I mentiioned the VOIP enhancement. Now this feature can be found in Shaw’s site.
It is used to improve the VOIP quality. Shaw’s Digital Phone does not use this QoS enhancement service. Its digital phone uses its own network and own QoS service.
QoS Enhancement
Shaw is now able to offer its High Speed Internet customers the opportunity to improve the quality of Internet telephony services offered by third party providers. For an additional $10 per month Shaw will provide a quality of service (QoS) feature that will enhance these services when used over the Shaw High Speed Internet network. Without this service customers may encounter quality of service issues with their voice over Internet service.
All public Internet networks (this is not unique to Shaw) encounter intermittent bandwidth shortfalls as bandwidth is consumed by applications such as Internet browsing and email. Bandwidth availability is an important issue when using voice services because the amount of bandwidth available at any given time can vary based on Internet usage.
For example, peer to peer music or video downloading can create periodic loading at the expense of other Internet applications.
With Internet telephony, voice data is treated like regular data. Under peak loads voice frames will be dropped equally with data frames. Regular data, however, is not time sensitive and dropped packets can be corrected through the process of retransmission. Dropped voice packets, which are time sensitive, cannot be corrected in this manner.
Quality-of-service (QoS) issues that are unique to Internet packet networks are a major concern with providing Internet telephony service at acceptable performance levels. Delay is the big issue with voice-over-packet services that operate over the public Internet.
Quality of service issues do not apply to Shaw Digital Phone because Shaw Digital Phone operates on its own separate, managed network. Voice traffic distributed along this network is never shared with public Internet networks, so you can be confident Shaw Digital Phone will deliver the service reliability and performance you expect. As an added safeguard, Shaw Digital Phone includes its own QoS Enhancement feature.
