Hosted PBX: VoIP not “voice over Internet”

Yes, there is a difference.

During lunch at Jack Astor’s on Friday, my lunch partner told me a CEO friend for a large corporation was unhappy with his VoIP service at home.  Although the VoIP provider name wasn’t known, it’s a common story – Poor call quality, dropped calls, jitter, latency.

I told him I wasn’t surprised.

“Well, how is your VoIP better?” he asked.  It made me aware that people, even those at the helm of large, publicly traded technology firms are not clear on the differences between VoIP over the Internet and VoIP over private lines (like a T1 for example).

To be clear, VoIP is an acronym for voice over internet protocol – not voice over the Internet.

The Internet is the world’s largest network and in order to participate on that network, you must use the IP protocol.  But to ensure high call quality and reliability, the last thing a business should do is connect calls through the public Internet.

Since the Internet is a collection of many thousands of networks, each managed by different organizations and service providers, the Internet is generally referred to as an “umanaged network”.

Although any business can choose to connect to the Internet, there is often no regard for packet prioritization or quality of service.  This means that sensitive voice traffic is treated the same as non-realtime traffic (such as web and email).

Additionally, depending where the VoIP provider switch is, phone conversations may travel multiple “hops” through networks that might be “congested”, meaning they don’t have enough “bandwidth” to forward all of the traffic in a timely manner. Plus, the more networks you have to “hop”, the higher the probility that any calls will be of lesser quality than is acceptable – especially for business.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s talk about the differences between managed and unmanaged VoIP providers.

We’ve already covered the fact that connections between a home or office to the service provider phone switch are paramount.  If connectivity is lost or degraded at any time during the call, poor call quality and drop calls will be the result.  It’s also important to note that connectivity troubles can occur at both ends of the connection: the user and the VoIP service provider.

As you can see in the picture above, a VoIP provider that does not offer an end to end managed network is limited in its capabilities.  Since each call is sent over the public Internet, they have no control over their subscribers’ services, making it almost impossible to troubleshoot or guarantee any reasonable service levels.

SUMMARY

Connectivity issues on the public Internet and a subscriber’s Internet access can wreck havoc with VoIP phone service.

This lack of a managed network will result a lot of finger pointing between the Internet service provider and the VoIP service provider and prove to be a frustrating experience for the user.

If you are investigating VoIP or Hosted PBX options, make sure you look for a service provider that owns the network you’re connected to and will act as a single point of contact for network connectivity to the Internet and voice.  HIP Communications* and Telus both offer managed hosted PBX solutions.

*Disclosure: As previously mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I am a Vice President for HIP Communications, the Hosted PBX provider mentioned in this posting.

Technorati Tags: VoIP – Internet – Phone – Canada – Service Provider – Hosted PBX – Network

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