Anybody who works in the VoIP industry would probably agree that there are some people who shouldn’t be using VoIP. These are the people who don’t understand how a packet switch network like the Internet works. Nor do they realize that there just might be a reason why they are paying a lot less than the would a normal phone service. The user’s expectation that a packet switched network should function as a circuit switched network does not make the technician’s life any easier.
I’ve come up with a one question test to determine if you are a person who is ready to VoIP, and that test is quite simple:
“Do you IM?”
Quite frankly, if you use an Instant Messaging client, you understand what happens to the conversation when someone’s internet connection drops, if there is latency, or packets somehow don’t make it to their destination (all those little messages that come back to you as, “could not be delivered”). VoIP in most cases works in a similar way, especially in the grand scale of the Internet cloud.
The VoIP industry doesn’t make it any easier for the user, by complicating the setup by including additional devices (or points of “failure”) to the process. Take for example the user who just keeps on getting dropped calls. Despite everything the technician has done, calls still drop. After weeks of troubleshooting, and no change, the customer get more and more frustrated… swearing, saying that the service sucks.
And then in the end it turns out his ATA was plugged into a bad power bar.
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