Perspective: Short-circuiting the VoIP revolution

I love VoIP phone services. Unlimited long distance at half the price of landline phones but with four times the features. What's not to love?

A new generation of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, routers and other equipment are nearly idiot-proof to install and use by both consumers and businesses.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to the VoIP revolution: Voice quality is getting worse, not better.

Conventional wisdom would hold that the Internet should be getting better at handling voice. But since March 2004, we?ve been testing nearly 1 million Internet phone calls by all sorts of customers from around the world. The results are disheartening, showing a consistent decrease in voice quality based on a commonly used Mean Opinion Score. The bottom line: The voice quality of one in five VoIP calls is unacceptable according to the data. If the trend continues, unacceptable calls will increase by 5 percent each year.

Simply throwing bandwidth at the problem will not suffice.

I?m not advocating we abandon VoIP services. The fact that 81 percent of Internet calls are good makes me believe the quality gap is not insurmountable. Providers just need to fix the problems.

The key causes of poor voice quality are late, lost or discarded packets and latency. But that's like saying cars are moving slowly because the highway is congested. There is no single cause and no single fix to the problem. It could be that your Internet service provider is throttling bandwidth from another provider. Or traffic has been slowed by firewalls or address translators. Or perhaps your call is conflicting with that huge video your neighbor is downloading.

But it's not your problem to figure out. And simply throwing bandwidth at the problem will not suffice. Instead, providers need to apply technologies that lessen delays and the number of packets discarded by the network. Consumers and businesses that are thinking of moving to VoIP need to demand service level agreements that carefully measure the factors that hamper VoIP. Customers should look to both their VoIP provider and their ISP when having voice quality problems. There is an equal chance that the problem is in the network they use to access the Internet, the VoIP providers' infrastructure or the Internet itself.

With VoIP quality falling, the industry cannot be complacent. Early adopters of VoIP technology may have been willing to accept an occasional poor-quality call, but the mass market of consumers and businesses won't. Service quality matters. And providers that hope to capture more of their customers' dollars need to consistently provide a high-quality experience.

Biography
Kaynam Hedayat is CTO of Brix Networks, a provider of converged service assurance solutions. He can be reached at [e-mail].

More Perspectives

[mrjlturner]

How does a consumer win?

If the problem lies with both the ISP & the VOIP provider, what can the average consumer do to get the quality up? The finger-pointing will just go in a circle. I can call my ISP, and ask for some quality control, and they'll just blame my VOIP provider, and my VOIP provider will just say that I don't have adequate bandwidth. How can I get them both to address their issues? I was an early adopter of VOIP, way back with Dialpad.com. I've always loved the technology, but always run into a wall when I try to get the providers to support it. Any ideas?

[jabbotts]

consider an ISP who is a VOIP provider

I'm a little surprised that this hasn't already started a Net Neutrality comment war but this is one of the issues that NN is supposed to fix (forgoing all the business amorality paranoia).

I'd speculate that switching to an ISP who is also a VOIP provider would show increased performance. That's the pessimist in me though.

[cellojazz]

Read this - its deliberate, not just bad quality!

I had suspicions that were then confirmed from a service tech that Time Warner deliberatly lowers the quality of VOIP calls, with both Earthlink and Roadrunner ISP's. I've heard the same from COMCAST subscribers (my cousins). I find it disheartening that this article seems to shift blame from the ISP's and operators to the VOIP providers. Obviously if you don't have problems with other services, but VOIP quality keeps getting worse, what else could it be. Also, why does SKYPE not have the same issues?...because its packets and protocol were hidden for this very reason. We'd better do something about this interference soon like real net neutrality legislation, and not at all the "Net Neutrality" bill that was exactly the opposite, giving ISP's the green light to do this bandwidth throttleing, and charging consumers like an extorsionist asking for "protection money" to turn it off for "higher level service". Write your Senators and Congressmen and women. Its not a good solution but we'd better do something soon!

[ffejie]

Reread the Article

Actually, this article is advocating for a free market internet. In my opinion, the writer is correct. "You cannot throw more bandwidth at the problem". Right! You need to enable QoS on the public internet, giving different services preference. I don't care if my movie downloads 2-5 seconds slower, or if Google or Yahoo take a couple extra milliseconds to load, but I want low latency and few dropped packets on my voice calls!

Think of it as an HOV (or Express Lane or EZ-Pass, FastLane) for my voicecalls. Let me have increased service where I want it!

[mrjlturner]

Breaking out the mighty "pen"

Interesting observation. I believe you are right in saying that Skype calls tend to be clearer. I wonder if I could find a way to encrypt my VOIP packets before they leave & hit my provider, or if my VOIP provider would consider such a technology to thwart the almighty QOS killer...

[beelissa]

throttled, throttled and throttled some more

I have Time Warner Road Runner, and they didn't offer internet phone, so I went with Vonage. A few months later, Timer Warner started offering phone, but it's still almost $10 more than Vonage, even with the "all-in-one" discount you get if you also have Time Warner cable and broadband.

My internet service is not perfectly reliable, so that affects my phone. Is it throttling? I don't know how to tell. I just know that sometimes the call doesn't sound that great, or I'll be able to hear the other person and they'll say they can't hear me. Or I'll be surfing the net and click on something, and have to click again, or reload, to get it to work. I stupidly think that maybe the pipe is too full. But phone reception is not god on my cell phone sometimes, either. Vonage is cheaper than a cell phone. I'm not sure any of them is very reliable.

[tsgglobal.com]

They also said that rock and roll was a fad!

I am the CEO of a VoIP wholesaler who came from the humble beginnings of telecom consulting for over a decade and gave that up to join this incredible revolution. After many, many years of researching VoIP as a consultant and testing the platforms as they crawled into a stagger and finally into a standing product that can not only save money but in it's final game as a free communications platform that not only will shrink the world as we know it but can also change the face of the socio-economic development of this world as we know it.

As a leader in this revolution TSGGlobal has defined itself as a VoIP network provider partnered with Level 3 communications and we see very high quality when the service is provided correctly.

If the consumer facing carrier is trying to split pennies to meet the expectations of the investors that's where the degregation really is.

As in the early days of another familiar revolution "The internet," had it's ups and downs and now is a tool that many wouldn't be able to live without.

With any evolution in technology the real players will survive and those who try and make a buck will falter.

As John Lennon said in a famous song "Give love a chance..." and please give VoIP the love it needs to grow...

Noah Rafalko