Garbled gab
Voices carry (or not) with Internet telephony
Matthew Miller
Michael Jordan and his buddy Tweety want you to join MCI's 5-cent plan. Sela Ward dances across your screen to entice you over to Sprint for a similar rate. Another carrier calls you every other evening (during dinner, of course) with a high-pressure pitch.
But you know the score. Most of those plans charge $4 or $5 monthly fees. The low rate is good only during certain times of the day. And even 4 or 5 cents a minute can add up.
All right then, how does 1 cent a minute sound? Or how about 0—yes 0—cents a minute? You can lock in such low (or nonexistent) rates right now by signing on with one of a burgeoning number of Internet-telephony services.
You won't see these services advertised on TV (yet), and they certainly don't employ celebrity spokespersons (or "spokes-cartoons"). Nonetheless, Internet telephony is luring increasing numbers of people with the promise of cheap, or even free, long distance.
I set out to try Internet telephony from the point of view of the average Joe—something I'm well-qualified to do. My home PC is a plain-vanilla box with Windows 98, a 400-MHz Pentium II, and a 56-kbps modem. No broadband connection, no home LAN.
Voice-over-data services are finding increasing use among businesses, but the real drama is unfolding in the consumer space. Online ITSPs (Internet-telephony- service providers) have been popping up like dandelions and attracting millions of members. And several consumer-oriented hardware products are starting to hit store shelves.
Whether you're an interested bystander or someone whose company is thinking of entering this market, the questions are the same: Can regular folks, who lack in-house technical support, really take advantage of this stuff? Does the quality measure up to regular calls? In short, can Internet telephony deliver on its promises?
...Which brings me to quality. When I started this project, I thought I'd use a simple litmus test. I planned to call people without mentioning that I was phoning over the Net, and see whether the quality of the connection became a topic of conversation.
As I expected, every product failed that test. But the test was unfair to begin with. As everybody knows, the Internet simply isn't built to deliver the same quality and reliability we're used to with the phone system. Not yet anyway.
In the end, none of these products outshone the others at starting and maintaining a connection. And none proved particularly outstanding at voice reproduction (although my $10 headset certainly didn't excel in that department)......
ednmag.com
FWIW, no mention of Ibasis
Jim |
