Is VOIP a sane option today? I see if offered by various startup companies for "free." Is there a reliable version that can be used by someone who depends on their telephones working?
I would characterize it as a developing technology.
It is certainly where the carriers want to go because circuit switching is less resource efficient (although more reliable at voice calls at this point). VoIP is packet switching, which potentially can make voice calls just another datastream. We are experimenting with this at this point. We call it "softswitching," which it is. It is not yet a core network technology. One of the major problems is guaranteeing QOS over the network. With VoIP you never know where the packets are going to be routed. In circuit switched applications the carrier controls the entire datastream, we "lock" a 64K channel for the call duration. We dedicate your channel for that call. Doesn't matter what facilities are used to do this, until you hang up you own the 64K. Actually you only own 56K of it, we still own the 8K signalling overhead unless you pay for ISDN, then you own the 64K but you pay extra for the signalling. But it still amounts to a locked channel. A phone call is easy in a circuit switched environment (well not exactly but you get my point). As long as you can seize a circuit it's yours. If all available circuits are busy you'll be told that. One of the classic network management problems is balancing capacity versus demand. Of course you run into the "Mother's Day Issue" which could now be called the "9/11 Issue," where the circuit switched capacity is overwhelmed. Fast busy tells you we don't have circuit switched bandwidth to handle the call. Or the carrier facilities don't, normally we're nice enough to give you a voice message. Can VoIP potentially solve this? Possibly. It's frankly a network topology issue and we're working on it. Most tests suggest that dropped packets can still be a problem in a VoIP environment as far as voice quality is concerned. So I'd say that packet switched voice isn't there yet for the regulated network but we're working on it.
************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
