Voip Test (Please Help)

[edcarden]

I'm from Canada, planning to move to Chiang Mai, and I'm trying to determine whether I should stick with my VoIP provider, who offers great rates but does not have a server centre in Asia.

The closest server centre they have is in London, UK.

Could someone in Thailand, with a good internet connection, open a command prompt window and type ping london. voip. ms (without the spaces after the dots)

Afterwards, please tell me the average round-trip time that you obtain.

Thank you in advance!

P.S. If I can help you in any way, please let me know!

Edited June 8, 2012 by edcarden

[bangkockney]

366ms

TOT 12 MB pathum thani (I can stream HD content on BBC iplayer)

[Darrel]

Av. 255

SophonBB (CAT) 4Mbits.

Connections to London are not very good from here. Some other parts of Europe are marginally better.

That said, I have VOIP servers in Europe and the UK, and both work fine.

[bob4you]

I use smartvoip.com free calls to Canada and US and many European countries

[Sydneycraig]

I use Skype usually with video and works just fine . In Phuket

[WilliaminBKK]

Get a Magic Jack, allows you to set up a Canadian number in most Provinces and the calls are free to and from Canada and your friends can call your local CDN number, I find the quality superior to Skype (and I love skype) you can pick one up at Best Buy in Canada they have two types one you plug into your computer and the other into your router. $50-$80 and your done for a free year of inbound/outbound calls, the following year $20-$40 depending on the model.

[Darrel]

$50-$80 and your done for a free year of inbound/outbound calls, the following year $20-$40 depending on the model.

Sounds expensive to me.

Why should I pay so much for something I can get for much less?

[Guest]

I have 380ms average on CAT CMDA mobile network to London and 370ms to Toronto.voip.ms. Not perfect but still pretty ok for VoIP.

If you are calling from Thailand to Canada, the service center (or better voip server / break out point) should be in Canada as you are likely call to your home country, not London.

In your case, the only benefit of having an voip server in Asia would be if the voip.ms would have dedicated bandwidth between their datacenters or better peering partners on the Internet.

[Guest]

$50-$80 and your done for a free year of inbound/outbound calls, the following year $20-$40 depending on the model.

Sounds expensive to me.

Why should I pay so much for something I can get for much less?

Simplicity and ease of usage? Techies want to make their own servers, but for not so technical people only thing that matters is that the service works and it's easy to use and setup.

[WilliaminBKK]

$50-$80 and your done for a free year of inbound/outbound calls, the following year $20-$40 depending on the model.

Sounds expensive to me.

Why should I pay so much for something I can get for much less?

The quality is superior and you can use a proper telephone. Skype doesn't offer an inbound Canadian phone number for friends and family to call you with a local CDN number. I don't know what the OP is referring to about is current VOIP but if it is Vonage/telus it is $30 a month so for me it is a deal. The initial set up is for buying the actual unit and then a fee to obtain a number for Canada, it is free for US subscribers I believe, so all in all for me it is not expensive at all.

Worth a read

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/520689-magic-jack-plus/

Edited June 9, 2012 by WilliaminBKK

[Darrel]

Simplicity and ease of usage? Techies want to make their own servers, but for not so technical people only thing that matters is that the service works and it's easy to use and setup.

I dont make servers. I just use commercial ones. But they dont cost me so much.

[Darrel]

The quality is superior and you can use a proper telephone. Skype doesn't offer an inbound Canadian phone number for friends and family to call you with a local CDN number.

I dont use Skype much but I do use VOIP. It works on my Android mobile phone for free so I dont need another telephone. Quality is fine.

I pay the equivalent of 60B/month for a package of largely unlimited calls to 40 countries and a free UK DID. I also have another completely free UK DID and also a European DID that I pay 1000B (equiv) per year for (thinking of ditching this last at some point as it is too expensive, but at the moment I still have a couple of people who call me on it). All three accounts run on my Android phone simultaneously.

So MagicJack seems very expensive to me.

[CP3]

I am using some provider from europe with g711 codec as first priorty. You won't feel the difference.

[2008bangkok]

The quality is superior and you can use a proper telephone. Skype doesn't offer an inbound Canadian phone number for friends and family to call you with a local CDN number.

