4 ms·

Just a little anecdote that’s relevant here. Around 10 years ago my girlfriend didn’t have wifi home yet (low tech family), so we spoke at night over landline,

Just a little anecdote that’s relevant here. Around 10 years ago my girlfriend didn’t have wifi home yet (low tech family), so we spoke at night over landline, as those calls were free. And it definitely did feel like what some people here are saying: you could hear everything with no delay or cuts at all, the whole call just felt like she was there next to me. They eventually setup wifi in their home, so we switched to VoIp calls, mainly so we wouldn’t block our families’ landlines for a couple hours every day. And the quality was so much worse... The delay sometimes would be so bad that we had this technique where one would slowly count down from 3 and then say “Now”! Then when the other heard Now they’d say Now too, and the first person could essentially count the seconds. This way we could “slow down” our conversation to accomodate for the multi-second delay, which (thinking back) was like our own protocol for dealing with signal delay!

csa 7y ago
I will go out on a limb and say that the issues you describe had more to do with your internet connection(s) than with VoiP. In the mid-2000s, I used Vonage (VoiP) from Japan to the US all the time. People were shocked because it sounded like I was right next to them. My grandmother actually thought I was bamboozling her by saying I was in Japan because she thought that there was no way it could be so clear. Granted, I was usually dialing my VoiP on a blistering fast internet connection (not in Tokyo, to be fair) to a POTS line in the US, but the connection was amazing. So I wonder how 10 years ago the VoiP-VoiP connection was so poor. Do you think it was basic internet speed (which the US has historically been behind other developed countries), or do you think it was something else?
- aurbano 7y ago
  Could very well be, she had a very basic plan (around 10Mbps), while I had a fiber plan on 200Mbps so maybe that was the issue. I can't recall how it was with other people though.

csa 7y ago

I will go out on a limb and say that the issues you describe had more to do with your internet connection(s) than with VoiP. In the mid-2000s, I used Vonage (VoiP) from Japan to the US all the time. People were shocked because it sounded like I was right next to them. My grandmother actually thought I was bamboozling her by saying I was in Japan because she thought that there was no way it could be so clear. Granted, I was usually dialing my VoiP on a blistering fast internet connection (not in Tokyo, to be fair) to a POTS line in the US, but the connection was amazing. So I wonder how 10 years ago the VoiP-VoiP connection was so poor. Do you think it was basic internet speed (which the US has historically been behind other developed countries), or do you think it was something else?

aurbano 7y ago
Could very well be, she had a very basic plan (around 10Mbps), while I had a fiber plan on 200Mbps so maybe that was the issue. I can't recall how it was with other people though.