23Nov 09
How reliable is IP telephony?
Posted by Renai LeMay @ 16:04 18 comments
Those with long memories will remember a period a few years back when corporate IP telephony was not exactly what you would call ... mature.
(Credit: Avaya)
The scenario would always play out the same way. With your normal analog desk phone, you would place a call to speak to someone in another organisation, normally one in the financial sector with more money to throw around on the latest technology than sense.
As your contact answered their phone, you would hear a weird kind of hissing, crackling or popping noise, maybe accompanied by strange delays in between the time they spoke into the mouthpiece and when the sound reached their ear.
"ARE YOU USING VOIP BY ANY CHANCE?" you would ask loudly into your end of the connection.
"YES, THEY JUST ROLLED IT OUT LAST WEEK, HOW DID YOU KNOW?" they would yell back.
What had happened, of course, is that your contact's IT department had rolled out a new corporate IP telephony system, but without really testing the network connection and quality of service required to support it in the back end.
I can't say how often this happened to me, but it happened often enough, and I'm sure it has happened to most people at some point.
The thing is, however, that over the past several years it has stopped happening. Now, I never have problems making calls using IP telephony, whether it be to organisations like Westpac that I know employ the technology, or even from my consumer-grade home VoIP connection (I'm an iiNet customer).
There could be several things behind this fact.
Firstly, organisations could simply be throwing massive network resources behind their IP telephony connections to guarantee they never, ever have problems that would be noticeable by upper management.
Or, secondly, that quality of service and other technology at the heart of IP telephony solutions has become very mature over the past few years.
What's your IP telephony experience been like?
6%
2%
My experience is about the same as yours, although I am not so tolerant of poor voice quality in call centres. I still encounter crappy connections and am suprised that some places do not fix these configuration issues.
As the technology is now 15 years old you would hope that the technology is easier to implement, especially echo, jitter and prioritisation settings. It wasn't that long ago when dial tone was a "feature" for some vendors.
My biggest beef with VoIP is that given the (vendor?) assumption of unlimited bandwidth (ie TCP/IP networks) why do we still use crappy compression algorithms? Surely high quality stereo would be better?
It seems to me that analogue mobile voice set the bar (very low!) for voice quality and the industry is patting itself on the back for achieving this bar for VoIP.