Ronald Guria asks the question how reliable should VoIP be? There is only one answer - completely and 100%. If any technology wants to disrupt and replace a system that has worked well for over 100 years, it has to be near darned perfect. The million odd early adopters don’t make a market - they are nothing but an extended beta test. I have argued about the ease of use and reliablity before. VoIP continues to fail the mom test. For the longest time I thought, perhaps I was alone in expecting ease of use and reliability. Glad to see that Martin Geddes is on the same page.
Whoawaitasecond...
"Easy" isn't the same thing as "reliable".
Easy to use VoIP could be a POTS killer.
Reliable VoIP will never be a POTS killer.
Chatter, jitter, bounce, echo, delay, etc. are all part of VoIP and totally irrelevant to whether or not VoIP is going to continue to take off. The reliability people are looking for is with their basic network service (a fact that seems to be totally lost on Bell Canada). As long as my network service is reliable, I'm more than happy to replace my rock solid POTS with totally substandard VoIP because of the following reasons:
- I hate Bell. Probably as much as you hate your phone company.
- Vonage, Skype, etc - all the POTS alternatives are cheaper than Bell - both in terms of initial and ongoing costs.
- VoIP has way better features built into the basic bundle.
Most importantly, the main reason why consumers, like me, are going to flock to Vonage and Skype and their ilk just as fast as the internet flocked to Google from Altavista, Excite and Lycos is because Vonage and Skype actually want my business.
Your local phone company doesn't.
If VoIP is not useful, easy even, then the party is over. But I'm convinced that users are going to put up with a lot of jitter and other reliability issues simply because of the enhanced features and utility.
As long as the basic network service is reliable.
