Is VoIP Google's Next Frontier?

WindBourne writes "Apparently, Google is looking to some degree at VoIP. Of course, the question is whether they will support such items as Asterisk and FreeWorld or will they simply buy another company and tinker from that end."

Comments

Quality?

[Sierpinski]

A friend of mine has a VoIP service, and I think its horrible. He cuts in and out all the time, low volume (even though he says he's almost shouting) and there's constant static. I don't know who his carrier is, but if thats any indication of the general quality of VoIP, then I'll stick with my landline and cell phone.

Anyone else have good or bad experience with VoIP quality?

Re:Quality?

[johnjaydk]

It is all in the codec (and configuration thereof) that your provider uses.

Are you for real ?

The codec determines the bandwith/voice quality tradeoff that's true but thats less than half the issue. The real deal is quality-of-service (QoS) in layer 2 (ethernet/atm etc) and layer 3 (IP). When you have QoS in hand and a reasonable bandwith ALL-THE-WAY through then you've got a real VoIP system.

I happen to do this stuff for a living and QoS is rather hard. In particular when you don't have much control over your customers (crappy) networks.

Re:Quality?

[swillden]

The real deal is quality-of-service (QoS) in layer 2 (ethernet/atm etc) and layer 3 (IP). When you have QoS in hand and a reasonable bandwith ALL-THE-WAY through then you've got a real VoIP system.

Both the codec and the connection are important. The codec and the bit rate determine define the upper limit on the audio quality. If the codec can't reproduce the audio accurately at the specified bit rate, your call is going to sound lousy even if every packet arrives instantaneously.

On the other hand, if your connection is lousy, either can't deliver the bandwidth required, has high (or highly variable) latency or frequently drops packets, you're going to have other problems.

I use Vonage on a Comcast cable modem, and the quality is generally excellent, unless I'm overloading my cable connection. I use a Linux router configured to do traffic shaping/policing and to give precedence to the VOIP traffic and that *mostly* works, but people I speak with report the occasional garble or dropout when I'm transferring large files.

My boss uses Vonage on a fairly low-bandwidth DSL connection and doesn't have a smart router to prioritize VOIP traffic, although he does put the Motorola VOIP box in front of his Linksys router/WAP, so the Motorola box should be able to do prioritization. In his case, his VOIP service gets really bad when he's sending large e-mails.

Assuming the connection is good, my experience with Vonage is that Vonage-to-land-line calls are excellent and Vonage-to-Vonage calls are astoundingly good. I don't know if I'd say "CD quality", but the audio is far clearer and louder than any phone connection I've used.

I do notice some latency, but I think that's only because I'm paying attention. After scrutinizing my VOIP connections for months, I now notice *massive* latency on my cellphone communications. My cell phone has almost twice the latency of my VOIP phone, but I never noticed it before I got VOIP and started obsessing over it.

BTW, it's fun to call my cell phone from my VOIP phone and hold them next to each other and listen to the "feedback". The large total latency (Almost 250ms, I'd guess) leads to some really interesting "echoey" feedback effects.

How about improving...

[should_be_linear]

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