How effective is broadband as a telephone?

[Ivan Seeking]

Well that's just great. For years we have been tolerating partial communications on cell phones, but with the advent of broadband telephone, now we c..n en...y partial comm...i...tions during all of ... conv...tions. One simply needs to le... how to ... ... every other word or so.

I don't know what it sound like from the callers end, but being on the receiving end of broadband calls sucks!

 

[Evo]

There is no standard that anyone is following. Basic rule of thumb, the cheaper you go (phones, amount of bandwidth, choice of ISP) the worse it gets.

 

[chroot]

Well, all large telephone networks are digital, packet-switched networks very much like the Internet, just owned and operated by a single large company. At some point, your voice data is converted back to analog and put on a pair of copper wires that go to your house. There's no reason why we shouldn't stop that practice eventually, and just extend the digital packet-switched network all the way to the customer's home. The broadband phone is just the first example of this kind of thinking, and -- you're right -- it's a little ugly still. The big problem is that, while voice networks are designed with very tight controls on latency, data networks are much more ad hoc and are optimized more for aggregate bandwidth than for latency. In general, most computer applications can tolerate a pretty horrific amount of latency that would make a telephone call pretty unbearable, without the user even noticing.

- Warren

 

[BobG]

Well that's just great. For years we have been tolerating partial communications on cell phones, but with the advent of broadband telephone, now we c..n en...y partial comm...i...tions during all of ... conv...tions. One simply needs to le... how to ... ... every other word or so.

I don't know what it sound like from the callers end, but being on the receiving end of broadband calls sucks!

You misspelled conversations. I'm not sure which letter you omitted, but you can't possibly fit "ersa" into only 3 dots.

If I were you, I'd consider changing cell phone companies. Even if the communication is digitized and multiplexed in with other conversations, it should be transparent to the people talking on the telephone. If you don't get a very good signal, it probably just becomes more noticeable with a multiplexed signal. You don't get lucky and have a large portion of the gaps fall in dead space between words.

 

[Evo]

If I were you, I'd consider changing cell phone companies.

Tsk, tsk. Lack of reading skills, it's finally happening.

Ivan was complaining about broadband VOIP.

 

[chroot]

Well, no, he was comparing VoIP to cell phones, in saying they are equally bad. BobG was just saying that cell phones shouldn't really be as bad as Ivan says they are.

- Warren

 

[Anttech]

VoIP over here is great. But most Telecos here are Quadruple Play now, and they have already upgraded there backbones, and migrated more or less everything to IP. Belgacom believe it or not seem to be bleeding edge, I was watching eurosport soccer on a friends mobile today no delay, crisp but small...

You are right on the Delay aspect, that is the killer, especially jitter, but most data networks on the backbones and thus Quadruple play networks are frame based not packet based. Frame switching is faster (Frame-Mode MPLS per example)...

 

[Ivan Seeking]

As for cell phones, I work with dozens of customers [and suppliers] all over the country who use cell phones almost exclusively. Granted, there are areas that do pretty well, but generally it is a problem across the board.

 

[Anttech]

Cell phones here, use the same infrastructure as the Internet.. Only the last mile is GSM

 

[Evo]

Well, no, he was comparing VoIP to cell phones, in saying they are equally bad. BobG was just saying that cell phones shouldn't really be as bad as Ivan says they are.

- Warren

Ptthhhbbbt

 

[chroot]

Ptthhhbbbt

Careful there, baby doll -- you got a little spittle on your shirt.

- Warren