Softphone and T-Mobile Not Ready for Prime Time

This afternoon I was in a Starbucks where the hotspot operator is T-Mobile. Offering full T-1's I figured with bad cell reception in the coffee shop, that it would be a perfect time for me to use my Vonage softphone and the Clarysis handset.

What a dissaster. Even with the excellent bandwidth at Starbucks that is good enough to watch streaming media at 300k, the voice quality was horrible. Packet loss, jitter, drop outs. It had nothing to do with my 3.0 ghz PIV Acer with a Windows Media Center quality sound card.

My view is that it comes down to the network. T-Mobile does IP over ATM and somehow it appears that Vonage and that network just doesn't work. I'll try this at other hotspot locations and report from time to time.