Could someone please share their experience or knowledge about the current ability to do voice calls over the internet…or at least leave some links for me to investigate…thanks.
http://www.hottelephone.com is a free pc-to-phone service. Very good but usually rather busy.
I’ve used it before to call a friend long distance.
It worked pretty well, but my friend said it sounded echoey.
The sound quality varies much, from nothing to perfect. Sometimes, the caller will ask what the heck you’re talking about, since, to them, you sound like you’re skipping. You have to realize, your voice is traslated into data that’s traveling through many busy servers and lines and into the PC-to-Phone server, and then that data is translated back into voice to their phone, which can cause the fluxuations in quality.
And yes, you will get “echo voice” if you use your speakers and microphone. Headphones are a must if you’re going to make the PC-to-Phone calls.
If you have a broadband connection that allows a nice upload speed (>15kb/s) you should be fine, if you are slower then that your speach will be broken up - or that’s my experence
I am learning about this very thing in my Data Communications class. Currently, voice over IP (VOIP) calls are not going to sound as good as traditional phone-to-phone calls. With the phone network, you have a direct connection to the destination, and your voice is sampled at a high rate. With VOIP, the data packets containing your voice information go through the Internet in the same way as anything else, getting bounced around and delayed at various servers. Also, the packet size is generally larger. A larger packet is more efficient to send over the Internet, but it means your voice is sampled less often which can alter the way it comes out. Also, if a packet is delayed and arrives out of order, the destination will just ignore it and a gap will be heard. The ATM standard is an attempt to integrate voice, video, data, and other services into a high quality package, but it’s still not perfect.