Voice Over IP Rates - Cost vs. Quality
It was only a matter of time before all the competition over providing the best voice over IP rates turned into a contest of quality more than cost. You’re paying cheap fees for IP telephony service, but can you use it anytime you want without getting annoyed at the poor voice quality?
Voice-over-Internet Protocol is, in essence, a cheap service as compared to traditional telephony. I mean, that is its very reason for being, isn’t it? Cost-efficiency?
But given the number of quality providers out there with affordable prices, there’s really no reason to settle for less.
If you go to a typical voice over IP provider’s website nowadays you’ll notice how they try to offer you a rate schedule that will probably hit your budget no matter what it is.
What’s more, they will also offer you a host of voice over IP solutions that can help you maximize their service even as you keep fees down, such as a SIP Registrar or Gatekeeper, Accounting/Expense Reports, Batch Statistics, etc.
Of course, you will have to pay for all these bells and whistles. But if you look around a bit, you can find free downloads for some really useful tools, although probably not all from the same website.
One of the coolest tools I think is the voice over IP bandwidth and quality calculator, such as the one you can download from http://www.voiptroubleshooter.com/diagnosis/emodel.html.
With it you can actually calculate the bandwidth you need and your listening quality given a certain codec. If the calculator is in Javascript, you will have to make your browser compatible by enabling it in your browser.
