is on the quality issue. Currently we are offering IP videophones. Using an ADSL connection in the Uk we can obtain excellent lip synch conversations (with no "and so over to you Harry" stuff). So, sorry but, from our point of view, ADSL can deliver on quality (voice and video) and we believe that it plugs the service gap - end users now want something more than fast e-mail, web browsing and a bit of VPN. Videophones deliver this. And yes our phones support ITU standards.
re: Brits Brace for VOIP BattleHi, A simple idea.. How about VoIP deliver better voice than POTS?? You have enough bandwidth to waste.. Why stay at G.711?? I believe this is what Skype did...
I tend to agree with Mr.Doran. I recently returned to the UK after living in France and have been pleasantly surprised at the level of competition here now.
I can get low cost voice services for local, national and international calls over my conventional telephone line. What's the point in moving to a lower quality VoIP service that offers no additional features or facilities?
In the past couple of weeks I've had a couple of telephone conversations with the other person being on enterprise VoIP. These were national, not international calls, and yet the delay was so bad we ended up saying "over" when we finished speaking. And this was using a G.711 codec. Goodness knows what the delay would have been like with compression. On the other hand I've had calls to a business contact who uses a VoIP service from home, and the quality has been fine. But part of the quality equation is consistency, and VoIP consistency clearly isn't there yet. I assume the biggest part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of the end to end connection, which may have to pass through several conversion stages in transit, each of which adds delay.
So what about adding new features to a VoIP service vs POTS?
A very useful feature on a residential phone system would be to have multiple phone lines into my house. I work from home, so this would be a real benefit. This can be done with POTS today, but the pricing isn't very attractive.
But current "broadband" technologies don't offer enough bandwidth for multiple voice connections, never mind leaving any additional bandwidth for Internet access.
What kinds of useful new features or services can a VoIP connection offer, compared to good old POTS?
Cheers,
Geoff