GGoogle chat vs Skype

[Fernando Cassia]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 11:58, Michael Ekstrand <michael at elehack.net> wrote:
>
> * Call quality - Skype's call quality is somewhat better than Google's
> VoIP offerings in my experience.

That´s a popular myth. A SIP voip call goes computer-to-computer or
device-to-device over the IP cloud.

"Voip quality" was an issue ten years ago, not anymore, not only are
the internet backbone links much faster, but also the end user
connections were faster.

I started doing VOIP using services like Deltathree.com and Net2Phone
ten years ago, with a dial-up connection THAT was awful quality (more
like AM radio).

Nowadays, any SIP VOIP call gives you equal quality to a land line, on
any 256 KBPs or higher broadband link (in fact, voice calls rarely
user over 64K of bandwidth with modern codecs, but the extra data pipe
length just gives a comfort zone to know there will be no congestion
and delays...

In fact, I question the whole idea that "peer to peer" is useful or
even desirable for voice calls. Every additional hop (host) on an
internet connection adds delay, and delay is what kills voice
communications. So how on earth can a voice call passing through a
dozen "p2p nodes" be better than a direct pc-to-pc link using the
default route provided by the normal tcpip routing, than the extra
overhead of a P2P protocol added on top of it?.

Since the Skype protocol is propietary and unknown to the general
public, I seriously question there is actually any p2p going on for
actual voice packets. Perhaps for text chat and discovery (in other
words a distributed p2p directory), but for voice? doesn´t make any
sense to me.

FC