Hosted PBX
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller When I mentioned Barracuda, I meant that they are using some sort of VOIP and it sucks, bad.
You mean for their own call centers? How do you know it is VoIP? They are a VoIP PBX vendor, they sell the Cudatel.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@wrx7m said:
When will it get to be at least as good as the old fashioned way?
Seriously, having used both, public Internet VoIP has been better for me than my landline experiences have been over the years. Better sound quality, more reliable calls. Neither is perfect, but VoIP has been better. And I've been on public Internet VoIP both home and office for around fifteen years now. And working in VoIP hosting on public Internet for over a decade.
I wish I could say the same. I would love to just say, Internet or bust.
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@scottalanmiller Yeah, their own call centers for support. I can tell by the quality of the calls. Sometimes it sounds like I am talking to them on a cell phone with garbling and echoes and it skipping so i can only here every other word.
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@wrx7m said:
I wish I could say the same. I would love to just say, Internet or bust.
Where are you seeing issues? I'm not saying no place ever doesn't have them or that every case VoIP works, but literally it's like 95% or higher. Whether home or business, we just don't see significant call quality issues these days. Used to, sure, but it wasn't that common even long ago. Today I almost exclusively see issues with people really screwing up, not from the infrastructure being unable to carry enough for quality audio.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller Yeah, their own call centers for support. I can tell by the quality of the calls. Sometimes it sounds like I am talking to them on a cell phone with garbling and echoes and it skipping so i can only here every other word.
Ah, so you are equating audio issues to VoIP. Maybe that is a PBX issue or a PRI issue. If you define audio problems as VoIP issues, or public Internet ones, you'll always believe that VoIP doesn't work. What if we did the opposite and assumed all audio issues were caused by PRI? Suddenly the opinion would be the opposite.
Granted, audio echoes and such are more common on VoIP than PRI, but I've had it on both.
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@scottalanmiller Yeah I am sure that the bandwidth isn't an issue for most now but that isn't the only thing. Latency and jitter, etc.
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@wrx7m said:
Sometimes it sounds like I am talking to them on a cell phone with garbling and echoes and it skipping so i can only here every other word.
More likely than VoIP is... that you are actually talking over a cell phone.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@wrx7m said:
Sometimes it sounds like I am talking to them on a cell phone with garbling and echoes and it skipping so i can only here every other word.
More likely than VoIP is... that you are actually talking over a cell phone.
You think I am talking to a random tech on a cell phone? Is that really a thing?
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller Yeah I am sure that the bandwidth isn't an issue for most now but that isn't the only thing. Latency and jitter, etc.
Latency is almost never an issue. Check some lines sometime, last time I saw someone with latency issues it was @Minion-Queen talking over a sat link from central Africa. I have been doing International calling on VoIP for years and latency isn't an issue.
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@scottalanmiller Interesting...
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Now Jitter, that's a real issue even on good lines. But you can normally solve that by switching to a more reliable carrier like adding an SSL VPN which reorders the packets.
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@scottalanmiller good to know about the ssl vpn reordering the packets.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller good to know about the ssl vpn reorganizing the packets.
I first saw that as a solution around 2005, back when jitter was a bitter issue, that people were getting better audio rather than worse over SSH, which was very counter intuitive.
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@scottalanmiller Yeah you would think it would have the opposite effect.
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I'm doing semi-regular conference calls from Crete and it is working here. I think this is a great example of just how incredibly good VoIP is today. Our SIP termination is at JFK in Brooklyn. Our PBX is by the airport in Chicago. I'm on a remote island at the southern tip of Europe as close to Turkey as to mainland Greece and only slightly farther from Libya. My house connection has to connect from the little village I am in to a small local city, from there to the big city on the island, from there up to Athens (no idea how it gets there... undersea cable seems unlikely) then from Athens likely to Belgium. Then over to NYC. Then out to Chicago to connect to the PBX. Then from the PBX it comes all the way back to NYC to hit the SIP trunk.
All that and the audio is just fine. Haven't had any issues yet.
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In 2009 I worked for a week and a half from a SIP phone on my laptop on hotel wifi in Germany connecting to a Canadian PBX to a US SIP trunk and it sounded fine, even with wifi in a hotel seven years ago and three countries involved at a minimum.
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@scottalanmiller Wow... Does geographic location have any bearing on the best SIP provider?
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@scottalanmiller I thought you were in Spain these days.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller Wow... Does geographic location have any bearing on the best SIP provider?
Some, but not nearly as much as people think. You do want your PBX and SIP landing location to have a great connection between them. You don't likely want them in different countries. But as long as the latency is low, bandwidth adequate and the trunk reliable, doesn't really matter.
It's all networking, not physical location. So if you have 4ms latency to the SIP landing point, even if it is a billion miles away you don't care.
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@wrx7m said:
@scottalanmiller I thought you were in Spain these days.
That was three countries ago. I was living in Spain a year ago. Spent the summer in Panama with @Bob-Beatty and @pchiodo. Then spent the fall in Nicaragua. In Greece (Crete) for the winter. I'll be moving up to Transylvania for the spring. Then the plan is Quebec for the summer.
