In the early days of the Internet with dial up connections, VoIP was something of a luxury. The latency and lag associated with slow speeds made voice calling an extremely scratchy proposition. Very few people used VoIP for anything and it was only a last resort when all other modes of communication over the PSTN phone system failed.
How times have changed! Broadband speeds in the US today are more than sufficient to handle the paltry traffic that VoIP generates. To give you an example of the speed comparison, some of the most high quality audio codecs used with VoIP in HD voice require around 128 kbs upload and download speeds. To put this in perspective, most people today have well over 2-3 Mbps connections if not more.
Under some circumstances however, bandwidth can still be a problem. For example if I'm downloading a large file that fills all of my available bandwidth space to capacity, the quality of the VoIP call will degrade. To compensate for this, most routers on the market today have inbuilt settings that prioritize real time traffic such as VoIP above all others. This allows regular Internet activity such as web browsing to take a backseat. This makes sense. No one really minds if their page takes 20 milliseconds more to load. But when you're talking to someone over the phone, that short period of time is enough to create a poor quality experience.
Perhaps the one place where we still face a bandwidth crunch when using VoIP is the mobile data scene. Even here, 3G technologies provide more than enough bandwidth to allow for a seamless VoIP experience. The limiting factor in this case is not the speed of mobile Internet, but the latency and lag associated with wireless connectivity. Wi-Fi so far has proved to be an excellent substitute as it is backed up by a regular ethernet connection and is much more reliable within its area of operation. Emerging 4G technologies however are proving to be ideal for VoIP giving rise to a new acronym - VoLTE - Voice over LTE.
Perhaps the biggest threat to mobile VoIP is not the technology itself, but the data caps imposed by carriers. While VoIP itself will probably not put a dent in your usage rates, it's a mindset that might prevent people from using it for fear of overshooting their data limits.
How times have changed! Broadband speeds in the US today are more than sufficient to handle the paltry traffic that VoIP generates. To give you an example of the speed comparison, some of the most high quality audio codecs used with VoIP in HD voice require around 128 kbs upload and download speeds. To put this in perspective, most people today have well over 2-3 Mbps connections if not more.
Under some circumstances however, bandwidth can still be a problem. For example if I'm downloading a large file that fills all of my available bandwidth space to capacity, the quality of the VoIP call will degrade. To compensate for this, most routers on the market today have inbuilt settings that prioritize real time traffic such as VoIP above all others. This allows regular Internet activity such as web browsing to take a backseat. This makes sense. No one really minds if their page takes 20 milliseconds more to load. But when you're talking to someone over the phone, that short period of time is enough to create a poor quality experience.
Perhaps the one place where we still face a bandwidth crunch when using VoIP is the mobile data scene. Even here, 3G technologies provide more than enough bandwidth to allow for a seamless VoIP experience. The limiting factor in this case is not the speed of mobile Internet, but the latency and lag associated with wireless connectivity. Wi-Fi so far has proved to be an excellent substitute as it is backed up by a regular ethernet connection and is much more reliable within its area of operation. Emerging 4G technologies however are proving to be ideal for VoIP giving rise to a new acronym - VoLTE - Voice over LTE.
Perhaps the biggest threat to mobile VoIP is not the technology itself, but the data caps imposed by carriers. While VoIP itself will probably not put a dent in your usage rates, it's a mindset that might prevent people from using it for fear of overshooting their data limits.
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