International Call Quality
Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 10:59 pm
My Ooma works great here at home in California. When placing international calls, however, the quality drops noticeably. So much so, in fact, that I use an international calling card, when I would have been happy to spend the money with Ooma. The calling card is cheaper and I would be surprised if it did not equally depend on VOIP for part of its international connection. Now I don't know if Ooma has partners who are below par or what, but there is a difference. In addition, the Ooma international service has the feel of a calling card with the announcement of credit and all that, which takes away from the feel of a seamless, permanent international service. It's like using money union instead of an international bank transfer. Considering International calling is one of the few revenue streams for Ooma, paying attention to international call quality should be important to Ooma. Here's what I suggest:
1. Choose partners carefully, based on quality of service, available capacity and cost, in this order. Reliability is king. Also, there is no need to overcharge on less popular destinations. It is a mistake other companies make and end up loosing as people use pre-paid cards instead. The strategy should be to capture every call and every penny, not to loose some calls because some dimwit in the partner company overpriced it.
2. Provide options for making International service look more seamless, option to switch off credit announcements (makes us sound like students counting pennies on prepaid phones, also less delay before connecting e.g. a fax) and direct debiting from credit cards for replenishing in options of $10, $25, $50 or $100 increments (returnable upon demand).
3. Keep stats of dropped calls ( I get these routinely on longer international calls), jitter, echo, retries, latency from server records and be first to notice quality variability, keeping ahead of the client.
Anyways, good luck getting International to get out of amateur mode.
1. Choose partners carefully, based on quality of service, available capacity and cost, in this order. Reliability is king. Also, there is no need to overcharge on less popular destinations. It is a mistake other companies make and end up loosing as people use pre-paid cards instead. The strategy should be to capture every call and every penny, not to loose some calls because some dimwit in the partner company overpriced it.
2. Provide options for making International service look more seamless, option to switch off credit announcements (makes us sound like students counting pennies on prepaid phones, also less delay before connecting e.g. a fax) and direct debiting from credit cards for replenishing in options of $10, $25, $50 or $100 increments (returnable upon demand).
3. Keep stats of dropped calls ( I get these routinely on longer international calls), jitter, echo, retries, latency from server records and be first to notice quality variability, keeping ahead of the client.
Anyways, good luck getting International to get out of amateur mode.