IP telephony has been a mainstream technology for some time now, with
large organizations such as a Winnipeg
school board opting for the technology.
But users
complain about delay, jitter and users having a hard time understanding
each other continue, and one blogger has proposed a higher tier of
service.
On the blog No
Jitter, Unified IT Systems president Sorell Slaymaker Monday
proposed a “Tele-voice” service, which would do to VoIP what
telepresence did to video conferencing.
Slaymaker proposes “high
quality audio” with very stringent network requirements” to meet this
standard. He says delay, compression and cheap handsets reduce the
quality of voice calls, and suggests users may actually waste time
because they don’t understand each other.
However, as Slaymaker
points out, most IP telephony projects are sold on the basis of cost
reduction, but users often have to repeat themselves and risk stepping
over the other callers on the line.
Presumably, adding more
network requirements and improving hardware would increase the cost of
voice calls. But Slaymaker has a good point when he asks if we waste
five minutes of time in a one hour conversation over IP, what is the
cost of this waste, and how does it compare to what we saved by using
VoIP instead of the plain old telephone system?
Having a robust
network that can handle real time traffic like VoIP is key. When you’re
calling long distance, you’re dealing with different carriers and
networks, which makes the end of end enforcement of standards
difficult, compared to an internal installation.
The comparison
to telepresence is valid. In the past, some companies were reluctant to
use video conferencing due to the poor quality, whereas telepresence
products from vendors like Cisco, HP, LifeSize and Tandberg make the
video conferences seem like live meetings. So if you install VoIP, and
your users can hear the parties at the other end, that in itself
doesn’t mean VoIP is a good way to communicate.