Tried & True or Latest & Greatest?
My husband recently bought a smart cell phone to keep his calendar, contacts and email while on the go. It's a very "cool" phone! However, because so much battery power goes into the "smartness" of the phone, little power is left for the antennae so cell signal is low and he misses lots of calls. Reluctantly, he changed back to his "old" tried and true, not-so-cool cell phone for all his calls and left his email and calendar on the smart phone. He now has to carry two devices, but his comment was "at least this old phone rings!"
The same thinking can apply in the world of land-line connectivity. There's lots of sales and marketing hype around the latest and greatest Voice Over IP (VoIP) technology. When implemented correctly, VoIP can offer substantial savings and significant enterprise-unifying benefits.
Our company has successfully implemented VoIP all over the world. However, we always caution that when it comes to the use of VoIP trunking (incoming/outgoing lines), it must be properly supported with enough data bandwidth (i.e., a T1 versus a DSL, depending on quantity of calls), correctly configured Quality of Service (QoS) to prioritize voice over data, plus a few other technical variables.
The reason for this is that voice --more than data - is latency sensitive. So any delays in the delivery of voice packets could lead to degraded call quality (like a choppy cell phone connection). In addition, any compression of voice packets (to make more fit into less bandwidth) may cause occasional echo or dropped calls. So if you're considering Voice Over IP trunking for your company, keep the following in mind:
1) Instead of jumping head-first into the pool of VoIP trunks, migrate to it slowly. For example, deploy a VoIP phone system that can utilize both traditional trunks (analog lines or digital PRI/T1) as well as VoIP trunks. Start with the traditional tried and true and then TEST the use of VoIP trunks before moving fully to them.
2) Be sure your data connection is enough to support whatever number of simultaneous outside calls you project having. There are network tools that can offer you hard data for this analysis.
3) Ask your VoIP provider what kind of compression mechanism they use, if any, and discuss how this could impact call quality.
Just as the smart phone is great but should be managed properly for specific applications, VoIP is also a great technology that's revolutionizing the telephony world but must be properly supported with the right bandwidth configuration to achieve desired results.
