Compare voip services

I do not have Voice over IP, or VoIP. Yes, it's available in my area: In fact, Cablevision offers its Optimum Online service at a lower monthly price than my current traditional phone service. But I'm not biting. Instead, I find myself wondering if the scores of former analog-phone-service customers marching over to VoIP providers are actually happy with the choice they've made. I suspect that the reviews are mixed.

As far as I can tell, VoIP's primary attraction is still price. It's cheaper than traditional analog phone service—and not just by a little bit. VoIP generally costs $20 to $40 a month for local and long-distance service combined. And we know that consumers do act on price, even, sometimes, at the expense of quality. Is VoIP's call and service quality worse than traditional phones? Sometimes. I've heard reports of, and had personal experience with, calls dropping out midsentence or becoming garbled. But that's not really the point. The big problem is that thousands of consumers are signing up for a service they know very little about.

VoIP is, though some may disagree, one of our youngest technologies. And if you compare it to the 130-year-plus history of the phone system, VoIP, at around 9 years old, is barely beyond a zygote. People need to realize that young systems typically have problems, and certainly, the VoIP services that most consumers use have nothing approaching the infrastructure that exists for the traditional phone system. There is the argument that VoIP is built on the Internet and the Internet is (going back to Arpanet) over 35 years old. That's true, but the Internet was not built with VoIP—or really any kind of streaming media—in mind. It was not built even for the services that most consumers are now using. VoIP was, until the last two years or so, an enterprise oddity that usually stumbled in the last mile to the corporate office and was considered too unstable and spotty for home use. Broadband everywhere changed that, along with the introduction of much improved end-user hardware and media-compression algorithms.

Thanks to these recent developments, VoIP is making steady progress and is now, quite rapidly, infiltrating the consumer space.—Continue reading...

Issue 1: The Numbers Game Considering VoIP? Well, in many cases, (with Vonage being an exception) say good-bye to your beloved telephone number. That's right, the one you took from home to home with you as you moved around the neighborhood, or the one that has been with you since you moved into your home 30 years ago. VoIP gives you a shiny new number. Great. But wait, what happens to your old number? Well, if someone tries to call it they do not learn that "the number's been changed, the new number is…" Nope. The phone companies consider you lost in space. You've been disconnected.

Issue 2: 911 Is Not Always Part of the Plan This important public service is there for everyone to use, and thanks to the hard work of the phone companies, it always works locally. In most VoIP systems, however, it doesn't work at all unless you pay another $5 per month. What you get, by the way, is not exactly "911." It's usually "E911." Vonage, to its credit, doesn't charge for its E911 service, but you still have to tell the company to activate the service. The company strongly urges customers to do so when they sign up. So why the heck doesn't Vonage just turn it on automatically?

The other wrinkle here is that E911 does not dynamically recognize your location. If you dial 911 on a VoIP service, it connects you to the nearest Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for the VoIP billing address. If you happen to be using your VoIP account from someone else's broadband connection and dial 911, emergency services will arrive at your home and not your current location. I guess the workaround could be always telling the 911 operator your current location. That's effective until you pass out—before you've given your actual location. With a standard phone line that's left off the hook, emergency services could, conceivably, trace the call and pinpoint your location on their own. That's a lot iffier with E911.

To me, it's shameful that some VoIP carriers charge for E911 ($5 a month seems to be the going rate). Again, most potential customers do not know this until they sign up, or far worse, until they actually need to dial 911. Here's a spot where the government could step in. The thing that really bothers me about this is that the VoIP companies do their best not to tell you this.

Issue 3: No Internet, No Phone If your Internet access goes down, so does your phone. If your power goes out, good-bye VoIP. Who needs all these things tied together?

Issue 4: Monopolies R Us Many VoIP services are tied to semimonopolistic regional cable companies. These companies make tons of money with nary a competitor in sight, and when they add new services they do not seem to know the meaning of "less than $29 a month." I'd rather pour my money into a competitive marketplace. These companies hate competition so much that they'll even try to block the VoIP port on your broadband service so you can't use a national VoIP provider like Vonage.

Issue 5: Is VoIP Too Vulnerable? Our standard phone system can be "phreaked", but it's not easy. But VoIP is Internet-based, and some of its services are accessed directly through Web sites. There have already been reports of hacks and VoIP message bombing. This is a problem that has the potential to get much worse before it gets better.

Granted, many of VoIP's technology problems have been solved or certainly improved, including audio quality, dropped calls, and the like. But the companies offering these still new services need to provide far more transparency up front and work like crazy in the background to build the kind of infrastructure necessary to support such an important international service. Until I'm confident they've done that, I'll be sticking with my local and long-distance telcos, thank you very much.

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