Something for nothing

Thats not typical Mikey, most of the time you can't tell if someone's using VOIP

The call was fading in & out with lots of treble I'll bet.........

Frequency response? HA! thin to say the least, no low end at all, intermittent echo, sounded like half duplex too (if that's the right term), I speak, I clobber him, he speaks, he clobbers me... (maybe that's what you're referring to as fading, I found it more abrupt like too tight a noise gate. I felt like we should be saying "over" Perhaps there was a problem with the line but I resisted those damn digital cell phones for as long as I could for the same reason. Quality.

I dunno, Mark. I'm thinking I've heard this before and just thought it was a digital cell phone. It's a step backwards. In a medium where the only sense available is audio, quality should take precedence. The telcos. can give you 15KHz lines on a pair of wires. I think the standard voice line is what 4KHz, you think that VoIP crap comes anywhere near that?

I have VOIP and that's exactly how it is like on my line. It's really fully duplex but when both parties are talking at the same time, you can't really make out what the other party is saying exactly and that's when there is no other network traffic going on either. Don't think it's got anything to do with my internet connection either because I have a 7MB down and 1MB up connection with QoS enabled, with the telephone adapter infront of my router.

The other problem with Voip is that it can slow down your netwrk data you are sending particularly vonage i have seen it with commercail service . the regular T1 provided service were a channel bank is used the voice quality is excellent but it can play hell with alarms faxes etc.

Your experience is atypical to most of the VoIP users I know. I have heard these issues (echoes, sounds like you're underwater, etc.), but only very rarely. Of course, when you ARE talking to someone who's line is working well (and I can almost guarantee you, you have without realizing it), you'll never know the difference.

Keep in mind that the technology is relatively new, and the very simple, very cheap broadband boxes most people are using for it are just that: simple and cheap. They're obviously not going to have the same level of error-correction and other such "filters" that enterprise-level systems will have.

I've been using VoIP for quite a while now. I tried one of the cheap services and it was just that. Voice quality ranged from OK to extremely poor. Service was terrible. The company was Vonage.

We switched to a higher quality, professional VoIP service several months ago. We now use VoIP telephone instruments with built-in PABX functionality and a high-end auto-attendant service provider. The difference is like night and day.

Vonage and similar services from AT&T and the like are probably OK for residential users. For business use we needed a better system. I now have 17 "lines" split into two hunting groups, the ability to handle two incoming and one outgoing calls per station simultaneously. All of this runs on three (and soon five) virtual PABX stations, each in a different location. We can conference between multiple inside and outside parties, transfer calls from within and outside the United States while I'm in Brasil, etc.

I can also preview or scroll back through Caller ID history with name and calling location. This comes in very handy in the event of an occasional dropped connection, which does still happen now and then due to fluctuations in DSL service.

I've found that one of the important keys to a successful VoIP application is reliable bandwidth. DSL makes a huge difference. I have half-T1 at all but one location and it is much better than cable. Even though cable advertises higher bandwidth, it is very irregular, causing that "underwater" sound you mention, lots of dropped calls, etc. Business grade DSL is expensive but it's well worth the cost when your business depends on it.

When did you get phones in Canada?

mikey wrote:

Sometime after indoor plumbing

WHAT....you mean I can get rid of my outhouse in the back yard ??

RHC

I choose Polesoft Lockspam to fight spam, and you?

I think he means you can stop pissing in your own backyard, sorry I meant p*ssing

Doug L

Still no 800 number?? Don't you think the new owners of your "old digs" are getting tired of receiving your mail?? Tsk!!!

That's OK... I use the neighbour's pool.

Oh jeeze, here we go... Amuricans still think they invented the thing, next we'll hear they invented baskeball too.

That explains why my fish keep dying.

I use a VOIP digital keyset at home that connects to my Inter-tel AXXESS phone system at the office. I work at home often and no one (including me) could ever tell I was on a VOIP link (using a DSL connection). I have no idea how well the vonage stuff works though.

I've had dealers run >Heard VoIP for the first time today. It should make troubleshooting a lot

baskeball?

| >

| > mikey wrote: | > > Heard VoIP for the first time today. It should make troubleshooting a | lot | > > easier. I knew right away when customer answered the phone when I called | > > (failed test last night) what the trouble was. | > > VoIP sounds like shit. The guy uses the line for business too and it was | the | > > most annoying conversation I've endured since tin cans and strings. What | > > garbage. | >

| | |

Yes. Sun is so scare up here, when it comes out, we take out a ball or two and just bask.