VoIP is great for sending calls long distances at minimal cost. If you've tried it to call Aunty Mabel in Australia you will know Skype works - and if you have used it you will be aware of the quality of call you can achieve most of the time.
So if you need to call colleagues long distance, talk to overseas suppliers, make internal calls to staff working from home or even if you run a cheap long distance call shop then Voice over Internet Protocol is the technology of choice for you.
However VoIP can also be used for making internal calls between sites or even to remote parts of your offices that dont have telecoms cabling, and more and more phone systems are coming onto the market that use it.
Plus you can also use VoIP for moving external calls around if call quality isn't vital to you - if you have ever called a customer support operation that has foreign staff and poor call quality you will know what I'm talking about. In the above case, you need to ask if the companys image suffers if their customers experience poor call quality.
You can of course use VoIP to build top quality call handling systems - but you need a top quality data network to move calls over. The crux of the matter is the network needs to be prioritised for voice packets. This is because, simply put, VoIP works by breaking the conversation into little pieces and then sending them across a data link. If you think about it sending pieces of data across a link, if a piece gets lost the far end requests it gets sent again, but if a piece of a voice call gets lost, then there is no point in asking for it to be re-sent!
The technologies required to do this are called Voice Optimisation and to get good call quality every link along which you send calls requires to be Voice Optimised - using "Quality of Service" (also called "Class of Service") and "Packet Prioritisation".
On a network you have direct control over (normally the Local Area Network or LAN) you can ensure Voice Optimisation, but on links or "Circuits" between sites or to the Internet you have to specify they are to be used for VoIP to the Service Providers you are renting them from eg. BT, Virgin, Cable & Wireless. You really need to read the small print carefully and match the quality of the Circuit to the requirements of the VoIP phone system you are using.
This is, of course, why Telecoms Resellers like to order your Circuits for you - plus many get commission from the Service Providers, but that is another subject for the blog, the many ways Telecoms Resellers make money out of you...
The key question you need to figure out the answer to is - what benefits will you get from using VoIP and do the benefits justify the costs? Obviously this answer varies from company to company so there is no "right" answer, but it is the business process you need to go through to arrive at a decision.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment