sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Acceptance of the decline of voice quality

The commentary below comes from an email I get from telephonyonline. The subject line is "VoIP Revenue Booming". The writer spends most of his time discussing how we (well, not those of us who care) are accepting lower quality of voice service, yet the revenues keep going up. It's sad.
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VoIP's burden
By Dan O'Shea
Since the invention of voice-over-IP technologies, poor quality of service has been the burden that any operator and any user of VoIP has had to bear. Even long after VoIP evolved beyond a purely Internet-based, unmanageable solution and began to consistently improve, the quality questions and accusations still lingered.

This week, service assurance company Brix Networks put out a report noting that VoIP service quality continues to decline. It also suggested that with the emergence of more bandwidth-rich traffic, like video, VoIP quality is only destined to get worse.

But, while the quality concerns only mount, the big question is, does quality for voice still matter?

Another report that came out this week from Infonetics said that VoIP service revenues doubled last year in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and will continue to boom. Market shares may still shift radically, but the positive growth trend continues.

Is that an indication that service providers and users don't care about quality anymore, that they just want the next new thing? Not necessarily, but what constitutes quality for a voice call has dramatically shifted in recent years, with the long-ago acceptance of mobile voice quality that is less consistent than wireline quality, and with the more recent acceptance that voice is just one of several readily available communication methods.

We're moving to a future where voice quality just won't be held to as high a standard as it was when it was the only option available. Does quality still matter? Of course it does, but there's a new threshold of acceptance, and the industry needs to continue to manage quality of service so that it remains somewhere above that threshold--while understanding that attaining perfection or even near perfection is an impossible goal. They would do better to focus on managing near-perfect quality for another service for which quality expectations haven't and won't change anytime soon--video.

E-mail me at [email protected].
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Richard

DVDs do *NOT* have the quality of the large Laser Disk format. Video, like voice, has been going downhill ever since VHS came out to compete with Beta -- two/thirds the price for half the quality. Like voice service it is a matter of lowering the Limbo stick each time the customer gets use to the previous record low.

I once figured that my Stepper completed 99.99% of all correctly dialed calls. I had a sweet running machine. Boss had to write a letter explaining why our service index was so high. I had bootlegged in a unique alarm bell to the Dial Tone Speed (grabbed a line from each finder group, alarm if no dial tone in three seconds) machine so any finder problems could be fixed immediately. Nowadays misdirected calls are rather commonplace.

No one has gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the consumer.

I think that the advent of the cell phone has affected the telecommunications industry as a whole. To say "I didn't have a signal" or "can you hear me now?" is acceptable now.

A poor voice connection appears to be perfectly acceptable today. It's a shame; 129 years of telephone companies striving to improve the quality of voice communication only to have it head in the complete opposite direction today. Not only that, but people are actually paying more money for the luxury of poor voice quality. I need to start making wooden nickels.

A little VOIP food for thought or I did not realize that . A basic TDM fuctiion users utilize everday ! BGM over their tel set . With VOIP for every user listening to BGM 40k of bandwidth is consumed just to play music over an idle telset . Another anomaly with VOIP , there is no centralized Tone Generator . The sets themselfs provide DT,RBT,ROT,BT&FACT unless an analog service is being utilized . All VOIP systems utilize a DSP for multiparty conf/video . One last thought , QOS only works as well as the Voice Quality Manager Software you purchase ! IMHO :shrug:

Just when we started to understand PCM , the industry changed the rules again ! Go Figure

Remember the TV commercial where a needle was dropped on a table top next to a telephone handset to evaluate the duplication of sound transmitted long distance to a conference room full of executives miles away?

If Voip was done right it would be a lot better quality then traditional phone calls now. The bandwidth of telephone is reduced to about 3000 Hz , Voip done right will give you near digital quality so you could hear the pin drop. Its up to the consumer to demand better quality other wise the big companies only care about profits.

The problem with VOIP is that all the advanges that make it attractive go away when you have to do what you need to do to get it to perform like a traditional PBX.

metelcom "...big companies only care about profits."
Pardon me, I kinda bristle when I see any comment that profits are a problem.
Yeh, that kinda is the point, to make money, big or small company. I hear what you're sayin. Companies will take short-cuts to keep costs down. But we all do that. Whether it be in business or in our personal lives we have to make compromises. How many of us have the BEST of everything? Not many. Concessions have to be made. Can I live with the $60 DVD player or do I have to spend $600 for the latest and greatest? Get Great Value soup or Campbells? (I think I'll spend about a $150 DVD player and a I'll take the Campbells soup) As for me, I'm not prepared to recommend a VoIP solution for just the reason that Coral Tech mentioned. There may be some scenarios where it will work, but from where I sit it appears one would have to spend too much money on the entire network to make it worth it.

Richard

Ed is right,

The real decline came when cell phones went digital. Thier premise was better service, their reality was higher capacity with lower quality.

Its sad that all of Bell Labs work in determining acceptable voice transmision is going by the wayside. i.e. bandwidth 300-3600 give or take a few hundred Hz. You throw that away, then Nyquist becomes irrelevant (sample rate should be twice the highest frequency), 64K T1 channel i.e. 8 bit @ 8KHz.

It's not that I'm against change, there are alot of good compression algorisms. Mostly they should be relegated to music. Yes a 44KHz sample rate is easier to compress without a lot of complaining. I don't think I ever heard a 22KHZ sound.LOL

Teddy K. (Unabomber) was correct with his assertions, but his action went astray. :shrug:

If Voip was done right it would be a lot better quality then traditional phone calls now.

Done right? Increased bandwidth= less capacity= less money. Why do you think voice quality is so poor?

-Hal