Saturday, August 27, 2005

VoIP Phones for Travel - China

Should you take your VoIP phone along while traveling? Here is the experience of one of my VoIP customers. He took a small $8 phone along with his VoIP dta on a China trip. In the first hotel where he stayed, he never got a dial tone. This was possibly because of IP blocking. At the second hotel, he could make and receive calls with no difficulty except that, although he could hear the person on the other end of the call loud and clear, the person on the other end reported that his voice was very weak. At the third hotel, in Beijing, he was able to make and receive calls with USA friends and relatives and the call quality was great. The lesson is that, although many of us have plugged VoIP phones into random broadband connections and found them to work, sometimes they won’t work or won’t work perfectly.