Soft phones can never replace all hardware IP phones

Intersection (DSCN0462),
originally uploaded by Li-Ji.

I was in a voice conference inside company Intranet using a soft phone in my Intel Core i5, 2G DRAM notebook. Unfortunately, I encountered voice loss several times during the conference. I noticed it might not be the problem of network QoS, because when voice loss happened again, my notebook was also busy accessing the hard drive, which is also 7200 rpm model.


General purpose PC is not good at QoS, especially for voice application

There are always some disk-demanding tasks running in the background, such as anti-virus software scanner. Even my notebook is great enough in performance (i5, 2G DRAM, 7200 rpm disk), the audio quality is still suffering in such moments.

I do not think PC venders would add some easy switch to slow down other tasks when soft phone is running, in the near future. Consumers expect PCs to be able to multitasking. If they found they cannot receive Emails while they are speaking on the phone software, it would become a really big problem.

Voice quality is more critical than you might expect

The worst thing is, I cannot ask the speaker to repeat my missed (but important) phrases. Because the limited time and so many participants were also in the conference, it would be very rude to make such request. I did record the conference in my local hard disk. However, the loss is still recorded as a loss. No way to recover those missing phrases!

PC is not an always-available platform

We have to reboot PC to complete its security updates from time to time. Most of these patches are not related to the soft phone we care about.

On the other hand, it is not energy efficient at all to keep a PC running only to make telephone service always available.

My Conclusion: Soft phones are only good for casual talk among two people

It would be easier to ask for a repeat only when two people are talking to each other. However, if you ask for repeat too many times, it is not a working communication because that is really annoying.

You must have dedicated hardware IP phone, if you do not want to repeat my pains!