Don’t get me wrong, I love Skype. It’s saved me a fortune, and is way more convenient than the alternatives.
But sometimes it lets me down. Yesterday, I was expecting an important SkypeIn call at 4pm. Never came. I was online, for sure. Finished work after 5pm.
This morning when I log on at 3am (hello jetlag), I get the voicemail from that person — timed at 4.15pm yesterday. So it never rang, and I didn’t get notification of the voicemail. Annoying.
I’ve also had problems with conference call quality at times. SkypeOut isn’t as good as BT’s VoIP voice quality. SkypeIn is generally pretty good though.
What this is telling me is that the field is wide open for competition in the small-medium business space. And a telco brand could be just as good as an Internet one. I don’t mind paying for business-class quality — I just need something that works at a reasonable price. There are additional feature like web conferencing (synchronised Powerpoint, desktop sharing) that need to be in there too.
PS - Downloaded Sightspeed this morning. Looks like a nice product, but they make the users jump through far too many hoops to get going.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 03:48 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/819.
Hey you should try voipstunt. It's a European company, but i think you can get their software from their website (draw-back is that it's download instead of webbased n I personally hate downloads because I think they mess up my system).
Also do you know of any academic paper that compares voip voice solutions to circuit switched which states which is more effective aside for pricing and then that factors in price in the comparism.
We would be setting up a website for small business very soon n presumably it should solve this problem. You can look up my blog at my website occasionally for when we would lunch.
Have a good one.
Posted by: at November 18, 2006 06:17 AM