We recently had Shaw Digital Phone installed at the office.  Shaw provides what is sometimes known as Cable Telephony, that is VoIP run over a managed network separate from the Internet.  Shaw's reps actively deny that their service is in fact VoIP - we suspect they wish to differentiate themselves from Broadband Telephony services due to the fact that companies offering analog phone lines have been long since branding VoIP as unreliable.  Shaw however has done a great job of eliminating the issue of bandwidth sharing as the data simply does not run over the Internet.  We're still waiting to be allowed to purchase SIP/IAX trunks and access them over Shaw's private network.  But, until that's available, Shaw Digital Phone is a great, cost-effective alternative.

Everyone asks us how the sound quality compares, and we can't really describe sound quality succinctly.  So, Mango made a movie about it:


As far as we're concerned, Shaw Digital Phone appears to be better quality than an analog line, and G.711 the best of all.

For these samples, we used two SIP softphones, specifically some software called Zoiper.  We used one to transmit the music and one to record it at the other end.  The reason we picked SIP softphones for this was because we had control over the audio codec, or the algorithm used to compress the audio signal.  We suspected G.711 would win the contest; as it turned out we were right.

We used the three-way calling feature of each provider to call each of the softphones.  This resulted in a conference call between all three lines with the test line in the middle.  So in order to get from one softphone to the other, the audio signal was forced to travel through the test line.  Is this test perfect?  Actually, no.  We're not sure what's between our VoIP provider and Shaw.  It's possible that in further tests we may be able to squeeze even better quality out of Shaw Digital Phone.  In spite of this however, Shaw did still easily beat Telus.

Our opinion is that Cable Telephony is a great alternative to a traditional analog phone line, especially since the new Arris modems are now available.  We also think that Cable Telephony is a good alternative to Broadband VoIP if one does not want to take the time to learn how to implement and maintain a Broadband VoIP solution.

If you're interested in Shaw Digital Phone, consider reading our Shaw Digital Phone review.