Voip Blog
Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
I've owned a pinball machine for a number of years. For the past few years, the pinball machine has been broken and taking up space in my office. Recently, I've had someone come out and get it working. After a few visits by the repairman and some part replacements, I have myself a working pinball machine. It still needs a few repairs, but that's beside the point.
The machine in question is an Eight Ball Deluxe Limited Edition. I paid for an emulator for this pinball machine over a decade ago, long before I bought the real thing. At the time, it was pretty good. It rendered the table nicely and the game play was authentic enough.
Playing a rendition on a computer and playing the real pinball machine are completely different experiences. The ball does crazy stuff like bounce off the glass and over rollovers. You can nudge the machine and change how the ball bounces so that it goes you way. It has a feel to it that a computer just can't emulate.
So how does this in any way relate to VoIP? Glad you asked. Voice over IP has to turn your voice into ones and zeros. It does this through a series of rapid sampling of your voice and then encoding it into ones and zeros using something called a codec.
Codec is a combination of two words: COmpressor and DECompresser. The audio must be compressed and sent off to the remote end, which must decompress it. There are various codecs out there, some of which optimize for quality (at the expense of bandwidth) or optimize for bandwidth (at the expense of quality).
Codec usage is one thing that can affect quality. Packet loss and latency plays the largest role. If some packets get lost, one party might sound like it's underwater, really garbled, or may disappear entirely.
There are a lot of moving parts involved in making your voice over IP call sound almost as good as being there. Video can help bridge that gap somewhat, but at the end of the day, it's not always enough to call--or video--it in. Sometimes, you've got to have the real thing--that person, face to face, in the same place. That's a problem VoIP can't solve.
