VoIP quality

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Doug Sweetser wrote:
|
| I am trying to pitch SpeakEasy's voice over IP to my girlfriend.
| Right now we are connected via dial-up through Verizon.  It looks like
| it will cost about $84/month to go with SpeakEasy:
|
|      $50    DSL service
|      $ 6    Payoff to Verizon for _dropping_ the phone line
|      $25    VoIP service
|      $ 3    Taxes
|
| Her current reservation is that she want to hear from someone else who
| has this service and is satisfied with the quality of calls.  I can
| understand how the baby bells all want us to worry about this new
| technology.  If anyone here has the service, any reviews would be
| appreciated.

We got their VoIP service pretty soon after they started offering  it
here.   One  funny problem that we had at first was that when my wife
called home from her (T-Mobile) cell phone, she would often miss  the
first  syllable  or two when I started speaking.  This happened after
every pause, not just at the beginning of a call, so it was a bit  of
a  hassle.   Then she replaced her 2-year-old cell phone with a newer
model, and the problem went away.  So it probably wasn't  Speakeasy's
fault, at least not entirely.  More likely it was T -Mobile's doing.

One thing that has produced a bit of discussion in tech fora is  that
a  lot  of  ISPs are now offering VoIP, and some of them program in a
bias for their own VoIP packets.  This often causes  sporadic  delays
and  dropouts  when  the  two  ends  use  different services, as both
services give low priority to the other's packets. I've read that the
FCC is looking into this, but nothing has happened yet.

One  restriction  here  (Waltham  MA)  is  that  they  only   support
connecting  to  a  single  phone.  They say that this is because they
can't guarantee reliability with a lot of  old  house  phone  wiring.
They  are  working  on  it,  but can't say when they'll support house
wiring.  Their advice is to get one of  the  N-phone  cordless  phone
packages,  and  plug the VoIP adapter into the cordless base station.
We already had a 3-phone cordless setup, so it was no big  deal.   If
you  have a lot of wired house phones, replacing them with a cordless
phone package could be a bit of an expense. OTOH, cordless phones are
good  enough  now  that  you  may  be  glad to be forced to make this
change.  (But look for one that doesn't use the same  frequencies  as
your wifi. ;-)