Route Quality
The best quality is usually over 'bilaterals': high-capacity direct fiber-optic links between the former national telephone companies. The calls go straight to the far end company managing the national network. Routes to other licensed telecoms companies in de-regulated countries will usually have as high a quality as bilaterals. Satellite transmission adds a slight delay, which is noticeable even over transatlantic calls, though the call quality can be as good as a call over a fiber-optic cable.
At the other end of the quality spectrum is a route using VoIP over the long-distance satellite link terminating in an ISP using a leaky PBX to terminate the calls.
VoIP packets contain a lot of signaling overhead: to carry the 64k of data packet a conventional telecoms network transmits needs around 100k of bandwidth with VoIP. VoIP achieves lower bandwidth by using data compression techniques on the voice part of the data packet and this reduces the call quality.
Read more about this topic: International Telecommunications Routes
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