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New Study Finds VOIP is Getting Better
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jul 21, 2005 03:42 PM
from the also-water-is-good-for-you dept.
from the also-water-is-good-for-you dept.
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.
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Take heed (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Take heed (Score:2)
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.
Or Put Another Way... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Parent
BS stats in the article, then misread by many (Score:3, Informative)
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 provide
Re:Or Put Another Way... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 compl
Re:99.9% is.... (Score:3, Funny)
a lot more than you quoted it to be......
Re:Take heed (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Take heed (Score:3, Informative)
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 ste
Re:Take heed (Score:3, Interesting)
So during a critical emergency, how many people have time to go digging through their basement to find an old telephone?
Re:Take heed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Take heed (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
hmm (Score:2)
I was going to get VOIP, but... (Score:5, Funny)
99.44% (Score:5, Funny)
Loving VOIP here (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
No need for that... (Score:3, Informative)
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?
99.4% sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
Not the complete picture. (Score:4, Informative)
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
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.
Parent
Re:99.4% sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Phones go out just like anything else - electricity, cable, you name it.
99.4%!? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's good enough for me (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Good Cost Saving as Last Resort (Score:3, Informative)
Baby Bells (Score:5, Insightful)
99.999%
Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.
Availability (Score:3, Funny)
"We can't give you 5 nines availability, would you settle for 9 fives?"
Downtime (Score:2)
Landline for Tivo (Score:2)
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.
99.4% is not that good (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
My vonage expereince has been great.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
QOS, 911, regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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/region
And this is news? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Have to Compare to Cell Phones (Not Land Lines) (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Near-whoring (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Choices, Choices (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Why the Whining? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [binfone.com] 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.
Sounds ok to m (Score:3, Insightful)
CT complaining about uptimes? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Tivo fix (Score:3, Informative)
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
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.
It's only as good as the pipe (Score:3, Informative)
Landline to VoIP: notes from a switcher (Score:3, Informative)
- 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!
More of your calls might be VoIP than you think... (Score:3, Informative)
Lies, damn lies, and statistics (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Why keep POTS for Tivo? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:directivo (Score:3, Informative)
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:Power outages? (Score:5, Funny)
My guns are purely mechanical devices, no electricity required.
Next question?
-paul
Parent