After realizing the MCI was overcharghing me, I switched my long distance carrier MSNLD (MSN Long Distance). MSNLD had a business relationship with CoVista Communications. I inquired with a CoVista representative about the voice quality of their service and I was assured that they did not use compressed voice of any type. The representative assured me that their voice channels were normal 64 kilobit PCM voice (the normal telephone standard). MSNLD was great for a few years but in 2006 the voice quality of the service dropped substantially and became unusable in 2007.
One weekend, my long distance service went completely out (fast busy, unable to connect). I called CoVista and foundout that they use Global Crossing (a voice over IP company) as a supplier of voice service for my two home phone lines. I also could not reach a long distance operator to "dial-around" the problem.
The CoVista representative told me that I would have to wait until Monday or Tuesday to have someone look into problem. I am pretty sure that I was not the only customer with such a problem. Late Monday, my service started working again.
In addition to the weekend outage, I could not reliably speak with my brother-in-law who lives in Danville about 45 miles from me. The calls would drop; sometimes he could not hear me or I could hear him as distortion and dropouts would severely impair the call. In February of 2007, I switched to a flat rate $30 a month plan with ATT for both home phone lines. So far, the ATT service has been perfect. ATT is not a great solution because they have very unreasonable pricing on International calls. If I want competitive prices, I have to pay an additional $5 per month for a "premium" International plan; in my opinion this is bad marketing and mistreatment of their customers. I use Skype for all my international calling. It is very reasonable in cost and the quality has been very good.