I have been using VoIP, in one form or another,
for residential phone service for more than 8 years. I currently have 3
voice VoIP lines and 1 Fax VoIP line.

However, I still have my good old POTS service from Bell and I don’t
intend to give it up for the foreseeable future. Here’s why:

QoS

Unless the service provider owns the network path end-to-end, they
are unable to guarantee voice quality. The service is at the mercy of
the conditions of the network between the end-device and their network.
Despite this, in most cases it works great. But, if there are
congestion or reliability issues anywhere along the path, you and the
service provider may be completely powerless with respect to rectifying
the issue. This happened to me a few years ago when my service provider
began experiencing network congestion. My VoIP service became unusable
due to excessive delay and jitter. Luckily I moved, and for the past
two years the voice quality of my VoIP service has been great. But that
could change at any time. Obviously the cable companies have an
advantage here but that advantage is restricted to the subscribers that
are on-net.

Trust

I am very confident that Bell Canada will still be in business a
year from now. I’m also very comfortable with their ability to maintain
consistent quality. In a year, my VoIP provider might be bankrupt. In
fact, as I have stated previously, I’m convinced that a standalone
best-effort VoIP service is not a sustainable business model. Vonage
must change their business model or, I’m convinced, they will not
survive. While the quality of my VoIP service has been, for the most
part acceptable, I have experienced outages and messaging issues that
are related to the VoIP provider’s core infrastructure. I lack
confidence in their operations and their ability to scale; especially
if financial pressures results in them sacrificing investment in
operations in favour of marketing for example.

Emergencies

Yes, it’s true that most VoIP providers have E911 capabilities.
However, in many instances, unlike your POTS service, your call does
not terminate directly in the E911 PSAP. Instead, it is directed to a
call centre first, which in my view, could potentially compromise the
efficacy of the response. In addition, as others have pointed out,
unless your ATA has, or is plugged into, a backup power supply, your
VoIP service will be non-functional in a power outage. Even, with ATA
backup power, a power interruption might bring down the network through
which your VoIP service is delivered. Sure, most cable companies do
have UPS to protect their trunk and distribution amplifiers but the
capacity may be very limited which means that an extended and
widespread outage will almost certainly result in your VoIP service
going down. In addition, the reliability of the backup power is
dependent on diligent maintenance, which is a non-trivial and expensive
challenge. My Bell Canada phone service, I am confident, would continue
to work even if a power outage lasted for weeks.

Conclusion

I am not bashing VoIP. I am passionate about the industry and the
many advances that have been, and will continue to be enabled by VoIP.
I use VoIP services because I get great features and services that are
not available through any other source. For residential voice services,
I am aware of the potential VoIP pitfalls and based on my assessment of the risks, I choose to keep my POTS service.

So
choosing VoIP or not, exclusively or not, should be based on knowledge
of the facts and the risks.

Rick McCharles
VoIP Consultant, Toronto, Canada