Best VoIP Providers For Business

Have you been thinking about making the move from multi-line analog or PRI trunk phone service to VoIP, but unsure about how well it will work? Here are some ideas and recommendations about what you can achieve and how to proceed successfully.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is also called “network voice” to distinguish it from traditional wireline phone service. The key word is “network.” VoIP is designed to run on computer networks rather than the proprietary telephone technologies we’ve been using for the last century. In fact, on the network, voice is just another service running along with data, video and streaming audio. Every service generates packets that are transported from source to destination using routers and switches on the network.

This presents a huge cost savings opportunity for larger businesses. Having one network to carry all traffic saves over having to maintain separate telephone and data networks. It’s less of an issue for smaller companies, although there are also cost savings in having one service provider connection instead of different telephone and broadband lines.

Where VoIP has gotten a dicey reputation is from using the Internet as both a telephone line and a broadband data service. The Internet wasn’t designed for high quality two-way voice conversations, so it’s a hit and miss proposition as to how good the voice quality of your conversations will be. Some calls may sound as good or better than the best analog line. Others will sound distorted and slightly delayed so that you and the other party cut off each other’s conversations. Residential users may not find this variable performance all that annoying, so they’re happy with the savings they get from dumping their analog landlines in favor of using their broadband Internet connection for both phone and computer service.

Business users who want clear conversations with their customers at all times have some better performing options available. Medium and larger companies will opt for a private line or MPLS network connection to their phone system provider. This is also called a SIP Trunk after the Session Initiation Protocol standard used for VoIP switching. A SIP trunk can support multiple simultaneous phone conversations, similar to an ISDN PRI trunk that is used with in-house PBX telephone systems.

Note that the type of VoIP service we’re talking about here is remotely hosted telephone switching at a service provider’s location. This is also known as Hosted VoIP, Hosted PBX, or communications in the cloud.

Small companies can also benefit from Hosted PBX service even if they have only a few to a few dozen telephones. In this case, the SIP Trunking provider supplies your business with an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that uses the SIP trunk to deliver both telephone and broadband Internet service. Unlike residential broadband phone service, the SIP trunk keeps the voice and data packets from interfering with each other. That maintains your voice quality on telephone calls. The phones have priority. Any bandwidth they are not using is automatically assigned as broadband Internet bandwidth. With some providers, you may also elect to plug existing analog phones into the IAD. This is called an analog handoff.

Another service that can provide both Internet and telephone service is Cable business broadband and telephone bundled service. You have one line coming into your office in the form of a coaxial cable. This cable carries telephone, broadband Internet and even television. Quality of service is maintained by keeping the telephone, television and Internet services in their own channels on the cable. Your phone service is VoIP technology, but your phone calls never touch the Internet. They just ride their own channel of the cable to a switching system that connects to the public telephone system. Note that to make this work, you need to get both your business broadband and phone service from the same Cable provider, like Comcast.

Are you interested in learning more about the advanced features and quality of service protections for VoIP service? Get features and pricing from the best VoIP providers for business telephone service now.

Voice over Internet Protocol Phone Services

Voice or Internet Protocol or VoIP appears destined to replace traditional wireline telephone services such as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Services) and even ISDN PRI digital trunks. What’s behind this shift in technology and what’s the key to maintaining voice quality with a new type of phone service.

The fundamental shift in technology can really be boiled down to a move toward computer networks and away from telephone networks. Also in the mix is the inclusion of wireless voice and data services that add another layer of complication.

Telephone networks started with Alexander Graham Bell and remained largely analog for most their century of dominance. Back when everyone had a telephone line and nobody knew what broadband meant, there was an effort to get the telephone system to do double duty as a means of voice communication and also computer communication via analog modems. This quickly hit its technical limit because the telephone network was designed for the human voice, which has a very low bandwidth requirement.

There was an effort to move to digital phone lines, called ISDN, but it was too little too late. Cable and DSL broadband offered much higher speeds at lower cost. Businesses ordered T1 and T3 lines, originally developed for digitizing phone lines and bundling them to save transmission costs between telco offices. These digital lines work just fine as point to point or dedicated Internet connections for data transmission. In fact, they’re still the most popular connectivity for small and medium businesses because of plunging prices and high reliability.

VoIP came out of the computer, not telephone, world. The IP stands for Internet Protocol, the most popular networking standard. Yes, it does say Internet protocol, but that doesn’t mean it is limited to the Internet. In fact, the Internet would have probably stayed an obscure academic network had it not been for the development of Ethernet as a way to connect computers and their peripherals.

The difference between telephone networks and computer networks is the difference between switched circuit networks and packet switched networks. Switched circuit networks, like the telephone network, actually switch connections to set up a private path for each phone call. This is bit like switching electrical circuits to power something as long as you need to use it. Packet switched networks are more like the US Mail. The network provides hard pathways to every destination. Each letter or packet gets where it is going by looking at the address for that individual packet and routing it accordingly.

VoIP is simply a way to send a set of packets in real time that are digitized pieces of a telephone conversation. Put them together end to end and the voice from the distant location is recreated. When it works well it sounds just like a telephone call, although you can also use a computer for two way conversations if it has a microphone and loudspeakers or earbuds.

Just like computers have struggled to press the century old telephone system into service for carrying data packets, computer networks have struggled with carrying sensitive voice packets on a system designed to reliably transfer data files even if parts had to be resent due to network errors. When VoIP goes bad, it sounds garbled and clips each side of the conversation. That’s a symptom of a network that isn’t optimized for real time voice packets that have to get through without error, jitter and time delay (latency).

The Internet is hit and miss when it comes to carrying VoIP telephony. If you have sufficient bandwidth and little congestion, you can experience a decent quality call. That’s especially true if cell phone call quality is what you are comparing to. If the Internet is having problems or getting congested, you may come to miss your old faithful landline.

Businesses that require optimal voice quality don’t use the Internet as their phone connection. Instead, they use private lines or MPLS networks that are engineered to support packet voice signals. You may hear this referred to as enterprise voice or enterprise VoIP, even though there is no Internet involved with the Internet protocol in this case.

Are you considering a move to VoIP with your next business telephone system upgrade? If so, be sure to understand the costs and tradeoffs with Internet vs non-Internet implementations. You can get that help along with pricing and availability for Enterprise VoIP telephony at no cost or obligation for serious business applications.