New Study Finds VOIP is Getting Better

Proudrooster writes "Keynote Systems Inc. made 154,000 VOIP calls during the months of May and June. In total they tested six VOIP providers and seven ISPs. Their conclusion was that VOIP isn't quite as robust as the public phone network due to dropped calls, lower audio quality, and latency (audio delay), but it is still pretty good. The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad) and overall the reviewers were pleasantly surprised with the VOIP test results. Vonage ranked best for "most reliable" with 99.4% uptime, AT&T CallVantage ranked best for "audio clarity"." Personally I think 94.8% is pretty awful. I don't think 99.4% is very good either. But there is no doubt that audio quality is getting better. I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

Comments

Take heed

[bigwavejas]

The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)

I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.

In addition...
There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it. We use VOIP phones at work and I recall a situation last year where a hacker brought our internet connection to its knees (hence no VOIP phones) and everyone was running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to figure out how to make calls. Our solution was to use cell phones for back-up, but I couldn't help but point out if we had regular phones we would have avoided the problem entirely.

Re:Take heed

[linzeal]

Emergency phone calls should go through a centralized system or set of protocols that is shared by all the providers and is monitored by the FCC to ensure what you are talking about.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't use VOIP for 911 calls. It's not designed for that. Use VoIP for cheap, not for critical. Don't use the wrong sollution and then blame the technology.

Re:Take heed

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Amen brother! If that downtime is randomly distributed, than means that about 1 call in 20 won't happen because your VOIP provider is down.
Personally, I receive about that many calls over the course of a day, and place about twice that many. Thankfully, I've only called 911 twice in the past 10 years, but it would be annoying as hell to accept a ~5% failure rate for telephony.

Re:Take heed

[badasscat]

The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)

I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.

Seriously. 94.8% means there's a one in 20 chance that when you pick up your phone, it's not going to work. That is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette in an emergency.

There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it.

In addition to the issue you mentioned, you forgot about a simple power failure.

When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.

(Of course, this is also true of cordless phones, but anyone can head to a drug store in a major power outage and buy a $10 AT&T corded phone if they don't already have one. This cannot be done for a VoIP phone, though.)

Re:Take heed

[MikeFM]

Not really. Last time I dealt with being hacked they simply cut our physical phone lines to the building.. meanwhile the network, which was wireless, kept going and no hacking attempts were very successful.

If you rely on your wired phone always being there then you're kidding yourself as to it's reliability. I experience a lot more downtime from my regular phone lines than from my Internet.

Re:Take heed

[QuantumRiff]

and if you had stayed with carrier pigions, you wouldn't have to deal with fiber optic cable cuts either.. Face it, all new technology is never as good as the old when it first comes out. VOIP is nowhere near standard telephones for emergency, but way, way far ahead on capability. The fact that local PUC's have given phone companies legal monopolies over areas because they promise this kind of capability is one reason they are ahead. (BTW, any VOIP consultant worth more than $0.50/hour should be requiring at least 1 POTS line per building, just for this reason..)

In northern Oregon last week, my friends lost all long distance, internet, (except cable internet) cell phones, and every thing that goes with it. (like ATM's, Visa machines, Bank branches, etc) The reason? A rodent ate through a fiber cable, killing the main line out of town. The backups lines didn't work either, they are "investigating" that... If they had carrier pigeons, they would have been fine.. Or the post office..

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

So your VOIP serivce becomes unusable when you're hit with many gbps of traffic from a network of thousands of zombies?

What happens to your N land lines when you have N+1 people wanting to make a call?

Re:Take heed

[axonal]

You could still run into the same problem with regular phone lines. Its possible to create a DoS with normal phones. A bunch of computers programmed to wardial continously a number. Your phones would be ringing off the hook.

Re:Take heed

[mattdm]

You shouldn't use VOIP for 911 calls. It's not designed for that. Use VoIP for cheap, not for critical. Don't use the wrong sollution and then blame the technology.

That's nice and all, but meanwhile people/companies are pushing ditching traditional phone service for this. And for that, they absolutely deserve that blame.

Re:Take heed

[vertinox]

When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it.

I'm sure someone, somewhere on an ISP help desk is laughing about this ingenious plan ;)

Re:Take heed

[Col. Klink (retired)]

I recall when hurricane Isabel hit here lots of co-workers told me they had to scramble to find a phone that didn't require power to work. I only have one such phone (it actually does need power, but uses batteries). Most household phones nowadays are feature laden and require external power (especially true of cordless phones).

So during a critical emergency, how many people have time to go digging through their basement to find an old telephone?

Re:Take heed

[sbrown123]

When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.

Thats interesting. Most VOIP operations are using the same 911 services used by most cell phone providers. You advocating everyone returning cell phones too?

There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it.

Lets see: I've been using the internet over a decade. I must admit that I haven't seen a hacker take down the internet yet. Maybe I just was not on during when that occured and they corrected the problem before I noticed. Have to go to bed some time!

We use VOIP phones at work and I recall a situation last year where a hacker brought our internet connection to its knees (hence no VOIP phones) and everyone was running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to figure out how to make calls.

Wow. My last employer had the complete opposite problem. But the nemesis wasn't hackers, it was thunderstorms. Every year we could count on a storm knocking out the phone service. Storms seem a more common threat to communication technology as compared to hackers taking down the internet.

And if your using DSL to connect for VOIP, and your phone line goes down, aren't you SOL anyways?

Re:Take heed

[digidave]

My ISP, Cogeco, is offering VOIP with a modem that has an 8 hour battery backup. Definitely a nice feature.

Re:Take heed

[pyrrhonist]

When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago...

...but anyone can head to a drug store in a major power outage and buy a $10 AT&T corded phone if they don't already have one.

I went to CVS on the day that happened. The power wasn't out in our area, but was out in much of the northeast. The funny part was that CVS couldn't sell anything, because the connection from their registers to their datacenter was down. Thus, I was unable to purchase a phone (or a Coke, actually).

Re:Take heed

[bedroll]

When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.

Sure, but Verizon Wireless was still going strong. I happen to have been there for that, although I had power after a half hour (party at my place!) and Vonage was back to working. I didn't care, I only used Vonage that night to order Chinese for my guests.

Aside from that, you do realize that the landline companies aren't allowed to completely cut off your service, right? They have to allow the line to access 911 services. So, even if you get VOIP you can still have that corded phone plugged into the land line incase of an emergency. You could also just use a cell phone, as they have similar reliability and the chances that both services would be out is pretty slim. If they are, skip Walgreens and call 911 from the payphone outside.

Re:Take heed

[kesuki]

whoo hoo you just said 100% uptime is the only 'acceptable' uptime for anyone. there is a 'bug' in the decimal system. any 'infinitely repeating' decimal string can through a valid algebra equasion be proven to be equal to 1 (or in this case 100).

EG: 99.99~ = X ; 10*99.99~ = 10x ; 999.99~ - X = 10X -X ; 900 = 9X ; 100 = X

keep in mind in order to offer 100% uptime the telcos have triple circuit redundancy... and even then '100%' means 'barring an act of god, or terrorism'

Re:Take heed

[Phurd Phlegm]

The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)

I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.

I disagree too. An availability of 94.8% means once in twenty times when you pick up the phone, there's no dialtone. Considering that I was probably 20 before the first time this happened with my land line (except for when the other people on the party line were talking), I'd say VOIP is not ready for prime time.

I have a geekie friend that has VOIP and he's thinking of dropping it because it sounds worse than his cell phone(!).

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

IN SPITE OF THE BIG PRINT THAT SAYS 911 WILL NOT WORK PROPERLY!!!! You are dumb. If you make that choice, that's your choice.

Re:Take heed

[podperson]

99.99 (repeating) would be nice!

I don't think anything is that reliable.

Re:Take heed

[DA-MAN]

Seriously. 94.8% means there's a one in 20 chance that when you pick up your phone, it's not going to work. That is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette in an emergency.

True but there is also a 19 in 20 chance that the second time around will work. Dialing 911 doesn't magically save your life, help still has to arrive. If hanging up and dialing a second time took too long, then you probably didn't have a chance of living to begin with.

In addition this report doesn't say if this is 94.9% chance of incoming calls failing or 94.9% chance of outgoing calls failing. I've been using voip for over 2 years now and none of my outgoing calls have ever been rejected. Only issues I've had were with incoming calls going straight to voicemail, and those were rare based on the feedback I've gotten from friends and family. No worse than a cell phone.

In addition to the issue you mentioned, you forgot about a simple power failure.

If power fails, the stations that provide power to the phone systems will eventually fail after prolonged period of time. Even then, most people these days have a cordless phone which will result in the same thing. In a day where most people who use voip also have cell phones, this is probably not a big deal.

Re:Take heed

[pthisis]

Thankfully, I've only called 911 twice in the past 10 years

I wouldn't be too thankful--that's WAY above the average.

Re:Take heed

[rbarreira]

I liked the fact that 4 nine's transformed themselves into 5 nine's in the middle of your equations. You can't do what you did, your proof is only valid for an infinite amount of digits, which is commonly written as 99.(9). In this new case, it amounts to proving that 1/3*3 = 1.

Or is 10*99.99 = 999.99 in the place where you come from? ;)

Re:Take heed

[cayenne8]

"Aside from that, you do realize that the landline companies aren't allowed to completely cut off your service, right? They have to allow the line to access 911 services. So, even if you get VOIP you can still have that corded phone plugged into the land line incase of an emergency. You could also just use a cell phone, as they have similar reliability and the chances that both services would be out is pretty slim. If they are, skip Walgreens and call 911 from the payphone outside."

I think the mandatory 911 from landline companies policy...is location based. Probably best to call them first before 'cutting the cord'. I've moved into places, and the lines were completely dead until I had my phone number activated there.

Also, with cell phone proliferation...I can rarely find a payphone anywhere any longer. And even if there is one down the block..if you're having a heart attack...kinda hard to make it down the block during the middle of it to get to that payphone...

I need to call my local landline to see about the 911 issue myself. Also, I need to find an extra battery to keep charged...so I can ensure I always have the cell phone powered and ready to go. I'd hate to be without phone for emergencies...

Re:Take heed

[DigiShaman]

There are always trade-offs with new technology. If you must use VoIP as your only phone service, then may I recommend you learn CPR and stock up on a medical kit. Besides, 911 is useless for the person that need immediate medical attention (such as choking or having a heart attack).

Re:Take heed

[Dahan]

gg reading comprehension

Re:Take heed

[squiggleslash]

This is why I keep one plugged in at all times, just in case. It's rarely used, but it's a tough - drop it from any reasonable height and it'll still work - phone with an actual bell. (The bell isn't a safety feature, I just thought I'd mention it because it's cool.)

It's remarkable, in my view, how so many people do not do this. I understand the attraction of cordless phones, but these days you can have any number attached to one base station. With four or five outlets in the average home, one attached to the base station, one for your modem or DSL modem, and one other for your answerphone if you have one not integrated with your normal phone, you should have at least one more outlet available, and if you don't, a phone line splitter costs something in the region of $1.06 (yes, you can get them from the Dollar Store, where everything costs $1.06.)

Worse still, I live in Florida. These people suffered a week without power last year, and twice in the space of a month. And how many people have unpowered corded phones? Hmmm? Take a guess.

On a related note, a firefighter soon-to-be-relative happened to mention the whole issue with 911 and VoIP over the weekend to me. I've posted at length my concerns about VoIP and 911, so it was interesting hearing the same perspective from someone (a) who isn't a geek and (b) who actually is close enough to the wall to know how important 911 is.

Re:Take heed

[hackwrench]

You seem to believe that the situation in your locale is the same as everywhere else. I've lived in a few places and never had trouble. Plus, you say phone lines. What is your setup exactly and are your problems with the phone company, or maybe only your connection of all the phone company's connection is bad, or just the circuit you're on

Re:Take heed

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I keep one in a logical place where it will get used occasionally and where I don't mind being tethered to a line at all- by the toilet.

Re:Take heed

[name773]

--| |--

i'd guess film type, am i right?

Re:Take heed

[jacksonj04]

AFAIK if you don't keep up payments, they will cut your line to everything including emergency numbers. This is unlike the mobile network, where (in the UK at least) handsets and operators must make every attemt to connect emergency calls even if it's a handset with no SIM card. It will just grab the strongest signal it can and demand emergency carrier access.

In short, if you don't pay your line rental they are allowed to cut you off.

Re:Take heed

[mikvo]

I wouldn't say useless. 911 operators can either assist, or put you in touch with someone who can assist you by providing instructions on how to deal with a lot of situations. If you aren't trained, chances are 911 can help. Onsite skill is always better, but that doesn't mean 911 is useless.

Re:Take heed

[erlenic]

I just can't bring myself to use the phone on the toilet. I don't want the other person hearing my grunting and other assorted noises.

Re:Take heed

[Cramer]

This is not true. However, so long as the line is connected to a phone switch, yes, they are required to process 911 calls on it. Bellsouth will also allow you to call their service center (780-2355?) where you can signup for service.

(There are a few "poor people" loopholes -- all that Universal Service bull...)

Re:Take heed

[MightyMartian]

I thought we had long ago established that, when it comes to the Internet, most users are dumb.

Re:Take heed

[dcsmith]

Let the off-topic moderation begin...

You're either 12 or 92 if you think 9-1-1 is useless for truly emergent situations. (To young to know better or too set in your ways to get rid of your rotary-dial phone with the administrative number to your local fire department stuck to the side.)

I won't say all, but many PSAPs (Public Safety Answering Points) have implemented Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) programs that allow the 9-1-1 telecommunicators to quickly get the right assistance on the way and then step the caller through a variety of pre-arrival instructions. These protocols very clearly define the steps to be taken for situations like choking, heart attacks, apparent anaphylactic shock, etc. No, the programs aren't perfect, but they have many documented saves that make the value of a well-trained 9-1-1 staff clear to anyone who actually looks into the question instead of just lipping off with stupid and incorrect generalizations.

Please feel free to just go ahead and call a priest instead of 9-1-1 when someone in your family has a heart attack.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe couldbe shouldbe

Re:Take heed

[juniorkindergarten]

I have vonage, and the call quality at first was poor enough for me to consider cancelling the service.
I actually read the manual and the recommendation was to port forward directly to the to the vonage box.
From that point foward everyone I've talked to doesn't know its voip or if they know remark that the call's clearer.

Re:Take heed

[hruska]

(Of course, this is also true of cordless phones, but anyone can head to a drug store in a major power outage and buy a $10 AT&T corded phone if they don't already have one. This cannot be done for a VoIP phone, though.) How are they going to run the checkout lane at the local drug store when there is a major power outage?

Re:Take heed

[radish]

On 9/11 I couldn't get a phone line to work from downtown Manhattan all day (or most of the next). However, my email (and thus VoIP, if I had had it then) was fine throughout.

No technology is 100% reliable, they all have their weakpoints. It is the users responsibility to ensure that they have adequate understanding of what the weaknesses are and have backup plans. Personally, I have VoIP at home. My backup plan is either of the 2 cellphones in the apartment, or one of our 200 neighbours in the building, or the building doorman. I think that just about covers it... Of course, YMMV, and that's why choice is a good thing.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have to maintain an entire seperate landline network just for 911, then VoIP isn't cheap. The cost of a usable VoIP network is then the cost of POTS plus the cost of VoIP, while the cost of POTS would just be POTS alone.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but you have to be a complete idiot if you are running your VOIP traffic over your internet connection. Who would do such a thing? It sounds like the problem isn't with the technology, but the way it was implemented in your situation. You should never route your calls over the internet. You should have a call manager hooked into your PBX, which transmits the calls via regular T1/DS3/Whatever lines to the phone company, or hook it up to your wan cloud. You never connect it to the internet. That's just plain stupid. Now, for home users, that's a different story, and 99% uptime is as good as it gets for home use. But, that's all this article was talking about, not business VOIP. That's an entirely different entity.

Re:Take heed

[bbrack]

Phone companies are required to patch through 911 calls, regardless of whether the line is active or not.

Since the 911 phone is only for the power is out/house is on fire/someone has a heart attack/whatever, have a phone (non cordless, so it's not dependent on whether the power is on) connected to the land-line, and use it for the emergency calls.

Considering the fact you shouldn't be calling 911 all that often (hopefully - I think I've dialed it twice in the last 10 years), this should be a fairly workable solution...

Re:Take heed

[Luke-Jr]

You don't need a POTS dialtone or service to use it for 911. As long as the wiring is there, it should still work.

Re:Take heed

[hurfy]

Even better.

If they had been using that one provider they would have ONLY missed about 8008 calls.......

I cant recall any of the POTS lines at work not working in years. Even AFTER the fact that i am using a self-managed 1980's PBX analog PBX system. I don't recall a failure in either ever here :)

What do i call our last 2 lines? Phone co hooked em up to a T1 instead of POTS. VOIP on steroids or something? Never said anything to us about VOIP. Terribly curious as to 911 now tho.

Re:Take heed

[jc42]

An availability of 94.8% means once in twenty times when you pick up the phone, there's no dialtone.

Not necessarily. One serious problem with this discussion is that there are lots and lots of ways that people (and companies) define "availability".

Back when I had a POTS line (now DSL) I saw numerous cases where the phone system was in some failure mode. Usually it did give a dial tone, but all calls would fail. Sometimes I could make a call, but I'd always get a busy signal - even when I called my neighbor who was waiting by his phone for the call. Sometimes I'd punch in the numbers and get absolutely no response at all. Sometimes I'd get an ongoing dial tone after I dialed, as if I hadn't dialed at all. Usually all my neighbors had the same problem at the same time.

So I'd check, and sure enough, the phone company's official reports claimed 100% availability for the entire exchange for that month.

They obviously define "availability" differently than I do. They can be 100% up and "available", but not completing any phone calls. They consider that uptime. I don't.

In any case, at least here in the US, chances are that any call you make outside your local exchange is now using VoIP for at least part of the connection. The phone companies have been switching everything past your local loop to IP for years now. Of course, it's not usually over the public Internet; they have their own dedicated lines. But still, once you realize this, the ongoing debate about whether you'll use VoIP does seem a bit moot. You're likely using VoIP whether you realize it or not.

But you're paying for a POTS "land line". ;-)

And those "availability" statistics come from managers and marketers; not from engineers who will define the term properly.

Re:Take heed

[kesuki]

apparently some people don't understand what a 'tilde'(~) was used to represent... an infinitely repeating number of 9's it's more common to use ...
but still... it's not that hard to understand it if you read the paragaph i wrote before it...

Re:Take heed

[TheGSRGuy]

I totally agree. Downtime on a phone system is not acceptable. The one second it is down might be the second I try to call 911. That single second of downtime might cost me my life. Phone switches have ridiculous reliability. The one at my university has not had a single second of downtime in over 20 years. How do you like dem apples?