I dont use Skype much but I do use VOIP. It works on my Android mobile phone for free so I dont need another telephone. Quality is fine.

I pay the equivalent of 60B/month for a package of largely unlimited calls to 40 countries and a free UK DID. I also have another completely free UK DID and also a European DID that I pay 1000B (equiv) per year for (thinking of ditching this last at some point as it is too expensive, but at the moment I still have a couple of people who call me on it). All three accounts run on my Android phone simultaneously.

So MagicJack seems very expensive to me.

What provide are you using, seems like a great deal, care to share...

[Darrel]

OVH

[edcarden]

Wow, I guess my thaivisa account isn't enabled for e-mail notifications, I had not idea this thread had taken off, thanks so much everyone!

According to the voip.ms wiki, a latency of 150 ms is barely noticeable, while anything above 300 ms is unacceptable.

They do mention that with some routers, you have Quality Of Service (QOS) settings that you can tweak, to favour bandwidth for VoIP calls. However, that will not influence the latency between my router and the server centre, which means the quality of my voice still risks being very bad from the numbers that have been reported.

That's too bad, because their service within Canada is amazing and dirt cheap ($1/month for the number + $0.01/minute, incl. voicemail-to-email service, multiple simultaneous registrations, advanced interface).

If by any chance anyone uses voip.ms in Thailand with no problem, let me know.

Meanwhile, I'll start looking at smartvoip.com and another options

[edcarden]

I use Skype usually with video and works just fine . In Phuket

Unfortunately, Skype does yet offer any Canadian phone numbers that you can tie to your account.

Skype calls are great, but my clients are not often around a computer, so I really want them to be able to reach me by phone at any time. Plus it would be great to offer friends & family a local number for them to reach me.

[edcarden]

Get a Magic Jack, allows you to set up a Canadian number in most Provinces and the calls are free to and from Canada and your friends can call your local CDN number, I find the quality superior to Skype (and I love skype) you can pick one up at Best Buy in Canada they have two types one you plug into your computer and the other into your router. $50-$80 and your done for a free year of inbound/outbound calls, the following year $20-$40 depending on the model.

Yes, I've seen good reviews for MagicJack, and I may ultimately decide to go that route if I really can't find anything else of worth quality. However, there's two things that make me want to search for other options.

1. I prefer using softphone applications instead of actual physical phones. The open-source application I currently use, Jitsi, has more features and is just more convenient for me than any phone I would hook up to MagicJack. For example, Jitsi syncs with my Google contacts (which are the same contacts in my smartphone), has a record button, and it is also a chat client for Gtalk. On top of that, I can also register with my Sipdroid app on my smartphone, so that I can answer calls on my cell when I'm away from my computer.
   
2. $50 to $80 annually, + $10 for a canadian number, is actually expensive compared to what most VoIP Pay-as-you-Go plans offer.
   

Vonage is an excellent VoIP provider, but it is geared towards people who are not technical, which is why their plans are as pricey as they are.

[edcarden]

I am using some provider from europe with g711 codec as first priorty. You won't feel the difference.

Who is your provider?

[Darrel]

MagicJack is just a VOIP/POTS adaptor coupled to a VOIP service. As such it's not going to work any better or worse than any VOIP service, depending on your internet connection and where the servers/destination numbers are situated.

I don't really understand why people keep on about it as it is nothing special at all.

If you really want to use an old POTS phone with a VOIP service you can buy a Cisco/Linksys VOIP adaptor for very little and use the VOIP provider(s) of your choice. Personally I would rather use a proper VOIP phone than an adaptor as they work better, and indeed that's what I do for free with my Android mobile phone.

[CP3]

voipdiscount. Latency is above 200ms but still good

[Guest]

Wow, I guess my thaivisa account isn't enabled for e-mail notifications, I had not idea this thread had taken off, thanks so much everyone!

According to the voip.ms wiki, a latency of 150 ms is barely noticeable, while anything above 300 ms is unacceptable.

They do mention that with some routers, you have Quality Of Service (QOS) settings that you can tweak, to favour bandwidth for VoIP calls. However, that will not influence the latency between my router and the server centre, which means the quality of my voice still risks being very bad from the numbers that have been reported.

