Got this offer in my inbox last week:
Stay in touch for even less with BT Communicator Offers
As a BT Communicator user, you’re part of an ever growing community of over 1.5 million people. [I think they mean they’ve foisted 1.5m bundled downloads with Yahoo!’s IM client, regardless of whether you use it or not.]
With BT Communicator’s discounted call rates to 35 international destinations, it’s never been cheaper to stay in touch with friends and family – wherever they are.
New low international call rates with BT Communicator
* No call charges to Australia for up to an hour** until September 30th 2005
* Calls to the USA and Canada lasting up to an hour** now capped at only 25p until March 30th 2006 or just 1.5p per minute
* Calls to South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe lasting up to an hour** now capped at £1.50 until November 30th 2005 or just 5p per minute
* Rates to selected EU destinations starting at 2p per minute
Now, those rates may be 100% more expensive than Skype’s, but that’s not the point. The standard BT daytime rate to the USA is an eye-watering 15p/minute, or about US$0.25. So to compete with the VoIP alternative, they’ve just reduced their prices by 90%.
See those little asterisks? Curious as to the terms? Here’s the kicker:
You must be an existing BT PSTN residential customer.
Which means you must pay £10.50 a month to have a standard BT landline, whether you want it or not.
To the extent that people value emergency service, back-up connectivity, and PSTN call quality, they’ll keep on paying. And that’s bad news for Skype. Because there’s not a whole lot stopping BT from dropping their prices further and further; sacrifice the PSTN application revenue to capture the sticky connectivity revenue. They’ve got an army of lawyers and accouuntants who can doubtless justify pretty much any pricing structure as being cost-based, when costs are now largely a figment of the interconnect contract and unrelated to any real network costs.
Skype’s only way out is to deploy the stupid network to its utmost: increase the nummber of features compared to PSTN telephony, and fast. Their client is still years ahead of the clunky BT/Yahoo offering in all other respects.
This last week I’ve used both SkypeOut and BT Communicator. Both were disappointing. The call I made on SkypeOut had terrible audio quality. The DTMF tones didn’t work with the IVR system I was calling. So whilst Skype represents “free Internet telephony that just works”, it has a downside of being “cheap PSTN telephony that works only sometimes”.
BT was barely better when calling the same number. The audio quality was good — BT’s client seems to be a consistent winner on this one. But the DTMF tones still didn’t work. That meant I couldn’t complete the transaction. A failure is a failure is a failure. Doesn’t matter how.
The BT experience, as well as Skype’s normally excellent on-net audio, tell us that this isn’t a problem that has to wait for some central telco QoS solution like IMS. It’s entirely happening inside my PC and their gateways. It’s within Skype and BT’s control to fix it.
It seems to be time for the VoIP/PSTN providers to stop competing on price and start competing on customer experience.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:12 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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http://saunderslog.com/?p=1735 from Alec Saunders .LOG
Vis a vis BT’s PSTN business, Martin Geddes says:
To the extent that people value emergency service, back-up connectivity, and PSTN call quality, they’ll keep on paying. And that’s bad news for Skype. Because there’s not a wh...
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I've always agreed that quality is of the most important factor. How does Skype add QoS to their gateways? Aren't these leased from Level3 and other inter-carriers?
Posted by: at August 22, 2005 05:13 PMMartin says that on-net quality is good. He also suggests thet the only difference is the codec. So the resellers' gateways need to be upgraded to include iSAC from GIPS. I suspect that licensing requirements might come in the way. Alternatively, they can use Speex. I understand that BT Communicator, via Yahoo via Xten uses it. It is high time gateway vendors upgrade their products to include one or more wideband codecs.
Posted by: at August 23, 2005 02:04 AMI believe it's more involved than just codecs. iLBC would be the best choice, because it is free narrowband.
I believe there exists jitter, latency and dropped packets at the gateway that don't get resolved. If this is the case, then gateways need a solution to recreate the signal before transporting it onto the PSTN.
Posted by: at August 23, 2005 03:11 AMCorrection, iLBC isn't the correct codec. It still needs the current G codecs since it not packet-based once it gets on the PSTN. A circuit-based codec will do the job.
Posted by: at August 23, 2005 03:16 AMiLBC is good (better than any narrow-band G.* codec other than G.711, which is not compressed). It's still narrow-band (which is fine for PSTN; wideband gets you very little once you transition to PSTN).
The real problem is lack of out-of-band DTMF. RFC2833 (on RTP streams, which would include BT but not Skype) encodes DTMF as separate packets so the codec doesn't affect the quality of the tones. DTMF rarely will survive a compressed speech codec intact. Often it won't be intact enough to run an IVR (depends on the IVR, though).
It's possible that both SkypeOut and BT were trying to use 2833, but the outbound gateway didn't support it. That's very unlikely.
Posted by: at August 23, 2005 04:01 PMDrifting slightly off the subject somewhat...Does anyone know whether implementing QoS on a broadband router would have any affect on improving the voice quality on say, a skype-to-skype call? If so what parameters would be used?
Posted by: at April 13, 2006 06:55 PM