Re:Take heed

[mythosaz]

There are numerous other ways to illustrate to people that .9 repeating = 1.

What is the decimal value of one third? .3~
What is 3x one third? .9~

Q: What number do you add to .9~ to make 1.0?
A: .0~

Q: What is 1 divided by 9? -- .1~
Q: What is 2 divided by 9? -- .2~
Q: ....
Q: What is 8 divided by 9? -- .8~
Q: What is 9 divided by 9? -- .9~
A: .9~ and 1 are the same number.

...the problem with all of these, of course, is that people just refuse to "get it." It goes against intuition. These, of course, are the same people who can't understand the Monty Hall problem, so *shrug*.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

phone with an actual bell. (The bell isn't a safety feature, I just thought I'd mention it because it's cool.)
The bell is cool? C'mon, you are giving us geeks a bad name. Have you evr had sex (with someone else?)

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of a senior project I heard about- the students said that they executed their test 100 times, and they concluded that it was successful 99.9% of the time...

Re:Take heed

[rbarreira]

Yep, after your parent replied I read it again and saw I had missed the "infinite" part, sorry. It's just that I've never seen the ~ notation used like that, only in contexts such as:

x ~= 8 which (at least here) usually means that x is approximately 8.

Re:Take heed

[MikeFM]

I've lived in Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, and Nevada and had most major phone companies at one time or another. I've never had what I'd call reliable phone service. Pick it up and there is major line noise or no connection at all. Various locations, phones, and setups too.

Re:Take heed

[kesuki]

it's because i'm lazy i can type one ~ faster than three ...'s and besides... i use to many periods in my writing already... i need to start conserving them before my supply of punctuation runs out and i have to type like this forever without any kind of punctuation at all itd suck totally because people wouldn't be able to follow what i said they have a hard enough time when i punctuate

Re:Take heed

[bareminimum]

(Of course, this is also true of cordless phones, but anyone can head to a drug store in a major power outage and buy a $10 AT&T corded phone if they don't already have one. This cannot be done for a VoIP phone, though.)

Would you seriously keep your drugstore open when power goes down? :)

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I hate to post as AC, but still I wanted to chime in here since I have been using Vonage now for 4 months.

I have never dropped a call, or been unable to use the system. I have noticed some echo, as have the people I call.

I use mine over cable, and have kept my phone landline at min charge (which is a little less than $20, so I have a backup. In addition like most people I have a cell phone. I do not have 911 on the cell, but I do have the local police on the phone.

Re:Take heed

[DigiShaman]

Actually, I'm 28. Regardless, I've had to call 911 twice. In both instances, they were totally flowchart scripted. 911 is useless for the totally medical inept and/or retarded, but most of the shit that spews over the phone can be garnered through common sense.

First time I called 911, it was because I had someone driving behind me shooting off a rifle. I managed to loose the two in a truck after loosing them in a high speed race. The moment I found safety, I pulled over and dialed 911. It took 20+ minutes before I got in contact with a constable patched through his CB. Fuck that, I should have packed an RPG and blew the motherfucker off the road. I'm lucky to be alive after that incident.

Second time: It was because my room mate drank too much and went into sugar shock. Calling 911 was much better then last time, but I was just told to keep him awake and give him water when he needed it. Sure thing lady, I will do it as soon as he stops going into convulsions his skin stops turning blue. He's alive to this day, but not much was done when an ambulance arrived. Obviously, he is in much better hands with an EMT then with me. But, the staff that I talked with on 911 was useless as far as I'm concerned. Rather then talking with a human flowchart / psychiatrist wannabe, just dispatch someone ASAP...THEN ask questions later.

Re:Take heed

[jdhutchins]

If power fails, the stations that provide power to the phone systems will eventually fail after prolonged period of time.

No, the phone system's power won't fail. Most phone stations have generators and contracts to get diesel delivered in the event of a prolonged power failure. I know cell phone stations have this too. I don't know if cable tv stations have this, so if you have a modem with a generator or long-lasting ups, you might still be able to get VoIP service.

Re:Take heed

[karnal]

Ummm...

That's why you always get a T1 or 2 out to the local carrier. Just in case.

Or to supplement for 911 purposes, etc.

It could be something where the rates on that T1 are HORRENDOUS (sp?), but you could still keep the business running...

Also, get multiple peering points for internet access. Even getting a dual-channel ISDN could suffice for quite a few calls with G729A compression....

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not call your post insightful, I'd call it no shit. If you want 99.99%, stay with a local telco. I have NO problem paying less then a third per month and using VOIP. If my VOIP is down, I'll use my cell phone which I already have anyway. Hell, I am away from home more then 50% of the time anyway and I would not have the comfort you refer to of a land line anyway. Neither VOIP or cell phone is as good as a land line but I still have two options. Let's be realistic. I could get a dedicated T1 from the telco to my house and get a specific SLA or pay much less or use a best guess consumer grade DSL connection. You choose based on your needs.

Re:Take heed

[ciroknight]

.9~ and 1 distinctly aren't the same number, it's a flaw in the number system, but it's nothing to huff about, it's easy to catch and remedy.

The reason for this, of course, stems back to why we have a need for .0~ in the first place; what's 1 / 0? Undefined, and there's nothing we can do about it; no amount of mathematics can change 1/0 into anything else. But, there is a way around this.

If we say a number is "arbitrarily close to zero", aka .0~, we can say that 1/.0~ is infinity, thus solving the problem we had. Anyone who's been through differential calculus (and some precal courses) can tell you that much.

But then of course, you are the one who fails to get it in this case; there is a way to get 1 from .0~; add .9~ to it. I've had people try to argue to me that it isn't possible, but algebraically it makes perfect sense; there is no reason .9(9-bar) should repeat any faster than .0(0-bar)1, and as long as .1 + .9 is 1.0, we get back to one.

Re:Take heed

[Baricom]

Pen, paper, and possibly battery-powered calculator. If the cashiers don't know the prices, keep 1-2 lanes open and send the rest of the cashiers into the stores to read prices off the shelves, write them out on slips of paper, and hand them to customers along with the product. Once power returns, key purchases into the POS system manually. If this doesn't quite work for whatever reason, any competent manager should be able to tweak it.

There's no reason cash sales of non-perishable items should stop during a power outage, provided there's no hurricane or similar natural disaster outside. The drug store is still paying the employees; why should they stand around waiting for the lights to come back on?

Re:Take heed

[aminorex]

Truly. I've never called 911 in my life, nor has anyone with whom I have a close enough acquaintance to be aware of it if they had.
So I think my chances of ever calling 911 are on the order of 0.0000001. Which means that my chances of calling it when the 94.8% available VOIP service is on the fritz must be around 0.000000052. The probability that said call would actually save my life must come out around 0.000000001. If I can save 0.0004 cents each month by cancelling the local phone service entirely (as opposed to just cancelling the long-distance like most VOIP users do), it is a wise move, as far as mathematical expectation goes.

I'm also taking bets on Drake's equation.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times has the power for the North East failed in the last 50 years? I was in New York during the blackout and every drug store was closed because cash registers need power too.

Re:Take heed

[KyolFrilander]

Is that still true now that we have SLIC huts and CO extensions and all that noise? Sure, the CO will be chugging away on diesel generators from hell, but will people who are fed off of those puppies be SOL?

Re:Take heed

[KaptNKrunchy]

" You shouldn't use VOIP for 911 calls."

Well in an emergency, you might just not have a friggin choice.

Re:Take heed

[CritterNYC]

I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.

Repeat after me... VOIP is *NOT* for use as your sole means of contacting emergency services. A landline is the prefered method. I don't know anyone that has VOIP and no landline or cell phone for emergencies.

And, overall, since moving to NYC, my internet connection (cable modem) has been more reliable than my local phone service (lines all owned and maintained by the joyous Verizon).

There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it. We use VOIP phones at work and I recall a situation last year where a hacker brought our internet connection to its knees (hence no VOIP phones) and everyone was running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to figure out how to make calls. Our solution was to use cell phones for back-up, but I couldn't help but point out if we had regular phones we would have avoided the problem entirely.

The opposite can happen as well. And did to me. The Verizon wires here got crossed and took out my phone line for 3 days. If I'd had VOIP over a cable modem at the time, I'd have been fine.

Re:Take heed

[dotgain]

Personally I've never been loosened, but the way I see it, they should have called the cops, not you! And racing at the same time. So irresponsible.

Re:Take heed

[DigiShaman]

Uh huh, right. Because, I should have just stopped my car and let those two thugs jump out of their truck and riddle me full of holes. I mean, the fucking police that finally caught them traced them back to killing three other people and running over a jogger.

Ya, go FUCK YOURSELF!

Re:Take heed

[BackInIraq]

When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.

If you are going to be using VoIP for your primary phone line (which honestly I wouldn't recommend, however you may hate the phone company) the first thing you should do is invest in a small UPS, to run your modem and phone in case of power outage. Considering that it's a long term investment, which has other uses (should you ditch VoIP later), it's a no-brainer.

I've actually done this, and I don't even use VoIP. But the power in my neighborhood is so unreliable that finally I put my cordless phone, DSL modem, and WAP on a UPS so I could continue to work on schoolwork that may or may not require internet access when the power would go out...at least for a good while. Also beats having to run for the corded phone.

Re:Take heed

[Loconut1389]

I called 911 from a cell phone (e911 enabled) when a car nearby me stalled out and caught fire after a minor explosion. I was no more than 2 blocks away when the police sires could be heard and in less than 2 minutes the fire engine was there.

The driver had already gotten out of the car, but had he been unable, he still would have survived with the help of the fire department- the fire hadn't totally engulfed the car yet, was mostly the engine compartment.

That was actually the first time I'd called 911 on a cell phone since before E-911 when I got the highway patrol and waited on hold for 4-5 minutes while a woman was getting pushed into traffic in a highway-side dispute with a large man. In any case, I was extremely impressed, my phone lit up that they were accessing my gps coordinates and i actually got my local 911 center- voip will get that far, but it will be a while before the infrastructure (comcast/mediacom/whatever) is strong enough. Once I have cisco a router on a fiber or copper loop at my house, I'll trust voip for my life, until everyone else does- I dont think voip should be your only communications.

back to my original point, 911 is far from useless, just by myself I've potentially saved two people with the help of 911. Remind me not to call when you're on fire.

Re:Take heed

[patio11]

None of your emergency services are 99.99% reliable, and you aren't willing to pay enough money to see that they are. If you call the cops in Chicago for a home invasion, your likelihood of seeing a police officer respond in under twenty minutes is below fifty percent, if I remember the newspaper correctly.

Re:Take heed

[Carpal Tunnel]

I am quite aware of the great things 911 has done for people. i have been lucky enough to only have called it once, and my experience was rather pathetic.

I also used my cellphone(e911 enabled). I was in Philadelphia, PA. A man was passed out on the street and after going through standard procedures(scream-"sir, are you all right?"... shake arm with foot, repeat screaming), i dialed 911...

countless rings and over a minute later, i hung up and dialed the operator, who asked me where the hell i was, and patched me through to the local fire department, who also asked me where i was an got there in a few minutes(less than 5).

i NEVER got 911. I'm not sure if this is the fault of verizon(wouldnt surprise me) or something else, but obviously something was fooked.

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sign on Walgreens: "Closed. Due to power outage."

Re:Take heed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking that people who say that VoIP sucks either a) need to take a vacation, or b) work for the phone company.

I have a VoIP line and I love it. If my Internet connection isn't up, so what? Both my wife and I have cell phones. And if I miss a call or two, so be it. If it's important, they'll leave a voicemail and I will be notified on my cell phone. If the call drops, bfd, I can call them back just like I do on my cell phone. But even so, in my experience with VoIP, it hardly ever happens.

As for the 911 bullsh*t, I have 911 service on my VoIP line. If I can't hang on for 15 seconds to give them my address, then they have my address from my VoIP provider's billing address.

!!caution, rant mode on!!
The best thing about my AT&T CallVantage VoIP? The fact that I can tell it not to ring at all whenever I want. If I'm watching a movie or ballgame, I don't need to pause it if the phone rings -- it won't ring! Way better than a DVR. No telemarketers or charities can call when I'm eating dinner or giving my kid a bath. Phones are rude devices people, quit giving in to them!
rant mode off

Re:Take heed

[Hercynium]

My employer, a small CLEC (actually, now a large CLEC, since the merger) has been experimenting with offering VoIP service to the customers, and we have the same concerns. However, we have some creative engineering solutions to those issues that, so far, seem to help in a big way. While I'm not involved with the project directly, I'll let you in on what's making it work... MPLS.

When bandwidth guarantees are critical, class-based routing is your friend.

In addition, we have looked at several application-server platforms and settled on one that seems to offer the reliability of a soft-switch, and loads of functionality. In fact, a huge problem I heard about was that our hardware-based POTS switch didn't play well with the PRI lines coming out of the VoIP gateway!*

As far as concerns over Internet connection reliability is concerned, most of our customer data connections travel through the same router and back to the CO over the same T1 line with their voice service. By using a separate PVC for VoIP, any attacks over one link shouldn't affect the rest.

Separating VoIP traffic from regular data traffic over an IP network is really not much different from how we seperate Voice and Data PVCs on our ATM network. I, for one, welcome our VoIP overlords.

* Disclaimer: I'm not a voice engineer, nor do I play one on /. I just eavesdrop on them.

Re:Take heed

[jusdisgi]

Sorry guy, but I call bullshit. Phone service in any location in America is more reliable than Internet service in the same place. Your claim that "I've lived all over and phone service sucks" sounds ridiculous on its face, completely disagrees with the available statistical data and all the rest of us here's experience, doesn't logically follow (given that all Internet services are one way or another dependant on the telco systems you claim are less reliable) and is just plain wrong.

Re:Take heed

[illumin8]

So during a critical emergency, how many people have time to go digging through their basement to find an old telephone?

Most fairly new cordless phones allow you to put two AA rechargeable NiMH batteries in the base station, which should keep you going for a couple hours in the event of a power outage. I know mine has this feature, which isn't as good as having a plain old analog telephone if the power is out for days, but works fine for a couple hours, and also has the convenience factor of charging the batteries in case I need a spare set for the cordless handset during a long conversation.

Re:Take heed

[Loconut1389]

FWIW, I called from US Cellular in Ames, IA on an LG-VX6000 phone.

Re:Take heed

[MikeFM]

Go by stats if you'd like but it doesn't deny the obvious truth of picking up the phone and not even getting a dial tone where as you're Internet is still going. Anyway, I'm not so much claiming that the network is more reliable than the phone as that I'm pointing out that the phone isn't any more reliable than the network. As you said they often use the same transmission medium. The major difference being that it's cheap and easy to get redundant network access while it's not for phone service. For phone the best you can do is to get a completely sepperate cell phone which isn't quite the same as a system that automaticlly works around outages.

Re:Take heed

[wolf31o2]

Well, there is a very common fix for the problem of VoIP being dropped when bad things happen to your Internet.

Don't run your VoIP services over the same lines as your Internet.

I know that isn't the most popular thing to hear, but in the case of a business, not being able to answer when your customers call because your phones are down makes you look pretty incompetent, and if the customer isn't very loyal, you most likely just lost a sale to a competitor. Part of the problem with most VoIP installations is that people are using them over cheap, consumer broadband lines with absolutely no Service-Level Agreement with their ISP. Add in the lack of a Service-Level Agreement from the VoIP provider, and you have a poor-quality phone service, hinged on the reliability of two consumer services that are independent of each other and have no contractual obligation to perform any repairs within any reasonable amount of time.

I work for an ISP that offers VoIP services, however, we don't allow people to use software phones. Instead, the VoIP services we offer aren't much different from the traditional services. They still terminate into a piece of equipment at the customer site that is owned by us and the equipment converts the calls to SIP. Of course, we only cater to businesses, but we offer both voice and data to our customers at a reasonable rate.

The reason that we do not offer VoIP services to the customer's desk is we do not control their network. We have no way of ensuring proper QoS is in place or that their network is of sufficient quality for voice. I believe this to be the primary failure of companies like Vonage. They're out there putting out services on sub-standard lines and giving the entirety of VoIP a bad name with their lax reliability and quality.

We save our VoIP customers quite a bit of money, but we manage to do it without skimping on our quality. Maybe if Vonage could match the traditional telco, things would be different. Just as a point of reference, we also are a telco and offer "normal" lines, too. Our VoIP products have the same or better reliability than our "normal" voice products, and E911 isn't an issue.

Re:Take heed

[jusdisgi]

Go by stats if you'd like but it doesn't deny the obvious truth of picking up the phone and not even getting a dial tone where as you're Internet is still going.

Paraphrased:

Go by statistical data if you like, but it doesn't deny my anecdotal evidence.

That's downright laughable. You are totally clueless.

Anyway, I'm not so much claiming that the network is more reliable than the phone as that I'm pointing out that the phone isn't any more reliable than the network. As you said they often use the same transmission medium.

Man, you've got trouble with logic. The "same medium" argument works my way, but not yours, for one simple reason: the Internet requires telco infrastructure, but the telco infrastructure does not require the Internet. The Internet connection is working telco plus a bunch of other added services. Thus the reliability of it will be lower by definition. The isolated anecdotes about having no dialtone while your Internet connection is up are just that: isolated anecdotes. Something happened to go wrong with one wire and not another. But the probability that each of the two wires would fail was identical.

Oh, and I didn't say they "often" use the same infrastructure. I said Internet service requires telco infrastructure, period. Not often, not some of the time, but always. Your cable company is connected to the Internet on services provided by a telco. So is your wireless provider.

Re:Take heed

[MikeFM]

Umm you don't need a telco for Internet. Duh. Cable modem, sat, wireless, etc. Life isn't all dial-up and DSL. It's quite possible that your telco could have last-mile issues that your Internet doesn't have.

Re:Take heed

[CritterNYC]

When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.

When the power went out here in NYC, my local phone went dead (and yes, I'm one of those people that keeps an unpowered phone for emergencies). At least my cell phone worked while the batteries at the cell towers held up.

Re:Take heed

[jusdisgi]

Umm you don't need a telco for Internet.

Umm, yes you do. You're an idiot. And you also didn't bother to read my whole post, because the last line was:

Your cable company is connected to the Internet on services provided by a telco. So is your wireless provider.

Did I mention you're an idiot?

hmm

[Whafro]

Meta: New Survey Finds No Surprising News Today

Re:hmm

[youknowmewell]

Meta-Meta: Same Survey Finds No Surprising News Tomorrow

directivo

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.[/quote]

that's stupid. get a usb network card or wireless device.

Re:directivo

[Anonymous Coward]

But then he couldn't brag about his HD Tivo to all of the /. readers.

