TMCnet News

President Obama Has VoIP Glitch

[January 04, 2012]

President Obama Has VoIP Glitch

Originally posted on VoIP & Gadgets Blog, here: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/voip/president-obama-has-voip-glitch.asp.

Apparently, President Obama had some VoIP glitches when he attempted to tried to steal some of the Republican Iowa Caucuses' spotlight last night via a live address to his Democratic supporters over the Internet. The video teleconference had sporadic audio issues making him hard to understand. It's bad enough trying to understand some of President Obama's policies when he is speaking clearly never mind when he's encountering VoIP packet loss and jitter!

According to ABC News, Obama's video teleconferences utilized a proprietary software program developed for the Obama campaign by Adobe Systems Inc. It's likely a derivative of the Adobe Connect VoIP, video, and collaboration platform.

In one part of the video, he sounded like Max Headroom "(static) In some ways, I'm actually more optimistic now then I was when I first ran cuz we've already see... seen. change take place." No, it wasn't your typical Obama stutter, but an actual glitch in the VoIP packets. Not good to have the leader of the free world not being able to clearly convey his message. Wars have been started over minor miscommunications!

After the event, Senator Harry Reid (D) took to the Senate podium to announce H.R. 3862, the VoIP Video Clarity & Neutrality Act. In a prepared statement he said, "Thank you everyone for coming. As we saw with President Obama's video conference, there were some technical glitches due to what I am told by my technical staff was packet loss and jitter. We believe there may have been some issues with the ISP throttling the packets, whether for nefarious or unintentional blocking of VoIP packets is unknown at this time. Now, more than ever we need strong net neutrality rules to ensure that this President, and indeed any future President does not have his voice communications interfered with. I'd like to yield the floor to Nancy Pelosi who would like to comment."

Sen. Nancy Pelosi stated, "It is with deep sadness that I come to you today to discuss the need to further regulate Internet service providers to ensure VoIP companies such as Adobe, Voyage and Sky-pee, do not have ISP throttling issues. I am co-sponsoring this bill and we actually have bi-partisan support from Senators McCain and Snowe."

Did she really say "Voyage" (Vonage) and Sky-pee (Skype). Nah, not really. Just pulling your leg about this whole H.R. 3862 biz. But t is true wars are started over miscommunications - so here's to hoping the Internet deploys QoS for critical VoIP & video packets - or the ISPs just throw so much bandwidth at the problem, no packets ever get lost or delayed. Yeah, I think I like the latter option better.