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NYT Reviews VoIP: Vonage, Packet8, VoicePulse
securitas writes "The New York Times Technology section reviews VoIP services Vonage, VoicePulse and Packet8. A second article rounds up the competition including VoIP start-ups, cable companies and traditional telcos. The review primarily focuses on Vonage and it's an enlightening review particularly because the reporter isn't a techie. Most interesting is the comment from Vonage's CEO Jeffrey Citron: 'We're not that happy with the level of service today.' The outcome of the review and CEO's comments really do indicate that VoIP is still at the bleeding edge - and not for the average consumer - but the technology is maturing quickly. It will be interesting to see if the telcos do any better with their QoS (quality of service) - which has historically been a critical differentiating factor and competitive advantage - when they introduce their VoIP services in 2004."
As a Vonage subscriber, I'd like to mention my experiences thus far.
Excellent!
Although, the service did take over a month to get turned on, now that it is, I haven't had any problems. The one or two occasions that the Vonage VM had to pick up, was while I was dinking with my router, and was blocking everything by mistake. I'm still working on getting QoS to work on my side, and thus improve performance, but so far the only drawk back is that I cannot be uploading at the same time, else it sounds muted when not speaking.
I can download all day long and still recieve excellent quality voice.
The other drawback I see, however, is the ATA. I would perfer a better way to incorporate it into the existing phone wiring, but no good. I've since purhcased a dual handset cordless phone, and no problems since, going forward, it'll be easy to take with me whereever I go. Just get the broadband access connection, and walla.
Thinking ahead, I'm sure I can incorporate it into my home phone wiring, as soon as I get a home, currently living in an apartment, but again, minor.
my 2 cents.
harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
Hilarious! I did the exact same thing as the journalist who wrote the NYT piece: called my mom. My nickname for her is Inspector Gadget because she still gets a kick out of picking up the phone and saying "Hello (insert caller's name)" after having peeked at her caller ID box. She refuses, however, to get an answering machine. ("What the heck do I want one of those things for?")
Like cooking rattlesnake for someone and letting them think it's chicken 'til after they've eaten and enjoyed it, I dragged my mom onto the Internet. I don't know which one of us was more thrilled.
Oh, and the Vonage service is fantastic. I actually called Qwest and told them I was switching to Vonage. Now there I definitely knew which one of us was more thrilled!
Sorry, I keep forgetting to add the tongue-in-cheek emoticon to the bottom of my posts...
The good news is that some new network devices (like VoIP handsets) may avoid the wall-wart syndrome of most modern telephones. IEEE P802.3af is a backward-compatible standard that delivers device power over standard CAT5 ethernet lines. A quick search shows that network gear makers are already selling switches that provide power to connected devices.
It will be nice to return to the days when desktop telephones were powered by their network connections.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Why? I already pay for my internet connection. If the money I pay for my connection doesn't cover the cost of the internet backbone, then my ISP has a bad business model. That's not my fault, is it?
Steve.
A latent existence
This is because if you have no power, your VOIP phone won't work - so you can't call 999 (911).
Apparently, BT Broadband Voice, is more of an effort to compete with cable companies (from here), although being something of a toe in the water as regards VOIP.
However, "the service, at this point, falls short of the feature-rich low- cost offerings by consumer services, such as Vonage" - so not quite before anyone else.
Interestingly however, their solution uses Metaswitch as their class 5 switch - as does Fujitsu's effort.
thats not interesting or informative, its a troll. check your facts before modding posts like this up.
An actual Vonage user for about 3 months now.
I signed up with Vonage back in October, or maybe the end of September, of 2003. The intial experience was not bad at all, and in fact the Cisco ATA-186 worked flawlessly with my netfilter configuration once I setup dhcp. The intial customer support was great, with fast, meaningful responses.
I opted to transfer my old POTS phone number from Qwest, so I had a temporary Vonage phone number for incoming calls on that line. My Qwest phone number appeared as my outgoing caller-id number on the Vonage line, which was nice, since several of the people I call use caller-id and/or distinctive ring features.
Then the trouble began.
To transfer the number, you have to submit a Letter of Authorization along with a current phone bill. I asked them if I could scan and email the docs, and I got an immediate response with instructions to email attachments of the documents to a particular email address and they would print them out. I thought this was great!
First attempt, scanned them in at a resonable resolution, sent them in, got a response that they were not legible. No more informative than that.
Scanned them in again, this time at 300 dpi greyscale and sent them as TIFF documents. They looked excellent, if I may say, but the response once again was that they were not legible. I suggested that there would be no way I could fax documents at a higher resolution using any fax machine I had access to, so they cancelled my transfer.
At that point, I was a little ticked, and a couple of days later I learned that someone finally printed out the documents and they looked just fine (as expected), but then nobody got back to me and told me this (I have this email thread stored away in the Stupid folder...). But, once the process is cancelled, it has to be handled manually, which means as slowly and painfully as possible. Oh, and there was absolutely no way to get them to put that to-be-transfered number back as my outgoing caller-id number, so everyone would answer with "what number is this?" or "where are you calling from?" or just not answer (I get that enough when they know it's me...).
On November 19, 2003, my number was transfered. Okay, actually on November 20. Well, actually on November 21. Wait, it was done on November 22. But remember, I had that Temporary number, which meant that even thought my Qwest number was now transfered, it didn't work. My outgoing caller-id was wrong, and my incoming calls would go to voicemail okay, but then my voicemail box was assigned to the temporary number. The email notifications of this process were not useful, and in fact they never sent a final email when the transfer was "complete."
It took a good week of emails, and finally I got on the phone for 75 minutes (timer running, that's the acual elapsed time) with a tech support person there who actually asked me for my login password (which I did not give him-- so they simply reset it on their end and logged in anyway). By the time I was on the phone, just about nothing was working according to plan.
In the end, I lost access to my voicemail box twice, had this number transfer go completely sour, had a very negative experience with the number transfer person (I have her name but won't bash her here), and presently my main issue is the intermittent and extremely annoying echo on my end of the calls. The Vonage FAQ suggests this happens with some handsets, but as it happens, one of my best buds from college is a VoIP developer at Cisco and gave me the 411... basically, Vonage has to fix that little feature, but I don't fell like spending an hour hearing about how the FAQ spells it out for me (incorrectly).
To be fair, Vonage service is lower in price than Qwest service was for residential use (in Arizona) and the feature set is fine. I pulled the outside wires from the phone junction box (they're rj-11 plugs) and plugged the Cisco ATA box into my house wiring, works without a hitch (before
Depends. How small do you propose this low-def TV clip is?
G729 is defined as generating 8Kb/sec. At 50 pps (what Cisco uses), 2 samples per packet, this comes out to 160 bits (20 bytes) per packet. IP/UDP/RTP overhead is 40 bytes.
So a typical G729 call is going to burn up 60 bytes per packet * 50 pps == 3000 bytes/sec == 24000 bits/sec
That's AFTER IP overhead, as you can see in my math.
Ignoring IP overhead for a moment, I'm unsure how you propose a low-def TV clip is going to be any smaller than 8Kb/sec. The audio alone would probably be encoded higher than this.
Frankly, VoIP is a pretty small burden on IP networks, at least as far as bandwidth needs go. It's need -- and where you typically have issues over enterprise networks -- is consistancy. Jitter is the enemy of VoIP, and right now, most serivce providers offer no SLAs for this particular metric. This will change over time, and people will begin to demand differentiated services for their different types of traffic.
Look in to Cisco's V3PN (Voice and Video-enabled VPN) program for information about how they propose to build and deliver end-to-end QoS to their SP customers:
http://www.cisco.com/go/v3pn/