Cable VoIP calls better than Landline Phones

Sunday, September 24, 2006

With all the recent hype about huge VoIP savings, many business as well as residential customers making the switch to Voice-over IP (VoIP) Telephony.

Keynote Systems -- a global internet and communications testing company -- has completed a very thourough test comparing VoIP audio quality to that of conventional landlines, and the results are quite surprising.

To test call quality and remove human bias, Keynote Systems set up automated machines nearly 3,000 miles apart call one another 125,000 times throughout the month of August, play a 30 second clip, and let an audio analyzer compare the results.

VoIP hard / soft phones, digital cable VoIP phones, and traditional landline phones were all tested. They discovered that cable company-provided VoIP phones that utilized PacketCable -- an IP multimedia transmission system optimized for coax -- scored a whopping 4.24 MOS (mean opinion score), beating the 4.0 found in traditional phone networks. Granted, when comparing all VoIP offerings, outliers were found around 2.6 MOS, which is fairly unacceptable when a 3.2 MOS is considered the "minimum" for a decent-quality conversation.

In summary, landline phones scored second only to the mighty cable company VoIP offerings, while hard VoIP phones (like the ATS E6501) came in third, and "soft" services (Skype, for instance) were declared last.

While we've personally had good experiences with Gizmo, Skype and similar free internet calling alternatives, our ears certainly aren't sine wave decoders, so if you're thinking of tossing that old rotary dial telephone for something with a touch more clarity, you probably should give your cable company a call.