[bsaunder]

Old fashioned PSTN lines would secure the full bandwidth needed end-to-end when the original call was established (which was really in efficient from a data utilization perspective).

With VoIP you are:

1. Beholden to the bandwidth/latency issues of the crappiest link in your end-to-end path.

2. Intentional use of poorer quality codecs (by your ISP and/or VoIP software to reduce aggregate bandwidth use). Ironically this can be inverted, there are codecs that sound much better than PSTN calls (but use more bandwidth).

[snuxoll]

> 2. Intentional use of poorer quality codecs (by your ISP and/or VoIP software to reduce aggregate bandwidth use). Ironically this can be inverted, there are codecs that sound much better than PSTN calls (but use more bandwidth).

I mean, people use G.729 for example because, yes, it is more efficient than G.711. But ultimately, if you want to communicate with the PSTN those are your only two choices and it's easier to just say "G.729 for everything" instead of wasting processing time on the server re-encoding everything that goes off the network.

You want better codecs? Bitch at the phone companies who have drug their feet on implementing G.722 while more and more IP phones and mobile devices continue to add support for wideband audio.