potpourri (Re: Clearwire May Block VoIP Competitors )

Thu Mar 31 19:16:42 UTC 2005

On 31 mars 2005, at 12:18, Paul Vixie wrote:

> ...all kinds of things that nobody outside the POTS empire actually
> cares about.  folks just want to talk.  cell-quality voice is fine.

When we first started playing with voice over IP at CLEAR in New 
Zealand in the mid-to-late 1990s, we found that there was a wide 
variety of call quality that was acceptable to users, far down below 
the "minimum acceptable" voice standard defined by the ITU (and, 
subjectively, much worse than GSM). We ran packets across all kinds of 
deliberately-broken networks in order to see how people coped with it.

The important thing, we found, was that the quality had to be 
consistent in order for people to be able to use it.

It didn't matter so much that the quality was nasty, as long as it was 
consistently nasty.

Joe