Despite the great leaps that VoIP has made over the years, there's a lot to be done in order to make it perfectly easy to use for the average person. It's not necessarily a bad thing right now because the industry is in a state of flux and the current confusion and complexity reflects an atmosphere of experimentation and seeing what works and what doesn't. Different configurations, different SIP providers, varying features pricing models and even business models are all in the mix. Things are slowly settling down though as the industry self organizes. SIP for example has come to be the de facto open standard for all VoIP communications and this is really a huge step.Unfortunately, the lack of standardization can sometimes hurt VoIP quality especially on devices like mobile phones which (to make things worse) also have unstandardized hardware and software. Some platforms like iOS don't allow applications to run in the background and we have to use workarounds such as push notifications instead. For this, and a variety of reasons, mobile VoIP is generally more dodgy than the same application on the desktop. Take any client which has a version for the desktop and a version for the smartphone, and you'll find that the smartphone performs just a little bit worse. There are a few things we can do to address this issue though.
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To a certain extent, VoIP demands a certain amount of CPU power. This has to do with the codecs in use by VoIP and the encoding/decoding times can increase the apparent lag on the device. VoIP codecs are also designed for maximum compression to preserve bandwidth. So naturally, even a little bit of packet loss can result in significant degradation of VoIP quality. There are many different codecs and they all vary as to their compression capability and bandwidth requirements. The best ones like G.729 perform well on both counts. Unfortunately, it's also a licensed codec and therefore isn't free.
In the future, perhaps some of the VoIP processing can be passed along to a dedicated hardware chip instead of doing it programmatically. This is far more efficient and should represent some major speed increases. Other speed increases can come from using wifi on a router that has VoIP based QoS rules embedded into it. This will be more reliable than the wireless 3G or 4G network and will improve VoIP quality significantly.
Bhagwad is an expert consultant on Making an SIP Account. He also specializes in Mobile VoIP Phones.
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