You Should Never Have to Compromise VoIP Call Quality

It’s true that the benefits of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are widely known. As Business Day explains in this recent article, VoIP can cut various business costs in half. The only problem is that businesses are compromising for less than appealing VoIP call quality in favor of cheaper prices. Unfortunately, that’s not how things work; in order to get the benefits, you have to make the smartest decisions of which provider to trust and which supporting solutions to invest in.

Some organizations claim that VoIP is all hype for them, and the largest instance of this claim is directly related to poor phone call quality. But while poor call quality reins as the largest issue in today’s VoIP environments, about 60 percent of VoIP quality problems have nothing to do with the VoIP call server. “Complaints of delays, interference from nonvoice traffic on the network and poor quality of calls are not uncommon or invalid,” BD says, listing a company’s Internet connection and bandwidth as the top two factors affecting voice quality in VoIP conversations.

Some things to avoid are “bursty” broadband connections, high latency and of course, as mentioned earlier, poor quality not-so-secretly masked by low prices. “The cheapest solutions are normally the poorest quality (but not always). It is always advisable to have as much information as possible on an analogue telephone adapter, router or IP phone before investing in it,” BD adds.

And obviously, partnering up with the right provider is key. “Experienced providers can employ a range of tactics to offer quality assurance, from infrastructural interventions including local area network design and analysis, to managed interventions including monitoring of the solution, to a range of network applications to prevent and remedy quality issues,” BD explains, noting that infrastructural preparation is “fundamental.”

As mentioned before, the only way to handle VoIP call quality problems is to invest in a trusted Quality of Service (QoS) management solution. Tone Software’s (News - Alert) esteemed ReliaTel VoIP QoS Management solution finds its greatest strength in being vendor agnostic, meaning it can reach deep into VoIP switches, gateways, PBXs, voice mail servers, applications, routers and call servers from virtually any vendor to manage QoS in real-time.

“We’re managing and monitoring VoIP metrics at a very deep level, so we can give you between both the Avaya related QoS metrics scheme and the Cisco (News - Alert) QoS protocol,” explains Tone Director of Marketing Tracey Whitney.

The ability for ReliaTel to create dashboards, trend analysis and diagnostics with these deep analytics really gives operational teams the advantage they need to quickly and successfully find the problem, locate exactly what’s causing quality issues or network bandwidth or performance issues, and have the information necessary to resolve the right problem as fast as possible, Whitney explained to me.

To discover more about Tone’s esteemed platform agnostic ReliaTel QoS Management solution, click here. To learn more about all of Tone’s offerings, visit www.tonesoft.com.

Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli