voip mature yet?

When i joined BT a few months ago they gave me a home-hub that had a VOIP phone with it, with its own number, all pretty sweet.

The problem i found with it, which may be an isolated issue, if i was maxing out my download speed on the pc and then went to make a call, it would connect but the sound would crackle or break up during the call, stopping the download to continue talking made the line clear again.

I think this is down to my line only supporting the lower end of the broadband speeds, 1mb ish on a good day, bt are investagating, if they fix this so an increse in speed, or i jump ship to Cable, i will definatly give the VOIP a try again, but i think that you gotta have good decent solid line and speed, 2mb upwards.

Hope this helps
 
Bobcat said:
The problem i found with it, which may be an isolated issue, if i was maxing out my download speed on the pc and then went to make a call, it would connect but the sound would crackle or break up during the call, stopping the download to continue talking made the line clear again.
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VoIP doesn't like latency. If you had a router with QoS (Quality Of Service) you'd be able to download and use the phone.

I personally don't think VoIP for the home user can be relied on 100%. There are some providers out there like vonage, siptalk in whom you can get service from.

I use my ZyXel router and voipcheap.com to make VoIP calls. Its free but you don't always get a brilliant line. Free calls to Canada and the US though.
 
cyclopopcicle said:
what alternatives to home hub are there? i dont want to go with BT for my broadband, but cheers for the reply
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tons

you can convert any wifi smartphone into a Voip phone. Phones such as the Nokia N80, the E61, T-Mobile MDA Vario II, all have wifi. And being based on either symbian or windows mobile 5, have a multitude of wifi clients available for them. Most of these clients will offer you free calls to other people running the same client (eg Skype to skype is free) and will usually offer you a service to dial landlines.

Another dialler available for symbian is called truphone. Gives you unlimited calls to all numbers with no restrictions for £20/month. Of course you need to be in a wifi hotspot to use it, but the rates are very competitive when dialling land lines.

There are also wifi based handsets you can buy for your home network for about £50. These come in a variety of forms, most of them support a dialler programme called Skype. OcUK's range can be found here

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=46&catid=884

You can sign up for a SkyPE account, that you can use on the handsets above, from your PC, or from your wifi enabled smartphone from www.skype.com

and of course, all of these diallers that can be used on symbian smartphones / propriarty handsets. Can all usually be installed on your PC as a normal windows app, and use the intenet connection on your PC. Just need a headset with a mic, and you're away.

One thing that is worth nothing though. a lot of the Wifi Phones dont like NAT. Truphone http://www.truphone.com/scn/welcome.tru manages this fine. But others are more pickey.
 
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I find voip excellent and use for all my calls. I have a Fritzbox Fon bought cheap on ebay in Germany for around £32 and converted to Annex A for the UK. One just plugs bogstandard telephone into the adsl voip router. With voip one always has to dial the country code first ( UK 0044 Germany 0049 USA 001 etc) I use
http://www.internetcalls.com/en/index.html
Get 5 hours a week of free calls to most of the Worlds mainline countries and I have a normal telephone number - in my case a Leicester number It cost around £8 for 4 months but as the calls are mostly free the only means of using the money up is for mobile or 0845 0870 etc numbers. The quality of calls is excellelent But then The Fritbox fon is an excellent router with QOS lots of updates to the firmware. Naturally the telepone rings if someone rings my Leicester number - which it would do if I was in Melbourne or LA and plugged into the the Net
 
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Bobcat said:
I think this is down to my line only supporting the lower end of the broadband speeds, 1mb ish on a good day, bt are investagating, if they fix this so an increse in speed, or i jump ship to Cable, i will definatly give the VOIP a try again, but i think that you gotta have good decent solid line and speed, 2mb upwards.
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You need about 64k for a decent speech link (that's all that ISDN uses, for example).

The problem is, as you suggest, maxing out the connection. You need some sort of Quality of Service that ensures your real-time critical voice packets get ahead of something that can wait (your download). This is where the technology falls down, as for it to work perfectly the whole network needs to support it. At the very least, your router needs to.
 
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