Comments on: Is VoIP an Excuse for Bad Voice Quality?

By: r.pad

r.pad — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 10:23:44 +0000

I actually do care about call quality, since I call people in Asia a great deal. At the start of 2006, I was juggling Vonage and Skype. At the end, I threw in Yahoo! Voice in the mix. I dropped Vonage because the price and call quality were poor. I try to stick to Yahoo! since the rates are great, but the quality is a crapshoot. Skype is my old reliable, but unfortunately its rates are double that of Yahoo!'s (for the areas I call).

By: Todd Holsombeck

Todd Holsombeck — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:18:58 +0000

Om…this deserves a bit more looking into. MOS scores can be rigged. LAN’s are often misconfigured. Poor quality endpoints effect call quality. There is also beginning to be a debate about the fact that consolidation plays a role here. All the dark fiber laid in the late 90′s has not been lit. As we move toward less and less CLEC’s how many routes are out there to move around. Combine this with “hot potato” routing schemes most larger backbones employ, and you may be beginning to see congestion. Not the kind of congestion to disrupt email or web surfing, but the kind that makes your real time call to India bad. Put in the Ted Steven’s vernacular, people are treating the Internet like a dump truck…not a series of tubes!

By: Jesse Kopelman

Jesse Kopelman — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 03:46:58 +0000

william, a 'regular' telephone should actually get a MOS score of at least 4 (that is toll quality). An MOS of 3 is barely acceptable. Most humans have trouble differentiating between MOS=4 and MOS>4, but the differences below 4 are quiet dramatic. Also, when it comes to MOS your individual mileage will vary as the actual scores are based on a table of averaged opinions done way back when. Also, MOS is a measure of how good the reproduction is not how nice it sounds. Just like you may not care for a wine that got a 90+ score from 3 different reviewers, a call that scores a MOS=4 may still not sound that great to you. If you are very used to listening to CDs and especially MP3s and using digital phones, you may actually prefer a digital conversation with a lower MOS to an analog conversation with a higher MOS. Few digital phones break the MOS=4 barrier, due to the nature of vocoders used. A decent mobile phone call is usually around MOS=3.5. A final thing to consider is that a call may be of excellent quality over the actual communications network but still sound bad to you due to a poor quality components in your handset. A lot of cordless landline phones just sound terrible.

By: SIPthat

SIPthat — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:42:36 +0000

VoIP Quality or Lack of it...

Om asks the question, Is VoIP an Excuse for Bad Voice Quality?, the answer is no, it is not.The truth is that VoIP is capable of delivering better quality than most are used to but the technology is not given......

By: Jim Louderback

Jim Louderback — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 23:24:22 +0000

You are so right! Why does voice sound so bad on the net? We have great codecs, great technology, and still, regular calls and VOIP sounds terrible.

The tech is there. Someone should make it work!

By: Brian Laks

Brian Laks — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:30:14 +0000

So what is the best one now? Skype? My main interest is that it be free (of course), and at least intelligible voice quality. I'm not going to fault them too much now as long they intend to improve it. And when is Cisco going to silence all these wannabes? Let's see free worldwide video conferencing!

By: Arun Bhardwaj

Arun Bhardwaj — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:08:24 +0000

i agree with everyone that voice communication companies should focus on providing good voice quality before jumping on the next hot thing. But then companies fear competitive disadvantages. So the fact of life is, with the communication worlds converging, VoIP (or some other form of Internet based voice communication) is here to stay.

Let me provide you with the other side of the story. In the last two years (working with Keynote Systems, Inc.), I have been involved with the customer experience measurment of the voice service quality in the USA. Our overall observation is that the VoIP quality is gradually improving and in some cases it performs better than the PSTN.

Take the case of cable based VoIP providers. They have the bandwidth advantage as well as they are providing a new lastmile connection. Also as compared to the analog communication, the digital communication is more immune to the external imparement factors. Therefore, because of the last mile factors we have frequently observed that the Voice Over Internet services perform better than the PSTN especially in the old houses or in the houses away from the centeral office.

As far as the international communication is concerned, I have not analyzed the data, but my reliance phone card experience has been extreamly pleasant (may be they are not using public Internet at all). I am sure once Vonage and likes can figure out how to reduce their extreamly high customer acquisition cost, they will start focussing on improving their call quality.

Meanwhile, some of the VoIP service providers are becoming confident of their voice service and publishing their voice service quality numbers (monitored by an independent third party) on their website (example www.vonics.com). This trend suggests that just low cost is not going to be a differentiator for the VoIP companies, they will have to start cometpting on the overall service quality.

Arun

By: Telemorph

Telemorph — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:01:09 +0000

We consumers have clearly demonstrated how little value we place on QoS, at least as it relates to voice communication. As more and more people flocked to 'free' internet services like Skype, and began thinking of the PSTN as either irrelevant, or a premium service (as you obviously did), the price of that 'premium' service would have had to go up to compensate for reduced usage and revenues and reflect that value premium, or the Service Providers could race for the bottom, and try and compete on cost. In their judgement, the latter must have appeared more viable.

By: freechelmi

freechelmi — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:59:45 +0000

SIP + speex Wideband = Better sound than a phone. Problem : if you call on PSTN, most of the proxues does not support anything else than PCMU ...

By: Moshe Maeir

Moshe Maeir — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:44:45 +0000

"routerguy" has put on the table the real problem. As the Chief Flattening Officer at the Flat Planet Phone Co. I am constantly asked how can a business depend a VoIP service?? The truth is that all the carriers from at&t down use VoIP for terminating their international calls. The typical carrier works with a few terminating partners in each country and sends traffic to the cheapest bidder. Quality is sacrificed to save a tenth of a cent. In fact in many cases our customers of the little VoIP company get better quality than the customers of the BIG Carrier...