Tuesday, August 16, 2011

PSTN vs VoIP


VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is going to be more popular around the world comparatively with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). The main reason for growing market for VoIP over PSTN is availability, reliability and low cost etc. In this article I will show that there is no reason to limit the expectations to achieve only the same level of quality as in PSTN.

By deploying wideband codec, much better voice quality can be achieved. But using narrowband codec there are some standard solution that can be used in VoIP to get finest quality voice. Such as, traditional PSTN solution does not use the available spectral bandwidth, but these can be done easily in VoIP system. Implementing a wideband codec or expanding the bandwidth of narrowband codec does not automatically guarantee great quality. There are many potential pitfalls when deploying VoIP. There are some issues need to be discussed that effect the final voice quality over PSTN or VoIP. In this article I will discuss what level of quality can be achieved and describe how this can be implemented.



Speech Signals and Speech Coding Sampled digital signals can hold frequency content up to half the sampling frequency. As we know, a young adult has a hearing span from about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
And the sampling frequency of CD audio is chosen to be 44.1 kHz, which is more than double that of the highest frequency perceivable by most humans. Legacy telephony solutions are narrowband, which seriously limits the achievable quality. Wideband codec could potentially be used in digital telephone systems, but this has never been practical enough to gain any real interest

In traditional telephony applications such as PSTN, the speech bandwidth is restricted much more than the inherent limitations of narrowband coding. Typical telephony speech is band limited to 300 Hz to 3400 Hz (listen to Sound Pure digital connections are found in enterprise environments.
Due to poor connections or old wires, significant distortion is often generated in the analog part of the phone connection, a type of distortion that is entirely absent from VoIP implementations. The cordless phones so popular today also generate significant amounts of analog distortion due to radio interference and other implementation issues.



Calls between two parties in a PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) are connect by a series of private or public switches. The resulting fixed communications link is dedicated for the duration of the call. When an individual makes a phone call over a circuit-switched network, a connection is made between the providers PBX and the local telephone company, also known as the PSTN. Depending on the destination, this connection might extend to the national or international exchange before reaching another local exchange, where it will be passed on to the PBX and the person who receives the call. This end-to-end link, established by a series of public and private switches, is 100% dedicated on a single, per-call basis and cannot be shared or used for another function as long as the call is in progress. For this reason, these dedicated circuits cannot be shared and the carrier bills the call on a time and distance rate.

But the Internet does not use switches to link calling parties. Instead, the analog voice signal is digitized by an Internet Protocol (IP) and broken up into thousands of small data packets by a router – the VoIP equivalent to a switch. These data packets are sent, or routed, over the public Internet to their destination, enabling calls to bypass the PSTN entirely.


Other article can be read:

1 comment:

  1. the Internet does not use switches to link calling parties. Instead, the analog voice signal is digitized by an Internet Protocol (IP) and broken up into thousands of small data packets by a router – the VoIP equivalent to a switch.
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