VoIP on Windows is like POTS on crack

Relying on a soft client running on Windows as my sole resource for making important calls has been a recipe for disaster. Plain old telephone service may be old fashioned, but you know what? With POTS, 99% of the time the phone just works. The same can't be said for my current voice over IP setup, which I am relying on in my new office.

I am in my third week of a pilot VoIP project. My setup now includes a Plantronics cordless headset in conjunction with Siemens "soft phone" client software on my laptop.

One issue is call quality. It's either great or it just plain sucks.

Just now as I hung up on a call, I asked the person: "Can you hear me ok?" "Yes, but you sound a bit clipped," came the reply. Often, my VoIP call quality is excellent. At other times it's an annoyance to me and the person on the other end of the line. What's dicey is that a call that sounds fine on my end may be terrible on the other.

I also have had problems with instabilty of the soft client as currently configured. My soft client just stops working or crashes entirely and won't close. So I end up killing it in Task Manager. Sometimes I can relaunch it. Usually I have to reboot.

That's not to say that you would have the same experience. While the system is not beta, my deployment is still part of a pilot, the purpose of which is to shake out such things. In my case the problem could be the soft client. Or something to do with Windows. Or a conflict with another application.

My favorite crash appears in the image below. This is my phone on crack. The outline of the soft client appears, but with a Microsoft Word document inside it. That happened while I was on a call. How do you hang up a call when you see can't see the controls? Fortunately, my head set has a button on it to hang up without relying on the soft client. But I had to reboot the machine to get the soft client - and my phone service - back runnning again. That's a pain in the neck.

With the telephone dependent on a general purpose computing device running Windows XP, it's not nearly as reliable as that big 'ol switch down the road. It handled call routing. It did the signaling. If I didn't have dial tone I called repair. Now when my phone doesn't work I trouble shoot my PC.

So here I am wishing I had POTS, which unlike my Windows laptop follows my golden rule for telecommunications and microwave ovens: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. I was going over some of my issues last week with a technician from Siemens and he has suggested using a VoIP desk phone with a VPN router. My cordless headset can also be configured to work with it.

In this configuration I do nothing. The hardware authenticates, maintains the connection and reconnects if there is a problem. And it cuts the Windows laptop right out of the loop. Here's the funny thing: For years people talked about using VoIP to bypass the telcos and avoid line charges by running calls through the Internet. Now here I am opting to bypass another monopoly - Windows - to improve quality of service.

Will it work? Stay tuned.

Click for larger view.