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Friday, January 05, 2007
Remember that crystal clear voip call I made to my brother? Apparently, the broadband they grow up there in Washington is not the same as what we get down here in the Sunshine State.
Just for kicks, I decided to run a little comparison while the memory of my voip internet phone nirvana was still fresh at hand. First, a few statistics:
- My brother's broadband is DSL coming in at a theoretical 1.5 Mbps
- Our "vastly superior" broadband is Cable, coming in at an advertised 3 Mbps, however for the last several months we've been lucky to see speeds above 1.2 Mbps.
- Voip only needs about 90 Kbps to work
The call I made to my brother was pin-drop clear without noticeable lag. Results using my own household broadband weren't nearly as good. We made calls to both a cell phone and a traditional cordless phone, using four configurations:
- Corded phone attached to voip internet phone adapter
- Cordless phone attached to voip internet phone adapter
- Headset and laptop connected to wireless network
- Headset and laptop with a hard connection to broadband network
In each instance, we experienced lag, echo, overlap, dropped snippets of conversation, and static. Calls coming from the PC were marginally more clear, but the overall quality was pretty abysmal. Not surprisingly, when I ran a speedtest on my connection I discovered there were problems with my connection:
- Download speed: 1.2 Mbps (less than 50% of what I'm paying for)
- Upload speed: 225 (right around what I'm paying for)
- Average round-trip time: 295 ms ( rtt > 250ms = a whole lotta bad audio)
- Maximum pause: 285 ms (yeah, that's not good either)
- QoS: 45% (you really need an 80% or better to be happy with the sound quality)
Sooooooo...what I want to know is how in the sweet bye and bye is my ISP going to make good on the automatic speed upgrade they just told everyone about, when they can't even regularly provide a) half the advertised upload speed we're paying for and b) a consistent signal?
