Quality vs Cost

Nothing is free, it's an old saying and I fully believe in it. In the VoIP world, it is more true than ever. VoIP is a revolutionary technology; it has taken the high cost of entry of the POTS world and made it dirt cheap. Unfortunately, the dirt cheap idea seems to be taking over and the quality and availability we used to expect is falling by the wayside.

I have very high expectations of computers and technology. I switched to Debian GNU/Linux in 1995 and since then I've learned how stable things can (and should) be. A reboot should happen to upgrade the very core of the operating system, a hardware upgrade or a power failure. Anytime other than that and something or someone has failed to do their job properly. When I am on the phone, I expect high quality audio and a connection that stays connected. Why the world is starting to accept crap from telco's is beyond me. What happened to the 5 9's? (For those of you keeping track, that is about 5 minutes a year that your phone can be unavailable, whether you are on it or not).

Granted, anyone who has really worked with SIP will acknowledge it has some fatal shortcomings, so perhaps that is contributing to the degrading service quality we're seeing in the telephoney world. I don't think that is the sole cause. Honestly, I put a lot of the blame on the consumer. We don't vote with our dollars enough. For some providers, the cost of monitoring their trunks appears to outweigh the loss of revenue from when links go down. I find it incomprehensible, but with the focus so much on cost, quality gets the shaft.

I hope the pendulum starts to swing the other way, and customers actually get up and leave a telco that is failing to provide a quality connection. The nice thing about capitalism is that, at least in theory, the consumer market can punish those companies that fail to meet expectations. Hopefully the market will weed out the providers that charge $0.001 less per minute for about half the quality and availability. If that happens, those of us trying to provide the service we'd like to use ourselves can continue to do so.