Round 5: Voice quality/performance

There's nothing more annoying when talking on the phone than hearing only every other word the other person is saying. After all, the point here is to communicate, and you're not doing that if you spend half the call going, "What? Wait?what?" Less annoying, but bothersome nonetheless, is a low-level buzz or hiss that often pervades VoIP calls. The problem with voice quality over VoIP lines is that you're using the same pipe that carries your music, video, and e-mail to and from the Internet. VoIP providers implement a Quality of Service (QoS) protocol that gives priority to voice packets. When we test VoIP, we use a POTS-quality call as our baseline: no buzz, no dropped words, no clipped syllables. This is the ideal. Of course, when you're on a VoIP call but not uploading or downloading files, you don't have any data packets competing with your voice packets. Under these conditions, most VoIP services do very well, and Vonage is no exception. Our reviewers found the sound quality to be as good as the quality over a POTS line, with the exception of a barely noticeable background hiss. When uploading or downloading files, voice quality over Vonage was also excellent, but you'll see a noticeable degradation in your download/upload speed, which is exactly what the QoS is supposed to do.

With Skype, it all depends on your situation. Call quality between two Skype users was excellent, almost on a par with that of POTS calls. In other scenarios, things went downhill. Skype-to-analog (using SkypeOut) or analog-to-Skype (using SkypeIn) calls suffered from static and random chirps, sometimes on just the analog side and sometimes on both. Even worse was the call quality during data uploads and downloads, where the sound would occasionally cut out altogether.

Winner of this round? Vonage. If you're dead set on using Skype, you should try to convince your most frequently called friends to sign up, too.