Comparing VoIP to Legacy Phone Reliability
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So once again, I have another case of VoIP working and legacy phones not working. My dad's home line, a traditional analogue line, has been down for days and the local phone carrier says at least three more days till they have any chance of getting it fixed. That's a full week without a working phone. No calls are working at all.
I've had T1 customers with outages that hit six months before! Nearly every customer I've ever dealt with that uses T1 lines has outages of several days or weeks, not often, but they all get them.
Using land lines myself over the years I've had periods of more than two months without phone service that the phone company could never figure out and all kinds of call quality issues that far exceed anything that VoIP has ever had for me.
VoIP can have issues too, of course, but logically there is so much more redundancy and resiliency in IP protocols and first hand experience of nearly forty years with legacy phones and building and supporting VoIP systems commercially for over a decade I've never seen any VoIP line experience an outage even remotely on par with the typical outages of any non-VoIP system whether analogue or PRI. Typically we say that legacy systems are fragile but call quality is rock solid (when it works), basically that they are all or nothing. But my experience has been that non-VoIP call quality has been just as problematic as VoIP, except there is no way to do anything about it. VoIP you at least have options.
Mostly just stating some examples. But it drives me crazy that anyone things that there is some inherent reliability in legacy phone lines. They are absolutely awful.
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I have seen the same thing. Often VoIP reliability simply outperforms traditional phone types. VoIP gets so much more modern infrastructure and has so much more resiliency, mostly in the ability for the end users (customers) to enact their own redundancy strategies whereas traditional phone types required complete dependence on a single vendor to supply all reliability and if they failed to do so there was little recourse leaving little incentive for them to do a good job.
