Vonage, VOIP, realities

I’ve been a big fan of the Vonage concept ever since it launched in the UK. I was first in line to get my Linksys router and phone numbers. Technically, the service appears excellent — I particularly love the call management / diversion options.

However, the call quality for me is abysmal.

Normally what I do is have my Vonage number routed to one of my mobiles. That works quite well — it gives me a heck of a lot of flexibility when I’m out and about and I’m not nailed too badly when it comes to the per minute forwarding charges from Vonage.

The landline functionality just doesn’t work properly though. I really have no idea what’s going on. When you call me on the Vonage number and I pick up, I can hear you fine. You can’t hear me though. You can’t talk over me. In fact, it only works if we communicate like this:

YOU: Hi Ewan how are you?

[ I hear the message. I now wait 3-5 seconds because it’s a stupid Internet connection with no call quality. I can actually imagine the data packets being constructed, populated, beamed down the line… ]

ME: Good, yourself?

[ You now have to wait 5 seconds before replying to allow for bandwidth issues. ]

If we start trying to have a proper conversation where you sometimes talk over each other or where you’re talking fast, it’s absolutely useless.

My business partner, Hetty, hates it. She won’t admit it directly. But if I ever call her on a Vonage or Skype Out or something like that, she’ll put up with it for a few moments before asking if she can ‘call me back on another line’. Hardly business quality service, eh?

This evening the Vonage line rang. It was one of our clients. I was delighted that she was, for some reason, able to hear me. We had a good talk for about 3 minutes… until I realised she couldn’t hear a damn word I was saying properly. She was doing her best to cope with the pathetic line quality from me.

I cannot tolerate this. It’s critical that the person that we’re providing service to can actually hear me. I’ve swapped Vonage to ring my mobile now.

Now I blame Vonage because they’re the public face of my issue. However I think the real problem is that I generally work about 30 miles or so outside London. As far as telecommunications go, that’s like living on the moon for our primary communications provider. It doesn’t matter how much you pay per month, you’re still using the same pipe as little Johnny in the house opposite. We’re on an 8mb connection here.

That means I can get a realistic throughput of about 100-125k a second. You know, seriously, my Vodafone card will actually do better than this sometimes (provided you don’t move.)

I just… now and again it’s quite clear to me that the broadband industry in the UK has got quite a way to go. If you live in London, perfectly fine, yes your 24mb/sec connections are actually useful.

In fact I’ve seen countless bullshit presentations from British Telecom senior executives over the years — most recently a few months ago — telling me about their massive bandwidth pipes and strategies. Absolute nonsense. There’s a key difference between talking and delivering. Every time someone from BT or a broadband ‘telco’ like Bulldog tells me about their capabilities, I just ask them why I’m still stuck on 100 odd kilobytes a second.

Their first response is ‘Ah, get a business broadband connection’.

‘It is’. Their face drops a little bit. We continue to play the game for a few minutes longer until they finally admit that, behind the press releases and the grand visions, we’re nowhere near as advanced from a broadband perspective as we should be.

I have a Skype In number. It diverts to voicemail. Why? Well, that’s the only way I can guarantee audio fidelity. Again, not a reflection on Skype. It seems to work for the other billion people using it! It’s my connection.
Anyway, geek that I am, I understand the issues. Goodness knows what Mr & Mrs Average think when they get a 128k broadband connection from BT and buy themselves a Vonage box…. only to find out it’s all a bit iffy? What does this mean? Ultimately nothing. Don’t worry about it. As long as you can get your hotmail and download something on itunes within a reasonable time frame, who cares, right? It’ll sort itself out in a few years. Can I be bothered to wait though…

You know what, I think I might move.

I’ve moved before because of no Internet connection. A while ago, I bought a place in the London Docklands — just up the road from the London Teleport where all the data comes flying in/out to the country. There are huge satellites all over the place. I could hit one of the satellites with a stone. I lived that near, right? It’s not far from Telehouse either.

I stupidly bought a new place. So new that BT didn’t have lines there. Arse. If I wanted a broadband connection I’d have needed to pay £40k install. Errrrr.

So I survived for about a year on a 56k connection. Then I called it quits. Someone offered me ridiculous amounts of money for the property. I agreed.

I was delighted to move to the countryside and get a broadband connection. Or what, I thought was a broadband connection. Web pages load quite fast. Files download at 100k/sec. It’s OK. Just the throughput can’t handle anything decent. It’s just not good enough.

I think I need to move to London.