Keynote: VoIP audio "merely tolerable"

Releasing its sixth study on VoIP service providers in three years, Keynote Competitive Research (KCR) says audio quality hasn't improved since the last go-round in April 2007. Reliability, however, is improving.

KCR, the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, measured a mix of nine voice services -- landline service provider AT&T; VoIP providers AT&T CallVantage, Lingo, Packet8, EarthLink, trueVoice, Verizon's VoiceWing and Vonage; and cable Comcast Digital Voice and Time Warner Digital Phone services.

Findings of the study indicate that digital providers are outpacing the competition with audio quality, an interesting finding where VoIP audio is deemed as "merely tolerable" and a shift from the previous study where landline providers prevailed. In the published rankings, Comcast Digital Voice scored 901 performance points, followed by Verizon's VoiceWing service at 609 points and AT&T's land line service at 506 points.

Only one of the VoIP providers in the study failed to provide dial done 99.9 percent of the time or better and there's also one VoIP provider out there that requires two seconds more to set up a call than anyone else.

Eight out of the nine providers have improved their call completion rates since the previous study.

For reliability, AT&T landline line service ranks at number 1 with 996 points, but Time Warner Digital Phone pulled 926 points, followed by Verizon's VoiceWing service at 872 points.

For more:
- Visit Keynote's website for the press release [1].