Re:directivo

[doughrama]

No It's not that stupid.

HD Tivo's are the unit's produced to work with DirecTV's HD. These boxes have their USB Ports disabled. So you suggestion will not work. AFAIK.

If I'm wrong somebody please enlighten me because I would like to put my HD Tivo on the network like I do with my regular series 2 Tivo's.

Re:directivo

[pikman]

After trolling through the tivo forums which is a gigantic time consuming pain if you want to learn anything about modifying your tivo I have come to the conclusion that DirecTV tivos (both HD and regular) have their usb ports disabled as the poster noted above.

Re:directivo

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't do your homework.

www.dealdatabase.com/forum

Re:directivo

[mjgraves]

TurboNet is not a USB thing. It's a network interface that is installed inside the Tivo chasis and provides an RJ-45 connector. It's essentially a normal NIC on a slightly strange connector that mates to an edge connector on the motherboard. I have one in my Series 1 Tivo. It works better (faster) than the USB NIC on my Series 2 Tivo. Fax and data services are not likely to work over an VOIP connection that doesn't truly support the t.38 standard...and essentially no ATA devices provide proper implementation of this standard. Michael Michael

I was going to get VOIP, but...

[swelke]

Ya' know, I was going to get VOIP, but then I realized that with my dialup internet connection, it might be kind of redundant.

Re:I was going to get VOIP, but...

[hardaker]

Not at all. Then you can use the phone *while* you're using the internet. Just think of the possibilities man! Incredibly slow multi-player games while talking really slowly to them at the same time! Beat that!

Re:I was going to get VOIP, but...

[intmainvoid]

I know plenty of people who Skype with dial up and have no problems.

Re:I was going to get VOIP, but...

[Chuan-kai Lin]

So instead of VOIP, you are getting IPOV? Marvelous!

Re:I was going to get VOIP, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

VOIPOV

Re:I was going to get VOIP, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The converse, dial-up over Skype/VOIP does not work however. Once the modem signal goes through a VOIP line, the other line can't demodulate(?) the signal.

(?): Not sure if my terminology is right

Not only ...

[Perren]

Is 94.8% pretty bad, you have to take the union of your VOIP providers downtime with your ISPs downtime to get your true total VOIP downtime. At least with my Comcast service, that's bound to be even higher.

Re:Not only ...

[Stargoat]

In the business world, when installing a real VOIP system like Avaya, Shoretel, Cisco or NEC, we look for 5 9s (buzzword bingo, anyone?).

Not hard to achieve, but you need some pretty big batteries for the PoE switches.

99.44%

[mph]

I don't think 99.4% is very good either.

Come on! That's near Ivory Soap levels of purity!

Re:99.44%

[jfengel]

But VOIP doesn't float.

Re:99.44%

[SgtSnorkel]

Hey, 99.44% is way better than I get from my cell-phone carrier!

Re:99.44%

[bennomatic]

Maybe they should get Linda Lovelace to be the spokesmodel for VOIP! I can only imagine the tag lines...

Loving VOIP here

[SYFer]

Hey rooster: can't you put that TiVo on your home network? I don't have an HD model, but my Series 2 connects via Linksys USB wireless and works great.

Also, although not rated (and maybe that's because it's just a re-branded service from one of those that was--I don't know), my Speakeasy VOIP works pretty well. Voice quality is far superior to my old telco service, but there are indeed occasional minor dropouts or fizzle-outs. Since I also have a mobile phone, that gives me adequate redundancy in the event my service goes down, so I've been pleased overall.

With broadband and VOIP now coming from from Speakeasy, I can't tell you how nice it is NOT to be doing any business whatsoever with my old nemesis, SBC (formerly Pac Bell here in CA). Of course, in time, I may come to view Speakeasy the same way, but not yet. Perhaps I'm in the "rebound" phase after my divorce with SBC, but there's a spring in my telecommunications once step again.

Re:Loving VOIP here

[william_w_bush]

I agree with parent, actually I've got vonage for my primary line and broadvoice for a secondary with free calls to europe (quality is awful though, drop-outs, etc), because speakeasy didn't offer voip till i signed on to vonage and switching is a pain. Also, broadvoice has very little customer service, but if you're a tweaker it's awesome, they give you asterisk pbx setup options and everything.

For 911 use a mobile. the internet isn't up to life-critical reliability yet by a long way, but it's generally cheaper and more flexible if you want to experiment. Still don't think voip is completely there for jon q yet, but for businesses it's a no-brainer.

In the end though, anything to get out of the telco's grasp is a win.

A few weeks ago some genius came up with the unbelievably (apparently for him) brilliant idea of tying 2 cell phones with in network calling into a voip system for unlimited airtime. With bluetooth and asterisk you can do that easily if that's what you need, and get cheap overseas calls. In the end voip is the flexibility to do what you want to do, but the good-ol' "plug it in and it works" aspect is lost to the comprimise.

Re:Loving VOIP here

[Anonymous Coward]

I HIGHLY doubt you will. I've yet to meet a customer service rep who wasn't willing to bend over backwards to make sure I was happy. As long as you don't get hostile about the higher prices you won't become jaded with them unless they have a serious corporate culture change.

Re:Loving VOIP here

[alienw]

Try Voxee.com. They have very cheap prices and excellent quality, even to foreign destinations.

No need for that...

[DrEldarion]

I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

Normal TiVos can be configured to get data over the internet rather than over the phone line. Can this not be done on HD TiVos?

Re:No need for that...

[frovingslosh]

I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

I sure never liked the idea of a Tivo needing to dial out on a telephone line. This really sucks, in my area it would mean you would spend about an extra $30 (including all the extras the telco wants to tack on, and not including features like caller ID) just so your Tivo can call home. As VoIP gains ground I hope any service that expects to be provided a land line will feel the pressure on their bottom line as customers abandon them.

Re:No need for that...

[brjndr]

DirecTV has not enabled the use of USB ports on the direcTivo's, and so far they are the only ones who offer HD Tivo. This means you are left using the land line if you have a HD Tivo.

Re:No need for that...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use the fax line option for vonage to do the dialout, you just have to set the modem baud rate to ~9600 because there is a little more line noise on the voip line.

Re:No need for that...

[CharlieHedlin]

The stand alone TiVo's can use a network connection. If you want to on a DirecTV integrated unit (which includes the HD TiVo) it requires hacking.

This is a DirecTV limitation, not a TiVo limitation.

Re:No need for that...

[Zemrec]

I have a DirecTivo (not HD) and it works fine without a phone line plugged in. It'll just pop up an annoying message every 2-3 weeks or so if it can't dial up.

It gets its program data from the satellite, and as far as I know (and from asking questions on tivo community forums www.tivocommunity.com) it only actually needs to dial up to confirm PPV purchases. I don't use PPV so I don't care.

It is possible to hack the tivo so the messages don't show up, and with the recent 6.2 tivo software update (check your tivo's information page to see if you have it) the USB ports are supposed to be enabled, but you still need to hack it to be able to use a network device and call in that way.

I haven't hacked my box yet, but I did on my previous standalone Series 1 and its not hard. Lots of instructions floating around the web.

Re:No need for that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed they can. I use the serial port on all my Series 2 Tivos to connect, this includes the HD Tivo(HR10-250).

Re:No need for that...

[Phil Karn]

I presume you never buy PPV movies. If you do, the box reports them over the phone line so you can get billed. I know that if you unplug the phone with unreported PPV movies, the box will get increasingly insistent about phoning home, and it will limit how many PPV purchases you can make.

Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[MilesParker]

Tivo can connect through network..I have both of my \boxes set up from wireless hub. Or is this only an issue for some reason w/ HD Tivo?

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[mph]

Tivo can connect through network..I have both of my \boxes set up from wireless hub. Or is this only an issue for some reason w/ HD Tivo?

DirecTV units can't use the network (or at least my non-HD one can't). Maybe he's using DirecTV.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[LinuxHam]

DirecTV units can't use the network

Sure they can. You, my friend, need 9thtee.com. I used to login and schedule recordings on my buddy's DirecTiVO all the time. It works fine.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know not what you're talking about. They can be hacked to allow a network connection, but they can't use the network without voiding the warranty.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[DA-MAN]

You know not what you're talking about. They can be hacked to allow a network connection, but they can't use the network without voiding the warranty.

According to this, you only get a 90 day warranty anyways. So wait 3 months and then hack the box.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[nsayer]

Actually, you can set up the local call over serial port networking without voiding the warranty. I've actually done it over serial-over-bluetooth to avoid having to run wires to the server. Works perfectly.

You still must leave a phone line plugged into the Tivo for the crypto card to make it's once-a-month call home, but THAT call can happen over Vonage without any trouble.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[LinuxHam]

You know not what you're talking about. [that hack voids the warranty]

I don't know what I'm talking about because a hack that works voids the warranty?? No wonder you hid behind AC to make that comment. Holy cow.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[LinuxHam]

You still must leave a phone line plugged into the Tivo for the crypto card to make it's once-a-month call

My sis went nearly 18 mos without a phone line on a DirecTiVO. She just got a bunch of "cool" updates when she finally hooked it up, but it worked fine in RO mode for over a year.

Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo?

[nsayer]

Ok, I will rephrase. You must leave a phone line plugged into the TiVo for the crypto card to make its once-a-month call if you have local channels, sports packages or exhaust your PPV credit limit.

If you're willing to ignore software updates and the nag messages, you don't have to do the PPP connection either. But it's easy and geeky-fun.

still, only 94%...

[sargosis]

i need that extra 6% when i'm making long-distance 1-900-number calls...

99.4% sucks

[Gothmolly]

my land line works 100% of the time. That's not 2 nines, or even 5 nines. 100% of the time, through blizzard after blizzard here in the Northeast US, through rainstorms, through anything. You know what's nice about that? 911.
99.4% = 4 HOURS a month, your phone doesn't work. That's absurdly crappy. At that reliability level, it should be a free product.

Re:99.4% sucks

[rbarreira]

Not to mention 94.8... which gives more than 1 and a half day of downtime!

Re:99.4% sucks

[vertinox]

my land line works 100% of the time.

You've never had Bell South for a phone company have you?

Re:99.4% sucks

[jeffmeden]

How often do you check it? Can you say for certain that you have metered its availability nearly enough to make a conclusion like that? Saying "it's there whenever *i* needed it" doesn't count.

Re:99.4% sucks

[Gothmolly]

Actually, it does count. They sampled a VoIP line at some frequency, did the math and got 99.4%. I sample my landline at some frequency, do the math, and get 100%.

Re:99.4% sucks

[InsaneGeek]

Using that methodology, for the past year then I can say Vonage has a 100% reliability factor and that the reports sampling is incorrect. Since for the past year, I've not had a drop or unavailability at all with Vonage when I picked up the phone.

Re:99.4% sucks

[PaxTech]

How reliable do you think land line phone service was when it had been generally available for as long as VoIP has been generally available? I bet it was less than 99.4%.

Re:99.4% sucks

[zdzichu]

Classical telephone networks are designed with lost call probability 1/10000. That's over 99,99% reliability.

But with VoIP there's a catch: we are unable to design reliable AND efficient network! With classical telephony we have some mathematical models (Erlang, Engstet and so on), usign which we can figure how many resources are needed.
For VoIP - there are no usable models (yet). IP is almost impossible to mathematically predict - changing routes, variable packet length, jitter. It's just too hard. We can't say ,,we need that many megabits and interconnects to achevie 99,99% reliability''. The best what we have now is made by merely guessing and assuming what will be good.

I know. I'm a student of 4th year of Telecommunications.

Re:99.4% sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

To claim that it's more than 5 nines, you need to sample your landline at least 100000 times, i.e. 10 calls/day for 27 years.

Re:99.4% sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if I accept your ridiculous logic, I'm willing to bet that even ancient telegraph was more reliable than VoIP is today.

Old phone systems consisted of two pieces of wire, two microphones, two speakers and a battery. There's not much to go wrong. The only downtime was when you were changing the battery. VoIP on the otherhand is intrinsicly and infinitely more complex.

Re:99.4% sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

That's great for you, though somehow I doubt that you actually tested your phone service continually.

Some of us don't have magical phones though, and I personally was without any sort of phone service more than 4 days this year. Not due to a storm or network outage, just due to damage on my line that the phone company took their sweet time to repair.

That's less than 87% uptime for the month and less than 99% uptime for the year. It's also not the first time I've been without phone service for serveral days -- if your service goes out anytime after Friday at 8 AM it's not getting fixed until next week.

Re:99.4% sucks

[msoori]

Actually its not that bad... you dont keep a VOIP line as the only line. Ive got cell phones, and I have a VOIP line through Packet8. I've had it for over year and a half now, and it works great. I even took it to Sri Lanka, where I am originally from and used it from there just by plugging it to a ADSL connection. I was there when the Tsunami hit in Sri Lanka on Dec 26h, 2004. All the phone lines were jammed because everyone was trying to call friends and family to find out if they are safe. Surprisingly, the ADSL was up and I could call my friends and family in the US to let them know I was safe. I called on behalf of others I knew as well, and as a bonus all those calls were free because I had a US number. The call was going thru the internet and surfacing in the US side as a local number! Now thats cool!

Re:99.4% sucks

[dynamo]

mod parent up. this matters.

Re:99.4% sucks

[TooncesTheCat]

Voice over IP wasnt / isnt supposed to be a end all replacement for traditional POTS. Your comparing apples and oranges basically. Your paying for what you get. Yea true while its working its great to be able to have unlimited long distance and superbly cheap international rates and changable area codes and the like. But when its down of course your going to be angry. People buy cheap bandwidth from providers like Cogent ( yea I know they have gotten better ) knowing that since its cheap its bound to have reliability and some issues every now and then. You get what you pay for. Same with voIP, you get what you pay for. No one places mission critical servers on a Cogent pipe, why should you place your life on a voIP phone. People have higher quality servers on higher quality pipes, you should have your 911 calls reserved for POTS. Have a nice day.

Re:99.4% sucks

[westlake]

How reliable do you think land line phone service was when it had been generally available for as long as VoIP has been generally available? I bet it was less than 99.4%.

maybe so.

but the telephone network was reaching maturity as early as 1896. dial phones, copper wiring, underground cabling, common battery, long distance service, the private branch exchange, etc.

Re:99.4% sucks

[Doc Scratchnsniff]

Measured by the metric used in this study (number of successful connections/number of attempted connections) my land line worked approximately 50% of the times attempted last month. Now, that was downtime for just one day, but during that time there were 25 failed attempts to call me (by just 2 people). In order for me to achieve 99.99% uptime, I will have to have 13.7 trouble-free years of phone service to make up for the 12 hours I was down.

Re:99.4% sucks

[DroopyStonx]

Sorry, even land lines are NEVER 100% guaranteed to be up.

Phones go out just like anything else - electricity, cable, you name it.

Re:99.4% sucks

[Vellmont]

my land line works 100% of the time. That's not 2 nines, or even 5 nines. 100% of the time


You must be just lucky as hell, or very young. There's plenty of times in my life where the phone hasn't worked for a day, sometimes two. In 10 years if the phone doesn't work for 1 day that's 3649/3650 or 99.97. That's not even 4 nines. Sorry buddy, but even land line service isn't perfect.

Re:99.4% sucks

[chrysrobyn]

my land line works 100% of the time. That's not 2 nines, or even 5 nines. 100% of the time, through blizzard after blizzard here in the Northeast US, through rainstorms, through anything.

That's interesting that you've done the studies for your personal case. Most of us can't tell if our phones blink for a minute here and there per week. Most of us sleep 6+ hours per night and spend another 8+ hours at work, meaning less than half of the day is left for noticing the phone is down.

I used to have a 56k modem full time dialed into my ISP. I could tell when it redialed because my local phone company billed by the minute (and I logged redials; there was also a cap on the number of minutes charged). The machine itself was up for 6 months at a time. The dial connection remained active for about 45 days at a time. Maybe the ISP was rebooting their modem boards from time to time, but maybe my phone service wasn't 100% either.

In the same area, I had my other phone line go down some time between a Tuesday and a Friday. It was really hot, so it was easy to assume the heat caused a wire to loosen and then fall out (the tech claimed the wire was no longer hooked up). The phone service ended up being down for 24 hours after I called it in. It would take several other neighbors to have 100% for the phone company to claim 99.999% in my neighborhood for that year.

Re:99.4% sucks

[MoogMan]

Point 1: Your phone line is not 100% reliable.

Point 2: VoIP *is* a free "product". That is, there is no reason why it cannot be free - besides bridging the VoIP-Land line gap.

Considering that VoIP is a relatively new concept (in comparison to land lines), I find it hard to complain...

Re:99.4% sucks

[PaxTech]

What about making an international call with the old telephone service within the first ten years of it's existence? That required quite a bit more than your tiny list of components.

My point is that VoIP is brand new technology, and can't be written off just because the reliability right out of the gate isn't very good.

99.4%!?

[Shkuey]

That's terrible, that means with the best service 1 in 200 calls doesn't go through? I run an old school PBX where we make hundreds, possibly thousands, of calls each day. I couldn't deal with that kind of poor reliability.

Re:99.4%!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The newer non-voip pbx here has already gotten down to 3 or 4 9's. Its a damn expensive system for a ton of lines here on campus. I'm pretty sure the largest outage this year was at least 30 minutes.

Ugh.

Re:99.4%!?

[Bryansix]

Is the reliability testing each time you make a call or over all time theoretically? Because with the theoretical avaiability number, most of the time you could just wait a second and the phone would connect right on through anyways assuming it has automatic retry built in (Which would make sense).

Who are you VOIPing today?

[hexed_2050]

Great!! 90+% availability! Now only 1 in 10 customers will get the 'Sorry, we are trying to save money so we can't take your call right now.' message.

It's good enough for me

[timeOday]

I made the switch to Vonage and disconnected my land line several months ago. Overall, the service is fine by me (actually I've had more trouble getting support than with the phone service itself).

I have noticed an outage or 2, even when my Internet service was up. So don't take the plunge if you can't tolerate a missing dialtone. Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, anymore than when I'm out of the house away from the phone (no I do not have a cellphone).

Re:It's good enough for me

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I made the switch to Vonage and disconnected my land line several months ago.

Okay, I'm not about to do that, primarily because I don't use the phone that much myself, but I'm curious: what happens with 911? do you even get someone at the other end? or is the number just not there?

Re:It's good enough for me

[pcidevel]

You have to sign up for 911 service (for free) by assigning an address to your account, and then it just works. But if you disconnect your router and plug it into someone elses internet (say you take it with you on vacation), then when you call 911 it will report your home address.

Re:It's good enough for me

[tiker]

I've just signed up myself for Vonage. The delivery guy with the linksys box was at my house today; but I'm at work.