That's too bad, because their service within Canada is amazing and dirt cheap ($1/month for the number + $0.01/minute, incl. voicemail-to-email service, multiple simultaneous registrations, advanced interface).

If by any chance anyone uses voip.ms in Thailand with no problem, let me know.

Meanwhile, I'll start looking at smartvoip.com and another options

Rule of the thump: If it works, don't change it. If you are happy with your current VoIP provider, keep using it.

Distance between Thailand and Canada is about 13.000km, round trip 26.000km. Network cables will go for longer trip, so let's assume the ping round trip would be 30.000km. Speed of light in the vacuum is 300.000km/s. This equals to 100ms (0.1 seconds). Light slows on an matter, so let's say the speed in the fiber optic cables is 1/2 speed of the light in vacuum. Now we get already 200ms for the roundtrip. Then we add delays from all kinds of routers between these locations, etc.. For Voip there will be voip packet sampling rates, translating codec to another etc.

Each voip voice packet (RTP) will travel from Thailand to Canada when you are doing an call. Same thing with GSM and landline calls.

The distance effects to every call, GSM, landline and VoIP. This comes from the physics.

At the first you might notice that there is slight delay when calling to home from Thailand, but both parties will soon adapt to this. It's normally not so much.

For me, if I would now be moving from my home country to another, I would make sure that I have local (for you Canada) inbound phone number available, before I would move. This way your friends can call you with their normal mobile phones to an local Canadian number. When you first move, your friends are more likely to get an habit of calling to you. I setup my own local (Finnish) number years after I moved.. after the habit of calling each other was already gone.

[Guest]

MagicJack is just a VOIP/POTS adaptor coupled to a VOIP service. As such it's not going to work any better or worse than any VOIP service, depending on your internet connection and where the servers/destination numbers are situated.

I don't really understand why people keep on about it as it is nothing special at all.

If you really want to use an old POTS phone with a VOIP service you can buy a Cisco/Linksys VOIP adaptor for very little and use the VOIP provider(s) of your choice. Personally I would rather use a proper VOIP phone than an adaptor as they work better, and indeed that's what I do for free with my Android mobile phone.

It really is the simplicity of usage or better yet, simplicity of taking the service to ordinary home. I have not used their devices, but if I understood correctly they send an fully configured ATA to their customers, which the end users simply plug in. That is something that my mother would be able to do. Same thing with Skype - it just works (ok, nowdays Skype is pretty much unstable than before). These companies did their homework and spend a lots of work to make their products easy to use. Skype had been famous for it's ability to lure itself trough all kind of network obstacles.

For normal end user, setting up voip server names, ports, stun, proxies is just way over the head. For you and me that's where we can gain our control to make the service better. I personally want to know what is happening and why, but my mother - she just wishes to call her little boy every once in a while.. and expect everything to work well.

I have been part of mobile voip deployments for few Asian and European mobile operators. As I would love to believe in the human intelligence, the fact is when it comes to the computers/devices, non technology focused people simply refuse do anything for configuration, as they are afraid that the device would break up. We did OTA configurations and different kind of configuration applications, which helped.. but still were slightly clumsy. This was years ago.

The most complicated configuration, which can be left for the end user is setting up username and password. Companies which have understood this are able to go for mass markets. The companies which does not, will not

[Darrel]

It really is the simplicity of usage or better yet, simplicity of taking the service to ordinary home. I have not used their devices, but if I understood correctly they send an fully configured ATA to their customers, which the end users simply plug in. That is something that my mother would be able to do.

For normal end user, setting up voip server names, ports, stun, proxies is just way over the head.

There are really only three bits of information required to get VOIP working on a VOIP phone be it an Android mobile or a plug-in ethernet device. I have never had any trouble and I defy anyone not to get it working by following a few well-written instructions. And once configured the VOIP on my phone should work on most wifi networks in the world without any extra configuration or extra box to cart around. This seems a big advantage to me.

You are probably correct about the pre-configured box being desirable for some users, but in this respect the manufacturer is playing on people's illogical fears and desires rather like Apple does.

[henrypayne]

VoIP offers great advantages. I am developing an own softphone at the moment with an SDK, called Ozeki VoIP SIP SDK. Having an own application is also a good thing.