How Voice over MPLS Expands Enterprise VoIP

Medium and large enterprises have been converting from traditional telephone and computer connections to VoIP over converged networks. The reasons are higher productivity and lower costs. But what happens when you connect your phones and computer network to the outside world? Do you lose the advantage of your enterprise VoIP technology?

Sadly, for some businesses, this is the case. Everything is efficiently connected over a high performance local area network. That network stops at the edge of the premises. In order to connect with other business locations, both voice and data must be transmitted over common carrier telecom services. This is true for each location. There is one architecture for the internal network and quite a different one for the transport service.

Typical interfaces include a PBX telephone system that connects to multiple outside telephone lines. These may be individual analog business lines or a digital ISDN PRI trunk line. In either case, the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network is used to make calls to both outside phones and the phone systems of the other company locations.

Computer networking is handled with point to point dedicated lines, often set up in a star network with headquarters doing the routing for all locations. This works well, but can be quite expensive when locations are on different coasts or in nearly every state. Add international locations and costs skyrocket.

What’s a better solution? The latest technology is MPLS networking. An MPLS network is a privately operated “cloud” network that uses a special tag switching system instead of IP routers to manage traffic. MPLS networks offer quality of service mechanisms so that real-time traffic, like voice and video, are unaffected by simultaneous data file transfers. That makes MPLS networks ideally suited to extending converged networks among as many locations as needed.

How can this benefit your organization? By interconnecting all of your locations through an MPLS network, you can create a seamless internal voice and data network for telephones and computer connections. Using an MPLS network to carry telephone traffic is known as VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS.

With VoMPLS, all of your internal telephone calls stay off the public phone network and you avoid toll charges. Only when you need to make an outside call do you need to connect to the PSTN. This can be an enormous cost savings compared to your monthly phone bill now. Similarly, the cost of using an MPLS network for file transfers can be considerably less than the cost of all those dedicated lines and the effort it takes to maintain a proprietary network. Plus, any productivity enhancements you’ve achieved by converging your voice and data networks can be shared among your other business locations.

Can Voice over MPLS technology offer you a significant cost reduction? Why now get cost quotes for a VoMPLS networking solution to links all of your business locations? The savings and performance can be impressive.

Managed Voice over MPLS For High Quality Enterprise Telephony

Companies with multiple locations are rapidly discovering the cost and performance advantages of MPLS networks. MPLS VPN networks are becoming the preferred way to interconnect multiple sites around the country and around the world. But what do you do about your voice services?


The traditional approach is to keep voice and data separate. The telephone system has a proven legacy based on switched circuit analog and digital trunking. Most PBX systems are set up to interface to standardized copper pair analog business lines or ISDN PRI digital trunks. These are your portal to the worldwide PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network that links every telephone set on Earth.

This traditional approach to business telephony has the advantage of guaranteed connectivity and proven voice quality. The incentive to change to something more advanced comes from potential cost savings and productivity features.

There are huge cost savings possible if you can combine your voice and data networks and keep your internal phone calls off the PSTN. Isn’t that what Enterprise VoIP about? That’s exactly what many major corporations are doing. But only well-healed companies can afford to manage their own nationwide converged private line networks. When it comes to international connections, the costs can go up dramatically. Is there a more cost effective option?

Why not use the same MPLS networks that provide data connectivity for your many geographically diverse sites to also carry your voice traffic? Well, why not? MPLS networks already have the requisite quality of service controls to ensure that voice packets won’t get trampled by data packets. The entire network is managed to ensure low latency, jitter and packet loss. It seems like a good match for IP telephony.

Indeed it is. That’s what VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS is all about. With VoMPLS, your internal telephone traffic stays on your own network. In fact, it’s the same network that interconnects all your PCs and other network device. You’ll only pay per-minute telephone charges when your calls have to go “off net” to the public phone system. You can make that connection yourself with ISDN PRI trunks connected to your company PBX or you can outsource call termination to a SIP trunking service.

Does VoMPLS make sense for your company or organization? New services, including one just announced by AireSpring, are making this option the best cost/performance choice more and more. Find out with a quick inquiry about Voice over MPLS network options.