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Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
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I regularly speak with many small businesses who’ve tried VoIP systems and are having problems, here’s one email I recently received:
“I have tried Fonality (dropped calls), and another voip system and the probem I was dropping too many calls, etc.”
In the past few months we’ve replaced an Accessline Vertical Accelerator VoIP system, Blarg’s VoIP System, and have proposals to take out a Speakeasy system.
Why all the problems with VoIP? There’s a few reasons: the nature of the internet, the equipment, and the line provider.
The internet was never designed to carry voice traffic, but VoIP commonly goes across the public internet. The designers of the internet realized making a perfect meshed network was nearly impossible, so instead they designed a system which could lose data in transmission and delay traffic - it doesn’t matter if the contents of a web pages come in 20ms or 2000ms. Voice however isn’t so tolerant of packet loss and delays - this leads to stuttering, poor audio quality, and dropped calls.
Your internet connection is a major bottleneck - while your office network runs at 100 or 1000Mb, internet connection upload rates run around .75-3Mb. Note I said upload rate - a 6Mb DSL refers to the download rate, the upload rate is usually .75Mb. These asynchronous connections are well suited for web surfing as its mostly downloading, but cause problems with VoIP as they depends just as heavily on upload as download. Just a few calls and internet traffic can bog down the average DSL line. Installing a “quality of service” (QoS) router/appliance helps, but they are still limited on what they can do to improve the situation.
A great way to see if your internet connection is the problem is the problem is testyourvoip.com. This isn’t just a simple bandwidth test but actually is a call quality test, a good score is 4-4.4.
In a recent case a business with Accessline’s Vertical Accelerator system was having major call problems, but their cable internet’s VoIP score was 4.3 - a great score which says to me that the problem wasn’t the internet. At that point you know its either the equipment or the carrier. In this case it was an equipment/carrier bundle, so the nice thing was there was only one vendor to call - unfortunately Accessline was not able to isolate and solve the issue.
Prevention is truly the best cure. First, make sure you really need VoIP and are willing to either accept the risks or invest in carrier grade service which sends VoIP across a private network instead of the public internet. VoIP when done right isn’t necessarily less expensive than traditional service, so its worth investigation to assess. Simply put many of these services just don’t work right - be very certain you pick one that does. My last bit of advice is to pick a vendor who will come onsite for installation and service - many of these bad VoIP services are “do it yourself” which leave small businesses with only phone support for really critical and complex systems.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Phone Systems, Phone and Internet Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Good article that gets to the heart of the issue.
We’re running business-class static IP ADSL with 512k outbound and have two VOIP trunks and a POTS line running into our Talkswitch. The VOIP trunks are used for in and outbound voice and the POTS line is dedicated to the fax inbound and used for outbound voice transfer calls.
We used to have problems with packet loss. First, we changed our VOIP trunks to use the G.729 CODEC saving bandwidth. Second, we installed a QoS router allowing us to assign priorities to different kinds of network traffic and reserve bandwidth for the Talkswitch. These changes have allowed us to have quality service and reduced our monthly phone costs by about 40 percent.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I’m actually surprised by your use of G.729! Obviously it saves bandwidth, but it is also more sensitive than G.711 to the whims of the public internet. Personally I only recommend G.729 over private networks, but if it works for you - that’s what matters!