I spend at most 15 minutes a month on my home phone line. Paying almost $40 (Canadian) a month for 15 minutes is kinda bad when I can pay $20 from Vonage.

For the 911 stuff you can read Vonage's explaination at http://vonage.ca/features.php?feature=911

Re:It's good enough for me

[Luke-Jr]

Or you could get raw termination service for 15 minutes easily under 30 cents...

Re:It's good enough for me

[Anonymous Coward]

whats with this preoccupation with 911?

does your mommy still make you wear a helmet when you ride in the car?

if my life ever depends on my ability to make a phone call, ill be glad to die.

Good Cost Saving as Last Resort

[ehaggis]

We support people in several countries and sometimes the most cost effective way to get through is VOIP. Many times it is also has an almost intolerable delay. If it is a conference call with one person at a time giving information it is OK, with an actual conversation it is nearly impossible.

Baby Bells

[ffejie]

The Baby Bells keep their uptime greater than 5 nines typically.

99.999%

Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.

Re:Baby Bells

[CE@UIC]

Actually, the Bells keep their uptime at 7 nines. Cellular shoots for 5 nines (obviously this is for the network not people in elevators).

Re:Baby Bells

[Brigadier]

I have Vonage, given the cost especially with international call for the average home user it work great. Plus I as most peopel do have a cell phone so for me it works. Baby Bells despight the competition are still price gouging. I made a 15 minute call to jamaica which cost me over $100 dollars. given my family lives there I prefer being able to contact them in imergencies ( hurricane) and not have to worry about my phone bill.

Re:Baby Bells

[Anonymous Coward]

As a point of reference:

1 nine: 90% availability, or 37 days of downtime per year
2 nines: 99% availability, or 88 hours of downtime per year
3 nines: 99.9% availability, or 9 hours of downtime per year
4 nines: 99.99% availability, or 53 minutes of downtime per year
5 nines: 99.999% availability, or 315 seconds of downtime per year
6 nines: 99.9999% availability, or 32 seconds of downtime per year
7 nines: 99.99999% availability, or 3 seconds of downtime per year

Re:Baby Bells

[RosenSama]

I can see those needs for a business, but at home I really can handle much lower availability. I mean, if I understand what the "service availability" represents in the conclusion link, your service level means that for every 10,000 calls to or from you, only one or none could not go through or disconnect before you finish. Even when my VoIP is out, it still goes to voicemail. I'm not a huge phone user, so 10,000 calls is roughly 7 years worth of calls. Personally, I can live with more than one call in 7 years winding up in voicemail.

Re:Baby Bells

[hackstraw]

Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.

Yeah, reliability has killed the cellphone market.

I guess once cells are reliable, people will start using them.

Re:Baby Bells

[rob_squared]

Show *ME* a landline service that's as cheap for local, long distance, and international calls and I'll give up my VoIP.

Re:Baby Bells

[radish]

I had more outages with my Verizon line (almost 3 days total) in 1 year than I've had with Vonage (0 days) in 2 years. Of course individual experiences aren't statistically important, but the common assertion that POTS is uber-reliable is far from accurate in my opinion.

Re:Baby Bells

[Doc Scratchnsniff]

If 99.99999% uptime is an actual, nationwide user uptime percentage, I know where over 1% of all downtime existed in the last year. Assuming 250 million customers, that translates to 9125 days of downtime. Yates City, IL has rural customers who lose their service every time it rains, requiring service calls to restore it. Among three lines I know of in that area, there were at least 100 days of downtime in the last year.

Re:Baby Bells

[Anonymous Coward]

Your moms basement is not a dissaster recovery command center. You don't need 99.99% uptime or 99% uptime and neither does the vast majority of us.

Re:Baby Bells

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me an Internet connection that does 99.999%, for that matter. The big push for phone connections was reliability, and they achieved that (although I've had several occasions when the "circuit [was] busy"). The goal of Internet connections seems to be speed. Until that priority changes, we'll probably continue to see mediocre service levels. That said, I love using Vonage since I rarely use the phone. I have a cell phone provided by my job if I'm ever in a real jam where I need a phone and my Internet access or Vonage is down.

Re:Baby Bells

[Registered Coward v2]

The Baby Bells keep their uptime greater than 5 nines typically.

99.999%

Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.

Reliability is why I have land line.

Cost is why I have VIOP - I have a line overseas, so I can call there as if it were a local call. Show me a land line that gives unlimited calling to and from an overseas country of my choice for $24 and I'll switch.

In my case. cost trumps reliability.

Availability

[pyrrhonist]

Personally I think 94.8% is pretty awful. I don't think 99.4% is very good either.

"We can't give you 5 nines availability, would you settle for 9 fives?"

Re:Availability

[SnprBoB86]

Why would I have to settle? They are both worth 45 total.

Sign me up for the 9 fives!

Re:Availability

[mikefe]

Yes.

Per minute.

Thanks Taco..

[Trigun]

Personally I think 94.8% is pretty awful. I don't think 99.4% is very good either. But there is no doubt that audio quality is getting better. I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

I only use my landline as a tax shelter to save my millions upon millions of dollars from the taxman.

Thanks for rubbing that little taco factoid in.

I'm amused

[CreepingDeath]

Proudrooster dosn't know you can use a usb network adapter on your tivo2 and "Dial-out" over your broadband connection? Well, you can ;) list of supported nic's

Re:I'm amused

[brjndr]

USB ports are not enables on HD Tivo's, so he is stuck with dial-up for now.

Re:I'm amused

[ahaning]

I'm amused that you've been here as long as you have and yet you still don't know how to read the stories.

The part in quotes and italics was from Proudrooster. Then CmdrTaco added his bit.

And yikes, the "-1, Redundant" moderation will get a workout because of that TiVo comment.

Re:I'm amused

[MikeFM]

Can you not use a modem over VoIP? I've used fax over VoIP so why not a modem? I thought about setting up an old fashioned dial-up BBS over VoIP just for fun. Put some access lines in various big cities.

Re:I'm amused

[nsayer]

He said it was an HD Tivo. That means it's from DirecTV. Those TiVos do not have their USB ports activated.

You can still use serial port networking, but it is a bit more hacking and a custom cable to do it.

Love to Hate

[Anonymous Coward]

Your local telco that everyone loves to hate is required to provide 5 nines availability. Your service must work 99.999% of the time.

Re:Love to Hate

[MikeFM]

Umm.. I haven't had a telco that did that in my entire lifetime and I've lived through several states and in both major cities and rural areas. Where are they checking the lines at?

Downtime

[th1ckasabr1ck]

5% of one year is about 438 hours of downtime/year or 18.25 days. That seems like WAY too much downtime.

Re:Downtime

[varmittang]

Wrong math. I think its more like out of 100 calls you make, 5 would get dropped. Since you can really be on the phone every second of the day.

And if my math is right, 99.999% would be 1 in every 100,000 calls would get dropped. So yeah, it is very bad service.

Landline for Tivo

[prakslash]

I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from

You could be smarter!

If you already have broadband for VOIP, use the connection for Tivo's network-connectivity feature to do updates over the network. All you need is a USB-to-CAT5 adapter. This will save you another $30-50 a month.

Re:Landline for Tivo

[CharlieHedlin]

HD TiVos are DirecTV combo units and don't support networking you insensitive clod!

99.4% is not that good

[Zebra_X]

99.4% of uptime equates to 518.4 seconds of unavailablity per day.

That's roughly 8 minutes of the day that you won't be able to use your phone. Given that unavailability is usually related to demand, you won't be able to use your phone for 8 minutes during the hours that you'd really like to.

Also, consider that for a bit more money you can get a land line with better voice quality and unlimited calling as well.

Re:99.4% is not that good

[DA-MAN]

That's roughly 8 minutes of the day that you won't be able to use your phone. Given that unavailability is usually related to demand, you won't be able to use your phone for 8 minutes during the hours that you'd really like to.

Actually the report is light on facts. The metrics just aren't there for you to make this assumption. This report doesn't even separate incoming vs. outgoing calls being dropped.

Also, consider that for a bit more money you can get a land line with better voice quality and unlimited calling as well.

Actually a landline is a LOT more money. Packet8 has unmetered access for $20. In addition you can go for metered accesss and call nationwide for 1.7 cents a minute via SixTel.net or something. I use my home voip phone a lot and I spend about 12 bucks a month with lots of long distance use.

Also the call quality is better on VoIP than landlines. There is a small tad of latency, but it is no wose than a cell phone. I've never had a line as clear as my voip. But then again phone wiring in San Francisco appears to be very substandard. When I had dialup, I wasn't even able to make a 33.6 connection, only 26.4. I swear I could hear the radio in the background whenever I used that phone, and yes I did call for the phone company to send out a guy and run tests.

Although it got magically clearer when I got dsl, go figure. (Those lying SBC bastards just didn't want to fix it, even though the problem was on their end!!!)

Re:99.4% is not that good

[mikvo]

Wouldn't it be nice if it all averaged out that nicely? I could live with 8 minutes a day. The problem comes when I lose 2 hours every other week, or something along those lines. The outages never spread themselves out to minimize the impact.

My vonage expereince has been great....

[MilesParker]

I have had 100% uptime -- e.g. I have never not had a dialtone when I picked up and to my knowledge have never been droppped. And quality is hugely better than my POTS line was.

But the best thing has been cost. I am paying $14.95 a month for better service than the $60+ a month I was paying to my local telco and MCI. And my local bell "wants me back". Uh, keep dreaming guys...

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[pyrrhonist]

I have had 100% uptime -- e.g. I have never not had a dialtone when I picked up and to my knowledge have never been droppped.

Of course you had a dialtone, because with VoIP it's generated by the phone.

Try dialing out and count how many times you get the reorder tone.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[Anonymous Coward]

> Of course you had a dialtone, because with VoIP it's
> generated by the phone.
>
> Try dialing out and count how many times you get the
> reorder tone.

Zero.

Over the last 18 months of VoIP service (three locations, five lines, 10-14 hours per day of regular calling), we have had no failed calls, no lack of dialtone (except during a major power & services outage which affected our entire city for over 12 hours, and the Verizon wired line was also dead during that).

The phone quality has been better at one location than with Verizon. Verizon lost service on our main line for 10 days during which they routed calls to a little old lady in the neighborhood.

Everyone has their horror story. YMMV, but we dropped all wired lines after that last Verizon fiasco, and have had no problems using VoIP exclusively for the last 10 months.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[MilesParker]

Hmm...yes, I often pick up the phone just to see if it has a dialtone and then don't make a call, I'm OCD like that... not. LOL

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you had a dialtone, because with VoIP it's generated by the phone.

Yes, the dial tone is generated by the phone. But most consumer voip routers don't generate dial tone unless they can connect to the voip service.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[pyrrhonist]

Hmm...yes, I often pick up the phone just to see if it has a dialtone and then don't make a call, I'm OCD like that... not. LOL

Okay, well, you're obviously from a part of the world with better phone lines and quite a bit more sarcasm than I am.

My point is that you can't just test for tone like you used to be able to do, you have to dial out to verify that your line is working.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[pyrrhonist]

Yes, the dial tone is generated by the phone. But most consumer voip routers don't generate dial tone unless they can connect to the voip service.

Yes, the routers should generate a reorder tone if they can't connect to the service. Some phones remain silent if they can't reach the VoIP server, but others will generate tone when they can't. It depends on model and configuration.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[Luke-Jr]

But the phone adaptors that generate the tone usually don't do it when they can't register with the service provider.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Try dialing out and count how many times you get the reorder tone.

OK. Zero times in the last 2 years.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[Anonymous Coward]

OK. Zero times in the last 2 years.

Your sex life would be better if you didn't live in your Mom's basement.

Re:My vonage expereince has been great....

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I live in your moms basement and she sucks good cock.

QOS, 911, regulation

[davidwr]

With regular phone service, you get:

Independent network, assuming cable not DSL
911
Quality of service: availability, reliability, signal/noise, time-to-repair, etc.
Regulation on quality and pricing
Works when the power is out
Not as cheap as VoIP, unless you are poor and get subsidized service

With VoIP you get:
Network dependent on underlying internet
Limited if any 911
Best-effort signal/noise
Good-enough(?)-but-unregulated quality of service
Little or no regulation beyond 911
Works when the power is out as long as your batteries last.
Cheap.
Generally no subsidized service, but most people on welfare aren't getting high-speed internet.

The best part: You get to choose.

Re:QOS, 911, regulation

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> With VoIP you get:

Every single "feature" that the baby bells charge extra for. Verizon was charging me $6.50/month for CallerID (w/names would cost $7.50).

I can check voicemail online. I can take my "home" phone with me on travel (including overseas).

I was paying Verizon $30/month for a phone with nothing but Caller ID. I also had to pay Verizon extra every month to keep my number unlisted. Apparently, it costs a few bucks every month to not print my phone number.

They *had* long-distance/regional calling at a flat rate with no monthly fees, but then they started charging me every month for that as well. I have a cell phone with enough minutes that I never needed the landline for long-distance. They wanted to charge me (one-time) $20 to change from their long-distance to "no" long-distance ($10 for no long-distance plus $10 for no "regional").

I was slammed twice by MCI and spent a great deal of time calling Verizon to have my long-distance switched back (which they would then charge me for, and I'd have to call back again and fix that).

After the first time this happened, they said they could put a lock on my account. I thought that meant that it couldn't happen again, but it did. They time they said they could put a password on the lock. They never explained what the purpose of the passwordless lock was, but I agreed and chose the password "Verizon Sucks". They said it could only be 10 letters. I told the V-E-R-I-Z-O-N-S-U-X. After consulting a supervisor, they agreed. (I'm only giving out my password now that I've ditched them completely).

This was the only enjoyment I ever had with Verizon. Whenever they would screw up my bill (which happened at least once a year), I could call them and they'd ask me my password and I'd tell them they sucked.

For $15/month, Vonage gives me 500 minutes a month anywhere in the US (I never use half that much). QoS is fine. The power here does go out from time to time, but I have my cell (and my wife has hers).

They're working on true E911 service and not just forwarding to a call center. But I also have a cell. True, they're not tightly regulated, but that regulation costs a lot of money and doesn't get me what the free market does. I see "under regulated" as another VoIP selling point.

Re:QOS, 911, regulation

[dacarr]

Note, Speakeasy is my carrier. Using a Onelink 1.5/768 ADSL with a side order of VOIP. With the extra bells and whistles, costs about $115/mo. VOIP feature I believe is around $20/mo, comes with free LD in the 48, all bells and whistles, do not disturb feature (a little something that SBC can't provide on POTS), and full service E911. Network dependent on underlying internet There's a reason it's called "voice over internet protocol", and I RARELY have downtime with these guys during the day. Limited if any 911 911 on mine goes directly to the local police dispatch center, and provides all my information to the dispatch console. This has been confirmed by way of actually testing it, and was in fact one of the first things I tested when I had the circuit set up. Best-effort signal/noise Good-enough(?)-but-unregulated quality of service Like I said in another post, it's only as good as the pipe. If you're running eDonkey2K, aside from being a fool, you're gonna kill the line. Little or no regulation beyond 911 New technology. Hopefully you have an honest carrier, but it's probably only a matter of time before it's regulated. On the other hand, it is a service provided over the internet, so the chance of it being as regulated as a telco as a result of this is pretty slim - unless they can provide a case where the 'net itself is regulated. As far as repairs, again, it's only as good as the provider. Works when the power is out as long as your batteries last. Can't deny that. A UPS is your best friend - though this could be moot, as many people are also using telephones that rely heavily on wall power, regardless of whether they use VOIP or POTS. Cheap. Yep. Generally no subsidized service, but most people on welfare aren't getting high-speed internet.

Re:QOS, 911, regulation

[Zach978]

IMO, high levels of regulation is not an advantage...

Re:QOS, 911, regulation

[Luke-Jr]

Um, when the power is out, landlines run off batteries too... What, do you think they stick power for every phone in the city on the phone lines?

And this is news?

[Szaman2]

How is this news? I would expect VOIP to get better. If it was getting worse - that would be newsworthy I guess...

What next? Study shows that CPU's are getting faster? Study shows that Linux is getting easier to install and maintain? I would say this is the natural progress. Things improve over time - that's just how it works.

Re:And this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this an original post? If /. posted a story no one had a gripe with -- that would be postworthy I guess...

What's next? Complaints about dupes? Linux zealots claiming that the OS is easy to use? I would say that /. posts that gripe are the norm. People bitch about it over time--that's just how it is.

Re:And this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Study shows that Linux is getting easier to install and maintain?

yeah, right

OK, but how are the smaller ones doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wanted to know more about VOIP, but I am particularly interested in SIPphone. How does their service compare with the rest?

Re:OK, but how are the smaller ones doing?

[Luke-Jr]

Try it: http://www.phonegaim.com/

Yes prob. true...

[MilesParker]

Hmmm..hadn't considered that. I have Dish now and they don't require a landline at all. Thats the problem w/ the integrated units. And remembering now I think the only way to get HD Tivo is to use the combo DirectTV unit.

Re:Yes prob. true...

[doughrama]

DirectTV's HD Tivo's don't "require" a land line either. But, you need to use the land line if you want to purchase PPV type stuff.

I've never plugged my unit into the land line, though I'm about to because of the annoying message I get each day telling me I haven't called in several hundred days.

Tivo over VOIP

[Anonymous Coward]

I must be doing something wrong. I get my data for my TIVO by phone connected to Vonage VOIP. Never been a problem.

Dear Prakslash

[Letter]

Dear Prakslash,

Good call. Now CmdrTaco will dump his landline, immediately have a heart attack, and won't be able to dial 911. Thanks, 99.4% uptime!

Letter

Why can't Tivo use voip?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

The phone jack of a consumer voip router emulates a plain ordinary phone jack, with dial tone. You plug a regular analog phone into the jack and it just works. Pretty much everything that works with a real dial tone will work with the fake dial tone.

Why would the Tivo not work?

Re:Why can't Tivo use voip?

[jdion]

I can't see why it wouldn't except in certain exceptions.

Imagaine doing some heavy-duty download/upload (i.e. BitTorrent) and saturating your link with TCP requests and actual data.

My experience with this scenario is the line will quickly start spotting out, similar to a digital cell phone in a bad area, and I could not see a modem handshake holding through that.

Other scenario is the quality of the connection. Currently my VOIP connection is set to run at ~96Kb/sec, however if Joe Shmoe has a bad broadband line (768/386 or less), the quality will need to be less, and you'll use a higher compression ratio, and a lot of the high and low tones that humans may not care too much about, but modems are very particular with, may be dropped and/or misintrepreted.

There have been good reports, but again it's going to dependant on your bandwidth + what you're doing at the time.

Re:Why can't Tivo use voip?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Optimum Voice and my TiVo has no problems using it. Haven't tried my fax machine yet. TiVo usually is set up to call at off times in any case, so it's unlikely it will be hit by heavy usage of your internet connection.

