[lug] VoIP: T-Mobile @Home

[Aaron Nichols]

I've used voip in my home exclusively for a year now and although not
through T-Mobile, I have tried a few different providers.

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Gary Hodges <Gary.Hodges at noaa.gov> wrote:

>
> The hang ups, questions and concerns:
> 1.  Does VoIP really sound as good as POTS?


When it's working well it does sound just fine. This depends heavily on your
Internet connection quality (latency, jitter), your equipment, the codec
being used, and the quality of your voip provider. In my experience it works
as well as POTS 90+% of the time and when it doesn't, it's either a short
period of strange audio or the call goes completely south and you have to
re-start the call (this is rare). I have found the issues tolerable given
the cost savings but my experience has not been flawless. Note that I also
use very inexpensive voip providers and generally configure my own equipment
so some of this may be my own fault.

>
> 2.  Are the 911 issues really solved?  With T-Mobile you register your
> address on-line, and presumably that info is available to emergency
> people during 911 calls.  Can I trust this?


The problem with 911 is that hopefully none of us get to test it out very
often. Perhaps others can comment, but I have E911 on my service and have
registered the address which is supposed to pop up @ the 911 call center
when I call. I have not tested it, I do not know if you can trust it. Keep
your cellphone programmed with your local police as backup because if the
power is out or your Internet is down your voip line may not be an option
anyhow.


>
> 3.  Any chance of Comcast (my broadband provider) giving me one of those
> heavy usage warnings?  I see an article or two about Comcast throttling
> third party VoIP technologies.  Is this seemingly good deal from
> T-Mobile doomed to failure?


Not likely - I think the limits imposed are pretty liberal - like 250gig /
month. You'd have to have the gift of gab and a lot of friends willing to
listen to hit that limit due to voip calls. I believe G.711, a common high
quality codec, can consume 64kbits/sec and on lower quality codecs it's as
low as 8kbits/sec.

You may want to ask T-Mobile what your options are for terminating the
service if it doesn't work out. Ideally, you could connect the most commonly
used phone to the new voip service for a month or two and try it out - see
how it works for you. If things seem to be up to your standards then you
could terminate the pots phone. It costs a little more, but if you use the
phone a lot and are very selective about the quality of your calls you may
not find voip as a workable solution.

Aaron
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