WhichVoIP Blog

Due to a significant increase in the number of visitors to whichvoip.com we have had to move to a faster, stronger, better server!! We hope the increased download speeds and the increased content will help you make a more informed decision. Please roam around our site and send us any feedback.

www.whichvoip.com team

In the past 6 months Vonage has lost two patent infringement lawsuits. The first in March of this year Vonage was ordered to pay Verizon $58 million plus 5.5% of any future revenue. The second was today with them being ordered to pay Sprint Nextel $69.5 million as well as 5% of any future revenues.  Shares of Vonage holdings Corp plummeted by over 30% on the news.

Vonage said in a written statement that it would appeal the decision but also would begin developing workarounds so it won’t need to use the disputed technology.

“We are disappointed that the jury did not recognize that our technology differs from that of Sprint’s patents,” said Sharon O’Leary, chief legal officer for Vonage. “Our top priority is to provide high-quality, reliable digital phone service to our customers.”

Vonage have the money to pay but the bigger issue is the 10% of lost future revenue. It is going to be extremely difficult for them to invest in technology and push VoIP further into the mainstream. So what does this mean for existing customers – probably nothing for now. Vonage certainly are not going to disappear overnight and customers are not going to loose their service, however without the required investment it’s difficult to see Vonage continue to grow and add to its customer base.  They are starting to look cheap now for a take over by the likes of Verizon who could pick up a couple of million customers for not a lot.

Technorati Tags: Vonage Lawsuit, Verizon lawsuit, Sprint Nextel Lawsuit, Vonage VoIP, Verizon VoIP

There’s a brand spanking new version of Skype available now for download. To take advantage of all the latest features and improvements simply upgrade to the new version for free. Skype offers an easy way to test out a VoIP service, all you need is a PC and a Broadband connection.

According to Skype the new softphone delivers the following:

• Improved sound quality.
• Updated and user-friendly interface.
• Many more features to help you to stay in touch more easily, share ideas, thoughts and express yourself.

It’s easy to update Skype: 

• It’s free to download and easy to install.
• You don’t have to uninstall your old version first.
• All your settings will remain like your contacts and Skype Credit balance. 

Before purchasing a VoIP service I used Skype a lot to call friends and family abroad. Sound quality was good and it was easy to use however now that I have Lingo VoIP with free calls to Europe I no longer use Skype, so if anyone has comments about the new release please leave them here or write a review.

Calum

Came across a good blog today from Tom at TMCNet. 

There are a couple of good reasons for moving to T1 for your broadband data and voice needs.  The first of course is the Quality of Service (QoS) you get from T1 service providers.  The second is symmetrical uplink and downlink speeds of 1.544Mb/s.

Tom recently moved to T1 and had some fun getting full bandwidth on his uplink.  Turned out his Linksys router had QoS turned on and even when he did not have his VoIP ATA connected the router was still throttling his high speed data path.

For a full report check tom’s blog out at http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/covad-t1-speed-and-latency-test-plus-overview.asp

Interested in leasing a T1 line?  Read all about it on our site and request a free T1 quote.

http://www.whichvoip.com/index_business.html

Andy

So who is the cheapest VoIP phone provider out there? Well assuming we are looking at residential VoIP plans and not calling card plans, softphones/PC phones or business VoIP solutions then Lingo wins that battle with their basic plan costing $7.95 per month. So what do you get from Lingo for that price? You’ll get the typical features for free, Voicemail, call waiting, call forwarding and Caller ID with name. You’ll also get some advanced features like 3-way calling, anonymous call rejection, do not disturb and all calls to other Lingo users are free. With this basic plan you also get the Emergency calling service (911). This isn’t a bad deal at all.

You also get more than just the features and the price, there are a few intangible benefits related to Lingo. Lingo is a subsidiary of Primus Telecommunications Group, joining the VoIP phone service market in 1999, so they have been around for a while and have a mature product, which should relate to fewer problems for the customer. Lingo have been reviewed by customers over fifty five times on our site. This gives 55 completely independent opinions about the same service, more than enough for you to judge the quality of their service.

What don’t you get? Well every minute costs 3 cents regardless of where you are calling to in the US or Canada. Still not a bad deal but then if you have a teenage daughter on the phone for 3 hours every night them maybe this is not the VoIP plan for you. The cheapest plan that has unlimited minutes to all of the US and Canada is Viatalk. At $15.95 per month you get unlimited calling in the US and Canada and at present they have a special deal of 1 Year free. Less than $10 a month for unlimited calls and a whole bunch of features thrown in, that’s an exceptional deal that won’t last long.