Or Put Another Way...

[linuxwrangler]

94.8% is....

20 full days per year down time or

1.2 hours down EVERY DAY!

And to make matters worse, failures tend to occur more often when things are heavily loaded - ie. not in the wee hours but rather when people actually want to use the phone.

Obviously someone has a different definition of "not bad" than I do.

I remember when M$ proudly claimed 99.9% uptime for NT. To me that sounded terrible. Over 3.5 FULL 24 HOUR DAYS of downtime every year. Horrid!

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[Anonymous Coward]

The figures are clearly garbage. No one would use the VoIP products if every 20th time they picked up the phone it was dead.

Living in FL, I found the service stayed up even with the hurricans and we have no power for 2 days. Yes, I used a small UPS, and was able to make international calls whenever I wanted.

Something to bear in mind is that the regular POTS phones are wireless these days. I have two from different manfacturers, neither have battery in the base units. If the power goes, they die too. And being in FL, power dies a lot! I don't think I've even seen a wired phone in anyone's house for quite some time. No one is complaining about the wireless POTS phones now are they?

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[MyGirlFriendsBroken]

I remember when M$ proudly claimed 99.9% uptime for NT. To me that sounded terrible. Over 3.5 FULL 24 HOUR DAYS of downtime every year. Horrid!

99.9% uptime is 0.1% downtime, or 1/1000th. 365 divided by 1000 is 0.0365, or about 9 hours, 1/10th of your quoted annual downtime.

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[CyanDisaster]

...20 full days per year down time or ...

Actually, just shy of 19 days, based on 365.25 days a year. There is the occasional leap year you know. Also, I don't believe the 94.8% is based on 24/7 usage. I was under the impression that it was how many calls were dropped or not received. I don't see dropped calls being much of a problem, as I'm under the impression that it's random, not something that will happen numerous times in a row.

...Obviously someone has a different definition of "not bad" than I do...

Obviously someone figures that if something isn't 100%, it's horrible...

...And to make matters worse, failures tend to occur more often when things are heavily loaded - ie. not in the wee hours but rather when people actually want to use the phone...

You may be correct there, but there could be several other factors such as ratio between current users and complaints, whether more failures occur due to higher volume as opposed to random equipment failure/damage, etc...

...I remember when M$ proudly claimed 99.9% uptime for NT. To me that sounded terrible. Over 3.5 FULL 24 HOUR DAYS of downtime every year. Horrid...

My math may be off, but 0.1% downtime over 365.25 days a year is about 0.35 days, whereas 3.5 days is closer to 1%...I think it would be more accurately estimated at 8 hours downtime, not 3.5 days. If you can find someone that can guarantee 100% uptime on servers, let me know. How can NT, or any other operating system, be up 100% of the time if you need to run general maintenance on it from time to time, which includes updates, upgrades, and cleaning? I personally think your expectations are far too high...

Hope be with ye,
Cyan

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[mr_zorg]

...Also, I don't believe the 94.8% is based on 24/7 usage. I was under the impression that it was how many calls were dropped or not received.

I agree, I was under that same impression. And in my book, that really isn't too bad. That means only 1 out of every 16 calls will have a problem. I wish my cell phone had that kind of reliability! I also believe, unlike other posters, that reliability figure probably includes not only the VOIP failure but the ISP being down too.

To the poster who was complaining about needing 911 to be 100% reliable I say, "have you ever tried calling 911 in a major metropolitan area?" You'll get a busy signal or be on hold longer than it would take you to redial on your VOIP phone.

Just for the sake of argument, let's say that most people only make ONE life threatening 911 call in their lifetime. Now let's say they have an 80 year lifespan, and the call lasts 15 minutes. That's 0.000035% of your life where you really need to be worried about your VOIP not working. Given a 5.2% max failure rate, that mean there's only a 0.00000182% chance of that failure occurring during the 0.000035% of your life where you really need it to work. So, in effect, the "critical" failure rate would be only 99.99999818%. Now, tell me, is that so bad? P.S. Since I'm not mathematician, I probably botched the math, in which case mod me funny... But If I happened to get the math right, mod me insightful!

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[Luke-Jr]

You assume the mods have any clue about math ;)

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[aminorex]

99.9% of 365 days is 0.365 days, not 3.65.

I think the short bus is coming.
Get ready.

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the sake of argument, let's say that most people only make ONE life threatening 911 call in their lifetime. Now let's say they have an 80 year lifespan, and the call lasts 15 minutes. That's 0.000035% of your life where you really need to be worried about your VOIP not working. Given a 5.2% max failure rate, that mean there's only a 0.00000182% chance of that failure occurring during the 0.000035% of your life where you really need it to work.

Erm. Assuming that our hypothetical person makes one 911 call during his entire lifetime, let's just consider this one call. If any call has a 5.2% chance of failing, there is a 5.2% chance that a person will die when our hypothetical person chooses to use this phone system for his emergency communication (assuming he doesn't call again with the same, or some other system, for whatever reason).

Doing away with the assumption, any critical call(really, any call) made with a system with (approximately) 95% reliability has a 5% chance of failing. If we still consider the case of using such systems for emergency communication, let's consider the case of 20 people calling 911 to report life threatening situations. The probability of one or more calls failing is 1 - .95^20 = 64.15%. Equivalent numbers for 99%, 99.5% and 99.9% reliability: 18.21%, 9.54%, 1.98%.

Now, assuming each caller whose call attempt fails gets to make one more attempt, we can square the chance of failure: a 5% chance of failure per call means a 0.25% chance of total failure. (Note that we are simplifying the situation by assuming that the rate of failure is constant. Obviously, sometimes there will be e.g. extended downtime during which the rate of success will be zero.)
This transforms our reliabilities(95%,99%,99.5%,99.9%) into 99.75%, 99.99%, 99.999975% and 99.999999%. Consider the case of a system being in widespread use, and as such consider 2000 emergency calls instead of 20. The chance of one or more failing will be in each case 99.3304%, 18.1277%, 0.0500%, and 0.0020%.

Note that the seemingly small difference to the "naked eye" between 95% and higher reliability rates can be very deceptive. While doing this sort of math obviously involves abstractions, and my particular scenario may have been lacking(notably in the absence of a comparison with a realistic failure rate for a normal phone - which is certainly not zero), I feel that 95% can be shown to be an abysmal rate of success for any system meant to be used for emergency calls.

So, in effect, the "critical" failure rate would be only 99.99999818%. Now, tell me, is that so bad?

I'd say that would be rather horrible, but I believe you meant to say that that would be the success rate :).

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[Sircus]

365 divided by 1000 is 0.365, though you're right with about 9 hours.

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[mr_zorg]

If any call has a 5.2% chance of failing, there is a 5.2% chance that a person will die...

You're right. Duh. Even though I read the original post that way, for whatever reason when typing the post I treated it as though it was 5.2% of every 24 hours. Which is a completely different thing.

So, in effect, the "critical" failure rate would be only 99.99999818%. Now, tell me, is that so bad?

I'd say that would be rather horrible, but I believe you meant to say that that would be the success rate :).

You're right, of course, that is what I meant to say. But it apparently wasn't right anway. You've completely bamboozled me with the rest of your post, so I'm guessing you are a mathematician of some sort... I stand corrected. :-)

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to defend M$, but 99.9% uptime means 0.1% downtime, which gives 0.3 days/year (more or less 8 hours), which isn't "not so bad" but isn't 3.5 full days, either ...

Re:Or Put Another Way...

[monkeydo]

0.1% isn't 1/1000, it's 1/10. 365 divided by 10 is 3.65. Are you the bad math troll?

In response to several of posts

[RecoveredMarketroid]

I recently switched to a VoIP provider. The cost is about 1/3 of what a land line would cost me for the same features. I understand that a large portion of the cost savings is realized because data passes over the public internet. I also realize that this means the service is unlikely to provide service that is equivalent (in terms of uptime quality) to a PSTN line. I'm extremely happy with the tradeoff. The service has been excellent so far.

Re:In response to several of posts

[RecoveredMarketroid]

Sorry, this post was an incomplete version of one which follows...

Why even a regular line for Tivo?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can have Tivo even dial out over your VOIP line. It is actually very simple to have your entire home's wiring talk over the single VOIP device. Go in your basement and disconnect the incoming phone line that connects into your home network (its your standard phone plug), and just wire the VOIP device right into one of the wall jacks. You can connect a Tivo to any of the other jacks and you are in business. With 3500 sq ft home I had to use a line amplifier, but that was the only time.

Re:Why even a regular line for Tivo?

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo modems have trouble using VoIP. Most can be networked, instead, so it doesn't matter. HD TiVos (only from DirecTV right now) can't be networked because DirecTV will not enable it. However, they do not need the phone line for daily updates -- that comes over the satellite. They only need the phone for PPV and new software activation. So, ditch the landline, 'cause DirecTV is never updating that software again.

Power outages?

[Aeron65432]

What about thunderstorms when the power goes out?

One of the reasons I have not wanted to switch to VoIP (other than the 911 deal) is because if the power goes out, so does your VoIP phone. Landline phones keep on working during power outages because of the nature of their setup.

Combining the two, what if you had an assailant break into your house during a power outage?

Re:Power outages?

[Stradenko]

Combining the two, what if you had an assailant break into your house during a power outage?

Shoot 'im (or 'er).

Re:Power outages?

[crimethinker]

Combining the two, what if you had an assailant break into your house during a power outage?

My guns are purely mechanical devices, no electricity required.

Next question?

-paul

Re:Power outages?

[let1]

BATTERY POWER, it's the best thing since slice bread.

Re:Power outages?

[smcallah]

Also, what if you won the lottery? Or what if you won the lottery during a power outage and someone broke into your house? What if it was snowing and your power was out and someone broke in a stole your lottery ticket?

Re:Power outages?

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

gimme a break. are you that married to your phone? we need some sort of apocolypse to wipe out all the pansies like you.

It's not the VOIP providers..

[riflemann]

The problem with reliability and quality with VOIP is generally not the fault of the VOIP providers.

Rather, it's caused by the fact that the traffic goes over the public internet. This has zero Quality of Service, meaning that they have to 'join the queue' with normal data packets. Any congestion as a result of things like Bittorrent and Kazza will kill the connection.

If there is any hope in hell of VOIP actually working as good as the PSTN, something has to be done about this limitation. Some broadband providers are starting to provide VOIP themselves, and their ability to control the quality end-to-end will help.

Unfortunately a lot of the people building and running these networks are IP guys, not telco guys, so uptime is still an issue.

But despite these issues...it's a young technology. It has it's place now in the right environments, but will still be a while before it's a true PSTN replacement.

Re:It's not the VOIP providers..

[varmittang]

Yeah, but they are building into the network that VoIP gets priority over all other data connections, right. So, quality should become as high as anyone can make it without giving a dedicated line for the phones, which is basically what we have now.

Re:It's not the VOIP providers..

[Phil Karn]

The only significant bottleneck in most people's broadband service is the uplink out of your house, and you have control over that.

I have Speakeasy DSL (768 up, 6000 down) with their own VoIP (actually Level3). My router is a Soekris Engineering net4801 running Linux. The standard Linux tc (traffic control) QoS stuff works absolutely wonderfully once you tune it correctly. I can load up my link with Bit Torrent traffic, pick up the phone and make a call, and it always sounds fine.

I actually created four traffic classes. VoIP is the highest, so it gets unconditional priority over everything else. Bit Torrent is the lowest, and the middle two are for interactive and bulk computer data. Within each class, stochastic fairness makes sure that no one flow gets it all.

I don't know what kind of QoS Speakeasy implements in their downstream direction (they refused to tell me when I asked) but it seems adequate. Because my downstream pipe is so much faster than my uplink, downlink QoS is not nearly as critical as upstream QoS.

In response to several posts...

[RecoveredMarketroid]

I recently switched to a VoIP provider. The cost is about 1/3 of what a land line would cost me for the same features. I understand that a large portion of the cost savings is realized because data passes over the public internet. I also realize that this means the service is unlikely to provide service that is equivalent (in terms of uptime quality) to a PSTN line. I'm extremely happy with the tradeoff. The service has been excellent so far.

I plan to use the savings to get a cell phone which I would not otherwise have. In addition to the added benefit of mobile communication, it will cover me during the .6% downtime that I'm likely to encounter with my VoIP service...

Have to Compare to Cell Phones (Not Land Lines)

[Salis]

A lot of people have already lost their land line and are now using just cell phones. Service on cell phones is certainly not 99.99999%, nor even 94.8% (my guess). But people still use them vs. a land line.

So, when you're comparing service availabity, cost, and features, you need to include cell phones as the dominant competitor.

Really, your grandma won't be switching to VOIP. If anyone, it'll be people who already have a cell phone and want a cheap long-distance service as their land line. If they need to call 911, they'll be using their cell.

-Howard

Re:Have to Compare to Cell Phones (Not Land Lines)

[winkydink]

How many are "a lot"? I know exactly 2 out of a few hundred people who have done this. I believe that those dropping conventional land-lines are still considered early adopters.

Re:Have to Compare to Cell Phones (Not Land Lines)

[Salis]

Many of my friends do so. We're still in (graduate) school, we change apartments yearly or bi-yearly, and we need a cell phone anyways. I don't have a land line and I have never regretted its absence.

Re:Have to Compare to Cell Phones (Not Land Lines)

[BackInIraq]

A lot of people have already lost their land line and are now using just cell phones. Service on cell phones is certainly not 99.99999%, nor even 94.8% (my guess). But people still use them vs. a land line.

If you're talking about using your cell phone from home (which when you're talking about replacing a landline you should only compare it to home use) your cell phone likely gets one of two levels of reliability...99.99% (if you live in a quasi-populated area), or straight-up 0% (if you don't). Generally the reliability of cellphones comes into question when travelling...but from home they are actually quite reliable.

There are, of course, exceptions...I imagine if you live towards the center of an apartment building, it might not be so good either...or other such scenarios. But again, you would probably know this before you ditch your landline, and it would be pretty consistant...generally using a cellphone from a static location will render either 4 or 5 nines of reliability, or zero.

Unless you're my wife, and constantly forget to charge your cellphone...then your reliability can also go to shit. :)

Re:Have to Compare to Cell Phones (Not Land Lines)

[Salis]

There's been plenty of times, especially during storms, that my cell phone loses calls. And then you get tower malfunctions, interference, and other transient effects. It's certainly not 99.999%. :)

5.2% failure

[darkonc]

The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad) [cough cough]

Look at it this way: Out of 500 'emergency' calls, 26 would fail... If you presume that only 10% are potentially fatal, that's one or two dead bodies. VOIP is fine for cheap long distance, but when it comes to HA, I'm keeping my land line. It's the same reason that I will always have a 'dumb' phone on my phone line. Every once in a while I spend long enough on the phone that I wear out both my primary and backup battery.

Wireless is nice, but sometimes it's more important to just be able to keep talking. Similarly: Unless you attach your base-station to a UPS, it's hard to call when the power is out (although I've only had 2 outages in the last 5 years, and one of those was about 90 seconds).

Re:5.2% failure

[KyolFrilander]

You're _totally_ taking your life into your own hands by not having a telegraph line hooked up, you know. Everyone should be taught SOS in grade school.

Related, though, do you know how long a cheap (I think it was $20, maybe less) UPS will power a wireless base station and cable modem and VOIP ATA? I've never found out, it's never died during any extended outages around here.

Re:5.2% failure

[darkonc]

I think that I mentioned UPS, but 75% of people are unlikely to even think about putting their phone on a UPS.. half of them probably don't even know what a UPS is.

Re:5.2% failure

[KyolFrilander]

UPS.. Those nice guys in brown, aren't they? But yeah, It'd be nice if a) ATA's came with a built in battery backup and b) UPSes didn't die every 18 months or so.

Re:5.2% failure

[darkonc]

18 months??? What the hell do you do to your units???. You might, however, just look at replacing the batteries, but they shouldn't be dieing that often. If you're getting real cheap UPS's, however, it might actually be worth replacing the (probably cheap) batteries with better quality jell cells. They might last you a few years.

Re:5.2% failure

[KyolFrilander]

Well, I'll admit that was completely talking out of my ass - I know they die when you least expect it, and usually when the manufacturer has given up on that line unless if you're using enterprise-level UPSes, but that's different. But it seemed like we went through APS 2200's at least every other year, possibly sooner, at my last job.

Smartass answer: You mean you don't use your UPSes to arc weld during thunderstorms? Sheesh, what has this world come to.

Re:5.2% failure

[darkonc]

If you're going to arcweld with your UPS, you're probably better off to pull the batteries out and use them raw. This also takes you out of the charge loop for lightning -- but you may might need some sort of current limiter to prevent burnout.

Jell cells can put out some pretty nasty amperages.

Near-whoring

[DeadVulcan]

So many people shrieking, "99.4% sucks!!" It seems almost like karma whoring. Yeah, yeah. It sucks. So don't buy it. Can we move on?

It depends on how the outages occur, doesn't it? If it means you occasionally need to redial, that's not a big deal at all. But if it means you might be without service for a whole day every few months, then that's terrible. There's a few subscribers who have piped up here with generally positive comments. Me, I can't say from personal experience.

But to put it in perspective, in many places outside of first-world countries, I suspect 99.4% would be better reliability than you can get with any kind of service.

Great for Online support

[let1]

Your call is important to us .. your wait time is now 10 minutes ... 5 minutes ... ...3 minutes... ...10 seconds... click .. hello.. hello .. hello...curse you VONAGE!!!!!

Not the complete picture.

[raehl]

911 is a free product - so get your free 911 landline, then get VOIP phone service.

Also, 99.4% reliability is perfectly fine for many users - like me. I have a cell phone (actually, two, with different providers) and VOIP. If for some reason my VOIP phone isn't working, I've got my cell phone.

Also, I'd be curious as to how they determined 99.4% reliability. Was that .6% of outage due ONLY to times when vonage was out, or did that also include ANY time the end user was unable to make a call - be it power outage, cable outage, etc.

I've had vonage for months, and the only times it hasn't worked for me were when the power was out or when the cable was out. My cell phone worked fine in either case.

Re:Not the complete picture.

[Jacer]

911 is not free. Everyone who has a phone pays a tax (whether or not they use it) to keep it running.

Re:Not the complete picture.

[Bryansix]

Exactly. Just keep a phone plugged into the phone line with no service on it and if your VOIP phone doesn't work, you can dial 911 on the other phone. That plus a cell means three ways to contact emergency services.

Re:Not the complete picture.

