On Tuesday PhoneBoy (Dameon Welch-Abernathy) and a Nokia employee (who keeps his interests transparent) complained about the quality of their internal conference calls through a VoIP bridge. He talks about the three types of connection originations that come into these calls: (i) people in conference rooms on a speakerphone, (ii) those calling in from home on mobile phones and (iii) those calling in from another VoIP-type system. He goes on:

Speakerphones are a problem for a few reasons: the sound quality of the people speaking into the speakerphone is horrible, the people listening in on a speakerphone may not be able to hear, and often speakerphones are half-duplex, meaning both parties cannot speak at the same time.

Mobile phones are a problem for two reasons: the audio quality is degraded with just a normal handset and, if the person uses a bluetooth headset, the audio quality is often degraded further.

Some participants may use a non-PSTN method for joining the conference bridge. This is the case in India or other countries not friendly to VoIP conference bridges. This also includes people like myself who dial into the bridge via Skype.

All of these different inbound call methods will likely employ a compressed voice signal. This gets thrown into the VoIP bridge, which then ends up re-encoding the voice into the appropriate codec. Each time a voice is re-encoded with a different codec, data is lost. Any imperfections are amplified by this process as well, making it difficult to understand some participants, particularly if English isn’t their first language.

Dameon's post triggered a call from Ben Lilienthal, CEO of VAPPS, operator of the HighSpeedConferencing.com service. After making some tests accessing the service via his Skype account, Dameon will probably be on a campaign to have Nokia use HighSpeedConferencing (with access via Skype) for these calls. PhoneBoy provides details on the codec technology used by VAPPS in their bridge to achieve the excellent sound quality available on this service: