Comments on: CNet Blogger Matt Asay on VoIP: “..it’s all rubbish.”

By: Garrett Smith

Garrett Smith — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:23:40 +0000

@Roderickm

Great point, one that is vastly misunderstood by most customers.

By: roderickm

roderickm — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:11:13 +0000

For readers that may not be as familiar with the many ways to deploy VoIP, it’s important to point out that Matt’s comments are criticisms of voice over the internet — not VoIP in general.

If the underlying IP network is unreliable, then packetized voice calls will be unreliable. For some, the internet is an acceptable transport for voice. But there’s no guarantee of reliability across internet networks.

There are many customers that enjoy the benefits of voice-data convergence on their LAN, but use dedicated circuits (T1 or POTS) to connect their business to the outside world. It’s easy to guarantee VoIP performance when you own the LAN infrastructure — no so on the hit-or-miss internet.

Rod Montgomery
Director of Services, Digium, Inc.

By: randulo

randulo — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:57:07 +0000

Although there is some truth to voip sometimes being rubbish, depending on many factors, I’m surprised this common mistake of talking about saving money enters into it.
VoIP is *not* about saving money – it least it hasn’t been for me since Dialpad (aka “sir, you’re breaking up”) and FWD (aka “is FWD down?”).
This said, a few of us who love VoIP for what it really brings to the mix in small business, including Dan York, Michael Graves and myself have all posted about how we retain POTS lines I need at least one per location for DSL anyway, so why not have a copper pair number for emergencies, including power outage?

By: VoIP Lover

VoIP Lover — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:38:45 +0000

Cory, Matt is just getting negative attention stunt for getting more traffic on his blog. Any upcoming technology is always on its development stage…everyday, every minute.

I request just to ignore this kind of NAY SAYERS….

By: Garrett Smith

Garrett Smith — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:36:13 +0000

Cory, it seems that Matt is a flip-flopper. An industry outsider who merely writes based on the trends of the day…which are set by those who actually know what is going on (the primary reason I do not read sites like CNET).

I suspect that last weeks slew of posts (one of which I wrote) about the less than impressive subscriber numbers from the more well known business VoIP numbers reported.

I don’t think VoIP is rubbish (obviously), but I do think that it is definitely not growing and progressing as quickly as many would like. At the end of the day, we have probably hit a temporary plateau…as new customer types take a look at the technology, most have had to been a little slow to respond to the changing demands.