Videnda News

Does VoIP give you what you pay for?

IP telephony has been a mainstream technology for some time now, with large organizations such as a Winnipeg school board opting for the technology.

But users complain about delay, jitter and users having a hard time understanding each other continue, and one blogger has proposed a higher tier of service.
On the blog No Jitter, Unified IT Systems president Sorell Slaymaker Monday proposed a “Tele-voice” service, which would do to VoIP what Telepresence did to video conferencing.

Slaymaker proposes “high quality audio” with very stringent network requirements” to meet this standard. He says delay, compression and cheap handsets reduce the quality of voice calls, and suggests users may actually waste time because they don’t understand each other.

However, as Slaymaker points out, most IP telephony projects are sold on the basis of cost reduction, but users often have to repeat themselves and risk stepping over the other callers on the line.

Presumably, adding more network requirements and improving hardware would increase the cost of voice calls. But Slaymaker has a good point when he asks if we waste five minutes of time in a one hour conversation over IP, what is the cost of this waste, and how does it compare to what we saved by using VoIP instead of the plain old telephone system?

Having a robust network that can handle real time traffic like VoIP is key. When you’re calling long distance, you’re dealing with different carriers and networks, which makes the end of end enforcement of standards difficult, compared to an internal installation.

The comparison to Telepresence is valid. In the past, some companies were reluctant to use video conferencing due to the poor quality, whereas Telepresence products from vendors like Cisco, HP, LifeSize and Tandberg make the video conferences seem like live meetings.

View full article here: Does VoIP give you what you pay for?