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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.
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.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
99.999%
Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Your local telco that everyone loves to hate is required to provide 5 nines availability. Your service must work 99.999% of the time.
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.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
I'm teminally incoherent
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!
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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
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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.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
99% is better than my cell phone, and I find that useful enough to pay for. Not saying they can't make improvements though.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
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.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.