Voice And Data On One Line

Nearly all businesses today have a need for both telephone and broadband Internet service. Most businesses installed telephone first and Internet later. That’s led to a mix of line services to meet specific needs. Is there a better solution?

Today’s digital technology allows you to have both telephone service and broadband Internet access coming in on a single line. That often offers considerable cost savings over two separate services. But what about quality of service?

You might cringe at the thought of combined telephone and Internet if you’ve had a bad experience with VoIP over residential broadband. Usually it’s the phone service that suffers. Voices get garbled, you may hear an echo on the line, people start talking over each other with a delay in the speech, and calls can even be dropped. That’s what can happen when you just plug a VoIP phone or adaptor into a shared broadband service with uncontrolled bandwidth.

There are much better solutions available for business users. VoIP telephony can sound excellent and be as stable as traditional analog telephony. The trick is to carefully engineer the line to ensure adequate bandwidth, jitter, latency and voice packet priority.

A service called Integrated T1 does just this. A single T1 line with 1.5 Mbps dedicated bandwidth in both directions connects the business location to the service provider. There are no other users sharing this line. A specialized router called an Integrated Access Device converts analog telephony signals to digital packets. Those voice packets are assigned a portion of the line bandwidth to ensure they don’t get overwhelmed by data packets from Web sites and other Internet services. This bandwidth is assigned dynamically. As more phones are in use, more bandwidth is reserved for phone calls. When calls hang up, that bandwidth is reassigned for broadband Internet access.

Integrated T1 service works best for smaller businesses that need 6 to 12 phone lines plus modest broadband Internet service. It is possible to add more bandwidth as the business grows by bonding additional T1 lines.

Another service that combines voice and data on a single line service is called SIP Trunking. SIP is the signaling protocol used by enterprise VoIP telephone systems. You may already have a VoIP telephone system in your office. If so, you can get both voice and broadband Internet service over a SIP trunk. Like Integrated T1, SIP trunking manages quality of service to ensure that data and voice packets don’t interfere. SIP trunks, however, can have much higher bandwidth that T1 lines. Large SIP trunks can carry hundreds or even thousands of telephone calls.

Are Integrated T1 or SIP Trunking the right solution to give your company a substantial cost savings? Find out with a competitive service quote from Enterprise VoIP. You may be paying far more than you need to with your existing mix of telephone and broadband services.

TelePacific’s SmartVoice Trunking Offers Telephone Smarts

TelePacific Communications has a clever and sophisticated solution for small and medium size businesses that need telephone and Internet service. It’s a SIP trunking solution that offers both voice and data on a single telecom line. What distinguishes their SmartVoice service is that it can accommodate different kinds of business telephone systems and offers a lot more traffic capacity than Integrated T1 lines.

SIP trunking is an IP-based transmission line designed to support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. SIP is Session Initiation Protocol, the signaling technology used by many IP phone systems. Since IP networks transport voice and data packets equally well, many SIP trunking providers offer a combination of telephone and Internet service on the trunk line.

TelePacific’s SmartVoice Trunking also offers a combination of telephone and Internet service. The system is set up so that any bandwidth not being used for telephone calls is dynamically allocated to Internet bandwidth. If another phone call takes place, that call gets a priority on the bandwidth it needs to ensure voice quality.

Now here’s something different. An Integrated T1 line will do this, but only up to its capacity of 1.5 Mbps. That’s typically no more than a dozen simultaneous phone calls with 750 Kbps of broadband Internet. SmartVoice Trunking bonds multiple T1 lines together to create a single SIP trunk line. Up to 4 T1 lines can be bonded to create a path bandwidth of 6 Mbps.

The significance of all this bandwidth is that larger businesses or telephone-intensive operations, such as customer contact centers, can have up to 48 simultaneous phone conversations through their IP PBX and SIP Network connection. Perhaps you don’t need that many phones, but do need the bandwidth for broadband Internet access to support many users. The Dedicated Internet Access on the SmartVoice trunk gives you the bandwidth you need without the necessity of paying for completely separate telephone and Internet lines.

SmartVoice also supports a wide variety of business telephone systems. The latest IP PBX phone systems are supported, of course, but so are standard PRI and CAS trunks for traditional digital PBX systems. You can even connect analog handsets or your key telephone system with capacity for anywhere from 4 to 24 outside lines.

What sort of advanced features does SmartVoice support? Caller ID is standard. You can also get up to 100 DID or Direct Inward Dial numbers so that each employee has their own phone number and there is no need to go through a receptionist. A feature set just added is hunt groups. With hunting, if one person doesn’t answer the call it will go on to the next person in line on a linear or circular pattern. Circular hunting allocates incoming sales calls to the sales staff on a round-robin basis so that every sales person gets a fair share of the prospects. There are other patterns you can set also.

Does this sound like the kind of telecommunications service that would benefit your company? If so, talk to an expert consultant and get a quick quote on SmartVoice and other cost effective voice and data solutions.