Consumers are rushing to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) despite the fact that audio quality and reliability are not yet up to traditional landline telephony standards. Businesses have exacerbated toll charges because they either pay for calls between branch offices or have call centres, which typically incur heavy line usage. By the same token, the more dependent a business is on telephone communications, the less it can afford to compromise on the quality of its phone connections. Poor audio quality can undermine productivity and customer satisfaction; dropped calls cost sales and money; a total telecom service outage might well be disastrous.
96.9 percent uptime actually equates to over 22 hours of downtime per month and 99.1 percent uptime still equates to more than 6.5 hours of downtime a month. Compare those numbers to 99.999 percent uptime, which equates to just 26 seconds of downtime per month. As most people understand, VoIP is telephone calling over the Internet. So, it may appear that switching from the POTS to VoIP is a fairly straightforward proposition for the average small or medium size business. Even if you have a great LAN, it is unlikely that your WAN, or the WAN of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is ready to go. In fact, the Internet Protocol itself was not really designed for real-time communication of any sort – especially the streaming nature inherent in audio, video, or online gaming.
During a VoIP call, speech is captured as analog information by a phone, then converted into digital information, compressed, and divided into packets for transmission. This whole process is relatively fast, easy and reliable. The potential problems happen at the receiving end, when the packets must be reassembled in the correct order, absolutely error-free, and reconverted from their digital form into a seamless audio stream – all in real time. If there are any substantial glitches in transmission, a VoIP call “breaks up” like the reception from a distant radio station. As engineers say, the audio stream stutters.
The LANs and Internet connections (WANs) used by most SMBs are simply not ready to handle VoIP. The basic firewalls commonly used for security and virus protection often cause VoIP calls to break up. The low cost routers from the local computer store often don’t have the horsepower to drive quality VoIP calls. LANs can also become congested, especially when users are transferring large files across the internal network, such as when sending or receiving emails with large files attached, downloading documents, doing file backups or copying media files.
Of course, your VoIP network includes not only your LAN but also your WAN. Your WAN begins with your broadband modem and ends with your broadband Internet provider. Most people don’t understand that just having a broadband connection is not enough. You actually need a *high quality* connection to deliver the call quality you need to run a real business. Many SMBs connect to the Internet via DSL or cable, most often with inexpensive modems. While such connections work fine for web browsing and email, they are not designed to handle VoIP transmissions, much less the combination of voice and data.
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