Cost should not be the only consideration when choosing a VoIP service, customer VoIP reviews give you an excellent insight into a company, friends and relatives recommendations are also useful and your own experience of a provider should all be weighed. Many customer choose to go with their broadband carrier for example Verizon have DSL and they have their Voicewing or Comcast broadband have their Comcast Digital Voice service.

VoIP is an inexpensive, reliable alternative to your traditional phone. Have a read at our How To Select a VoIP Provider article for tips on how to select the best VoIP provider that suits you and your families calling habits.

Technorati Tags: Lingo, Viatalk, Broadband Phone, VoIP, Cheap Phone, Digital Voice, Verizon, Voicewing

Although problems with VoIP and digital internet phones are not as common as the likes of Verizon would have you believe, they do exist. One such problem that I have the unfortunate pleasure of encountering is intermittent or choppy audio when using my VoIP Phone. 

If you have read any of the blogs in our Techie corner you will have a good understanding of how VoIP works. With a VoIP phone call your voice is digitally sampled and divided into small sections. Each section is sequentially sent out over the internet embedded within an IP (Internet Protocol) Packet. The choppy or intermittent voice comes from one or more of these packets being lost, not sent or delayed in the network somewhere.

So what can you do if you have this problem with your own VoIP phone?

There are a few simple things that you can do before you phone your providers customer service line.

Try and characterize the intermittent voice. Is it in one direction only? Is it when you and your family are using the internet? Typically if you are on your VoIP phone it will be the person on the other end who can’t hear you properly and you will not experience the intermittent audio. A common cause of this is a lack of bandwidth in the uplink direction. Residential broadband internet such as DSL and cable are asymmetrical in nature. Comcast may promise 6Mbits, and they do deliver on their promise, however that is in the download direction i.e. to your PC or Internet phone. In the upload direction you won’t see more than 384Kbits. Try running a speed test when you are on the phone and experiencing problems and take a note of the bandwidth you are getting in the uplink and downlink directions. Compare it to when you are not on the phone.

Another simple test you can do is a ping test. Open a DOS command prompt on your PC and type the following command “ping -n 100 yahoo.com” (don’t type the “”). Below is a screen shot of what you would expect to see.

What you are doing with this test is sending IP packets to yahoo.com. The servers that host the yahoo website are sending a response back to your PC. The 66.94.234.13 is the IP address of the server on the yahoo side. The bytes are how many bytes in the IP packet and the time is the round trip time for the message to be sent from your PC to Yahoo and then sent back again. Once the test has completed you get a summary of the results, the important one is the “lost” statistic, ideally this would be 0%. Any more than about 3% and the dropped packets will result in intermittent voice over your broadband phone. Try this test a few times and see if there is any correlation between using the phone, time of day or kids home from school and downloading music!!

It’s also important to check your setup and make sure you have followed the instructions your VoIP service provider sent with the ATA. This is particularly crucial if you have a router. Your ATA is effectively a VoIP router, it will give your voice packets priority over the data packets from your PC. This means that your voice packets will be sent out on time and will not be delayed even if you are downloading or uploading large files. The most common set up is is to have your modem, then your ATA and then your router.

Try the speed test and the ping tests with the ATA removed and again try and see any correlation.

If you see a slight drop in bandwidth or one or two more dropped packets while you are on the phone then this is actually a good sign. This means that your ATA is giving priority to your broadband phone at the expense of a few dropped packets of data. Data can be resent without a loss of content unfortunately voice can not.  

These are all fairly simple test to run and you don’t necessarily have to take any actions based on the results however it will give the customer service technician you eventually call a lot of valuable information and it will save you running these tests while he’s on the phone as he’s “scripted” to ask you. Very often the technician can change your ATA settings to use a CODEC with higher voice compression thus using less bandwidth and resulting in less lost packets. They may also get you to call your broadband provider and have them check your connection. The above tests are also valuable as your broadband provider customer representative will no doubt ask you run them.

The one thing that I find somewhat ironic in the residential VoIP market is the fact that the likes of Verizon push their POTS telophony on reliability and suggest that VoIP is not so reliable. Probably half the problems associated with VoIP are problems with a users DSL or Broadband connection and not the actual VoIP application.

There are many triple play deals out there, VoIP, Broadband and TV all from the same provider like Comcast, these are decent deals, but you could find a cheaper service if you shop around for individual services. However having one company to contact when you have problems and eliminating the excuse “call the other guy it’s his problem” could be worth the extra cost.

Calum

 http://www.whichvoip.com

Technorati Tags: Broadband Phone, VoIP, Choppy Audio, Intermittent Audio, Broadband bandwidth

Interesting news from Charter Communications in the last week or so.  By all accounts they now have 500,000 VoIP customers - 300,000 of them in 2006 alone.

