The Phone Professor

Is Your Internet Connection Fast Enough for VoIP?

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:44:13 -0700

Are you thinking of ditching your old wireline telephone and going exclusively with a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone, sometimes called an Internet phone? Your Internet service provider needs to meet certain requirements. One is raw bandwidth--the carrying power of your uplink and downlink. Be careful here--often what is advertised is the downlink speed--sometimes the uplink speed is much slower.

An Internet phone will require about 90 Kbps (kilo bits per second) both up and down. If your broadband link is faster than this, you may be ok on the bandwidth front. But note--if your link isn't much faster, and another person in your household who is sharing the line with you starts a download, for example a song for an iPod, this can cause voice quality issues, including stuttering and occasionally completely dropping the call.

But there's more. In addition to measuring bandwidth, one also needs to know the latency. The latency is how long it

Viack Web Conferencing Capability

Wed, 10 May 2006 07:23:25 -0700

You've heard about Internet phones, right? There's everything from Skype, which allows you to talk to someone halfway around the world using your PC for free, to services such as AT&T CallVantage, which uses your broadband but allows you to use your regular phone handset and gives you a telephone number anyone can call. Well, there's another way to talk. Are you old enough to remember Picturephone? (I'm dating myself.) It's a service that AT&T tried to offer back in the 1950s, but technical issues got in the way.

No more! Web conferencing with audio and video is here! Several vendors offer this service. One is Viack, a 100-person company with offices in Redmond, Washington (sound familiar?), Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. Their service, at $95/month per concurrent conference user (list price--they can negotiate discounts depending on how much business you offer them) offers audio, video (using your webcam), shared whiteboards, screen sharing, and some limited collaborative capabilities.

Purpose of this Site

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:39:01 -0700

Ever wondered about phone service? It used to be so simple! Just talk to the phone company and get a phone. Not anymore! There are dozens of options, from cellular and internet phones to the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS, and yes that's an industry acronym). The purpose of this site is to provide straightforward talk about phones. All types of phones.