Archive for March, 2006
VOIP Technologies
I may be one of the last hold-outs on this technology. I’m still not all that impressed with it, to be completely honest. Oh, I love that you can take your phone with you and plug it back in anywhere, of course, but the quality just isn’t up there for me. We first tried VOIP as our personal phone line about a year and a half ago and it was a nightmare. It was in Beta for Time Warner and we agreed to be guinea pigs. I am not kidding when I say that there was a week where we had no less than 20 people going through our home trying to get this thing to work for longer than an hour. When it did start working, we had some pretty bad problems with garbled messages and skipping and other “data packet” errors. We had then take it out after a month.
We recently had a client want us to answer their phones (temporarily while they are moving). We have had the same type of problems. This is Vonage this time – and we use a business internet account so we have a higher bandwidth than residential. I will say that installation was much easier, but we still have the same “packet error” type of problems. We have noticed that it seems to be worse if we are uploading a file or doing something that uses a lot of bandwidth. We specialize in bookkeeping and sending/receiving large files is just par for the course.
An article caught my eye because apparently Microsoft’s Summit seems to be having similar problems with a similar technology. I’m just not sure if this has been refined enough to make a viable option for business owners. After thinking about it, the only way this would work for us is if we had a separate internet line coming in JUST for this technology. For that price, we may as well have the landline.
The article on the Summit, referenced above, can be found HERE.