The other interesting side to this is that 7 out of 10 of their VoIP customers signed up for the Triple Play package.  I am sure with all the advertising these days you are aware of Triple Play.  If you’re just back from solitary confinement the Triple Play is Video (TV), Broadband Data (Internet) and Voice (VoIP or Broadband Phone or Internet Phone or Digital Voice….yes the marketing guys are having a field day with this aren’t they).

I can see the benefit of the Triple Play, all services from one company and therefore only one bill.  The other advantage is of course when things go wrong.  No doubt who is responsible if things go wrong.  This is a problem some users have right now when they have different service providers for Voice and Data - if the phone service does not work, is it the VoIP service provider or the Broadband Data service provider that is at fault.

However before you jump up and order Triple Play you may want to take a look at some of the deals the “Single Play” VoIP service providers offer.  You might just find you will save a good chunk of change.  For example some service providers offer 2 years of unlimited service for $199.  Now that is tough to beat Charter!

Take a look at some of the VoIP solutions we currently have on our main site:

http://www.whichvoip.com

Andy

Voice over Wireless LAN, or VoWLAN as it is referred to, has been getting a lot of publicity recently.

What is VoWLAN?  In simplistic terms this is VoIP but over WiFi or Wireless IP.  Many households have WiFi these days just due to the convenience of accessing the Internet, especially those with laptops.  Sit in the living room watching the basketball game on the TV and surfing the web and with no CAT5 Ethernet cable or the likes getting tangled up with your bottle of beer.

How nice would it be if you had the same flexibility with your telephone.  Yes with cordless phones we have this already….well kind of.  You still need to have the base connected to the VoIP ATA or the POTS line if you have the old fashioned form of telephony   Yes the technology up until now has definitely been of the wired variety.

VoWLAN gives you additional freedom.  Here your WiFi enabled VoIP phone will talk directly do your WiFi router wirelessly.  Many providers are now releasing such phones in the marketplace or frantically designing one to release imminently as this is likely to be a huge market over the next year.

However, there are some technical drawbacks with this technology that should be brought to your attention.  All of these can be overcome but may be of interest to you.

The fundamental problem is the way that the packets are handled.  The beauty of Internet Protocol is that the packets sent over the Internet backbone can be voice, video or data.  It does not matter, they are made up of packets of digital bits and sent across the Internet to their destination.  However, all packets are not the same.  Data packets such as web browsing tend to be large packets often over 1000 bytes at a time.  Voice packets tend to be significantly smaller, often as small as 30 bytes depending on the codec used for the voice compression.

Now with the various OSI stack layers used to send data and voice over the Internet, each layer adds overhead packets that define protocols, source and destination addressing, checksums for error correction and the likes.  When the actual voice packets are so small to begin with this ends up making the data transmission very inefficient due to the extra overhead, often as bad as 30% (e.g. 100 byte packet but only 30 bytes of actual voice information). 

Why is this such a bad thing?  Well, the WiFi Media Access layer tries to give each station on the network equal access and gives no consideration to the time each station has during its access time.  Therefore, because the voice packets are so small compared to the data packets a lot of time is spent by the VoWLAN phones backing off and waiting to transmit the next voice packet.  Now VoIP is very much reliant on low latency and low jitter.  This environment does not suit it well at all especially when many Data nodes are trying to access the WLAN at the same time.  The result, if not managed properly, is reduced system capacity and poor voice quality.

Another issue is the distance from the WiFi access point.  The further away you are the lower the signal strength and the lower the transmission rate needs to be otherwise the signal to noise ratio takes a serious hit and some of the voice packets can be lost.  The lower the transmission rate the longer it takes to send the packet and the more hold-offs required by the stations on the WLAN.  Again the voice quality can suffer and of course the system capacity.

It’s not all bad news.  The VoWLAN providers have worked hard at resolving these issues or at least limiting their effects.  The upside is the lack of wires and equipment needed in your home and the portability of your voice and data network.

I hope this has given you some insight into the world of VoWLAN. 

Interested in buying a WiFi VoIP phone, check out our hardware section for more details:

http://www.whichvoip.com/voip/voip_business_hardware.htm

Any of you using this technology at home or at work now - we would love to hear about your experiences, please add a comment below?

Andy

Technorati Tags: VoWLAN, Wireless IP, Wireless VoIP, VoIP

You may have heard the new buzz word floating around the technology websites recently - Internet Protocol TV or IPTV for short.  This really is starting to get interesting.

Today Sony announced that it would be equipping most of its new High Definition TVs with an attachable module that would allow streaming broadband High Definition TV to be displayed on their TV sets, simply by pushing a button on their remote control.

