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Cable VoIP Sounds Better Than Some Landlines
A. G. Bell writes "A recent study that looked at the quality of phone calls came up with some surprising results. Ars Technica reports that while 'traditional' VoIP call quality lagged behind landlines, service from cable ISPs was much better because of their use of PacketCable: 'VoIP from the cable companies actually surpassed the traditional phone network in reliability, meaning that the service was more often available and connected calls without dropping them. Cable providers also led the way in audio quality; the top firm in Keynote's study actually turned in an MOS of 4.24, above most real phone networks.'"
The idea behind PacketCable is that the call stays on the cable providers backbone for as long as possible, and only then does it go to the normal phone system. If any phone company tried to block or deblieratly degrade the service of phone service, I fully expect them to be on the recieving end of a lawsuit quickly.
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I forgot where I saw it (it might've been here), but not too long ago I read a minirant where the person was comparing the phone service of yesterday to the service expectations of today. Admittedly it's two different types of service (landline vs. cell), but we've gone from advertising phone service so clear where you can supposedly hear a pin drop to making a big deal out of being able to hear the person at all. Just a little food for thought...
This matches my experience. We have Vonage via cable modem. Our neighbors who have POTS have had a number of lengthy service outages within the last yeur or two, whereas we've never had any. As far as audio quality, it just sounds normal to me.
The only problems we've had have been with integration among the various parts of the system, and I guess that's not surprising, since it is multiple systems working together, rather than a monolithic system like Ma Bell used to be. The big problem we had was that every time someone would leave a voice mail on Vonage's system, our internet connection would die, and we'd have to power cycle to get it back up. The solution was simply to stop using Vonage's voice mail (which was klutzy anyway), and switch to using the answering machine that was already built into our phone anyway.
A lot of people express concern about the 911 issue. Vonage now has automatic address recognition (if you set it up with them, which they try very aggressively to make sure you do), and from what I understand, there's no real data on reliability of Vonage's 911 versus reliability of POTS's 911. It's apparently quite common for POTS's automatic address recognition to fail, and for that reason, the first thing they always do when you call 911 is ask for your address anyway. The thing that does bother me a little about the 911 issue, regardless of the service provider, is that you can't test it without making a false 911 call. I don't like the idea of an important safety system that you can't test.
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Yes, but the POTS switches were so jammed up by all the "OMG do u have ur TV on???" calls that a landline call might not have gone through either. The slight increased reliability phones doesn't justify an extra $600 a year to me.
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Granted, this isn't really a phone replacement, but if all the people I want to talk to are on their computers anyways, then it works great.
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Good point. And, we've made something as easy as making a land-line call potentially so complex that the average person can't even do it. For some reason I'm always having to do ridiculous things like unplugging my cable modem, router, and disconnecting the coax from the modem (in some special order that is hard to reproduce) in order to "fix" my internet connection. If I had Vonage for voice on top of all this it would be a real train wreck.
The problem is, people have learned to accept that "the internet is down", but it would be a much bigger deal if the water was off, the electric was out, or the land line was down.