I’ve used “voice over Internet protocol” or VoIP for many years. It’s not my primary phone service but it is an important one. I don’t have a traditional telephone “land line” or POTS but that’s only because I’m in the process of moving. I rely on a cellphone most of the time. Once I get established, I’ll very likely have a home phone again. The question will be if it is POTS, one of the commercial VoIP services, or cellular.

The problem I’ve had with VoIP service has been how it behaves with the inconsistent performance of the Internet. I have pretty good service right now but it not perfect all the time. I am sure the service at my new location will be less perfect.

VoIP services like Vonage are designed for good Internet connectivity. Bandwidth is not the critical measure - latency is. Latency is delay from when information is sent to when it is received. In the case of voice communications, it’s the time from when a person talks to when they are heard. A real world example of latency is the delay you notice from when a newscaster is talking to someone overseas and they are connected over a satellite link - there is a clear delay from when the local newscaster asks the question to when the person in the field hears it and responds.

If your Internet connection has more than about 100ms-150ms latency, you will have some issues with you and your party talking over each other. If you latency goes over 250ms, you definitely will have issues. This is less of an issue when there are just two of you as you will learn to adjust your behavior.

Where VoIP really falls apart is with conference calling. When there are a number of people on a call, they listen for pauses in the conversation to interject. The more people, the less time people will wait to “get their word in”. Thus, the more people, the less tolerance for latency.

Most consumers don’t make lots of conference calls, but business people do. It get’s really difficult if you use VoIP for your personal phone service and then dial into a conference call that is running over VoIP. You often end with your personal VoIP to traditional phone switching to VoIP conferencing service. You can see, latency times for the multiple VoIP solutions can become additive.

VoIP has come a long way. It use to be that VoIP meant you were tethered to your computer and there was little resemblance to a traditional phone. Now, the mainstream VoIP providers have broken from the computer-centric experience to a very familiar modern telephone experience.

The technology continues to improve and the Internet is evolving as well. At the same time, the volume of Internet traffic (music downloads, steaming video, and file sharing) is growing at an alarming rate and all of this data is competing with VoIP. There are methods for prioritizing the VoIP data but it is not ubiquitous so it doesn’t always help.

There is one more thing to consider. “What is your fall-back plan?”. Most people tolerate the fact that their cable modem fails when their cable TV goes out. When TV, Internet, and phone all go over the same connection, when you lose that connection, you lose everything. (Verizon has recently started to market to this weakness.)

So, for me, VoIP is still a “backup” that I keep in my business tool kit. I expect it to continue to grow in popularity and reliability. I’ll will re-evaluate my phone service every year or so, but given my next move to a “more rural” locale, I am not holding my breath that VoIP will be my solution of choice <grin>

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Posted in Collaboration, Computers, Rural America, VoIP |

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