Telecom, Telephone, and Communications News

I just read an article in PC Magazine online with the above title by: John C. Dvorak. Now Mr. Dvorak is a very knowledgeable man and a very good writer. But he has really missed the mark with this article.

One of his first statements, "There are problems arising, though, because most people are still running on phone-company wires and we have a more and more flaky Internet." had me shaking my head right off. The "phone-company wires" should be treated pairs plus you need to be close enough to the DSL POP for your connection to work properly in the first place. If you are having problems with your DSL connection, complain to your provider to sort it out. This has absolutely nothing to do with the VoIP provider.

And the flaky internet? Voice over IP is fast becoming a mature technology, with the providers adding more gateways in more centers all the time. This gets you closer to the actual gateway, and thus using less of the open internet for your connection.

Here's another head shaker. "I'm always amused when a call center in India has one of these systems and it's so overloaded that you can't understand a thing, since the sound is so muffled." The "system" isn't overloaded, the company in India has obviously overloaded their bandwidth (bandwidth is necessary to make any data stream work properly). They just need a bigger pipe, again nothing wrong with the VoIP service. And try making a call to India using a POTS line, god only what kind of connection you're going to get (they don't exactly have the greatest infrastructure)

And one more before I let him off the hook, "there was a whole area dedicated to the various small-fry companies jumping into Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony", does he mean small fry companies like Nortel, Ericsson, Siemens, Lucent, etc., etc.? All the big vendors are rolling out VoIP equipment like mad, and the major telcos are buying. And not just voice over IP enabled PBX's. Also carrier grade switches and local switches, as well as CDMA and GSM switches. So Mr. Dvorak, you just may well be using VoIP technology when you are talking on your good old land-line phone.

Read the full article here