VOIP
Posted by Ian Holsman
Ben mentions in his weblog that VOIP is getting easier, and indeed it is. I've been using switching between using 2 different VOIP providers, and a cheap calling card as my main method of calling my main office in SF (I live in melbourne) over the last 6-7 months. some points:
- latency is a bitch. There can be a gap of 1 second before I hear the conversation. while this might be ok on a 1:1 conversation, for a conference call it sucks big time.. this is mainly caused by me having a 200ms RTT
- drop outs. I've have the FWD service drop me out after half an hour of a conference call.. very annoying
- Clarity is good most of the time. (providing I'm no one else is using my bandwidth to do something else)
- you can get your self a UK and a Washington local #. very handy if you have bandwidth deprived friends over in those places
my rule of thumb is if I have to talk alot on the call, or the call is important I will use the cheap calling card (2/5c a minute for a cross-pacific is pretty good IMHO). otherwise I hook up X-Ten, or my shoreline softphone and use that. I'm still waiting for my Cisco powered office VPN, and when that comes I'll be able to use a real IP-phone which might help with some of my problems.
The other thing to look at is asterisk (a different protocol to SIP which is inter-operable), and if you don't have any friends without XP boxes .. skype. my number is 253297.