PC Magazine's In-Depth VoIP Review

Voipster writes "PC Magazine has completed their in-depth review of six VoIP providers. The Editor's Choice award goes to AT&T's CallVantage service. Unlike other reviews that consist of making a few phone calls, PC Magazine uses Minacom's PowerProbe 6000 VoIP testing equipment which provides hard numerical scores for a DTMF detection test, a fax transmission test, and two voice quality tests, PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) and VQES (Voice Quality Evaluation System). However, after a very detailed analysis of each provider, the calculated scores don't carry much weight as they award AT&T's CallVantage the Editor's Choice and four other services strangely tie for second place."

Comments

Lots of VOIP phones in 1 house

[BobPaul]

Hard-wiring additional phones will most likely require an electrician.

I don't know why they always say crap like this. All you have to do is go outside your house the to telephone box, disconnect your phone line from the local network (it's a good idea to leave a note saying that it should remain disconnected and tape the leads, just so it doesn't get reconnected...)

Once you've disonnected your house from the POTS, you can plug your analog telephone adapter into ANY telephone wall outlet in the house! This makes all of your phone jacks live with telephone service from your VOIP connection.

That is, unless of course you have DSL. In that case you should either use a 2-line adapter to run your VOIP phones on line 2, or change your DSL connection to line 2 and plug in your ATA normally.

Re:Lots of VOIP phones in 1 house

[jburroug]

That is, unless of course you have DSL. In that case you should either use a 2-line adapter to run your VOIP phones on line 2, or change your DSL connection to line 2 and plug in your ATA normally.

There are other ways to do this with DSL without doing the two line thing, which may not be an option for apartment dwellers (like me) who only have one pair available.

The first step is to identify which phone jack is the first one on the loop coming off of the phone box outside. Now take apart the jack and disconnect the pair coming in from the phone box, that is the pair that carries your DSL signal. Now wire this pair into a surface mount keystone jack or whatever and plug your DSL modem in. Put your original jack back together and back in the wall, you have now isolated your internal phone network from the phone box and wire up all of the extensions to your ATA. See pictures of the work in progrees here and the finished outlets here . For good measure I also diconnected the the last jack in the series so I'm not sending dial tone to the neighbors place :)

On a side note I've also managed to get my rotary phones working with Vonage by ordering a Pulse to DTMF adapter from Mike Sandman who also has lots of other neat telco goodies at his site. The Linksys router sends enough voltage to ring my Western Electric 302G and my 554 wall phone clearly, though the 554 wimps out after a fe rings. I think this is because my 302 was originally setup for a long party line install and has a ring isolater tube installed to compensate for weak ringing voltage from too many phones on the same line. I'm looking to replace the 554 with a 364 wall phone from a party line install, with the hope that it'll play nicer with the Linksys.

In any case it's immensely satisfying to use a 60 year old phone on a VOIP service...

Real world factors..

[freelunch]

There is a great deal of variability in VOIP provider performance. Unfortunately, I don't think the carriers are cooperating (with tools) in making it clear where the problems are. Whether on their networks, PSTN gateways, etc, or broadband ISPs. They could do a lot to clear this up. Though the potential for the finger to point at them is a reason for them not to do this.

VOIP quality must be measured over time. How is the performance at 8PM EST on Saturday? How many drop outs on a 1 hour call?

This gets more complicated as ISPs compete for service. I know of someone at Cox who was intentionally messing with VOIP provider traffic (and laughing about it).

I switched to Packet8 in September after using Voice Pulse for 5 months. Voice Pulse call quality had become embarassing, even after trying their higher compression codecs. "Mom, can you hear me??"

Packet8 quality has been excellent (much cheaper too). All this on Comcast. I can even run P2P at 10KB/sec upstream with P8. VP was problematic with no P2P.

A friend who lives 50 miles away has tried Vonage, Voice Pulse and Packet8. They all pretty much suck for him. He is on Comcast but it is former TCI infrastructure.

He agrees that the best VOIP he has ever had were when we use Creative Labs VOIP Blaster between Seattle and Virgina for over a year.

Voice Pulse tech support was useless when it came to outages (yes, they had lengthy outages) or performance problems.

My rule of thumb for VOIP is to be prepared to drop them if performance is bad. Don't waste your time. Don't get caught in a contract or a situation that will be expensive to get out of.

And don't become attached to the phone number. VOIP is a commodity, treat it as a commodity.