Two Internet Connections For Consistent Phone Calls

There are forces at work changing the way business phone systems connect. Plain old analog telephone service and traditional PBX switching systems are giving way to mobility, computer integration and cloud services that bear little resemblance to Alexander Graham Bell’s network of the last century. The new features can greatly enhance business performance… as long as the fundamentals of high quality robust voice communications aren't lost. Can we have both advanced technologies and quality of service?

We have to. There’s really no going back. If you are still tethered to an analog twisted pair or ISDN PRI, obsolescence is coming for you… and soon. It’s time to embrace digital voice and the cloud services that it enables.

What’s The Internet Got to Do With It?
Telephone networks were purpose built for telephone sets. When the Internet started, it glommed onto the phone network with dial-up modems because that was the only universal connectivity available. Fast forward to today and the Internet has moved on to high bandwidth fiber optics as a core network and last mile connectivity. Mobile telephony has developed its own wireless cellular system. That leaves the original phone network to rust in peace.

Business telephones are connecting more and more to the company IT network rather than run a separate phone network based on legacy wiring technology. For those calls to leave the company and connect to the greater world, a decision has to be made. Do you install a PBX system that connects those internal phone sets directly to the phone company using telco lines, or stick with the digital network system and connect to a phone service supplier via a dedicated private line or the Internet?

The Internet is a compelling answer. It has already been built-out to interconnect just about everybody, everywhere. Costs to reach them are as low as you can get. You already use the Internet and probably cloud business services for computer applications and file transfers. Why not let your phone calls ride along on the same network?

The fly in the ointment is that voice calls don’t have the robustness that file transfers enjoy. If the connection slows down a bit or gets little jittery, the data will get through just fine. The voice on the other end of the phone calls will cut in and out, become garbled or just disconnect. That’s unacceptable for business and a major impediment to adopting VoIP telephone systems.

How to Fix the Internet for Phone Calls
A solution to getting high quality business phone service along with the benefits of digital telephony is called SD-WAN. A WAN or Wide Area Network is any connection, such as the Internet, that goes outside your business. The SD part is called Software Defined. That means adding intelligence into the WAN connections to manage sensitive traffic for quality and reliability.

The most basic operation of SD-WAN appliances is to combine two or more WAN connections. That can be two broadband Internet lines, such as Cable, DSL, fiber, T1, 4G LTE or 5G cellular, or fixed wireless access.

The idea is that every connection has it own performance characteristics and variations that are different from other types of connections. That’s typical of the Internet. It varies all over the place from instant to instant, but not on all connections at the same time.

The SD-WAN appliance constantly monitors the characteristics of each connection. What is the speed, packet loss and jitter? Has the line gone dead or so congested it might as well be? With two or more lines to choose from, SD-WAN can route packet by packet through the best connection at each moment. Phone calls get priority over your other traffic so they get the absolutely best connectivity at all times.

There are other intelligent features that are also running to ensure voice quality. Forward error correction duplicates each voice packet so if one is lost, the other can take its place at the far end. That gets rid of a lot of the choppiness you hear in digital phone calls. Calls are also smoothed out using dynamic jitter buffering that collects the packets and delivers them smoothly in spite of variances in transmission time.

How about security? The Internet is notorious for terrible security issues compared to private lines and the traditional PSTN phone network. By encoding the voice streams and including a firewall and other intrusion preventing measures, even the Internet can be made acceptably secure.

SD-WAN Also Improves Your Other Applications
What helps improve voice calls is also a major benefit for all your network traffic over the Internet. As companies move more and more applications to the cloud, robust connectivity is becoming essential to productivity and customer satisfaction. SD-WAN can make all of your Internet interactions faster, smoother and more reliable. It comes down to having enough high quality links for the system to always have solid connections. Those links will be used efficiently since lower demanding traffic, such as backups and low priority file transfers, can traverse even slower and more jittery connections.

