[ILUG] Blueface

[Niall O Broin]

On 22 Sep 2005, at 06:07, Bernhard Rohrer wrote:

>> Well, hopefully 802.11g is a little less bad. I was planning to sign 
>> up to Blueface anyway, and today's telephone bill jogged my mind, 
>> sharply.
>
> I have tried blueface and I must say that like with skype I am not 
> impressed with line quality - some calls just do not get through. Or 
> at least not comprehensibly. What are other's experiences?

They say you can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs, and 
the arrows in the backs of early adopters of VOIP are poor quality and 
dropped calls.

The problem with VOIP currently is the issue of QOS (quality of 
service). Without any widely used, right to your desktop, means of 
marking particular IP packets as being time critical, you will see such 
issues when you encounter network busy-ness. Unlike with classic 
telephony, where a dedicated channel exists for your call between you 
and the called party, with VOIP the voice packets have to fight for 
network capacity with everything else.

And unfortunately, voice is quite sensitive to gaps in data, and 
variations in timing. I must say that I have found Skype quite good, 
partticularly Skype to Skype calls, and my worst issues were with 
Skypeout calls. Time will tell how Blueface's service compares.



Niall