Vonage Playing the Messaging Game

Vonage is the company that I first tried for VoIP. I left, largely because CallVantage simply sounded better. At the end of the day Vonage didn't sound good enough to be business grade, but AT&T's product was.

Now with the pending mothballing of CallVantage Vonage remains as the mass market alternative that many people will know of, even though many VoIP providers remain active and are growing.

Garrett Smith over at Smith On VoIP is touting the new Vonage, based on their new campaign to SOUND BETTER and to play on the angle of HD Voice, something my agency pushed as the key selling point over a year ago for VAPPS' High Definition Conferencing (and obviously it worked) as Citrix OnLine snapped them up and since then Skype and others have jumped on the HD bandwagon.

So bully for Vonage if Garrett's understanding is true about Vonage going HD voice. HOWEVER....HD voice will only work if both networks are using the same HD codecs or transcoding between the various flavors. This largely means calls between Vonage customers could sound better, but calls to all the rest of the world's numbers more than likely will not.

This inconsistency won't be known very easily by the mass market consumer. They just want a predictable monthly phone bill. So for those who care, HD matters. To those who don't, they likely simply desire High Quality voice, something Vonage failed in the past to deliver on, and something they can fix and deliver. If the do, then Vonage would have a good shot at picking up many of the AT&T CallVantage customers. At that point the difference in experience may take hold though, as Vonage, never known for their customer service or customer friendliness, may find they have customers who are used to a more "white glove" service environment and not opt in their direction if all calls don't sound as good as those over CallVantage did.

P.S. Codecs from client GIPS (Global IP Solutions) and the new SILK codec from Skype will be the winners here.

Comments

[dean.collins]

The discussion about voip carriers offering HD voice service was raised about a year ago in an Asterisk User Group conference.

The voip carriers involved basically stated not interested in offering it.

To this day it bugs me that my free skype calls are better quality than the 3 voip services i pay monthly fees for.

I noticed that Jeff Pulver is trying to push for HD voice again http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/008916.html hopefully this will be the inertia thats required to kick this off.

I personally dont understand why voip carriers aren't using this to convince more customers to join them away from the legacy carriers who cant compete without way more effort and costs - seems like a winning marketing strategy to me.

Cheers,
Dean Collins
www.Cognation.net

[Marc Abrams]

Andy:

To get the full benefit of HD voice, both parties and the network need to be optimized for HD and use the same codecs, etc. However, In my testing several years ago using Broadcom's Broadvoice/32 on one end of the call and a PSTN phone on the other, there was very noticeable improvement and the PSTN users could actually hear the difference in blind tests.

Anyplace you upgrade the equipment or network for or to HD voice, there will be some audible improvement, but some changes will be much more noticeable.

marc.