Can You Hear Me Now?! It Must Be BGP

The work

AuthorsNate Kushman; Srikanth Kandula; Dina Katabi
Typearticle
Year2007
Citekeykushman2007hear

Where it appeared

Published inACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Volume37
Issue2
Pages75--84

Identifiers

DOI10.1145/1232919.1232927
OpenAlexW2037142757

Abstract

Industry observers expect VoIP to eventually replace most of the existing land-line telephone connections. Currently however, quality and reliability concerns largely limit VoIP usage to either personal calls on cross-domain services such as Skype and Vonage, or to single-domain services such as trunking, where a core ISP carries long-distance voice as VoIP only within its backbone, to save cost with a unified voice/data infrastructure. This paper investigates the factors that prevent cross-domain VoIP deployments from achieving the quality and reliability of existing land-line telephony (PSTN). We ran over 50,000 VoIP phone calls between 24 locations in US and Europe for a three-week period. Our results indicate that VoIP usability is hindered as much by BGP's slow convergence as network congestion. In fact, about half of the unintelligible VoIP samples in our data occur within 10 minutes of a BGP update.

A copy is held

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How it got here

How it got hereagent via openalex
Added2026-08-21 00:00 UTC
Approved bya person 2026-08-22 10:50 UTC

Cite it as

@article{kushman2007hear,
  title        = {Can You Hear Me Now?! It Must Be BGP},
  author       = {Nate Kushman and Srikanth Kandula and Dina Katabi},
  year         = {2007},
  journal      = {ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review},
  volume       = {37},
  number       = {2},
  pages        = {75--84},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi          = {10.1145/1232919.1232927},
}

This record lives at https://refs.drheap.org/kushman2007hear/ and will keep doing so.