September 01, 2006
VoIP Call Quality Now Better Than PSTN?
ITWire has a story which quotes a testing company named Minacom. Minacom is claiming that VoIP phone service "now sounds better and connects faster" than PSTN phone service. This is based on data they collected over twelve months, and only applies to VoIP services offered by cable providers and telcos. The test uses a standard measure called an MOS (Mean Opinion Score). Minacom's test contradicts Brix Networks' recent report saying that quality is declining. However Brix measured opinion on soft VoIP and pc2pc only calls.
Having tried only soft VoIP services, I can't comment on Minacom's findings, except to say that I can see how phone2phone VoIP calls, using a plug'n'play adapter and a broandband internet connection, would be fairly high quality. As for soft VoIP, it's definitely not true. Not in my experience, anyway. Basically, the more software of any type that you have running on your computer, the lower your call quality is going to be.
As laptops tend to have less RAM than desktops, they are the worst for call quality. That's true even if one party in the conversation has a powerful desktop, as I recently found out when calling a friend on his laptop. My laptop with 512 Mb didn't fare much better, unless I pretty much closed all programs. Which is why I switched to making most of my calls on my desktop. High soft VoIP call quality requires optimum computing power.
My experience with my desktop (1 Gb RAM, dual processor) is that pc2pc calls are almost as high quality as regular phone2phone. (As I've said, I haven't tried a VoIP adapter or VoIP phones.) It's when there's a mix of pc and phone in a VoIP call that quality seems to go down. However, according to a couple of people that I've called on both Skype and Hullo, Hullo calls were almost as if I were calling from a regular phone.
So quality from soft VoIP services seems to be increasing, but I think VoIP as a whole has a ways to go yet. Better quality VoIP phones and faster connection speeds would make a difference. We might even find faster microprocessors in VoIP phones, or special VoIP-dedicated chips in the next generation of computers, just like graphics cards were eventually dedicated to computer screen management. A dedicated VoIP computer chip, either in computers or phones, would go a long way towards improving call quality. (If there are VoIP-dedicated chips, I'm not aware of them. Let me know.)
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