[Capt James McCarthy]

Well said. I pay $23.00 for my VOIP a month. If it goes down a couple of hours a month, so be it at that price. And guess what, that price never changes no matter how much I use it. Can't say the same thing about POTS, nor can you say you pay 23.00 for all your calls per month. So you get potentially %100 uptime with POTS, goody for you. Life is a risk, at $23.00, I hedge my bets that nothing bad will happen in those 4 hours a month and I won't need E911. Hell, people speed all over the place, but you don't see slashdotters complaining about speeders taking "unecessary risks." Geez.

Besides, from what I've read 911 centers have craptacular service.

I have AT&Ts CallVantage

[tolkienfan]

It was a pain to set up, but mostly due to a combination of me wanting to use a firewall with NAT and the Cable provider refusing to allow another MAC address to see the internet.

Once I got it set up, though, it's been great.

The audio quality can drop slightly when there's a lot of traffic, but it's rare that the volume get's that high.
I'd like to monitor the actual bandwidth calls take.

And I've had excellent up-time.

I haven't tried 911. I'd probably do it from my cell phone anyway - I tend to use it more than the VOIP line.

FYI for anyone having trouble setting up the Telephone Adapter (TA). If the IP address given to the TA when it boots is a non-internet routable number (10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x for example) it could be that your internet provider is refusing to give out another IP address for the new MAC address.
You can get around this on many devices by going into the settings (try user/pass of admin/admin or blank/admin) and mimicking the MAC address of the previously-connected device (ie the computer or the firewall - whatever is plugged into the cable-modem).

Five nines.

[Anonymous Coward]

99.999% uptime or availability is is referred to as five nines by the telecom industry. It means that there will be a maximum of 5 minutes of down time or unavailability in an entire year!

99.4%, the best VoIP providers availability is 3,154 minutes of down time or unavailability. Thats 52.6 HOURS per year where the phone doesn't work!!! What's worse is that you have no control over when that down time is! I hope for your sake that you don't need to call 911 during those 52.6 hours per year.

Then there is the whole 911 problem. The FCC in their omnipotent magnificence has deemed that all providers will offer E911 service by... There's about 60 days left for compliance I don't know how many exactly. But, there's no way to provide real E911 service without sending GPS coordinates with the call. None of the present VoIP protocols are designed with this capability so there is no way that VoIP as it presently exists can provide E911 capability. No way!!

Then after you work out all of the other problems, there are the problems with VoIP over the internet. Details like DDoS attacks, spam, and the total lack of end-to-end QoS. Until all of these issues are resolved, VoIP cannot be expected to replace the land line. I'm as big a techno geek as the next guy. I use VoIP via Nortel BCM's and Asterisk PBX's. But, I will not let go of the traditional POTS land line. I will probably maintain a POTS line for as long as I live because no amount of IP or virtual this-and-that will ever be as good as solid copper to the handset!

Can you tolerate the loss of your phone for 52.6 hours?
99.4% uptime == 52.6 hours of downtime per year.

Re:Five nines.

[badmammajamma]

Dude, if I lose my phone for 52 hours a year it's no sweat. There's VERY FEW people I care to talk to. Losing my internet access for 52 hours a year IS a big deal. Sad but true.

The only reason for me to keep a landline is for 911. Vonage has 911 support and sure it's possible that the 8 minutes of day downtime could be when I'm having a heart attack or something but I'll take my chances. I have a cell phone I can use for backup too. If you have health issues or your paranoid I can understand the concern but for most people it's just not an issue.

Re:Five nines.

[radish]

Can you tolerate the loss of your phone for 52.6 hours?
99.4% uptime == 52.6 hours of downtime per year.


When it costs less than one third of a landline whilst offering more features, and I have a cellphone as a backup? Sure. Next question?

I will probably maintain a POTS line for as long as I live because no amount of IP or virtual this-and-that will ever be as good as solid copper to the handset!


Sure, the copper goes from the handset about...ohh...1 mile or so. Then it goes switched. You guys talk like POTS is some magic network where every phone is hard wired to every other one and nothing ever goes wrong. That's crap. POTS fails plenty, it's happened to me a number of times. I went through months of having a dodgy phone connection a few years ago with BT, and more recently several days of outages with Verizon. When your POTS goes out what are you going to do? Cry? Or just use another phone?

This is not an ATM network

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

The internet is not an ATM network. Voiceip is just something you supplement your regular service with. BTW we have problems with our pbx systems all the time, and they are not voiceip.

300mS latency?

[sbest]

I don't understand the 300mS cross-US latency figure -- my informal ping'ing has an average roundtrip less than 20mS across the US. And AFAIK, the QoS requirements of VoIP require a max of 120mS to 150mS (eg, http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-QOS). I don't use VoIP or Skype on a regular basis...has anyone ever experienced 300mS?

Re:300mS latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

yup,

couldn't figure out what was wrong with the call to my girlfriend, until I realized there was over 1000ms of latency on the call.

Re:300mS latency?

[sams2100]

Even if you have a latency of 50ms or so, there is still some time required to compress the audio into one of the codecs used for voip. Some codecs take 100's ms of time to compress the audio, some (which take up more bandwidth usually) take around 100. If you have an actual voip phone, then the compression is done a little faster since its done via hardware, but if you are using a softphone on your computer, then expect that compression to take a bit longer.

my experiences

[Krystlih]

So far having VOIP LAN line for 6 months I can say the service is 10x better than Cell phone service. And yet every day people rely on their cell phones to do things like dial 911. I think the numbers are very promising for a reletively new technology. But like any technology it requires time to mature and find its place in the world.

Choices, Choices

[theBraindonor]

For me it has been pretty simple...

Telco:
3-4 weeks a year of tech-support hell. (older urban phone systems)
$60 a month price tag.

Voip:

1-2 dropped phone calls a month--with calls routed to my cell when it's down.
$25.00

My installer even set me up with my DSL on it's own NID, after which I plugged the voip adapter back into the wall socket. Now all my wall phone adapters work just fine.

As to power outages, it can be hard to find the non-wireless phone in the dark. Go ahead, tell me you have a cheap ten dollar phone hooked up. Where is it if the power goes out? Of course, since all my computer equipment is plugged into UPS's, I only worry about prolonged power outages.

Re:Choices, Choices

[dhazard]

Im with you all the way, I havent had a single dropped call yet or problem what so ever and Ive had my VOIP service with AT&T for almost a year now.

The only reason why I think everyone is hating on VOIP is because they have a crappy VOIP service or crappy ISP, or even both.

Re:Choices, Choices

[eli173]

As to power outages, it can be hard to find the non-wireless phone in the dark. Go ahead, tell me you have a cheap ten dollar phone hooked up. Where is it if the power goes out?

On the nightstand beside the bed. Which is where I'll probably be when it's too dark to see. Some of us do think about these things you know...

Re:Choices, Choices

[radish]

Amen. I swear I'm never giving another cent to a traditional phone company, they all suck (and overcharge to boot). Vonage has been 100% for me for nearly 2 years now...love it.

Re:Choices, Choices

[sootman]

"As to power outages, it can be hard to find the non-wireless phone in the dark."

Sorry, but that's a pretty damn weak argument. I've got as much crap as the next geek, but few people have houses that are unnavigable when the lights are out. If you're smart enough* to think "I'll keep this traditional phone in case the power goes out" then you're probably smart enough to make sure it's vaguely accessible in bad conditions. My office is a sty, but I make sure there's a clean path from the door to the phone on the desk. Many people have them in even better locations, like nightstands and kitchen walls.

Besides, a wired phone is a great way to pass the time when the power's out, and it doesn't cost you minutes or precious battery time.

My choice was equally simple: $20/mo for a landline I barely use, rock-solid phone system, haven't called the phone company since the day they installed it except for the time I dug through the line, versus $25+ for a less reliable system with features (voicemail, long distance) I don't need. To each his own.

* many people, especially if born after ~1985, aren't even aware that traditional phones work when the power is out.

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue that VoIP doesn't work during power outages can be a major bummer. We don't have a home line only cell phones and 2 years ago they went down during the blackout in NYC. I couldn't call my girlfriend in the city and got stuck in Long Island. She had to call my office from a
street phone. (BTW: there were lines.) After that we considered getting a phoneline or VoIP just for emergencies.

With VoIP So when you need it most, in an emergency, that's when you are least likely to have it.

Sounds like you get your money's worth.

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

im so tired of the "if the power goes out you lose your phone" argument.

a cheap $20 UPS will run a cable modem + router + VOIP box for HOURS

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

The New York blackout lasted for over a day...
and I doubt that my VoIP provider was running
smoothly.

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

I have UPS's also, but bought a $500 generator for longer power outages. Often I'm the only house on the block with lights and electricity and the internet. I have guns, ammo, food, and dogs, so I'm all set to protect myself and family.

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

As to power outages, it can be hard to find the non-wireless phone in the dark. Go ahead, tell me you have a cheap ten dollar phone hooked up. Where is it if the power goes out? Of course, since all my computer equipment is plugged into UPS's, I only worry about prolonged power outages.

Does your mother know that you keep her basement so messy?

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

yea & a few years ago a severe ice storm knocked my power out for 2 WEEKS

but then, that same ice storm also knocked the phone lines down.

Re:Choices, Choices

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, too.

He is probably referring to the many people who use
portable phones- they get dropped anywhere and so you
need to see them to call out.

Why the Whining?

[tarsi210]

Personally I think 94.8% is pretty awful. I don't think 99.4% is very good either.

It's just fine.

I see a lot of people whining about how your phone would be down 4 hours out of the month if you have 99.4 or whatever. My answer is: So?

How many times do you need to make that phone call right-the-hell-now? Out of the phone calls in the past year, I'd say maybe...20. Max. The rest were more relaxed calls to friends/family that weren't time-dependent. Out of that 20, I can think of one time when I wanted to use the VoIP to call my wife's home country (Australia) and couldn't because it was down, so instead I paid Sprint a few dollars to do it through my landline. Whoop-dee-doo.

Sure, 911 is a concern. But keep a cell phone or cheap landline around and you have that. My landline costs me $17/month. Potatoes. My VoIP is worth it because it has brought my costs down from over $75/month to less than $20. Couple that with neat features of running my own Asterisk server and I have a really fun, useful service.

I guess if you're using your VoIP as your home office phone or as a telemarketing device, 99.4% would hurt. For the average home user, the small inconvenience vs. price shouldn't bother anyone that much. I pay about $35/month for my entire phone service and my wife can call home as much as she wants. What a deal.

Re:Why the Whining?

[entrigant]

Do you have a problem with improvement? Is the drive many others have to do better a problem for you? For every realized idea there is an ideal form, and what we have managed to create so far. The ideal form of VoIP is no delay, instant, 100% reliable, and high quality audio communication.

There are people out there who enjoy striving for perfection even when it may not be possible, and for many of them, while striving to perfect their art, they watch others strive to perfect theirs. Personally, I feel a pleasant satisfaction when I see a technology hit a major milestone in its development. It makes me feel good that someone else has succeeded at something I can appreciate.

Now granted, my point of view may be quite different than the guy complaining that his phone doesn't work for 4 hours out of the month. However, we shouldn't just stop development because something has become acceptably satisfactory. For people like me this has nothing to do with needing to talk to someone right-the-hell-now. It's about a desire to see the ideal form of the idea realized.

Re:Why the Whining?

[tarsi210]

Fair enough. I can appreciate the pursuit of that ideal of perfection. I have no problem with improvement...indeed, I'd be very happy to have that one time of VoIP not working go down to zero. Or to get a reliability good enough that getting rid of my landline wouldn't bother me at all.

My admonition was more directed to those who are whining that VoIP "isn't good enough yet" to be used by them...they require it to be as reliable as a landline before they can adopt it and make it useful. Bullshit. I say it's useful now -- not for everything, not for every case, but most. A few flaws in the system do not render it without merit.

IE: Running Debian testing might not be a crash-free experience, but there's still value to be gained from it, and many people have working, useful systems running it. Being a perfectionist prick and insisting that everything spins like a top all the time before you can use it despite the numerous problems it has to overcome is just being pretentious.

In the end, use what you think is best. I think anyone who thinks that VoIP at 99.4% is unusable is missing out on some great technology that'll save you a ton of cash and give you some great features. That's essentially the idea.

buy a UPS

[EvilStein]

Very simple. Buy a big ass UPS. Actually, it doesn't even have to be that big. My APC SmartUPS 1500 will keep my cable modem/vonage ATA/Netgear router up for *HOURS*

My power was off (maintenance issue, PG&E warned us about it) for 8 hours one time, and the UPS did just fine. It wasn't even down to 50% after 8 hours.

So, my internet access and phone stayed up just fine.

As for the intruder, I have several firearms. Phone or not, I'm shooting first and making phone calls later.

Sounds ok to m

[recursiv]

99% is better than my cell phone, and I find that useful enough to pay for. Not saying they can't make improvements though.

Lingo

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Lingo (www.lingo.com) as my VOIP provider. I don't know where they ranked on this evaluation, but from my experience they have been great. I initially chose them because they have unlimited calling to the USA, Canada and Western Europe. Nobody else has a wider calling area that I know of and they are cheaper than everyone else at $19.95. It was an absolute breeze to set up. I recieved a box in the mail, literally the following day from when I placed the order. I plugged the device into my ADSL line and then my phone and home router into it. That was it! I was calling friends in Finland, the UK and right up the street here in the US for less than $20 a month. Also, there has never been a time when I have gone to use the phone, that it did not work. Of course, there have been power outages that prevented it from working, but that is beyond any VOIP providers control. And I still have my mobile phone for the odd power outage...

amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of whining about the uptime not being good enough... Frankly the phone companies didn't start at the level of uptime they have now, they got there over time, which I suspect will happen with the VoiP providers, particularly as infrastructure supporters begin to shore things up to support it.
If it's not good enough for you now... don't switch... slap your tinfoil hat back on your head duct tape your existing phone to your hand with 911 on speed dial (maybe as a failsafe you could have it dial unless you press a button periodically) and tell anecdotes about all the people who have switched and died cause they needed 911 during the time their voip connection was down...
Settle down stop crying and stop pretending that anyone cares if you wait til it's 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999999% available to switch...

CT complaining about uptimes?

[defile]

Personally I think 94.8% is pretty awful. I don't think 99.4% is very good either. But there is no doubt that audio quality is getting better. I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

Hey Taco, why don't you post Slashdot's availability?

Thought so.

Cheap VoIP with mobile phones as backup

[MarkByers]

If you had mobile phones anyway, you can use them to make the emergency calls, and use VoIP for everything else.

My voip views

[Anonymous Coward]

I am considering voip. What is funny is that my comcast service is as reliable as the power coming into my house as there were only 2 outages in my area in the last 2 months ( Of cource I don't use comcast dns that would be just plain dumb.
The local telco which just posted an earnings miss but still made 1 billion in profit was out at least 42 times over the last 12 months. If it wasn't pole related it was some other weird problem. Needless to say We won't be with analog for much longer.

And 99% and up is sweet. If your internet provider is of good quality (that means you are a cable costomer or sdsl :-) or a god with T1+) Then VOIP is the way to go. It's just a matter of time before the landline is completeley replaced.

If we can dial 911 and the operator can get your location via gps then eventually there will be no reason to have a hardline unless you have a alarm system that needs it.

In other news...

[ylikone]

Computer getting more powerful and internet connections goes faster! WOW!

Tivo can use VOIP

[Beatlebum]

I have a pair of Tivo's that quite happily use Vonage. I don't see why you would keep a landline just for your HD Tivo.

Fine, just don't expect it to be much cheaper

[Sycraft-fu]

One of the reasons you can keep normal phone lines so reliable is that they are very low function, in terms of what they do, and they equipment backing them up is very expensive.

We got in to this fight with our voice guys on campus. We want to roll out VoIP because of the additonal features it offers, and with our network we probably could offer 3 or 4 9s. They always argued how reliable their phone switch is, which is true it's never been down. However consider that we paid $5million just to UPGRADE the damn thing, never mind the support contract, the cost of running all the copper, and the cost of the lines for it.

VoIP at home is unreliable because it runs over cheap data networks. Get VoIP over reliable data networks, you can have highly reliable VoIP.

Now at home, of course, a normal line is cheaper to get reliable service. That's fine, just consider that you are paying more for the reliability. I pay $25/month for a bare phoneline. That's just the line and taxes, no long distance, call waiting, anything else. For that price or less, I could get VoIP on my DSL that includes all the line options, as well as unlimited long distance in the US and Canada. To get the same thing on the PSTN line is about $60-70 total.

Now for a business you may discover that VoIP is cheaper. If you have a seriously reliable data network anyhow, you can probably add some seriously reliable VoIP on top of that for not a lot of money. However for home users it's all about being cheap, and it's traveling over cheap data lines which is the problem anyhow.

New Study Delcares Some Results, Misses Others

[jevvim]

Multiple VoIP providers over multiple carriers? Wow, that's a lot of data, but could it lead to bad ratings because of poor carrier performance? Certainly an end-user, espeically a non-technical one, wouldn't care where the fault it, but there could be specific provider/carrier combinations with better reliability. It would be interesting to see if the data identifies any provider/carrier combinations with availability reaching into the 99.9%+ area of POTS.

For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if Verizon VoIP over Verizon DSL was a very reliable combination (assuming, of course, that the DSL installation itself is reliable). But it could be that Verizon VoIP has terrible availability when accessed via any other carrier - because Verizon VoIP might not have an equal-quality interconnect with other IP carriers.

Vertical integration of the service with the carrier - like traditional POTS - allows for integration of the support experience and elimination of interconnect issues which impair reliability. (Just try getting your local loop fixed by the ILEC when there's a fault which causes your non-ILEC DSL service to die frequently.)

Honestly, the only data point which matters to me is what's the reliability of the best provider/carrier combination as compared to POTS, not the "average" reliability of a provider over all carriers.

People will never accept lossy VoIP

[WillAffleck]

just as they never accepted lossy formats like MP3, JPEG, and so on.

Um, what's this iPod I see before me ...

Work

[scrotch]

Our office changed to VOIP through Covad five weeks ago and it's been a nightmare. Around 10 calls a day are being dropped - in the middle of the call. There have been volume problems. There are echo problems - hearing your own voice a second after you speak. Lots and lots of customers have complained that they can't get through to us when dialing our number. Incoming faxes are mangled or truncated with no error on the sender's side. In fact, the fax situation is so bad that Covad gave up on it and installed 2 land lines yesterday for non-telephone equipment. I think that's pretty telling. Meanwhile, the internet connection is fine.

Maybe it's fine if you're just calling your grandmother once a week. But from what I've seen, VOIP is not ready for business.

Re:Work

[dhazard]

Seems more like a Problem with your network or how they set it up, you shouldnt base an opinion on one try. At my school we have VOIP, and it works perfectly fine and no problems at all, the only time it was down was when a maintence guy from Bell South came in and shut it down for 5 minutes with out any notice (The letter was hidden under other junk mail) .

