Just for clarification here’s the relevant quote from the review above:

Was I impressed? With their server, yes. Voice quality was more than adequate, and lag was non-existent.

Would I recommend dallasxtreme.com? I don’t know. I certainly don’t think you’re going to have any issue with the quality of communications. If I were you I’d first of all check out the test servers, and when happy, take a look at the pricing options and see if you’re happy with the price.

My only criticism of DallasXtreme is that they charge. It’s possible to get a free service of almost the same quality, which will be good enough for 90%+ of gamers. Of course with a free service things like guaranteed quality and uptime will definitely be an issue.

DallasXtreme.com quickly refunded the purchase price as soon as we found out you were not satisfied with the quality of service. I highly recommend that anyone interested in purchasing a Ventrilo Server test your connection in any of our worldwide test servers. I’m sure you’ll give our service 10 out of 10!

Thanks for the detail, I hadn’t seen it broken down as simply as TeamSpeak using UDP, Ventrillo using TCP before.

Regards sound quality vs lag… well I was going to say that that’s an easy one to answer - I’ll take the lower quality any day, but don’t lag me! But on consideration, that’s not quite true - it depends on circumstance.

In a hectic game of CounterStrike, where 1/100 of a second makes a difference then lag is unacceptable, but dropping voice packets is acceptable.

In the slower paced game of World of Warcraft at length discussion of your raid’s strategy is vital, but 1/100 of a second lag is normally dealt with quite well by the game network code.

So on that basis I would go for TeamSpeak with UDP. For WoW I would say that communication quality is more important, thus being more suited to Ventrillo.

Thanks for your comment.
amd.

Teamspeak supports a number of quality levels (codecs). It ships with one of the lowest enabled, because it takes up less bandwidth. Teamspeak uses UDP, a connectionless protocol, to send data. This is faster than TCP/IP, but less reliable.

Ventrillo supports a number of codecs also. It ships with one of the highest enabled, because it sounds good. Vent uses TCP/IP, which can cause enormous lag if packets are dropped, but with guaranteed delivery you will always hear exactly what others said.

In summary: Vent sounds better out of the box, but may effect your game performance by hogging bandwidth. Teamspeak may occasionally sound worse, especially out of the box, but will have a much less noticable effect on gameplay.

Good point. I must admit that despite my dislike of all things Microsoft, I continue to use Windows as my gaming platform purely because Linux is not a viable gaming platform at the bleeding edge.

From the Ventrillo tech support forums:

The Ventrilo / Linux client tech support forum is here pending the official release of the client.

The forum will be activated once the first release is made available.

Thank you for your support and interest in the Linux client.

At the current time we do not have an official release date. Once we do it will be posted here and possibly some indication on the download page.

That’s dated 05-30-2005!