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What are the Pitfalls of VoIP? VoIP has brought down the rates for long distance including local calling so that many more people are trading in their PSTN telephones for spanking new digital VoIP phones. Since the is a new market there are many companies engaged in furious competition. the brings more services including lower costs to a greater number of people every year. However, while there are several advantages to VoIP telephones in terms of lower costs including better features, there are the pitfalls of VoIP that need to be considered by everyone thinking of switching over to VoIP. One pertaining to the disadvantages of VoIP is that there should often be delays in hearing from the other end making conversation difficult or confusing at the time there are echoes. These problems are noticeably absent from PSTN telephones. What happens in a VoIP telephone is that at the time you speak, your voice is taken as digital data that is compressed before it is sent over the internet. the compressed packet then reaches the other end including needs to be decompressed including converted back into sound waves. What happens is that sometimes because of a slow processor or due to insufficient internet bandwidth, the compression or transmission (or both) should result in delays. In the worst of cases it should even result in packet loss resulting in a particular information gap where what you say never reaches the other end. The typical delay in information processing in a PSTN phone is 10 milliseconds under most conditions. at the time a VoIP phone goes wrong, that delay should increase to a staggering 400 milliseconds. This sort of problem does not matter for the casual user who is using a free service (not paying a monthly charge to a VoIP telephone company) including the nature pertaining to the calls is not critical, as it will be for a business. The problem reaches intolerable proportions at the time corporations (or even a small group of people) rely on VoIP for their business. Since most corporate networks operate behind a firewall for security reasons, 1 pertaining to the problems with VoIP is that, at present, they are not too friendly with firewalls. Another problem with using 1 broadband connection for multiple users with VoIP features is that there is absolutely no way to determine which user gets how much bandwidth. the makes it impossible to know the exact requirements in terms of bandwidth versus number of users. Most of these problems occur only under 2 circumstances. at the time the internet connection is too slow (there is absolutely no point in using VoIP if you use a dialup connection, you need a broadband connection at a minimum) or there are too many users sharing 1 broadband connection while operating from behind a firewall. These are merely technical limitations that most VoIP providers are confident to solve in the neat future.
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