The Infinite Dial

A new study from Brix Networks shows that the quality of VoIP telephony has degraded by 5% over the past. I know I made a VoIP call just the other day and the quality was unbearably bad, though a subsequent call later in the day showed improvement.

If this degradation is real (and common sense tells me it is), there are implications for radio stations and other media channels who seek to stream their content online (as opposed to simply making it downloadable). The Internet we all know and love was never designed to carry the load it currently does, and despite near-ubiquitous broadband and increasingly common WiFi connections, all Internet traffic goes through a finite series of tubes.

As ridiculous as Sen. Edwards' description was, he was kinda sorta right about the “tubes” in that bandwidth is not infinite. As consumers increasingly make their phone calls online, and now with YouTube and other video sharing sites mucking it up even more, radio stations should be careful about their stream's audio quality. I have an extremely fast connection at home, and streams at 128 kbps often choke and sputter if I listen to them for more than 15 minutes or so.

I am eager to hear GCap's new higher quality audio streaming in the UK, which promises CD quality audio delivered over the Internet via a multicast solution. While sound quality may not be a problem now, GCap's rethink of their streaming architecture may prove prescient, indeed.