[96607] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: RTT from NY to New Delhi?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Sprunk)
Wed May 16 11:10:18 2007
From: "Stephen Sprunk" <stephen@sprunk.org>
To: "Tim Franklin" <tim@pelican.org>, "Joe Maimon" <jmaimon@ttec.com>
Cc: "North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes" <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 10:03:42 -0500
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Thus spake "Tim Franklin" <tim@pelican.org>
> Going east from NY, you'd add 70 or 80ms to that - and a quick
> look suggests routes going west instead. (Test from home to .IN
> NS goes London -> NY -> West Coast -> Singtel -> India, for
> ~370ms)
>
> It's starting to head a bit towards walkie-talkie mode for VoIP,
> but not too bad other than that...
You'd be surprised what people are willing to accept when the alternatives
are worse. I had a customer install VSAT in India just so they could use IP
phones -- and their only gateway was in the US. Apparently the audio
quality and reliability of the PTT was so bad that they were willing to
_stand in line_ to use the two IP phones there to make calls, even with the
walkie-talkie effect in full force. It was cheaper too, despite the
outrageous cost of VSAT bandwidth.
US telcos and engineers tend to overestimate the importance of audio quality
and reliability on VoIP; we have an entire generation of people now who have
been trained by wireless carriers to _expect_ to pay through the nose for
bad quality. VoIP across the Internet, even with no QoS at all, looks great
in comparison because it's cheaper and sounds better.
S
Stephen Sprunk "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723 are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS --Isaac Asimov
