VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol zoomed onto the scene and has made quite a splash for residential, small business and enterprise users. What's propelled the growth of VoIP has been the opportunity for cost savings on telephone services.
At the residential level, competitive phone service providers figured out how to use the Internet so they wouldn't have to lease regular lines from the local phone companies. They give you an adaptor so you can connect your phone to your broadband router or modem and then offer attractive bundle pricing for local and long distance service. This type of service is also attractive for very small businesses with only a single phone, including home office businesses. VoIP providers typically include many features, such as Caller ID, that traditional phone companies offer as options with extra charges.
Enterprise VoIP is a bit more sophisticated. There's big capital and expense savings to be had by using phones that connect to the company LAN rather than a separate telephone network. There's also an opportunity to tie computer screens and telephones together in computer-telephone integration to increase productivity in customer service and call center operations.
A big factor in VoIP call voice quality is the quality of the network connection. A good, solid high bandwidth Internet service with low latency and jitter and few lost packets can provide high call quality. A flaky Internet connection is going to sound bad no matter who the service provider is.
Enterprises rarely use the Internet as their telephone network. Instead, they terminate calls to the outside world through traditional digital telephone trunks or contract with a SIP Trunking provider that offers a private network connection.
A VoIP option called Integrated T1 service offers the benefits of lower cost telephone service for businesses using 6 to 12 phone lines and broadband Internet. A special access device connects to the service provider over a private dynamic T1 line. That line carries both telephone calls and Internet service. The quality of the phone calls is protected by the equipment, which assigns priority to any phone conversations and uses the remaining bandwidth for broadband Internet. The dynamic aspect is that any bandwidth not needed for telephone service is automatically reassigned to boost Internet speed.
