Results tagged “pots” from IP Communications and Technology

I have been using VoIP, in one form or another, for residential phone service for more than 8 years. I currently have 3 voice VoIP lines and 1 Fax VoIP line.

However, I still have my good old POTS service from Bell and I don’t intend to give it up for the foreseeable future. Here’s why:

QoS

Unless the service provider owns the network path end-to-end, they are unable to guarantee voice quality. The service is at the mercy of the conditions of the network between the end-device and their network. Despite this, in most cases it works great. But, if there are congestion or reliability issues anywhere along the path, you and the service provider may be completely powerless with respect to rectifying the issue. This happened to me a few years ago when my service provider began experiencing network congestion. My VoIP service became unusable due to excessive delay and jitter. Luckily I moved, and for the past two years the voice quality of my VoIP service has been great. But that could change at any time. Obviously the cable companies have an advantage here but that advantage is restricted to the subscribers that are on-net.

Trust

I am very confident that Bell Canada will still be in business a year from now. I’m also very comfortable with their ability to maintain consistent quality. In a year, my VoIP provider might be bankrupt. In fact, as I have stated previously, I’m convinced that a standalone best-effort VoIP service is not a sustainable business model. Vonage must change their business model or, I’m convinced, they will not survive. While the quality of my VoIP service has been, for the most part acceptable, I have experienced outages and messaging issues that are related to the VoIP provider’s core infrastructure. I lack confidence in their operations and their ability to scale; especially if financial pressures results in them sacrificing investment in operations in favour of marketing for example.

Emergencies

Yes, it’s true that most VoIP providers have E911 capabilities. However, in many instances, unlike your POTS service, your call does not terminate directly in the E911 PSAP. Instead, it is directed to a call centre first, which in my view, could potentially compromise the efficacy of the response. In addition, as others have pointed out, unless your ATA has, or is plugged into, a backup power supply, your VoIP service will be non-functional in a power outage. Even, with ATA backup power, a power interruption might bring down the network through which your VoIP service is delivered. Sure, most cable companies do have UPS to protect their trunk and distribution amplifiers but the capacity may be very limited which means that an extended and widespread outage will almost certainly result in your VoIP service going down. In addition, the reliability of the backup power is dependent on diligent maintenance, which is a non-trivial and expensive challenge. My Bell Canada phone service, I am confident, would continue to work even if a power outage lasted for weeks.

Conclusion

I am not bashing VoIP. I am passionate about the industry and the many advances that have been, and will continue to be enabled by VoIP. I use VoIP services because I get great features and services that are not available through any other source. For residential voice services, I am aware of the potential VoIP pitfalls and based on my assessment of the risks, I choose to keep my POTS service.

So choosing VoIP or not, exclusively or not, should be based on knowledge of the facts and the risks.

Rick McCharles
VoIP Consultant, Toronto, Canada