On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Pilcher, Fred wrote:
> My only experience of VOIP was to test it with a friend in Melbourne. We
> were both using dial-up connections and Netmeeting (yes, yes - I know).
>
> *Was* it our settings, Netmeeting's implementation, or is it simply a crock
> over a 28k dialup connection?
I'm not too sure what you guys are doing, but I use VoIP (NetMeeting -
H.323) to call across the planet (family in Canada) using 56k v.90 modems
with no problems at all.
Call quality is excellent, better and more consistent than a normal
telephone conversation. The only draw-back is the extra latency, which is
generally much better on a telephone conversation. Added bonus: I get to
see the family because they have a cheap camera at their end.
International telephone bill dropped considerably.
However, with a cheap/dodgey ISP it's harldy worth loading NetMeeting up.
At the other end of the spectrum, VoIP in a corporate network envrionment
is only beginning to take off and that's where it really does it's stuff.
Decent amounts of bandwidth to work with and routers with good QoS
queuing. And most importantly, it saves them money (dispate the initial
high cost of equipment - IP-Phones arne't cheap).
The US's Office Inspector General (the body that overseas the US postal
sevrice to make it more effecienct and reduce fraud) reduced their
telecommunications costs by 40% by combining two networks into one and
rolling out VoIP to all their offices.
Closer to home, WA's largest ISP, iiNet (now national), has rolled VoIP
out across the entire company, after starting with a few of their external
offices over the last two years. At one stage they even had local support
numbers at their remote POPs which then got transported up to the central
call centre using VoIP over DDS (cheaper than a 13 number and stops the
customer paying STD).
VoIP is only just beggining to flourish, and with more routers now
supporting good QoS protocols, it will only get bigger. In the corporate
world: it works and more importantly, it saves money.
PD
-- Paul Day Web: www.bur.st/~bonfire PGP-key: www.bur.st/~bonfire/pk.txt
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 03:10:02 EST