Is VOIP quality getting worse?

My colleague Paul Gilbert has, for some time, been warning about the perils of 'real time' traffic being placed on IP Networks. He's got some backing from Om Malik - who questions whether VOIP quality is getting worse.



According to Brixnet, which monitors such things, the rapid growth of peer-to-peer applications (such as Bittorent - used to download videos, music and everything else - now accounts for perhaps more than 25% of all public IP traffic) is causing your VOIP packets to have a lot more competition at each and every "hop". (A useful reminder of how routers work is found here, at Verizon's Learning Center.)

In the circuit world, it's all or none. You either get a circuit, in which case you can count on hearing a pin drop from thousands of miles away. In VOIP, you don't get a fast-busy, but you can get degradation of service due to underlying infrastructure issues.

No wonder we're seeing the big carriers invest so much in Fiber to the Premises ... and no wonder we're seeing battles rage over "Net Neutrality"...