The Voice-over-IP dilemma

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arjun_m:

It`s part of the ``protocol``, but has not become part of the infrastructure. The reason is that your ISP will not honor your QoS word and prioritize it. Ofcourse, in a ``virtual circuit``, or a VPN you actually pay everyone in the path a little extra to give you ``guaranteed bandwidth``. That`s what I`m trying to say, your network card could go blue in the face demanding QoS but if your ISP-or for that matter any internet core route upto and including your callee`s ISP-does not honor that QoS request you won`t get QoS because a chain`s strength is determined by it`s weakest link.

Think about it, your analog telephone gives you voice at only 3.4kbps, yet your dialup modem cannot give it to you even at 56kbps. The reason is simple, with a telephone call, you have end-to-end connectivity. With an internet connection, the connectivity is not end-to-end, bandwidth is not reserved for you, paths are not reserved for your data, they are routed on an availability basis. For IP telephony to work, everyone has to implement QoS or it won`t work.

Don`t know about baby bells or Vonage because I don`t live in the US.

Regards,
Irfan Hamid.

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Interesting discussion. I have just funded and started a VoIP infrastructure company (www.diyatel.com) to provide VoIP infrstructure and service between North America and South Asia. VoIP is a disruptive technology for this decade, just as PC`s were in early 80`s. The computation power in those days were about $1M, just as legacy TDM switches are $1M, alternative gateways and routers are about $50K for comparable infrastructure.
VoIP will allow companies to attack ``per minute`` based revenue model for phone calls to provide flat fee based phone calling.


ANIL KAPURIA

For the sake of records, a little correction to the trivia byte: The first commercially available VoIP chip IN PAKISTAN was designed by Enabling Technologies.

attended a seminar on the same subject, last year where they said that LOCAL calls from ISP may become FREE after deregulation of PTCL, similar to that of AUSTRALIA and few more countries, they mentioned as an example. There won`t be any prob to dial a local number from the ISP, something like that ...

By the way, I don`t think, net-to-phone or Voice chat is a good idea, other than for fun-sake unless we compromise with the `TIME-DELAY` in data transfering, which is really unwise in Voice communications. !?!