Are you frustrated with the quality and performance of your current business phone system or face disconnection of legacy services? If so, find out what high quality enterprise VoIP and Universal Communications options are available for your business.

Save the Cell Phone, Save the World

What toxic waste that you don't think about is piling up in our landfills? What source of gold is being tossed in the trash? What is it that people throw away that they could exchange for money?

Give up? It's cell phones. Cell phones are an environmental threat, a potential source of valuable minerals, and a marketable commodity all in one. Let's have a look at this underestimated resource and see what we've been missing.

A cell phone doesn't seem like much. It fits in the palm of your hand or tucks neatly into a pocket or purse. In its plastic or metal case a cell phone certainly seems chemically inert. Nothing leaks out and it doesn't stain your hand. So what's so toxic about a mobile telephone?

While in service or even left for decades in a desk drawer, a cell phone won't be damaging the environment. The problem is more subtle than that. The magic that gives a palm sized communicator the power to reach around the world lies in the materials and processing that create the electronic circuitry. These things aren't made out of renewable pine trees. They're made with lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury. They also have their share of plastic and glass. Toxic metals can leach out of the circuit boards and batteries once the phones are attacked by water and various liquid chemicals that also find their way into landfills. On day one an obsolete phone is just buried there with the kitchen wastes, old shoes and industrial refuse. On day 1,000 or day 10,000 nasty processes are at work, dissolving captive chemicals and adding them to a slurry of toxins that will work their way into the water table, if they can.

One cell phone will destroy the Earth? Of course not. The one tossed here and the one tossed there represent a minuscule problem. It's when they are joined by hundreds and hundreds of millions of their ilk that the problem grows too big to ignore. The thing that's unique about cell phones is that they are on a 2 or 3 year cycle. People sign up for cellular service, activate their spanking new wireless device, and proceed to glue it to their ear for the duration of their contract. Some people just keep using their phone past the contract date. But most can't wait to get either a new model phone or a different carrier, who will also insist on a new phone. Since the phones are subsidized by the carriers in order to hold onto customers for a least a year or two, the cost to the consumer is low. So what do they care if they toss the old phone and get a new one free or at a small cost?

It is estimated that 11 million otherwise working cell phones are retired every month. Some are immediately dropped into the dumpster, but many more are simply slipped into a desk drawer or box in the basement. You might not want to keep using the old mobile, but it seems too good to just throw away. So an estimated 500 million of them are sitting in distributed landfills, otherwise known as people's homes, right now. Some day, maybe on moving day, one family member is going to decide that this unwanted device will never be used again and should go in the trash along with broken toys, worn out jeans, and everything that wouldn't sell at the last yard sale. Some day all 500 million and probably many times that number of cell phones will be slowly decaying in our public landfills and private dumping grounds.

What makes this situation even sadder is that those same consumers could have mailed their unwanted phone to a recycler at no cost. The recycler disassembles the phone, recovers plastics and metals for reuse in other applications, and sends nothing to the landfill. That's right, nothing. Who pays for all this work? The value of the materials in the phone are enough to cover the costs of recycling. What might seem like worthless materials are actually in demand. That includes minute amounts of gold used in chip and circuit board manufacturing. A little gold plating here and there and you're talking a mine's worth of the stuff spread over millions and millions of phones.

Many cell phones don't even have to meet the crusher so soon in their young lives. Recent model cellular phones are quite salable in bulk to third world countries clamoring for affordable technology. Many can also be repurposed as emergency phones for people living in shelters. Some can be refurbished as offered as pre-paid phones. All of these possibilities mean that the phone you were going to toss in the trash might be a $10, $20 or $100 bill in disguise. If you took a few minutes to order a pre-paid mailer and sent your usable but unwanted surplus cell phone in for evaluation, you could be getting a check in the mail instead of a guilty feeling from contributing to the waste problem.

Do you have one or more old cell phones hanging around your house awaiting their demise? See how much your cell phone model(s) are worth and then send them in for recycling or reuse. You'll feel good and might wind up with some unexpected cash in your pocket.