Phone.com

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 10:33 PM EST

By: Alon Cohen – EVP/CTO at Phone.com

We got some interesting comments on our VoIP quality claims described in our post about “Why Consumers Like Our Home Phone Service?” where we claimed that VoIP quality is (ok… could be) even better than a land line!

People also commented about the fact that having a reliable network at the backend of the service provider has no relevance to VoIP call quality, stating that VoIP relies on the public internet anyway which has no real quality of service (QOS) guarantees.

First, we want to thank those who responded and pushed us to elaborate on those complex aspects just a bit more.

The QOS issue is not a simple one. The quality of VoIP is composed of many elements and the combination of which also changes from provider to provider. The usual culprits are network topology, end-point codecs, audio capabilities of end-points, end-point data latency and jitter handling; end-point network characteristics, central office redundancy, reliability and connection bandwidth and central office peek hour performance.
I will try to shed some light on few and how they affect the quality of VoIP and I apologize for using some technical terms.

VoIP Network Topology:

End-to end VoIP
• Two end-points communicate directly end-to-end. Here the quality of service depends primarily on the quality of the two Internet service providers at the end and the quality of router used at the subscriber home. Most routers today support QOS settings for VoIP or in simple words capable of providing higher priority for voice traffic. Even in this topology when a VoIP user calls a land line user the VoIP provider needs to send it’s subscriber’s data to the Land Line carrier so the call can terminate on a land line, this means that even here VoIP traffic is routed via the VoIP service provider network.

VoIP via the Central Office
• The end-points always communicate via the central office (never directly). This topology although considered more conservative allow for better call control and usually supports more in-call features.

In both topologies the quality, redundancy, and bandwidth of the connection between the VoIP service Provider’s central office and the internet backbone is critical. Given good connectivity the later topology usually guarantees better performance in terms of latency. In the first case traffic can be averted by the end point service providers via back channels or “side roads”, where in the second the traffic is directed to a very big pipe connecting the central office to the internet and then back from that pipe to the second user, which means that it is more likely that the data will to travel over major highways.

Most major Internet providers that are not involved in some vengeance against specific VoIP service provider will provide higher priority to real time VoIP traffic to keep their customers satisfied.

Better connectivity of your VoIP service provider networks to the Internet Backbone is hence crucial for providing good VoIP call quality specifically in both topologies where the data actually go through the central office. Good redundant connectivity of your VoIP Service provider is also critical to ensure overall reliability and availability of the service.

End Points
Today we can find three distinct types of VoIP endpoints on the market.

Direct VoIP Phones.
• Directly connected VoIP phones provide the highest quality calls you ever experienced, the reason is that they are not confined to the base low audio quality dictated by the analog phone system (300Hz-3400Hz). In fact they negotiate a Codec (Audio Compression Decompression Algorithm) that can even be a High Definition Audio Codec and use that to send your voice over the network in CD or (say FM radio) quality. The codec selection can be affected by the network quality, the service provider’s settings and preferences, the type of phone on the other side, and so on.

Analog Phones Connected to via an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter)
• The ATA or home VoIP gateway is similar to a VoIP Phone but it has no headset, instead it uses standard Analog Phone as its “headset” (or handset). For an ATA there is no real need to negotiate a very good Codec as it is, after all, fed with limited sound quality of the standard analog phone (even if it is in fact a digital wireless phone, it is still working within the confines of the standard for analog phones). The fact that we use a short line between our Analog phone and the ATA ensures that we don’t loose more quality or pick up interferences over a long land line distance usually connecting standard analog phone to the nearest land line neighborhood box.

Soft Phones End Points
• We have discussed Softphone Quality Aspects in the past, so I will leave this one out for now.

To summaries, when I call my colleague using my VoIP Polycom phone connected to my WiFi network and to the Internet via Cablevision, and my colleague using Comcast Cable Internet also uses VoIP Polycom phone, we feel as if we are sitting in the same room. There is no land line system that can emulate that. Needless to say we both use the Phone.com infrastructure along the way, in fact we insist on eating what we cook on a daily basis.

As for the ATA (which I also use) given a decent service provider, your VoIP traffic is a small drop in the sea and seldom we encounter the problems that VoIP had when we first started the VoIP industry back in 1995. It’s a new world now.

