On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 22:49 +0300, Peter wrote:

> Imho the present state of the art home networking is a dsl customer 
> using voip to another dsl customer using voip. This leads to delays of 
> the order of magnitude of one second per side all told (handset to 
> handset). 

Sorry, but if you're latency is a 1 second delay there is something
wrong with your link, or your ISP has heavily oversubscribed.

> This is way too long. Out of this, the ping time alone is 
> about 180msec best and 300msec average. 

This is even more indication that there's something wrong with the link.
My MAX ping times to most locations on the continent was <40ms with DSL.
With cable it's about the same (although a little more variable).
Overseas it reaches the 150ms range, depending on destination.

> Talking to someone with 1 second 
> delay precludes dialogue and requires iron discipline from the speaker 
> (you can hear your own voice as sidetone echo coming from the remote 
> with ~2 seconds of delay - this is extremely annoying and causes most 
> speakers to shut up when talking).

Your experience with VOIP is either out of date, or you're referring to
an experience with a bargain basement VOIP provider.

I have Vonage and the voice delay is far less then that of a cell phone.
It's not quite landline, but it's far below the threshold of being
noticeable. So far my experience is that VOIP connections sound better
then cell phone calls, and often are indistinguishable from landline
calls. I've never heard any echo.

Only time I had an anomaly was when I purposely saturated my link, both
upload and download was maxed out. The VOIP call worked, but there were
"pops" every 15 seconds. That was the worst case and it was still
usable.

> The 100Mbit ether is very nice but one should not forget that the first 
> segment of long haul for most people is 256kbit DSL uplink on a good day 
> with no network problems.

VOIP runs at most at 90kbps, 256kbps is more then enough. Latency is FAR
more important then raw bandwidth (assuming you have at least 90kbps
upstream).

Today's VOIP is many magnitudes better then the VOIP of only a year ago.
All the complaints I've had against it are gone. VOIP is easily as good
as landline for voice quality, almost as good for latency.

I will never go back to the ripoff of landline service. TTYL


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