Of course you will need to do some serious upgrades to your broadband service to facilitate the extra bandwidth needed for IPTV.  AT&T’s U-verse IPTV service gives customers a 20Mb/s link to their homes.  This provides high enough bandwidth for high speed Internet, VoIP and IPTV service. 

Verizon of course have their own elaborate plans to capture this market and as a response to the 1000 customers per day they are estimated to be losing to cable customers who already have triple-play.  They are, as we speak, rolling out a $20 billion investment throughout the U.S on a state of the art fiber optic infrastructure that will support Data, Voice and IPTV. 

The competition for this triple play is fierce and will be interesting to watch over the next few years.  The other question, where does this leave the likes of Vonage?

What’s your thoughts on this, we’d love to hear from you.

Andy

Technorati Tags: IPTV, Triple Play, VoIP, Internet TV

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas (of all places)ruled in favor of Comcast Cable in a suit brought by Caritas Technologies.

Essentially Caritas Technologies was awarded a series of VoIP-related patents. One, in particular, Caritas claimed could be read to include calls that were made partly using VoIP connections and partly across the PSTN (public switched telephone network). Essentially, Caritas was claiming to have invented to capability to connect calls running partially on the PSTN and partially on IP networks.

Caritas Technologies were trying to ban Comcast’s digital Voice service as they said it infringed on their patent. Cartitas were seeking 2.2 billion dollars in compensation and were expected to win being that 78 percent of cases heard in Eastern Texas are ruled in favour of the plaintiff. However the court ruled against them.

This is only good news for customers, new companies providing services would only be hindered by paying royalties and hence drive the cost of VoIP up, reducing the competition out there and would certainly give a hand to the incumbent telephony providers.  

I’m sure it won’t be the last battle but it is a huge win for Comcast and for all VoIP providers out there.

Calum

http://whichvoip.com

Should I get cable VoIP or DSL VoIP? As more and more people use the internet and start to understand the different ways in which they can get High Speed Internet this question seems to be asked more and more.

First let me state one thing, VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol as the acronym states, is just Voice over your internet connection. Whether that internet connection is your phone line, your cable, your satellite or some wireless network the likes of Clearwire are starting to introduce it really does not matter, well almost - it’s never that easy

The delay in Satellite communications can sometimes make a conversation difficult, you also need a guaranteed rate of about 90Kbps for a VoIP conversation over and above anything else you may be doing over the internet. I’m not saying it can’t be done but it’s not common.  

New wireless networks are emerging that are threatening “the last mile”. Instead of your internet being over a piece of wire(Cable or phone line) it is now wireless to a base station and then a local office, similar to a cell phone. These technologies are still emerging and are only available in a few select areas.

Now we get to DSL and Cable - what medium should I use?   

There is absolutely no difference between Cable and DSL in terms of what providers you can use, what plans you can have the features VoIP can give you or the installation in your home. The only real difference is the price you will pay. Here is a quick example of what I mean.

For DSL you need a phone line. For you to have that phone line it’s probably around $30 and this is before you pay for internet service. The actual DSL service is about $35 per month after any special deals have lapsed, so in reality you are paying somewhere in the region of $65 for your DSL. Cable tends to be around the $45 mark after the special deals have expired so you are $20 better off and that’s only for your internet.

Typical savings when switching to VoIP are around the $500 mark annually, when you take into consideration the potential saving by switching to cable you get close to $750 a year. 

What do I use? Comcast Cable with a higher bandwidth than the Verizon DSL I previously used and Lingo for all my calls. With this I save about $60 a month. Being Scottish friends say I am just cheap but I like to think I’m just smart

Calum

When you talk about high speed Internet access with friends, family and colleagues often the first question asked is “Do you have DSL or Cable?”.  This is a common question we get in our Inbox at WhichVoIP too.

If you are currently shopping for a Broadband provider and are trying to decide between DSL and Cable Broadband, read our Advantages and Disadvantages of DSL Service Versus Cable Internet Service to see which is best for your needs.

If you plan to move to VoIP, and why wouldn’t you , at the time of writing Cable Broadband makes more sense than DSL in my opinion.  Why, you ask?  Well until “Naked DSL” becomes mainstream you will still have to pay line rental to your local phone provider.  Remember, DSL high speed Internet access is transmitted over your regular phone line and your local phone provider wants YOU to keep paying for the maintenance of the line to your house.  So you can’t get completely rid off this service.

Using a cable connection for your Broadband needs, for example and a VoIP provider, say  will allow you to cancel your local phone providers service.  No more ridiculous line rental fees and one flat monthly fee that covers all your telephony needs!  Of course this assumes you already use this cable provider for your television service.  Once the local phone providers move to naked DSL and/or launch new services such as television over your regular phone line, the tide may turn.  Watch this space….

Andy