| reply to La Luna
Re: Vonage vs Lingo I have both vonage and lingo. I find lingo calls have better fidelity than vonage's, this in spite of lingo using a compressed codec, the g.729. I also find that calls from a lingo to vonage phone and vice versa tend to break up a bit. This I should expect because of the different codecs used by the 2 voip carriers. This is something that more and more people may well notice as voip usage expands.
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| said by ejrobinson:
I also find that calls from a lingo to vonage phone and vice versa tend to break up a bit. This I should expect because of the different codecs used by the 2 voip carriers. This is something that more and more people may well notice as voip usage expands.
I found Vonage -> Lingo and Lingo -> Vonage calls to be of poor quality as well. Something to consider if you're calling a lot of Vonage friends. |
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| reply to ejrobinson
I wish I could get Vonage out here in the 928 area -- cow country -- Prescott, Arizona. But I'll have to settle for getting three month's free service and unlimited calls to US, Canada and Western Europe with Lingo. Oh, well. [Sarcastic smile.]
ejrobinson brought up a point that is worth embellishing. The choice between the high-quality (G.711) and low-quality (G.729) codecs may boil down to the speed of your broadband connection. If you try to run G.711 with a 128kbps uplink, you may end up having enough dropped and discarded packets that the connection sounds worse than with G.729 over the same connection. Something like this happened to a friend with a home Vonage account. His voice quality went up when he switched to the lower-quality codec (see the logic?).
You might try running some tests using »testyourvoip.com and toggling between "Preserve Speech Quality" and "Conserve Bandwidth". Look at the detailed results when you connect to Boston, San Jose, London, etc. Conside the uplink and downling stats independently. Run the tests while there is no other network traffic going on, and no other apps besides your browser running on your computer. Should tell you a lot about what's going on.
Anyway, my 2¢.
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Bert Sierra • Tempered MicroDesigns • Prescott, AZ |
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| It is unfair and false to call the g.729 codec low quality. In fact, its quality is only slightly inferior to that of the g.711 codec. If it were low quality then neither packet8 nor lingo nor broadvox direct would be able to retain customers as they do. The g.729 has the advantage of performing satisfactorily when the upload speed is marginal, for one reason or another. The g.711 fails under such conditions.
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| I guess I should have more accurately referred to the codecs as 'high quality' and 'low bandwidth', which is how most VoIP providers appear to refer to them....
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Bert Sierra • Tempered MicroDesigns • Prescott, AZ |
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