This piece at Business Week.com takes a look at the high level of poor quality of service for VoIP. The well-written piece by Olga Kharif documents what those of us who have VoIP already know: calls get dropped, sound quality is variable and sometimes it’s just better to use a cell phone.
The complaints don’t stop with service outages. On average, VoIP call quality is worse than cellular, according to research by Internet performance consultancy Keynote. Audio delay (the time between when you speak and the listener can hear you) is often unacceptably long, leading to overlapping conversations.
But not all VoIP providers are the same, and cable operators may just be right when they argue that their higher priced, but higher quality, VoIP options will trump low-cost or free IP voice service.
For now, however, low-cost is the big draw and with it comes the fuzzy sounds and cut-off conversations. Even some of the non-quality of service advantages of VoIP look sketchy to me at times. My Vonage business line, which has substantially improved in terms of QoS over the past nine months, is a pain when it comes to online voice mail retrieval, a much-touted convergence benefit of the new voice option. At times voice mail is simply not retrievable and at other times, it takes forever for the audio file to download.
Still, VoIP is the fastest growing segment of the voice market, and despite these early growing pains, I doubt if growth will slow.
Cynthia Brumfield at 5:08 PM|Comments(0)
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