Why Consumer VoIP Quality, Despite Quality Components, Is Not So Good

Suppliers of IP telephony and consumer VoIP services often go to great lengths to ensure that the user experience is equivalent to the old "public switched telephone network," and yet users almost uniformly have encountered some instances where that level of quality is not experienced.

There are good reasons why, despite the best efforts made by developers of software, hardware and providers of network services often are part of a service chain that frankly does not work as well as the old PSTN. At a practical level, the quality of bandwidth over an unmanaged connection can be an issue, says Phone.com.

Enterprise and business connections are powerfully affected by the quality of the local area network. Consumer experience can be affected by physical placement of routers and analog telephone adapters, just like mobile connections. Simply, the ATA and the home router needs a bit of spatial distance or interference can result.

Also, VoIP still uses the same transmission networks, and those networks are affected by weather. When there are thunderstorms, heavy rain, or wind gusts, static can be generated. This “dirty-weed” static doesn't cause problems for Web surfing, but will affect VoIP.

As with many other problems, a hard reboot (unplug the hardware, wait a minute and plug it in again) will fix the problem.

VoIP, especially consumer versions, often fail to deliver the same quality as the old voice network, though not because of network, hardware or software carelessness. A VoIP connection is unmanaged, where the old voice network is highly managed.

When everything on an unmanaged network is aligned, experience will be great. When there are issues, even good quality component parts, and the best efforts of each supplier within the value chain, will fail to deliver a high-quality experience.

The phrase "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" conveys the idea. With VoIP, even a chain with individually strong links can occasionally experience issues that degrade quality, though.

Managed connections would alleviate most of the expected issues, but consumers cannot today buy such managed data connections (a broadband connection with service level guarantees). Nor is it clear such a service, end-to-end, is feasible for consumer connections.

Even a managed network connection would not make the end-to-end experience completely managed in every, or even most cases, as no transport or access services provider can always control every single part of the network. And use of third-party applications would obviously be outside the transmission provider's control.

But a small number of things are controllable at the end user level. Sooner or later, just about every consumer VoIP user will find the need to do so.

3 Things You Need to Know Now About Enhancing the Voice Quality of VoIP | Phone.com