Voice Quality: Google Voice vs. RingTo

[klaberte]

Now that Google Voice is officially sanctioned, has anyone noticed an improvement of the voice quality and call reliability?  What are people's current day-to-day experiences?

Also, since RingTo is the other "free" service, how have people's experience with RingTo been?

Can anyone offer a direct comparison between Google Voice and RingTo?

[SteveInWA]

Trying to make call quality generalizations between VoiP service providers is largely meaningless.  Each call may go through a different combination of routes over the public internet and through various intermediate VoIP phone carriers.  The most common call quality issues are caused by your own (e.g. home) internet service provider connection, and by any high-bandwidth things you are also using on that connection, like video streaming or torrents.  Less frequently, some VoIP carriers send some calls through problematic transit carriers, but that's not likely to be a significant/common issue with GV or ring.to.

Just try the service and see if it meets your needs.  It's free, after all.

[klaberte]

Dear Steve, I used to do research on internet protocols, and understand well the best-effort nature of the IP network.  Your explanation makes perfect sense.

My previous understanding was that, under the old system, Obi's were not officially supported, and thus Obi used some hacks to appear to be a Google Talk browser session to the Google servers.  Now, as I understand it, Obi is officially supported by GV, although it is unclear whether Obi made any changes (less-hacky) after this happened.  I guess my refined question is this: "Since Google now officially sanctions Obi's (they even have the logo!), is there any noticeable improvement in call quality and reliability?"  I ask because, in the olden days, I had only so-so quality with GV over Obi.

[SteveInWA]

The only change that was made with regard to using Google Voice with an OBi device was that the authentication method has been changed.  Formerly, the OBi device was logging directly into the user's Google account using the user ID and password provided by the user.  That was insecure, and violated Google's policy.  OBi now uses Google's approved OAUTH 2.0 authentication method.

This has no impact on how calls are handled at all.

Just try the service and see if it meets your needs now; conditions may have changed since you last tried it.

[klaberte]

A great explanation of what changed.  Very helpful!

Yes, my ISP has certainly made some changes in the past several years, so things may be a bit better!  I'm still not sure which path to go (Google Voice or RingTo), and now appreciate that user experience with the same service can be vastly different due to many things, especially the last few hops into the house (the ISP).

I welcome any other experiences, not withstanding that everyone's experience may be different.

[SteveInWA]

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough the last two times I suggested it:

You do not have to rely on other people's experiences, wherein the "your mileage may vary" factor would come into play.  If you have a Google / Gmail account, you can configure it right now, on one of your OBi's service provider slots, and use it for outbound calling, without an inbound phone number (outbound calls will show the generic GV caller ID in Escondido, CA).  You can provision (or leave provisioned) the other OBi slot with ring.to.  Then, you can make comparison calls on varying days and times to see how the two providers call quality compare.  If you find that GV is as good as or better than ring.to, then you can port your number over, or get a new number on GV.  If you don't like the service from GV, then just don't use it any more, or keep it enabled as a spare, at no cost.

[zorlac]

FWIW, my parents ported their POTS Verizon # to RT & it has more in/out call issues than GV ever has.
I setup GV in SP3 on their obi200 with a new GV# as a backup when RT gets wonky.
It took some getting used to but my parents have adapted to RT's shortcomings.
They get an inordinate amount of SPAM calls on RT but with a mile long block list and nomorobo configured they've been trained to wait for the 3rd ring before answering the phone.
I have seen that RT has less dropped packets than GV but I can't really notice it audibly.