If you live in a rural area and try to use a satellite dish as your internet connection for VoIP, I suggest you re-consider and use a Land Line. If you live far from your nearest telephone company and your DSL connection is intermittent, I suggest you use a Land Line, but if you have decent high-speed internet connectivity and good VoIP service provider, VoIP is the way to go.

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 10:29 PM EST

We in the Telecom industry, sometimes think that everyone knows what VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) based home services are and how they work but, surprise, surprise – it still is not the case.

For those who are still not familiar with VoIP, when talking about home phone service lets clarify that we are not talking about the ability to talk from a PC but rather from a regular phone that behaves exactly like your “old” phone service but relies on your high-speed internet connection (and not a “telephone line”) to reach the outside world.

Phone companies have been doing that “jump” or bridging from the analog local lines to the digital highway lines for many years now, all VoIP does is simply move that intersection closer to your home. After all with your broadband cable or DSL internet connection this highway is already at your house.

This method has a few benefits, one is that the analog line is so short that it picks up less sound interferences that are usually collected along the analog lines, and hence provides better sound quality (contrary to what many think of VoIP).

There are also many new phone services and features that are offered by VoIP based service providers, some like the cable companies offer what seems to be attractive as triple (TV, Internet, Phone) play bundles (usually attractive price wise during your first year of service).

We recently wrote about why we believe standalone VoIP based home phone services have their place and what their benefits are, but what makes the Phone.com Home Phone service really stand out?

There are many VoIP Home Phone services out in the market. Most are similar in price and in feature selection. NOT all are similar in network quality or in customer service, and this is a key element.

At Phone.com we rely on a robust network infrastructure and reliable uninterrupted service. And we put special attention on customer service! Our belief is that when a company is under the impression that it is doing you, the client, a “favor” by providing the service, it has no place in the market.

Customer service is NOT just how fast we answer the phone but also how we ensure the customer is served and how we thank our clients for selecting us, and yes, even making it easy for the customer to leave if for whatever reason they are not 100% satisfied.

So even if you just recently signed up and decided the service is not for you, we will let you keep the phone adaptor (sometimes called ATA) you have received from us and we will help you use it with another provider (we hope you don’t leave us though) by “unlocking” the device (this is really only for experienced users) or if you so choose, we will let you return the device to us (and therefore avoid paying termination fees).

This is just one more thing that makes Phone.com, stand out among other home phone service providers.

Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 9:18 PM EST

By: Alon Cohen

Though I have used VoIP for many years, we always had two “regular” home phone lines delivered by the “regular” phone company. One served as our main home phone line, the other as my fax line. But now I have gone cold turkey on both and am all digital.

I have found out that I really can not justify the expense on these phone lines, and by smartly moving my numbers to Phone.Com Virtual Office and Phone.com Home Phone and by simply managing my numbers on-line I can now not only save money but I can also gain functionality that I always struggled to have with the traditional carriers.

One can manage a home business using a toll free number using the same Virtual Office account. I for instance added extensions that dial internationally, so when I call my home number I can select an extension from my interactive voice response (IVR) menu (which took me 10 minutes to set up), and I call my family oversees at a very low cost (several countries are even included at no extra cost as they are part of the monthly minutes bucket anyway).

This is obviously at a lower cost than I ever paid all other traditional phone providers that I have used in the past and including some VoIP providers.

Now I don’t have to remember long international numbers, or pay extra when calling oversees from my cell. I can even call into the system from any other phone anywhere I am. I just dial my home number and press the desired extension and reach the person I want (and if I don’t want people calling me to know that extension 17 is say my cousin in Paris than I don’t have to list that extension in the menu).

When my wife traveled to Europe this summer, I simply forwarded her call to a European ‘pay as you go’ cell phone number so we can skip the roaming. It took me 2 minutes on the web. Usually if you want to forward your phone to another phone you have to remember to do that before you fly since you must be present to do that. With Phone.com I don’t care, I can do that from anywhere in the world.

So between my Facebook, linkedin and my Virtual Office I am all set with no old “phone company” land lines and a smile all the way to the bank when I know I am saving a bundle every month.