Hard To Beat POTS

In case you're wondering, POTS refers to "plain old telephone service." You know, the copper wires that we all used for communication for a century or so. Alexander Graham Bell definitely knew what he was doing, and it has become hard to improve upon the simplicity of a direct copper connection.

What gets all the attention these days is VoIP. This is "voice over internet protocol" that chops up the stream of your voice and then sends the packets over the internet to be reassembled at the destination. This is the digital telephone service that is sold by companies such as Vonage and AT&T CallVantage. It also is the basis of voice chat over IM protocols like Google Talk and Skype. While these are affordable options, and they get the extras right, such as CallerID and call forwarding, they tend to miss on the basics. More specifically, voice quality can suffer because of network traffic congestion (locally because of what else your internet connection is doing), and also 911 location services probably won't be able to find you (e911 attempts to fix this but it has mixed results and shouldn't be trusted when you're choking and can't talk).

Aside from the problem with 911, VoIP often falls short on voice quality. This is because the packets of voice may not arrive at the destination in the correct order. Think about when you watch a video on the internet; there are often stutters and buffering issues. Well, the same thing can happen with VoIP, but when you're trying to have a conversation it gets real old, real fast. While it may be fine for talking to a relative on the other side of the country, it's probably not the best way to seal the big deal for your business as your voice drops out. Your neighbors running a BitTorrent server can definitely screw up your phone call, especially if you both have your internet from your cable company.

By me, there are two other options. These are Optimum Online phone service, and Verizon Fios phone. While not as affordable as Vonage, they both do provide one advantage to a pure VoIP service (I was gonna say connection, but service is more accurate due to the nature of packets wandering around the internet). In both cases they are digital phone services. What you're getting is that unlike VoIP, some priority is given to the voice communication, so that a steady stream of data can be exchanged with no dropouts. In the case of Fios, reportedly voice gets its own frequency of light in the fiber cable so that it doesn't compete with the rest of the data to get to its destination.

I often hear the phrase "cell phone quality," to describe these new digital phone services. I've had a cell phone for almost a decade now, and it's definitely been varying quality. I remember my first cell phone, with AT&T service (way before it was Cingular), and it would wander connections between analog and digital towers. While the digital sounded clearer, the analog got dropped less and sounded more realistic so I can't say which was really better. Due to increasing numbers of users on a limited number of towers, cell phones are all digital now, but the signal dropouts remain.

I see a parallel to our home phone service. While we move from analog (POTS) to newer digital VoIP systems, while we gain capabilities, and in some cases affordability, I'm not sure that the core service, namely voice transmission, is really improving. At any rate, it probably won't matter because over the next decade the future of the telephone is clearly on the internet.

Jonas