What Is VoIP For Business?

There’s a lot of buzz these days about the advantages of converting from traditional telephone services to VoIP. There are, indeed, major advantages for businesses to go with enterprise VoIP solutions. However, there are some pitfalls to avoid if you want to make the transition successfully. First, though, let’s take a closer look at just what VoIP is and how it differs from the phone service you have now.

One confusing aspect of VoIP is the name itself. The term VoIP is an acronym for Voice over Internet Protocol. The thing that jumps right off the page at you is the term “Internet.” It immediately conjures up visions of broadband phone solutions that piggyback on top of Cable broadband or DSL connections. That is, indeed, VOICE going OVER the INTERNET. It’s also one example of VoIP. However, it is far from the complete story.

The idea behind broadband phone is that with the right equipment you can use your broadband Internet service to connect you to a competitive phone company. The whole impetus for this is that the local telephone company, called the ILEC for Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, pretty much owns you for local phone service. It’s easy to switch long distance providers, but much harder to change local services. Why? Because the ILEC owns the copper wires between your location, business or residential, and the switching equipment in their office. You can’t dig up the wires and move them elsewhere, so you need an alternative “phone line.” The Internet provides just such an alternative connection.

One of the major pitfalls of broadband phone is that the Internet was designed for transporting data reliably, not for transmitting voice quickly. Everything on the Internet is transported in packets. That includes data bits representing digitized phone conversations, video clips, websites, email and many other things. What they have in common is a standardized packet structure called IP or Internet Protocol.

Now, here’s where the trouble comes in. The Internet treats one packet just like the next. It doesn’t matter if they are zipping along smoothly or all clogged up. The system is set up to get each packet from Point A to Point B sooner or later. Having data correct is much more important than having it as soon as possible. If a packet gets lost or corrupted, another protocol called TCP or Transmission Control Protocol sees that the packet never arrived at its destination and retransmits it. As a user, this is all invisible. All you know is that your email or web page displayed correctly.

Voice differs from data in that it is a real time protocol. A voice packet that shows up late is of no use because the conversation has already moved on. VoIP is set up to discard missing or out of sequence packets. A few here and there won’t make a difference, but a lot of missing packets will punch holes in the conversation and make it hard to understand.

Video is equally sensitive or even more so. The way video stays intact is to have the packets go to a staging area before they are displayed on the screen. This area is the buffer. Buffering collects packets however they come in and then feeds them out smoothly to create a continuous picture stream. Buffering also works for audio and is used for Internet radio stations extensively. That way any congestion on the net won’t cause the audio to drop out.

Buffering could be used for VoIP, but not very much or it will create havoc. The tradeoff is that phone conversations are two-way. The buffer will cause a big delay from the time you start talking until the other person hears it. Buffering and other delays show up as something called latency which turns two way conversations into more like walkie talkie conversations. Only one person can talk at a time and you have to wait before taking your turn.

What’s better? Bypass the Internet and use a private line connection called a SIP Trunk. SIP is the switching and signaling protocol for VoIP telephony. The SIP Trunk is carefully engineered to give voice packets priority over data packets and to have enough bandwidth to avoid congestion that causes latency and jitter.

SIP Trunks connect your company to your business VoIP service provider. The provider takes care of all outside lines to the public phone system. You can connect the PBX phone system you have now using a SIP Trunk or use an IP PBX that uses IP telephones rather than standard analog phones. Even more interesting is hosted VoIP, which eliminates the in-house PBX system completely. The service provider gives you both lower rates to use the public telephone system and takes care of switching both inside and outside calls.

As you can see, there are various flavors of VoIP phone service available today. You want to be careful to pick a solution that not only saves you money but has the features and voice quality you need to conduct business effectively. Enterprise VoIP providers have solutions for all size businesses at attractive prices. Compare features and costs now to discover what’s available for your particular locations.

Advantage of Dedicated Cloud Connections

The capital investment and staff cost savings offered by cloud services are encouraging small, medium and large companies alike to move their telephone and IT resources to the cloud. It’s been assumed that a simple broadband Internet connection will suffice for access. That’s turning out to be a disappointment in some cases.

The notion that bandwidth is bandwidth is how we get in trouble specifying metro and wide area network connections. What makes the Internet attractive as a WAN service is that it is almost universally available and the cost is spread over millions, even billions of users. Savvy companies discovered long ago that you could get around the security issues by encrypting your data to create a VPN or Virtual Private Network. The VPN gives you a private tunnel through a public network.

VPNs work great to support remote workers and traveling employees who’s only way to connect with corporate headquarters is through a wired or wireless Internet service. They’re also good for linking multiple business locations, such as branch offices or franchises. With a VPN you can transfer sensitive financial and inventory files among dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations.

Note that we are talking about file transfers. The TCP/IP network protocol was made for this application. All you do is launch the transfer and TCP will ensure that all the packets that make up the file will get from point A to point B intact. If something goes awry and a packet is corrupted, it is automatically resent.

Remember that the Internet was designed for universal access and to be self-healing in the face of equipment failure or line breaks. While TCP/IP is making sure that files are being accurately transfered, the Internet itself is making sure that there is a path available from point A to point B no matter what. While you can expect to transfer data, voice or video files over the Internet, you can’t really expect that this is going to happen without hiccups or in any minimal amount of time. Packets may or may not be lost and require a resend. The path may change from packet to packet. The latency or time delay from source to destination can vary all over the place, or jitter.

The result of this is that real time performance of Internet connections is highly variable. This is no big deal for data file transfers. The time to transfer may vary by milliseconds or seconds for each file. Time sensitive data streams like audio and video need some extra help in the form of buffering. You compensate for unknowable transmission rate variations by filling up a buffer with packets and then clocking them out at a constant rate.

Buffering works great for one-way downloads, but creates havoc for real-time video or audio streams. That includes telephone calls and video conferencing. You can’t have much of a buffer or the latency increases to the point where you can’t talk and listen at the same time. There is a noticeable delay, fractions of a second or longer, that make two-way communication painful at best. Lost packets from iffy Internet connections add distortion that blurs your video and garbles your audio.

The same Internet that seems fast and responsive when searching for information on Google can be maddening when trying to calm down an angry customer on a VoIP phone call that is breaking up. Automated business processes that worked fine over the LAN when the data center was in-house all of a sudden become sluggish in the cloud. It’s not that the cloud isn’t just as good or better than local resources, it’s that you need a better connection.

What you want is a dedicated connection between you and your cloud provider. Level 3 Communications is now offering dedicated connections to Amazon Web Services (AWS) running in Equinix data centers to meet the demand from larger corporations. Dedicated connections include Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet MPLS and Wavelength services. T1 lines are also suitable for smaller companies, although Ethernet over Copper may be a lower cost option and offer more bandwidth for the money.

A dedicated connection ensures that you have steady guaranteed bandwidth plus low latency, jitter and packet loss. Security is also improved because access is limited, not publicly available. A well engineered dedicated connection is just like a very long LAN that includes your locations and your service provider.

Are you disappointed with the performance of your cloud services or concerned that quality will suffer if you move from a local data center to the cloud? All you may need to get things working to your satisfaction is a high quality dedicated cloud connection. Why put up with all that aggravation when dedicated connection prices are lower than they’ve ever been? Check prices and availability of dedicated cloud connection bandwidth you need to support your critical applications.