Re:Work

[katcoker]

Latency, Echo, Security, Oh My! -Sounds like an atocious installation. Not knowing enough about the equipment nor installation specification, this is pure convecture, but it sounds like the project team did not do a very good job. While even the best installations are not perfect, your sounds shoddy... that speaks more to how it was implemented than to the technology.

So when is an open source VoIP coming?

[Mr. Maestro]

Is there one I am missing? And I am not talking about Skype which is free calls only to Skype users last time I checked.
I think if someone had an open source VoIP it would bring the telco industry to its knees. It would be like free solar power to the oil industry.

Re:So when is an open source VoIP coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost of infrastructure/Bandwidth. That's all. Asterisk is a great VOIP opensource PBX for doing VOIP, but if if you let just anyone connect, then you have costs.

Re:So when is an open source VoIP coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

Around 2000 or so, maybe earlier.

LinPhone is stable, KPhone has been so for a long time, both open source. For the Windows users, SJPhone is free of charge, but not open source I believe.

Personally I didn't get an open source VoIP phone working until this year, because I waited for LinPhone. But even as I waited, KPhone had been ready for a long while, the only disadvantage being that it requires QT, which I don't have installed.

And no, a VoIP provider is NOT required. It is needed to call a POTS or cell phone, but if all you want is to call other SIP (VoIP standard) phones, you can do so, just like Skype always could call other Skype phones.

HD Tivos...

[Otto]

The HD Tivos actually get their guide data over the satellite feed (they're all DirecTV units) and don't actually need a phone line, to my knowledge. I might be out of the loop on this, however.

Standalone units can use a USB ethernet device to talk over broadband connections, but all the DirecTV boxes have that disabled by default. I think it's possible to hack new software onto some of those units and thus enable the USB (along with a whole host of other stuff), but it's not a minor modification.

Re:HD Tivos...

[pthomsen]

The HD Tivos actually get their guide data over the satellite feed (they're all DirecTV units) and don't actually need a phone line, to my knowledge. I might be out of the loop on this, however.

Yeah, they do need the phone line. Not to get the guide, but to make PPV purchases. If you don't do that (PPV), you might be OK without a POTS line, except for during setup.

Heh...

[TooncesTheCat]

Seriously. 94.8% means there's a one in 20 chance that when you pick up your phone, it's not going to work. That is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette in an emergency.

I believe Russian Roulette is played mainly with a revolver, dont know of any revolvers with 20 barrels.

I KEED I KEED

911 facts

[Anonymous Coward]

USA

By law, your discontinued land line in required to still be able to get through to 911 if dialed. This is also true of your old digital cell phones w/out service. This is not true of VoIP nor, as far as I can tell, GSM phones.

Fact. 911 on your land line shows the 911 operator your address. 911 on your Cell phone does not.

Point being, if 911 is a concern then leave one phone connected to your discontinued land line.

The phone companys don't want you to know this, and want this to be a reason why you don't switch from them.

The truth shall set you free.

Wonderful idea

[sheldon]

I thought the same thing. I have my cable modem, VOIP and such hooked up to an older 600VA UPS I had. My new 1500VA UPS powers my computer.

Then the power went out one day. My UPS kept my equipment running!

But the cable company doesn't have a UPS on their equipment. They may back in the main office, but they don't at the distribution points.

I used to have DSL in my old house, and the telco maintains power on their lines through battery and generators. So when the power went out, I still had internet.

99.9% is....

[darkonc]

I remember when M$ proudly claimed 99.9% uptime for NT. To me that sounded terrible. Over 3.5 FULL 24 HOUR DAYS of downtime every year. Horrid!

Eer, no. 99.9% would be 0.365 days per year or about 8.76 hours. 99%downtime would be 3.65 days per year.

On the other hand, I'm guessing that the way that they got 99.9% uptime was by having a monitoring system with an automated reboot everytime the system was non-responsive.

Most Linux boxes only go down when you have to upgrade the kernel -- and even then it's only as long as the reboot cycle.

Re:99.9% is....

[karnal]

99%downtime would be

a lot more than you quoted it to be......

Re:99.9% is....

[darkonc]

We're talking about Microsoft here. That goes without saying.

Re: What do you want?

[rob_squared]

VoIP is like any other product, you buy it if it provides what you want. If I am a company, then most likely I have a good sized call volume and can't stand anything below current landline service. But if I have family who lives far away and I can save money using VoIP then I certainly will. If I need speed, I'll buy a sportscar. If I need reliability I'll buy a honda. Everything isn't everything for everybody. Nor should it be.

Tivo fix

[nsayer]

Before anyone hits 'reply' too quickly, I am aware that he is talking about an HD DirecTivo. I am aware that the USB ports are placebos. This technique is different.

You can get your TiVo to use your broadband connection if you're willing to hack things a bit.

You make a special DB91/8" stereo plug and plug one end into your TiVo's "remote out" jack, which is really just an RS-232 port in disguise. You connect the other end into a serial port set for 115200 bps on a computer running a PPP daemon. Set your TiVo dialing prefix to ,#211. Your TiVo will now use PPP over the serial port to do its TiVo related calls. I can confirm that software updates can be fetched in this manner, as well as everything else.

You still must leave the phone line connected so that the crypto card can make its own phone calls, but THOSE calls will work just fine over Vonage (the modem bank they call into is 9600 bps). The only calls that have trouble are the V.90 ones into TiVo, and those are the ones that can be diverted with this technique.

In my case, I actually plug the serial port into a bluetooth-to-serial module, and have a virtual BT serial port on my mac doing the PPP server duties. Works perfectly and doesn't require running a cable.

Shaw Digital Phone in Calgary

[sputnikid]

I have Shaw Digital Phone in Calgary. It isnt technically VOIP since it uses traditional handsets and communicates seperately from my cable modem. However I do get VOIP pricing on long distance. The service is $55CDN/month which includes free unlimited long distance to North America, all of the typical calling features (VM, 3way, call display etc...) along with dirt cheap international calling and local 911/411 service.

Shaw is also considered a telco in Canada as a result and must maintain CLEC standards for their service. I have yet to have my phone service unavailable or even have sound quality that is any worse than my previous POTS service. Even the phone gateway they installed into my house has a battery backup in case of a power failure (not that it matters anyways my wife and I each have cell phones).

Shaw Digital Phone Website

Nope, it's free, as in beer.

[raehl]

Just because something is ultimately supported by taxes doesn't mean that it isn't free. Public education is free, travel on (most) public roads is free, fire and police protection are free - you are entitled to them whether you actually pay the taxes that support them or not.

You can receive 911 service even if you do not pay for phone service, and thus do not pay the tax supporting the 911 service. Getting a service you are not paying for is FREE (as in beer).

To VoIP and back

[dstone]

I recently undertook a project to move the office (12 employees) to VoIP. We chose a firm that specializes in hosted (and in-house) Asterisk-based solutions. To avoid the install, config, tuning, tweaking learning curve of Asterisk, we chose them to host the server at a datacenter (to which we connected via 3.5 Mbps DSL). Those folks customize and maintain the dial plan (extensions, forwarding rules, ring groups, etc.) and lease us the desktop handsets. (We also had access to the Asterisk scripts ourselves when small changes were necessary.) The handsets were mostly Sayson -- very nice feature set and with high-quality build and feeling. We kept the phones on a separate LAN with QoS features enabled on the firewall/router before heading out onto the network. We also tried a configuration with a local Asterisk server running in firmware at the office so the hop over DSL and the internet to the hosting company was Asterisk-to-Asterisk and (I'm told) more resistant to 'jitter' (i.e. inconsistent latency between handset and server)

In the end, we dumped the VoIP solution, despite excellent customer service and many many hours of tuning, tweaking, and debugging by the hosting company. Even with just one or two simultaneous calls (i.e. not maxing bandwidth), we had terrible call quality. Echoes. Dropouts. Metallic sounds. Yes, every codec and compression level was tried, every trick they knew of (and that had apparently cured our symptoms in others) was employed. Ultimately this was blamed on the variable latency or 'jitter'. The hosting company concluded something in the nature of our DSL connection was causing inconsistent latency between our office and the rest of the net and that we were the minority case that would not get good results from VoIP (today -- things will likely improve over time). I'm told even moderately high latency is better than inconsistent latency from a quality-destroying perspective

As for uptime, our connection was probably up 100% of the time, but the recommended and seemingly good quality VoIP handsets (approx CAN$350 to buy, but we leased) would crash and hang frequently. Despite firmware upgrades and custom keep-alive scripts on the server, it was a morning ritual to walk in have to reboot your phone (and/or to do it mid-day when you noticed it was hung only because it had not been ringing as frequently as it used to).

It sounds like we're likely the exception, but this was a very bad VoIP experience. We're back to using an in-house multi-line analog setup that can use old-fashioned single or multiline phones and we have excellent voice quality on calls anywhere in the world. This was very important to us. Our LD rates over analog are very competitive because we make a lot of LD calls, so the VoIP cost savings aren't terribly missed. Some of the promises of arbitrarily scriptable extensions, time-of-day features, call seeking/forwarding, dynamic menus, etc. that Asterisk promised will be missed though. Better luck for us next year, maybe...

It's All About Cost.

[ajayrockrock]

Bills before VOIP:

Cable Modem: 60
Local Phone: 40
Long Dist: 30
---------------------
Total: 130

After VOIP:

Cable Modem: 60
Vonage: 20 (15 dollar plan + taxes)
-----------------
Total: 80

I'm saving about 50 bucks a month using Vonage. Everyone in the house also has cell phones but when making long distance calls during the day, nothing beats using Vonage.

--Ajay

Bell in Ontario

[juniorkindergarten]

Bell technicians have been on strike since March here in Ontario. Residential customers are taking the brunt of this strike, while business customers are generaly only slightly delayed.
If you moved (like me) and there is a problem with the phone line then you're totally stuck. After several calls to "Emily" and talking to fustrated outsourced call takers and finding my repair date slipping from mid July to early August to late September, I got sick of the lies and decided to try Vonage.
After some initial call quality problems, and disconnects, I can honestly say that the call quality is equal to or better than was being provided by bell. The secret? I actually read the manual and made sure the needed ports were forwarded to the vonage box. Once I felt I was sure that the call quality was consistent and reliable, I told Bell to stuff it and cancelled the service.

Compression.

[raehl]

Your fax machine probably won't work over your VOIP either (mine doesn't).

To help on bandwidth, your router assumes that what it's sending in VOIP packets is voice. Data transmission uses different frequencies (and is already compressed pretty well), so the extra compression on top of that (which uses some shortcuts based on the assumption that it's compressing voice) makes the signal uninterpretable on the receiving end.

Vonage will sell you a separate, dedicated fax line at $9.95/month, which I assume is just a separate line that doesn't compress under the assumption that what it's transmitting is voice. To help with this, it may also add latency to the transmission, which while incredibly annoying with voice transmissions, is probably no problem when you're sending a fax.

Hey, Some Land Lines Aren't As Reliable

[DaedalusLogic]

Out in some rural, and even suburban areas Bellsouth's service is so horrible that it regularly cuts out in stormy weather. The fact remains, you should pick the right tool for the job and always have a backup. It's like in spelunking where you always carry a second or third light source just in case. Use VOIP, save hundreds of dollars, and use that cell phone if it flakes out for an emergency call.

And don't give me some rap about how you don't have the extra 15 seconds it takes to reach a cell phone to dial 911. That's just poor planning on your part if you don't plan ahead.

Nothing in life is 100% reliable.

Whiners

[Hanzo]

If having 100% uptime is that big an issue, my advice to you is to go out and buy a cheap pre-paid cell phone. Virgin mobile phones can be had for >$50 and only require $20 every 90 days to remain "active". And I may be reaching here, but if it's only for 911, the phone doesn't even have to be "active", it simply has to have power.

It's only as good as the pipe

[dacarr]

Over on Speakeasy's service (which is a contract with Level 3), my experience is that if there are heavy transfers going on, even if SE does promise quality of service, the other traffic will disrupt your conversation. Worst case I've experienced is just high latency (one second delays are FUN!), worst case you get a lot of skips and pops.

Landline to VoIP: notes from a switcher

[amichalo]

For those of you considering dropping a land line in favor of VoIP, I have a few items you may be interested in taking note of:

- You can take advantage of your existing home wiring by simply plugging your Vonage/etc line into any phone jack after you unplug the phone company's connection to your house in your main junction box. On newer homes and appartments, this will be a grey box you open and simply unplug the phoen cable. On older homes you may have to disconnect wires (don't forget to wrap ends seprately in electrical tape).

- That step complete, even TIVO should have no problem enjoying VoIP.

- What will not work are alarm systems that are wired directly to your house so a burglar cannot prevent an alarm signal by knocking a phone off the hook. For that, you may need a connector for your alarm that will allow you to not hard wire but plug in the phone line. I choose Brinks because they had such a connection that the service guy said was for VoIP installations, though mine was the first he had done and it was only avalable since Fall 2004. Anyway, you plug your Vonage line out into this line and from there it splits into the alarm and then has another line out you can jack into your home wiring so if there is a breakin, it cuts out the home wiring and goes straight to the Vonage.

- update yout 911 info online. Because you can take your phone box with you anywhere, you have to update your 911 info if you are going to be somewhere, line on vacation, for a while.

- Get ready for lower phone bills, less long distance, and free Vonage to Vonage and inside your area-code dialing!

VoIP on Skype

[drzolo]

I have a VoIP service from Skype(skype.com). You can get a phone number for around of 3 pounds a month, plus you fill up the account with 8.8 pound denominations. I think all calls cost me 0.015pound, no matter where i call (except mobiles). This services is great for the price.
Reliabilty wise its not greatest, and its not unusual for you to stop hearing the other party, or they do not hear you. But you can live with that. It saves money and its VERY LOW COST.
You can also just fill up you account(without buying the number) , and make calls right away. The service is great for my needs, for business might cause problems but good brainstorming of advantages/disadvantages should give you idea whether you can afford it or not.

Not a mathematician...

[bwoodring]

You're off by a factor there poncho. 99.9% uptime indicates about 1/3 of a day per year of downtime, which is better than what I've seen for most heavily used Unix systems.

Re:Not a mathematician...

[bill_mcgonigle]

My Verizon landline was out for 3 days last year. Because of a 'software problem', not like a tree fell on the line.

Still has a long way to go...

[NineNine]

As someone who is in the process of switching FROM Vonage, BACK to one of the Bells, I can say that VOIP still has a way to go. I certainly wouldn't depend on it for a business yet. I agree that they're improving, but right now... ugh! Poor quality calls. Switching to/from is a royal PITA. Price isn't much better. Reliability depends on broadband (which is still not good enough for a small business to rely on). Half-assed features (for example, with Vonage, if you have all of your calls forwarded, it doesn't actually forward calls while the destination phone is busy. It catches them in it's own voicemail, instead of doing what I'd like it to do, and forward the calls).

Like Linux, I'll probably try again in another few years. Like Linux, it has lots of potential. Like Linux, it's improving rapidly. Like Linux, it still has a long way to go to be as good as the product it's supposedly trying to replace.

BS stats in the article, then misread by many

[MDMurphy]

The charts in the linked article didn't say the service was down 5.2%. What it says is call completion failed 5.2% of the time. You can't extrapolate the call completion to determine network availability.

They made a call every 30 mins. If the the VOIP network was down for 20 mins it would still show one missed call. If it wasn't down but the call would have gone through if re-attempted 15 seconds later it would still show as one missed call.

And for calls that that were made, what was the phone provider at the other end? Was there a comparison between say a Vonage-to-Vonage call vs a Vonage-to-POTS call? If the phone network test was calling POTS to POTS, then you'd have to do Vonage to Vonage for comparison. If the VOIP networks are less reliable, is the loss in the IP part or the connection to the POTS line at the other end?
The real test of VOIP would be for in-network calls. Connections to the outside POTS network are at the mercy of the carriers, the competition.

We already have seen examples of ISPs screwing with VOIP providers and the phone networks don't like the VOIP competition either.

Interesting study, but the report in the article is sorely lacking in necessary data.

Re:BS stats in the article, then misread by many

[KyolFrilander]

And (anecdote time!), having worked for SBC Long Distance, POTS isn't really frickin' reliable either. I remember having massive LD outages lasting a reasonable amount of time (8+ hours), even though you'd think the network would be.. Well, more redundant than it is.

Doubly so when you're trying to call the middle-of-freaking-nowhere India and wonder why it sounds funny, must be SBC's problem. (Never sounded like this with AT&T. Of course, AT&T charged us 10 times as much per minute. "You get what you pay for" isn't a cliche outside of the US, maybe.)

Fun job for about 4 months, then it turns into a living hell as you realize everyone is a complete idiot.

Re:BS stats in the article, then misread by many

[Anonymous Coward]

They made a call every 30 mins. If the the VOIP network was down for 20 mins it would still show one missed call. If it wasn't down but the call would have gone through if re-attempted 15 seconds later it would still show as one missed call.

And if the VOIP network went down immediately after every call for 20 minutes, it would show up as no missed calls. Nothing here is skewed except for your examples. Sampling every 30 minutes is a good way to determine reliability.

Re:BS stats in the article, then misread by many

[MDMurphy]

My examples are fine. There's a difference between "availability" and "reliability".

The graph in the article shows % of calls complete. That's reliability. They didn't show % of the time the system was up, that would have been availability.

Your example is a good one, your conclusion as flawed as theirs. Your example would show 100% reliability when it had poor availability. 30 minute sampling basically sucks if you want to measure network up time. Would two 30-second calls that failed with 30 min sampling be recorded as 1 min of downtime or 1 hour? Either guess would be a bad one, not enough information.

Compromise

[Eudaemonic Pie]

Southwestern Bell customer: I cut my phone line down to $15/mo or so; no services (call fowarding, call waiting, no long distance. It serves only as a hard backup for VOIP failures, and for "real" 911 service, ADT Alarm service, and satellite dishes that need to dialout. Everything else goes over Vonage, with simulring forwarded to my cell. Pretty soon, I'll have a Sipura 3000 which automatically switches between PSTN and VOIP in case of power failure, so that all phones in the house will pass the wife test. And no matter what, when you dial 911, it is routed over PSTN.

Not even two nines!?

[peterpi]

The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)

That's fucking terrible. That's one in twenty calls failing.

imagine if your car broke down once a fortnight either going to work or coming home; absolutely unacceptable.

Hell, imagine if your car broken down once a year.

