E-mail, chat, & VoIP forum: is Google Voice supposed to be full duplex?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2435928/posts

"Objections:

1.)Placing calls takes...about 7 seconds longer

2.) Duplex is not completely full duplex —you have to wait slightly longer for the other person to shut up

3.)Sometimes you get that mathy, "tinny" sound"

-> I'm left to guess that you want the full duplex you enjoy on POTS. (do I need to expand all telephone acronyms when discussing telephones?) With PANS we get new issues and have to define so much.

--> If you are after the POTS full duplex, then my answer will change to no.
Bob

I don't want to argue semantics about the definition of "duplex". To the extent that Google Voice is not quite full duplex, what makes it not quite? Is it a property of the application, the connection, or the hardware? A "yes, but ..." or a "no, but ..." would be fine.

"Duplex is not completely full duplex —you have to wait slightly longer for the other person to shut up"
That's called "latency". It's pretty independent of whether I can interrupt someone.

The "objections" here don't really answer my question. Perhaps you can point to a "prior discussion" that is less than three years old. I've looked around on the web, and haven't found much of anything useful.

While it works for me, it is a mere shadow of POTS when it comes to "full duplex." If I compare it to other solutions they all come up short when we compare to good old POTS.

Good hunting for support for this one.
Bob

http://www.kolabora.com/news/2006/12/14/voip_tools_and_online_audio.htm
http://dots.ecml.at/TrainingKit/Activities/Audioconferences/tabid/2808/language/en-GB/Default.aspx

These folks specifically refer to Google Talk as full duplex. But as you say, it doesn't quite feel that way. Perhaps the short latency makes it hard to interrupt during a pause. That is, the person you're having a conversation with has already started talking when you're hearing the pause. If that's the case, if may be formally full duplex, but it might not feel that way.

Anyone want to try for a halfway useful response? There are so many reasons to believe that one might be able to do better than this.

The answer to the question is yes.

But if it's not full duplex then you could use prior discussions for reasons why.

-> Why I didn't offer any reason is there are so many. They won't fit here and it would be a bad idea for me to offer any given the clues so far.
Bob