In telephony, anything below five nines is an absolute joke.

you must be lucky

[Trepidity]

Back when I had a landline, it worked much less than that. Anything that resulted in downed trees hitting lines would knock out both phone and power for hours, since telephone lines are strung on, you know, telephone poles (at least in older areas, like most of Chicago).

knock on your neighbor's door

[Trepidity]

I live in an apartment complex of fairly high density. There isn't really a need for every single apartment to have its own 911 system. In fact, it'd be sufficient if they just installed a few call boxes out in the hallways.

911 historically was piggybacked on voice telephone because it happened to be a wire that nearly everyone had, so was convenient. There's no reason every single phone or phone-like service has to double as a 911 provider though; the two are perfectly separatable. If you have both VOIP and a cell phone, for example, there's no need to have 911 service on the VOIP, since you can always dial it on the cell phone.

Re:knock on your neighbor's door

[Spetiam]

In fact, it'd be sufficient if they just installed a few call boxes out in the hallways.

That would be convenient for all sorts of criminals. All they'd have to do to keep anyone on the entire floor from calling the cops is yell down the hall, "crazy killer on the loose!" and hope they're in a gun-free haven like Washington, DC.

I couldn't be happier

[Foz]

I used to have SBC. I despised them. They nickle and dimed me for everything... $8 a month for this, $5 a month for that, etc. I also had DSL and directTV through them (only because my apt complex had a captive contract with them to keep comcast out). Then I bought a tivo and had to take it back when I found out SBC was doing signal stacking in my complex and I needed to buy a destacker before I could use the Tivo (which cost more than the Tivo did).

I just moved out into a townhome. I went from 768k DSL (on a good day) to 6 megabit cable, got high def and a middle of the road TV programming package, and signed up for Sunrocket VOIP. My phone bill alone was around $60 a month just for dialtone, a flat rate long distance package and a few minor extras (like caller ID) and I'm paying $16.50 or so a month for my VOIP through sunrocket with no contract, no cancellation fees, didn't pay a dime for the equipment, AND got a free set of uniden cordless phones when I signed up.

In addition, between the DSL and satellite charges compared to the cablemodem + cable TV I'm saving another $25 or so a month and I'm getting roughly 8 times the speed (I'm capping out around 5.6 megabit on my speed tests). That's just shy of $75 a month I freed up to spend on beer.

SBC can suck my ass.

-- Gary F.

mine certainly never was

[Trepidity]

When I lived in the Chicago suburbs, thunderstorms that resulted in downed trees would regularly knock out both power and phone for a few hours. This is because the phone lines ran on, as you might expect, telephone poles.

That sums it up nicely

[bwoodring]

Assuming you have a reliable internet connection, the decision is simple: For the features that Vonage (for example) provides for $25/mo, you have to pay approximately $50-75/mo from a land-line provider. On the other hand, your phone will be down maybe once every couple of years. If you are willing to tolerate your phone being down maybe one hour/month, you can save $300-400 per year. In my opinion, you're much better off with Vonage and a good cell phone plan.

My bad, it's Marilyn Chambers, not LL.

[bennomatic]

See this link for more info.

99.4% sucks, really really sucks

[yagu]

Vonage ranked best for "most reliable" with 99.4% uptime

Personally having worked in the telcom industry for years my experience has been not only would people be fired for providing phone service as low as 99.4% availability, but the telco delivering that kind of service would likely be subject to some hefty fines, and some potential lawsuits.

For some hyperbole and perspective, if the takeoff/landing reliability of commercial airliners were of that order, of the approximately 25,000 commercial flights taking off and landing each day, there would be about 300 incidents each day. Some may consider it an invalid comparison, but when the telcos were the only game in town, their role and function and criticality to the functioning of our society approached that level of urgency.

People are comparing to the worst...

[WhiteWolf666]

Why not the best, or the average?

99.4% uppercentage for Vonage.

That's about what.... 50 hours of downtime a year? (Yes, I know they are talking about call completion, not uptime, but bear with me)

Well, this year, in Oak Creek, WI, we lost all SBC phone service for 5 days. That's significantly worse.

And that's not the only outage we've experienced; trees get blown over, the local phone company building experiences an outage, and other such stupid mishaps.

Nothing is 100% reliable. I feel that 99.4% reliable with a viable backup (cell phones) is more than good enough.

Not that I there aren't situations where both will fail; a major disaster will most likely take out wireline phone service, wireless phone service, and internet service. But if I get two providers with 99.4% uptime, I'll be A-okay.

Especially considering that cellular 911 calls have priority over standard calls *and* will use any signal (well, similar to your carriers (GPRS v. CDMA) to get ahold of the closest 911 center.

More of your calls might be VoIP than you think...

[pergamon]

Even old-timey phone companies are in love with VoIP, and many mainstream carriers are moving (or at least looking to move) their internal phone networks to VoIP for all their customers. What this means is that even if you and your phone buddy both have plain old analog telephone service, there's a non-trivial chance that your conversation might be carried as VoIP part or most of the way.

For me the issue isn't VOIP's reliabiliy.

[Molochi]

For me the issue isn't VOIP's reliabiliy, it's my ISP's reliability. My Comcast service goes down AT LEAST once per month and when it goes down, it usualy stays down for 24 hours or more. So, for me at least, VOIP isn't an option.

I guess my standards are low

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people are saying that if a phone fails 1 time out of 20, then nobody would use it.

I would, if it were cheap enough. I mean, what's the big deal? One day, I pick up the phone, and it doesn't work. "Oh well," I would say, and I'd would reach for the cellphone.

Sure, POTS is reliable, but relatively expensive (i.e. it costs more than my cell phone). One of the neat things about VoIP, if it ever gets done right, will be that it should be just about free (just as email and every other app that runs on top of IP is free).

99.999%

[rcw-home]

The Baby Bells keep their uptime greater than 5 nines typically.

I find it incredible that no one has mentioned in this discussion the fact that that availability metric does not apply to your land line.

That's the fabled gold standard of reliability they need from their equipment to be able to promise you a completely different availability metric for their network. Network, as in, after your call makes it to the phone switch at the CO, that's the chance of the call making it to the other parties' phone switch at their CO.

For example, Verizon only claims 99.99% network availability.

In fact, the article we're discussing only pegged a land line's availability at 99.9%.

94.8% good?

[webview]

My math is terrible, but...

There are (roughly) 8760 hours in a year.
94.8% of that is ~8304 hours of uptime.
Conversely, that's 456 hours of downtime.
Which translates into 19 days of downtime.

I would imagine that 99.999 is where regular POTS providers are at these days (maybe even higher).

Not considering the study was only for two months which is hardly (statistically) representative of 'uptime'.

analogy doesn't apply

[lommer]

there's a more reliable substitute for VOIP, there isn't for cell phones. The primary issues are still quality, reliability, and cost; and they're BIG issues either way.

I get 99.99% without a landline

[grahamsz]

Lingo + T-Mobile gives me easily 99.99% and at far lower cost than landline

Lingo gives me free long distance and calls to europe (i make lots), and my cellphone is more flexible but doesn't give me unlimited minutes.

Between the two I have no problem communicating with anyone.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

[RebornData]

I've been a Callvantage user for about 4 months, and absolutely love the service. I see a lot of people on this thread commenting about how bad 99.4% is, treating that number like server uptime... that the service is unavailable .6% of the time, which adds up to hours per month.

I believe that this study measures something different... the number of calls that were completed successfully out of all of the test calls. This is not the same as a time-based availability measurement. 99.4% means that out of 100 calls, less than one of them failed. This doesn't necessarily mean the service was down... just that the call attempt failed.

Think about it this way... 7 failed calls in a week of testing will result in the same "availability" measurement, no matter whether they were 7 failed calls in a row, or 1 failed call a day. The former indicates a real outage, where users would likely be unable to use the service if they wanted. The latter might indicate a temporary glitch (perhaps with the TA even) that could be resolved by immediately re-attmpting the call. The former is a much bigger deal than the latter, but the numbers they've given us don't distinguish them.

This matches my experience with Callvantage. I've never noticed that AT&T's service is "down". Sometimes when I attempt a call, it doesn't go through on the first try, but on the second try immediately after the failure, it completes. I've always chaulked this up to Internet flakiness. To repeat: I've *never* noticed an outage where I couldn't make a call, or where calls didn't ring to my cell phone (and I know... this is my business line).

Anyway, the point is, 99.4% can mean a lot of things... and we don't really know how these call-completion numbers really match to service availability.

-R

braggert

[uofitorn]

I only maintain my land line now for my HD Tivo to dial out from.

bah. I only maintain MY landline so that my land rover can phone home for monthly oil changes.

94.8% sucks!

[mschaffer]

unless you don't mind having your phone unavailable for the better part of 19 days a year!

Just say no to AT&T

[Jesus IS the Devil]

If I can help it, I would never use VOIP service from one of the greedy telcos. For the longest time these guys have been dicking us around, nickle and diming us to death with their stupid surcharges, fees, long distance rates, etc.

I distinctly remember a few years ago I made a call to Asia using AT&T as the long distance provider. It ended up being almost $3 per minute, no joke! In order to take advantage of their "lower" (which is still way way higher than VOIP service) rates, I'd have to pay some stupid monthly fee and join some plan.

Now that VOIP is here, these guys are finally offering it to compete. I say screw them. They've done the same to us for decades, tried and is still trying to put up roadblocks to VOIP. I would not trust these bast(a)rds ever again.

Reliability

[Halvard]

So roll your own.

Use an old moderately powered PC, install Asterisk on it with AstLinux and a generic version of the Wildcard X100P and a VOIP client or hardware VOIP phone or a Wildcard TDM400P with up to four FXO or FXS modules and POTS phones. Kris has already done the hard word for you. It's a CF image for Soekris 4801 boards or generic i586 hardware.

You are supposed to be able to call 911 in the US even if service is disconnected on the POTS line. Or keep the cheapest service and pay them for any outbound call but only use it for backup locally.

Then sign up with several VOIP providers that don't provide unlimited calling, voicemail, etc., because you don't need it. Someone like VoicePulse Connect to get your DID and another outbound only provider that's even cheaper per minute. Note that this isn't the same as the regular VoicePulse service. You want more than 1 s0o if one's down, have your outbound tables just go to the next.

Connect your FXO port to the wall, set up Asterisk to work with the different VOIP providers and now your telephone service is incredibly reliable. Internet routing caveats of course. You are at about $22 bucks per month plus outbound calling at US$0.01-0.024 cents per minute domestically. And $US$0.013-0.40 cents per minute internationally depending on destination.

caveat emptor

[DavidBorgioli]

Anyone who thinks that they are going to get the cheapest VoIP and have it be as good as their POTS trunk or T-1 PRI is sadly mistaken. I work for an ISP here in New York City. We are offering VoIP now in addition to our other offerings. I would never have a business take VoIP without at leat one POTS trunk as a back up. Usually there will be several POTS trunks as back up. There are many factors that can affect the quality and reliablility of the VoIP. I've had people do it themselves (to save money) and ended up spending more for a worse product. There are many factors that one can do to improve their quality and reliability. These range from having the ISP prioritize the voice packets (if they'll do that), to using better hubs/switches, etc to using a better Internet connection, to selecting the optimum compression method and IAD. VoIP is also close to having line powered VoIP also. I have some using a UPS (battery back up) to provide power for minor outages. Keep in mind that if you are using a key or PBX phone system and you lose power you will not be able to call with POTS or T-1 trunks unless you have a UPS. VoIP is a good system and when used correctly can be a good solution. It may offer families a second trunk that they other wise wouldn't get. It may save businesses money and/or offer features that they couldn't get before. Like any tool it can be a disaster if used incorrectly.

Email from my VOIP provider

[efedora]

I've been using Sun Rocket http://sunrocket.com/ for about 6 months. The service is superb. First outage was for about 30 minutes a couple of weeks ago. This is the email they sent to all subscribers.
Never got one of these from SBC - and I've had outages with them.
=====================
Dear SunRocket Member,

On behalf of SunRocket and all of our dedicated employees, I would like to apologize for any inconvenience that resulted from a SunRocket network disruption that occurred on Monday, July 11. The disruption was caused by recent surges in subscribers and call volumes. Unfortunately, one of the partitions in our network was unable to handle the demand, and it took several hours for our engineers to fully restore the network. While thousands of subscribers remained in service during the disruption, we failed to meet our reliability standards. Last week, we activated a new partition that doubled our capacity, but we had not begun the process of rebalancing the system load between the partitions prior to Monday's disruption. While that rebalancing is now underway, we will be activating a third partition within the next week to further augment our system capacity and improve the reliability of the SunRocket network.

We also recognize that we need to improve our ability to provide real-time status and notices during network disruptions, though our primary goal is to ensure that our network is fully operational at all times. You expect and deserve reliable phone service, and SunRocket remains committed to providing exceptional service at an exceptional value.

As an expression of our regret for any inconvenience you may have experienced, we will add 10 points into your RocketRewards account. Thousands of SunRocket members have taken advantage of the RocketRewards Referral Program, and we greatly appreciate your contributions in spreading the word about SunRocket to friends, family, neighbors and colleagues. We are also expanding your opportunities for earning RocketRewards points, as well as introducing more redemption choices. You can learn more about RocketRewards at www.sunrocket.com/community/referrals.

We are continuously striving to improve your service and enhance our ability to serve you better. Thank you for being a valued SunRocket member.

Sincerely,

Kevin Bennis
Chief Executive Officer

Forget VOIP whats the reliabilty of 911

[AltRN82]

Everyone complains that if you use VOIP it could fail when you need it for 911. Has anyone done the stats on how effective placing a call to 911 is?

What if 4 out of 10 calls to 911 are ineffective and you get shot anyway?

Most carriers send calls of IP...

[mjgraves]

The really silly part about this is that most calls through major carriers are VOIP based these days. There is a huge IP based build out going on as carriers migrate from TDM based networks to IP based backbone. What this study really addressed was common retail VOIP as a last leg delivery scheme. And that, by definition, means making calls through some form of ATA device provided by the carrier. There are carriers and then there are carriers. Some provide VOIP over dedicated networks with end to end QOS (AT&T, Covad, Level 3) while most others provide lesser infrastructure. Michael

POTS has battery at the switch

[davidwr]

"Um, when the power is out, landlines run off batteries too... What, do you think they stick power for every phone in the city on the phone lines?"

That's exactly how it works in Canada, I assume the USA is similar. The battery is at the telco switch.

Re:POTS has battery at the switch

[Luke-Jr]

I've always heard they keep the batteries at the phone pole things...

Canadian providers?

[novakane007]

I'm looking for someone like Vonage in Canda. Right now the only provider I know of is Shaw and they charge 50 bucks/mth for this bells and whistles package. I just want basic local dialing with voicemail and caller ID. The 14.95 package on Vonage looks great. Anyone know of any Canadaian providers?

Re:Canadian providers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err.. I'm guessing you didn't look that hard. =)

Primus Telecom (primus.ca) has full sized ads in the national newspapers and others in the Toronto subway system. They're also a CLEC, so have Local Number Portability, and when they screw up you can beat them with the CRTC stick

$30/mo CAD including all your North American long distance and the hardware codec rental. Works well, I haven't had a land line in a year, and I've had to call 911 three times. The first time, it didn't work and I got a month credit.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

Heh, I have you beat.

[Firethorn]

How about calling 911 three, four times a week, for four months?

Of course, I was calling a low-usage 911 line to make sure that it was still operational, and the operator was doing his/her job... ;)

I have never actually had to call 911 for an emergency.

Re:Heh, I have you beat.

[jackofallbrandnames]

Of course, I was calling a low-usage 911 line to make sure that it was still operational, and the operator was doing his/her job... ;)

I have never actually had to ...

You have GOT to be fucking joking me, right?

Re:Heh, I have you beat.

[Firethorn]

Nope.

Local OI -
0400 - Call 911 for line check
"This is the NCC with a 911 line check, how do you read?" Then make note that police, fire, and medical all respond.

Get a Turbonet Adaptor for your TiVo

[agentfive]

And ditch that land line. There's no need and you can do the setup over ethernet.

Why I use VOIP

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy. With the combination of a minimal cell phone account and a Vonage plan, my phone bill is significantly cheaper than an all land-line bill or an all cell bill.

If VOIP is down, I can use my cell.

Quality is superb.

Re:sugar shock

[Sinner]

What the hell is sugar shock? How does it make someone turn blue?

If he drank too much isn't it more likely he was suffering from alcohol poisoning? Perhaps if you'd said that your 911 call would have been more productive?

Re:sugar shock

[Anonymous Coward]

It is possible (although maybe unheard of in your area) to drink other things than alcohol.

I'd imagine a couple of bottles of Coca-cola could do something like that.

Re:Not a mathematician... - the REAL math:

[gnu-sucks]

break this down:

99.99 percent uptime:

n / 365 = 99.99 / 100

99.99 * 365 = 36,496.35

36,496.35 / 100 = 364.964

365 - 364.964 = 0.036 days downtime or:

0.036 * 24 / 1 = .864 Hours Downtime. (Thats 51 minutes, 50.4 seconds. What a lie, but anyway...)

Now, had that 99.99% been 99%, you would be looking at 3.65 days downtime.

And for the record, here are the downtimes for the various VoIP Providers, in simple terms (of those listed in the article):

Vonage 99.4% - 2.19 days
Industry Average 96.9% - 11.315 days
pots standard 99.9% - 0.365 days
lowest rated 94.8% - 18.98 days

So yeah, for 911, forget it. Come to think of it, how does the downtime rate for your isp, let alone voip provider?

not bad for the price

[chickenrob]

I have Sunrocket. I pay $17/mo for unlimited with all the features. To get a comprable service with the phone company, it would be over $100/mo. So, yeah not bad for a day or two a mo of downtime.. however. Most the time the line is down, you can revive it by cycling your cable modem, your voip adapter, or your router. The last time sunrocket was down for about 8 hours, everyone received an email apologizing and 10 reward points (which are worth about $10, over half a month's service) When is the last time you received an apologie and a refund from your phone company?

Happy VoIP Subscriber

[kilodelta]

I signed up for Vonage about nine months ago. Over that time I have had four outages, 3 of which weren't a Vonage problem.

Things like broken feed lines, etc. are what doomed me.

But otherwise the service works just fine over Cox IP services.

Don't have young kids so don't need a 5 9's phone service. Don't notice any delay on call audio, etc. But that little sidetone that Vonage puts on the line can get a little annoying.

With Fiber, they just might do that

[davidwr]

I'm not sure how fiber-to-the-curb or fiber-to-the-neighborhood setups manage power, I was speaking of "the old days" when you had a single copper pair leading back to the central office.

now that

[Trepidity]

sounds like an argument against "gun-free havens".

Re:now that

[Spetiam]

Exactly.

Re:sugar shock

[Sinner]

I'd imagine a couple of bottles of Coca-cola could do something like that.

I've drunk more than a couple of bottles of Coke in my time, and I've never turned blue. Maybe it was Pepsi?